September/October 2006 Feature

Israel’s Fight for Survival and its Dilemma

As I write this editorial on August 1, 2006, Israel has been forced into a difficult mini-war against the terrorist Shiite faction in southern Lebanon that calls itself Hezbollah (Party of God). It is a war that Israel did not ask for and, perhaps, did not even foresee. Hezbollah is a terrorist guerrilla movement sponsored by Iran and Syria, fanatically Islamist, that seeks the total destruction of Israel and its disappearance from the Muslim Middle East. It would be a delusion to claim that this war is going well for the Jewish state at this time.

Midstream is a bi-monthly journal, not a daily newspaper or a weekly news magazine with their large staffs and major resources. All our copy including this editorial must be prepared and sent to the printer weeks in advance of the due date of publication. Therefore, we can only hope that by the time this piece is published in the September/October issue of Midstream, the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon will be over, with a favorable result for Israel and for all people of good will. The heart and soul of the staff, writers, and, I’m sure, readers of this journal are irrevocably entwined in the fate of our people in Israel. So we continue to hope that the news a week from now and a month from now will prove our current trepidation unfounded and this essay a historic relic.

But at this moment, one must face facts and realities. What began as a clear violation by Hezbollah of international law when it attacked an Israeli military post by invading across an internationally recognized border, killing eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapping two without any provocation whatsoever, has now developed within two weeks into the makings of a full-scale war with destruction, civilian casualties, a massive exodus of refugees from southern Lebanon, and a million or two Israelis holed up day after day in bomb shelters. All this fully six years after the last Israeli soldier left the border buffer zone in Lebanon that Israeli had carved out for its protection. As for the elusive enemy of ragtag bandits, the few thousand religious fanatics of Hezbollah, they are not yet subdued. Indeed, the Muslim world cheers them on as the only Arab force that has successfully stood up to the Israeli army. How come?

Hezbollah had taken credit for Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon. What did this terrorist group do during the six years since Israel’s withdrawal? It spent the six years taking over the south of Lebanon and establishing itself as a state within a state, secretly supplied with 12,000 or more rockets and missiles, rocket launchers and other modern weapons, which the terrorist group stored in bunkers and tunnels that they dug all along the southern border with Israel. Apparently, they also stored missiles in civilian homes throughout the area among their Shiite brethren. Supply routes for these Iranian weapons came through Syria into Lebanon to the Hezbollah strongholds; command centers were built and dispersed from south Beirut to Tyre to other Shiite cities and towns. The U.N. had passed a resolution (#1559) restoring full sovereignty to the Lebanese government, instructing it to disarm Hezbollah and deploy the government army to all parts of the country including the south. To no avail. The Lebanese government, even after the Syrian occupation was kicked out a year or so ago, could not control the Hezbollah infection within its midst. Hezbollah, the terrorist faction that despatched a suicide car bomber to kill 241 U.S. marines in Lebanon in 1983, was the reigning power in southern Lebanon with the blessing of Iran and Syria.

When Hezbollah was ready to provoke a confrontation with Israel, it launched its attack across the international border past the very eyes of the feckless UN observers in the area. When Israeli air power responded in force to block the escape routes of the kidnappers of their two fellow soldiers, the rockets and missiles began to descend on Israeli cities and towns in the north as distant as metropolitan Haifa, Safed (Tzefat), and Afula. Those closer to the Lebanese border (Naharia and Kiryat Shemona) were equally assaulted. One hundred to one hundred fifty rockets fell on Israel daily in the first two weeks. Israeli artillery and bombing from the air were far more accurate in the attempt to knock out Hezbollah supply roads, command centers, and rocket-launching positions from Beirut to Tyre to other points in southern Lebanon. But alas, in the process, some 400 Lebanese civilians were killed, including many children. The flight of refugees from the south increased to awesome proportions. The terrorist trick practiced by Hamas as well as Hezbollah of positioning their command posts, their fighting men, and their missile launchers within civilian populations bore bitter fruit. Because only forty or fifty Israeli civilians were killed by the daily rockets over northern Israel, the self-righteous world began to turn against Israel (not a difficult thing to do considering the consistently lopsided votes against Israel in the U.N.). Did Israel have to suffer 400 casualties to observe the proportionality demanded by the world? The reaction was almost inevitable. The Jewish State, clearly the victim this time of an illegal attack, a brazen aggression, returned to its classic position as the world’s favorite villain, along with its closest supporter, the United States.

We Jews, who mourn the death of enemy Egyptians at every Passover Seder in reciting the ancient story of the Exodus, will never react with joy at the death of Lebanese or Palestinian children. But can we expect the world to differentiate between the purposeful targeting of civilians as the terrorists consistently have done and Israel’s inadvertently hitting civilians being used as human shields by these same terrorists embedded among the civilian population with their lethal weapons? I doubt it.

Examples of targeted civilians deaths at the hands of terrorists abound: the horrors of 9/11 perpetrated by Al Qaeda, a tragic event that we memorialize this month of September; the suicide bombings by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Al Aqsa Martyrs of Israeli cafes, buses, outdoor markets, and a Passover Seder in the second intifada; the daily murder of a hundred or more Iraqis by suicide car bombs sent by the insurgent Islamist terrorists in their ongoing ugly war of Muslims against Muslims.

I can’t recall a single U.N. resolution condemning suicide bombing as a crime against humanity. It took years for some human-rights organizations that consistently find fault with Israel to address the subject of suicide bombing launched against Israel throughout the years. Alan Dershowitz, commenting on Hezbollah’s bombing of Haifa and other cities in northern Israel and on world reaction to the Israeli bombing of Hezbollah strongholds within civilian populations, observed that if Israeli civilians are killed, Hezbollah wins, and if Arab civilians are killed, Hezbollah wins. A no-win situation for Israel in the court of public opinion.

I am not a military analyst. I don’t know how you deter a terrorist group that wears no uniforms, obeys no laws of war or peace, burrows into the ground, comes out to launch missiles provided by rogue nations and hides among civilians for cover. Israel’s initial attempt in this war against the Hezbollah terrorists in southern Lebanon to send in small elite forces to root them out of their holes has not been notably successful. Its bombing tactics have probably destroyed Hezbollah command centers, but they have not diminished the terrorist ability to launch a hundred or more rockets daily upon Israeli cities. The terrorists, on the other hand, know how to take advantage of that double standard in the Western democratic world. They know that they will not really be held accountable for violating the laws of war or for their religious fanaticism and medieval obscurantist mentality that speaks of even returning Spain to Muslim rule. But they also know that the West, including the Jewish people, will be horrified at the death of innocent Muslim children. One could almost believe that the terrorists welcome such casualties as a propaganda gift that advances their cause.

How does one defeat this new type of enemy that uses the Internet, cell phones, television, and advanced weaponry supplied by nation-states? I have no patience with right-wing views that call upon Israel to commit massive invasion forces and overwhelming military power to scorch every inch of earth and occupy the whole area for months and years. It jars one’s moral sensibility as a Jew and as a believer in Western values, and thus far, it hasn’t worked. The vermin will inevitably elude capture, however large the net.

I have equal disdain for the righteous left-wing view that if Israel were only to negotiate a settlement with the Palestinians (inevitably on Palestinian Arab terms), all would be well, and we Jews would be embraced by the Arab world. This strikes me as fantasy. It is clear to me that Hamas and Hezbollah and perhaps the so-called moderates among the Arab nations have not yet reconciled themselves to the existence of a Jewish state in their midst. For Israel to go back to indefensible pre-1967 borders (actually 1949 truce lines) and to the return to Israel of the descendants of Arab refugees of the 1948 war initiated by Arab nations bent on destroying Israel is to court disaster. Most Jewish people believe in a two-state solution, but they do not consider national suicide a Jewish moral value.

I know the problems; I do not know the answers. I mourn civilian deaths, but I agree with A. B. Yehoshua, the renowned Israeli novelist, a dove whose political opinions I generally find off-putting, when he said in a New York Times Magazine interview (July 30, 2006, p. 13): “This is so sad.... [The few thousand Hezbollah fighters] are now putting disaster on millions of Lebanese who did not want this war and now have to suffer.” And to cite Alan Dershowitz again, a police officer who attempts to shoot a criminal who has taken a hostage and inadvertently kills the hostage, is not charged with the crime. The criminal is charged with the murder. The many civilian deaths in this war should be charged to the original criminal acts of Hezbollah who put them in harm’s way.

America will not tolerate anything remotely resembling another 9/11. Israel cannot and will not tolerate rockets launched from Gaza by Hamas against southern Israeli cities and rockets and more advanced missiles launched from southern Lebanon by Hezbollah against northern Israeli cities. No sovereign country in the world would tolerate such outrages. Knowing what we know now about the six years of the covert buildup of Hezbollah’s missile-launching capability in southern Lebanon at the Israeli border by Iran and Syria, is it so difficult to imagine the horrible next step—a fanatic Islamist jihadi nation-state replacing the conventional warheads on those 12,000 missiles with chemical or biological warheads that can wipe out a small country in a contemporary Holocaust? Scare tactics? Not long ago, this horrible scenario was attributed almost exclusively to the paranoia of the Bush administration vis à vis Iraq and Al Qaeda. The 12,000 rockets and missiles secretly delivered to a terrorist band called Hezbollah at Israel’s border by Iran and Syria should make the world think twice.

We will continue to hope and pray that Israel’s response to the current danger to its survival rids it (and its neighbors) of this terrorist scourge just as we Americans will continue to hope and pray that 9/11 is never repeated here or anywhere else. We will also hope that the world will ultimately recognize Israel’s just cause. Consider that forty or so different countries have suffered from hundreds of terrorist attacks in recent years. Should the world persist in condemning Israel’s fifty-eight-year fight for survival against invasion from the day it was founded to unceasing terrorist attacks against its civilian population ever since, it will, in effect, be condoning terrorism, and will do so at its own peril. •

About the author
Leo Haber is editor of Midstream. His novel, The Red Heifer (Syracuse University Press), in its second printing in hardcover, was reissued in paperback in 2005.