Israel: From Mania to Depression Lessons for the US?

"presstitutes" - the word of the week (rest assured I will find a way to use it before the day is over...in real life, that is )

Good read, and there is much more of that in the Israeli press.

Here's one from a former senior CIA official...

http://hotzone.yahoo.com/b/hotzone/blogs8692

A Shaken Landscape

With a cease-fire in place between Israel and Hezbollah, it's in neither party's interest to resume the fight. The reasons why amount to a dangerous new reality for Israel.

Editor's Note: To better understand what's next for the Mideast in the aftermath of the recent fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, Hot Zone Senior Producer Robert Padavick spoke with Yahoo! News consultant Milt Bearden. In a career spanning three decades, Bearden headed the CIA's Soviet and Eastern Europe Division and served as station chief in places like Pakistan and Sudan. He also ran the CIA's covert war in Afghanistan from 1986-1989.

With a cease-fire taking hold after over a month of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, parties loyal to both sides are claiming victory. For former senior CIA official Milt Bearden, the winners and losers are clear.

"Where it counts, Hezbollah is clearly the winner," Bearden says. "For Israel ... not winning is losing. And for an irregular force like Hezbollah, not losing is winning."

Now retired, Bearden serves on the board of directors of Conflicts Forum, a U.K.-based nongovernmental organization that works to foster dialogue between Islamist groups and the West. That role has included talks with Hezbollah officials about the group's transition to a more political focus.

Bearden stresses that with fighting over it is in neither Hezbollah's nor Israel's interest to restart it — but for very different reasons. Those differences could partially guide the relative strategies for Israel and Hezbollah as the dust settles in the Middle East.

Hezbollah, Bearden says, now is in prime position for further political gain in Lebanon. The group already has a strong presence in the Lebanese parliament through an alliance with another Shiite group, the Amal Party.

"[Hezbollah] executed their side of the war to the extent that they are national heroes right now," Bearden says. "I think you're going to see that Hezbollah will be a big winner politically."

Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah is already taking steps to seize the momentum, announcing that Hezbollah will immediately begin repairing homes in southern Lebanon and even pay a year's rent to owners of damaged homes. The move underscores the extent to which Hezbollah is ingrained religiously and culturally in Lebanon, especially in the Shiite-dominated south, where the group runs an array of social services, including hospitals and schools.

Bearden says it's also possible that Hezbollah, even after sustaining a fierce Israeli barrage, actually could emerge with an expanded military presence in Lebanon — albeit in a different form.

"It seems to me that what we'd better be on the lookout for is the absorption by the Lebanese army of the military wing of Hezbollah," he says.

After a couple false starts the Lebanese cabinet approved a plan Wednesday to deploy 15,000 Lebanese troops in the south to bolster a United Nations force. Those troops began deploying Thursday. But neither Lebanon nor the U.N. seem to be concretely addressing the issue of disarming Hezbollah, even though a previous U.N. resolution calls for it. Bearden says it's a fallacy to consider that a possibility.

"The very concept of destroying Hezbollah or dismantling it is based on a faulty belief that it is somehow external to the fiber of Lebanon. It is not," he says. "There's nobody tough enough to disarm Hezbollah, or willing to do it if they are tough enough."

The scenario of a politically empowered Hezbollah, with militia remnants integrated in the Lebanese army, would present a dangerous new reality for Israel, which Bearden says is not in a position to restart hostilities against a foe that proved able to withstand its superior military might.

Hezbollah's stand against the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), long regarded as a military superpower in the region, amounts to what Bearden calls the "demystification of the IDF." The implications for Israel are serious, in that Hezbollah's success could embolden other groups in the region, particularly the Palestinians, to overcome internal differences and unite against Israel.

"Israeli rule has just taken a huge hit," Bearden says. "I would imagine right now we're going to see serious discussions among Palestinians who say, 'Why not us?'."

Israel, it seems, has few options at the moment. However, there are reports in the Israeli press that Defense Minister Amir Peretz this week hinted at one of them: renewed dialogue with Lebanon, the Palestinians, and even Syria.

Bearden, a staunch advocate for dialogue, even sees the possibility for Israeli dialogue with Iran — although the country is a prime backer of Hezbollah and its leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel.

Still, those on the more "realist side" in Israeli politics, Bearden says, "are going to start saying, 'We need to talk with Iran; we need to talk with Syria.' But also, I can guarantee you, sooner or later they're going to want to talk with Hezbollah and Hamas." Hamas has already proven its political prowess, winning the Palestinian Authority general election in January.

The extent to which the landscape in the Middle East has been shaken is just beginning to emerge. But Israel's fight against Hezbollah, the intent of which was greater security, may have left the country even more on the defensive.

 

A victory for hezbollah was not losing it's organisation. i know i sound like an idiot, but hezbollah won. Hezbollah had to withstand the Isrealie onslaught and still remaining to win the war. they did just that. .

 

Sadly, they also broadened their support, among all groups inside Lebanon as well. They came out better in the end than when it all started.

 

didn't see this anywhere. nyt a couple days ago.

August 16, 2006
The Overview
Hezbollah Leads Work to Rebuild, Gaining Stature
By JOHN KIFNER

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Aug. 15 — As stunned Lebanese returned Tuesday over broken roads to shattered apartments in the south, it increasingly seemed that the beneficiary of the destruction was most likely to be Hezbollah.

A major reason — in addition to its hard-won reputation as the only Arab force that fought Israel to a standstill — is that it is already dominating the efforts to rebuild with a torrent of money from oil-rich Iran.

Nehme Y. Tohme, a member of Parliament from the anti-Syrian reform bloc and the country's minister for the displaced, said he had been told by Hezbollah officials that when the shooting stopped, Iran would provide Hezbollah with an "unlimited budget" for reconstruction.

In his victory speech on Monday night, Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, offered money for "decent and suitable furniture" and a year's rent on a house to any Lebanese who lost his home in the month-long war.

"Completing the victory," he said, "can come with reconstruction."

On Tuesday, Israel began to pull many of its reserve troops out of southern Lebanon, and its military chief of staff said all of the soldiers could be back across the border within 10 days. Lebanese soldiers are expected to begin moving in a couple of days, supported by the first of 15,000 foreign troops.

While the Israelis began their withdrawal, hundreds of Hezbollah members spread over dozens of villages across southern Lebanon began cleaning, organizing and surveying damage. Men on bulldozers were busy cutting lanes through giant piles of rubble. Roads blocked with the remnants of buildings are now, just a day after a cease-fire began, fully passable.

In Sreifa, a Hezbollah official said the group would offer an initial $10,000 to residents to help pay for the year of rent, to buy new furniture and to help feed families.

In Taibe, a town of fighting so heavy that large chunks were missing from walls and buildings where they had been sprayed with bullets, the Audi family stood with two Hezbollah volunteers, looking woefully at their windowless, bullet- and shrapnel-torn house.

In Bint Jbail, Hezbollah ambulances — large, new cars with flashing lights on the top — ferried bodies of fighters to graves out of mountains of rubble.

Hezbollah's reputation as an efficient grass-roots social service network — as opposed to the Lebanese government, regarded by many here as sleek men in suits doing well — was in evidence everywhere. Young men with walkie-talkies and clipboards were in the battered Shiite neighborhoods on the southern edge of Bint Jbail, taking notes on the extent of the damage.

"Hezbollah's strength," said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a professor at the Lebanese American University here, who has written extensively about the organization, in large part derives from "the gross vacuum left by the state."

Hezbollah was not, she said, a state within a state, but rather "a state within a nonstate, actually."

Sheik Nasrallah said in his speech that "the brothers in the towns and villages will turn to those whose homes are badly damaged and help rebuild them.

"Today is the day to keep up our promises," he said. "All our brothers will be in your service starting tomorrow."

Some southern towns were so damaged that on Tuesday residents had not yet begun to return. A fighter for the Amal movement, another Shiite militia group, said he had been told that Hezbollah members would begin to catalog damages in his town, Kafr Kila, on the Israeli border.

Hezbollah men also traveled door to door checking on residents and asking them what help they needed.

Although Hezbollah is a Shiite organization, Sheik Nasrallah's message resounded even with a Sunni Muslim, Ghaleb Jazi, 40, who works at the oil storage plant at Jiyeh, 15 miles south of Beirut. It was bombed by the Israelis and spewed pollution northward into the Mediterranean.

"The government may do some work on bridges and roads, but when it comes to rebuilding houses, Hezbollah will have a big role to play," he said. "Nasrallah said yesterday he would rebuild, and he will come through."

Sheik Nasrallah's speech was interpreted by some as a kind of watershed in Lebanese politics, establishing his group on an equal footing with the official government.

"It was a coup d'état," said Jad al-Akjaoui, a political analyst aligned with the democratic reform bloc. He was among the organizers of the anti-Syrian demonstrations after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri two years ago that led to international pressure to rid Lebanon of 15 years of Syrian control.

Rami G. Khouri, a columnist for The Daily Star in Beirut, wrote that Sheik Nasrallah "seemed to take on the veneer of a national leader rather than the head of one group in Lebanon's rich mosaic of political parties."

"In tone and content, his remarks seemed more like those of a president or a prime minister should be making while addressing the nation after a terrible month of destruction and human suffering," Mr. Khouri wrote. "His prominence is one of the important political repercussions of this war."

Defense Minister Elias Murr said Tuesday that the government would not seek to disarm Hezbollah.

"The army is not going to the south to strip the Hezbollah of its weapons and do the work that Israel did not," he said, showing just how difficult reining in the militia will most likely be in the coming weeks and months. He added that "the resistance," meaning Hezbollah, had been cooperating with the government and there was no need to confront it.

Sheik Nasrallah sounded much like a governor responding to a disaster when he said, "So far, the initial count available to us on completely demolished houses exceeds 15,000 residential units.

"We cannot of course wait for the government and its heavy vehicles and machinery because they could be a while," he said. He also cautioned, "No one should raise prices due to a surge in demand."

Support for Hezbollah was likely to become stronger, Professor Saad-Ghorayeb said, because of the weakness of the central government.

"Hezbollah has two pillars of support," she said, "the resistance and the social services. What this war has illustrated is that it is best at both.

Referring to Shiek Nasrallah, she said: "He tells the people, 'Don't worry, we're going to protect you. And we're going to reconstruct. This has happened before. We will deliver.' "

Hassan M. Fattah contributed reporting from Sreifa, Lebanon, for this article, Sabrina Tavernise from Taibe and Robert F. Worth from Jiyeh.



nyt

 

Hezbollah definitely won, and that's a bad thing. That is why I was so against this action by Israel. An incursion into Lebanon by Israeli forces will only gain support for the people who oppose such an incursion -Hezbollah.

This was a no win for Israel, the more they struck, and the harder they fought the more support Hezbollah gained.

Now Hezbollah comes in and starts rebuilding the people’s homes and businesses that were destroyed by Israel and garner even more support.

This is a perfect example as to why war should only be interred into as a last resort. A "military" victory doesn't mean you win the war.

 

WTF?!?!

Israel uses Top Notch Military equipment, has huge funds thanks largely to us and STILL cant take out Hezbollah?!?!

Shame on them!

They should learn from our successful mission in Iraq.

Amatuers!

 

If the consequences from the Lebanon fiasco are as bad as the article implies, we could be entering an unprecedented period of destabilization. But this is the "buyers remorse" period for Israel right now. All of the hand-wringing, finger pointing, blame games, inflammatory rhetoric and exaggeration are to be expected. Right now is the time to assume the worst and throw tantrums. Further reflection down the road may suggest things are not so grim. We hope.

 

American support may no longer be enough

Israel's long-term future lies in connecting with its Arab neighbours, not a western superpower thousands of miles away

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1843882,00.html

This has been a war that did not happen by accident. The kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by Hizbullah was merely the pretext, long since forgotten in the absurdly disproportionate response by the Israelis, and the death and destruction that their country has wrought on Lebanon. Israel has, throughout its short existence, lived by the sword, safe in the knowledge that its military power, as an honorary western nation, is far superior to that of its enemies. Israel has managed to justify this behaviour, in the eyes of the world (or at least the west), by two means: first, the insistence that its very survival always hangs by a thin thread; and second, the remorse felt by the west over the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust.

Based on previous expectations, this was another war that the Israelis should have won. It was of their choosing, long in the planning and preparation; and from the outset they enjoyed the open support of the US. How wrong the Israelis have turned out to be. This is not a war they have won: indeed, as they have fallen so far short of their objective - the effective destruction of Hizbullah as a military force - it might well turn out to be a war that the Israelis have, in effect, lost. They surely expected that Hizbullah's resistance would crumble within a matter of days, but a month later Hizbullah appears to be as strong as ever, inflicting heavy casualties on the massive Israeli assault launched after the UN security council vote, its ability to fire rockets at Israeli cities little, if at all, impaired. Just as the US found that superiority in conventional arms was of little use in Iraq when confronted with urban and guerrilla resistance, rooted in the overwhelming opposition of the people, so Israel has discovered the same in Lebanon.

The ceasefire that is due to come into force today represents a serious setback for both Israel and the US. Its terms represent a significant retreat on what was previously proposed. One should not be deluded by the Israeli offensive launched after the ceasefire agreement had been adopted: it was a last desperate attempt to gain advantage before hostilities are obliged to cease, an attempt to snatch some kind of victory from the jaws of defeat. It is, in short, not a show of strength but a display of weakness. More importantly, the failure of the Israeli action against Hizbullah raises deeper questions about the means by which Israel has sought to govern relations with its neighbours, just as the failure of American policy in Iraq has brought into question the underlying precepts of neoconservative strategy. The common denominator has been a dependence upon, and belief in, the efficacy of military power above all else. Is it too much to hope that, at least in the longer run, Israel's failure in Lebanon will force a rethink among Israelis on the best means to secure their future?

Israel, though geographically part of the Middle East, has never regarded itself as part of the region, politically, culturally or ethnically. It identifies itself with the west. And the west reciprocates. How else can one explain the intimate relationship that Israel enjoys with the US, or the fact that Israel competes in the Eurovision song contest and European football competitions? It is regarded as an honorary member of the west in the same way that Australia still is, or apartheid South Africa used to be. And the reason is not simply geopolitical, but cultural and ethnic.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the creation of the state of Israel, the reality today is that it is - by the manner of its creation, self-image and attitude towards its neighbours, and how it is regarded by the west - a western transplant sustained by an American life-support machine. Under such circumstances, the very idea that peace in the Middle East is in any meaningful sense possible is illusory. Israel has been the primary means by which the US has exercised its hegemony over the region. It has, using the classic imperial device of divide and rule, vested its means of control over the Middle East - as Amy Chua argues in her book World on Fire - in a small but privileged ethnic minority state, namely Israel. Whatever the recent rhetoric about democracy, such a mode of control means that western hegemony in the region has been primarily exercised by force. The Arab world has been rendered embittered, divided, resentful and politically frozen, in a manner that should surprise nobody. It is understandable that terrorism has become such a fixture in Arab politics: it is the weapon of the impotent, the disenfranchised and the unorganised in the face of profound grievance.

An enduring peace in the Middle East requires two things: first, that the Arab states accept Israel's right to exist; and second, that Israel must come to see itself as an integral part of the region. The latter requires the kind of transformation in Israeli - and western - attitudes that is not even conceived of, let alone discussed. Israelis typically regard themselves as superior to their neighbours, and the root cause of this mentality lies in their sense of racial superiority. Indeed it is impossible to explain Israel's attitude towards the west on the one hand and its Arab neighbours on the other without understanding its racial character and motivation. Israelis aspire to be treated on a par with westerners - that is, of course, white westerners; by the same token they have contempt for Arabs, including those who are citizens of Israel, whom they look down on as less civilised than themselves. Israel behaves in the manner of a settler colony whose people do not believe they are of the region but who none the less think they have every right to be there.

There is a deep irony here. Israel was created as a result of one of the worst racial atrocities in modern history. It was in part the sense of guilt and sympathy that persuaded the west that it must help the Jews create their own state. From the outset, two factors were always likely to haunt the project: first, it involved the annexation of land that was Arab; and second, it implied the foundation of an ethnic state, with all the exclusivist and racist attitudes that this potentially involved.

Let us hope that the failure of the war in Lebanon might begin the process of persuading the Israeli people that their long-term future lies in viewing their Arab neighbours as equals and seeking to live with them in peace, rather than viewing themselves as an appendage of the most powerful country in the world situated thousands of miles to its west.

- Martin Jacques is a visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Centre, London School of Economics Martinjacques1@aol.com

 

Oh no **** ...