Q&A: What's going on?

I wrote the following Q&A as a brief introduction to a study group discussion at an ISO meeting. I don't go too much into the history of the region because the readings covered it, and I was trying to limit my introduction to ten minutes. Because it's just a brief introduction, it's also not footnoted or anything. However, you still may find some of this useful.

Q. The devastation in Lebanon is awful, but isn't Israel just reacting to the kidnappings of its soldiers in Gaza and Lebanon?

A. The short answer is no. It's becoming increasingly clear, even in the Israeli media, that this war isn't about the kidnapped soldiers at all.

On the Lebanese side, even Hezbollah was shocked at Israel's response, because this kidnapping wasn't a particularly unusual event. Hezbollah and Israel routinely make cross-border raids and then exchange prisoners, although Israel usually kidnaps Lebanese civilians rather than Hezbollah fighters. This is routinely the case in Gaza as well; many Palestinian teenagers, as well as a sizable chunk of Hamas's elected leadership, are in Israeli jails. Israel's outrageously disproportionate response indicates that this offensive, particularly in Lebanon, had been in the works for a while. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that this war was planned at least a year ago:

"Of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared," said Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University. "In a sense, the preparation began in May 2000, immediately after the Israeli withdrawal, when it became clear the international community was not going to prevent Hezbollah from stockpiling missiles and attacking Israel. By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we're seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it's been simulated and rehearsed across the board."

More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail.

What this, along with Israel's behavior, indicates is that Israel has been looking for a reason to launch this offensive. Just as the US seized the 9/11 attacks as a rationale for the attack they'd long planned on Afghanistan, Israel had business in Lebanon. If they can dismantle Hezbollah and install, with the US's help, a client state in Lebanon, they can stop worrying about one of their borders, use that client state's influence in dealing with other Arab states, and generally expand their power in the region. Israel also faces domestic pressure to increase its "deterrent power," its ability to act as the neighborhood bully. If it strikes as hard and as quickly as possible against any threat at all, no matter how disproportionate the reaction, it can keep its neighbors running scared, and do as it pleases.

Q. But Hezbollah is a terrorist organization taking orders from Syria and Iran. Doesn't Israel have the right to defend itself against terrorists who just want to drive the Jews into the sea?

A. First of all, the US Congress designated Hezbollah as a terrorist organization despite the fact that they had not carried out a single terrorist attack in over a decade, and when they did it was in response to Israeli occupation. Hezbollah is a major political party in Lebanon. It runs candidates for office and generally wins a respectable minority of seats. It operates schools, charities, ambulance companies and social services, often picking up the slack for Lebanon's weak government. And it operates a relatively small armed wing, which is now, thanks to Israel, undoubtedly growing. Hezbollah was born out of resistance to Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and it has become a legitimate, organic resistance movement. It is an Islamist party, like many in the region. I could give a whole other talk about the roots of Islamism, but all I'll get into here is that Islamist parties do not spring from some Jew-hating gene that all Arabs are born with, which is what Israel's mythology would have us believe. The reality is that in 1948, during the war that created the state of Israel, the Arabs who had lived for centuries in Palestine were forced from their homes, massacred and "ethnically cleansed" by people who wanted the land for a Jews-only state, and they've been rightfully pissed off about it ever since. That anger has taken the form of secular left-wing resistance groups at some points, and of radical Islamism most recently.

It's also important to note that Islamism is not a monolithic ideology. There are of course major schisms between Sunni and Shia Muslims; there's also plenty of internal politicking. Iran and Syria share a basic ideology with Hezbollah, they'll sell them weapons, they're generally more likely to support Hezbollah if things get out of hand, but each group has its own aims within the region. The recent media reports that liken Iran to the Comintern of the Islamic world fail to take any of those factors into account. It's just not as simple as Hezbollah taking direct orders from Tehran.

Q. So how much support does Hezbollah have among the Lebanese people?

Certainly more than it did before the bombings began. I'm going to broadly oversimplify here for the sake of time. Most of the Lebanese ruling class supported Hariri, the Bush-backed "Cedar Revolution" leader who rebuilt much of Lebanon, revived its tourism industry and began to improve the country's image abroad before he was assassinated last year, most likely by agents of Syria. His supporters, many of whom are part of the country's conservative Maronite Christian minority, are not fans of Hezbollah, and blame it for provoking Israel. This is an attitude that Israel wants to promote, and its bombings, particularly in Beirut, have been strategically planned. Jim Quilty of Middle East Report Online writes,

Israel has blithely played upon Lebanon's sectarian divisions with the patterns of bombing and with leaflets asserting that Nasrallah [the leader of Hezbollah] is beholden to foreign masters... [Some air strikes] are aimed at accentuating domestic antagonism against Hezbollah, indeed the Shi'a generally, without explicitly targeting the constituencies of the Bush administration's Lebanese allies... Through strangulation and anxiety about what will next be targeted, Israel hopes to provoke simmering resentment against Hezbollah rather than shocked nationwide anger at an external enemy.

How well this strategy will work remains an open question. Most Lebanese, particularly among the roughly 60% of the population that is Shi'ite Muslim, have shifted toward support for Hezbollah. That pattern is likely to continue, especially given that much of the food, water, medicine and other relief coming to the more than 700,000 displaced Lebanese is coming not from the Lebanese government, but from social service agencies run by Hezbollah.

If Israel launches a full-scale ground war, and there is a lot of debate right now about whether that is going to happen, it's likely that support for Hezbollah will skyrocket. We learned from Vietnam, and we're learning again from Iraq, that if you bomb and invade a country whose citizens are dead set against you, you can kill as many resistance fighters as you want. There will always be more. They will keep fighting you and fighting you. Hezbollah will establish new headquarters. They'll get new rockets. And they will have no shortage of volunteers.

Q. So why won't Israel just agree to a prisoner exchange and put an end to this? And why is the US refusing to call for a cease-fire? Why are they so determined to wade deeper into this mess?

Here's what the left-wing Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has to say about this war:

Retaliating to such a low-key operation with a total war and destruction indicates clearly that what matters is the grand design, not the pretext...the wider Israel's military might expands, the easier it is to complete the unfinished business of the 1948 [founding of Israel]: the total de-Arabization of Palestine.

Israel wants dominance in the region. And so does the US. Israel has always demanded the right to re-draw borders, relocate civilian populations, and throw its military weight around as it sees fit-- although it couches its justifications in terms of innocent self-defense, it is the most belligerent state in the Middle East. It wants a client state in Lebanon, the death of Hezbollah, and nothing less than complete submission from the Palestinians. And the US has a larger project going on as well, the one that started in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wants control of the Middle East. It wants to install puppet regimes, quell any uprisings or demands for real democracy or self-determination, drill for oil and lay pipelines anywhere it pleases.

Syria and Lebanon don't have any oil, but they're key players in the region, and it seems somewhat likely that the current offensive is meant to lay the groundwork for an attack by the US and or Israel on Iran as well as Syria. Calling for a prisoner exchange or a cease-fire now would stop that process in its tracks. Israel and the US want to press forward with this war. And other Arab regimes around the region have their own interests at stake-- Egypt wants to strangle any potential for a resistance movement that might affect the Mubarak regime, and the Saudis benefit from the inevitable rise in oil prices.

Q. Is this World War Three?

Not yet, although it's hard to say what will happen. Syria has made it clear that it will jump into the war if Israel gets too close to the Syrian border, particularly if there is a full-scale ground invasion of Lebanon. The US is stretched to capacity in Iraq and Afghanistan, so it seems likely that it will continue to support Israel in non-military ways. However, some conservatives in the US are calling for full-scale war. Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, for example, calls for immediate massive air strikes by the US on both Syria and Iran, and writes that the West's reaction to any terrorism from now on should be

Hard and quick retaliation — but without our past concern for nation-building, or offering a democratic alternative to theocracy and autocracy, or even worrying about whether other Muslims are unfairly lumped in with Islamists who operate freely in their midst. Any new policy of retaliation — in light both of Sept. 11 and the messy efforts to birth democracies in Afghanistan , Iraq , Lebanon and the West Bank — would be something of an exasperated return to the old cruise-missile payback. Yet in the new world of Iranian nukes and Hezbollah missiles, the West would hit back with something far greater than a cruise missile.

The US is not at a point militarily or politically where strikes on Syria and Iran are a serious option, let alone nuclear war, but another large-scale terrorist attack on American soil could change that. Israel has more to lose from a world war-- it's within easy striking distance of Iran, for starters-- and it is already starting to lose popular support at home for its increasingly bloody war on Lebanon. However, Israel's dependence on the US cannot be overstated-- without American aid, the ultramodern, militarized Israeli state would have approximately the economic power of Guatemala. The US can draw Israel into a major war if it decides that's the best way to pursue American interests in the region.

But that's speculation; so far, it's not World War Three, no matter what Newt Gingrich and Bill O'Reilly have decided. If the US had any desire to stop the conflict and the slaughter of Lebanese civilians, it could do so with a single phone call; so far it has decided that the bloodshed has been worth it, but if the costs become too high or there are unforeseen political consequences, the war could stop now. Our job, then, as socialists in the US, is to raise the political costs of this war to a point where it no longer makes sense for Bush to continue on this insane and bloody path.