• Michael Hayden, final CIA director under George W. Bush, said he has personally come around to the view that a U.S. bombing of Iran “may not be the worst of all possible outcomes.” [WSJ]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu confirmed that the 10-month settlement freeze really will come to a close in September. [JPost]

• Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator has agreed to meet with the European Union’s foreign policy chief. [NYT]

• Egyptian President Mubarak canceled a planned appearance at an African Union meeting Uganda. No reason was given, which means everyone assumes he’s dying (and, let’s face it, everyone probably has a point). [JPost]

• In a rare display of civic consciousness in Los Angeles, residents of Silver Lake gathered to remember the famed neighborhood “Walking Man,” Marc Abrams. [NYT]

At one point in my recent interviews with Israeli President Shimon Peres, I ask him why his mentor David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, in choosing among many promising young men of his circle, selected Peres as his aide. Perhaps motivated by modesty, the 87-year-old Peres doesn’t offer a clear explanation. But without doubt, the “old man,” as Ben-Gurion was often called, had spotted the youngster’s oratorical and intellectual brilliance, which has entranced world leaders, though not always the Israeli public.

At home, Peres’ persona was shrouded for decades in a pall of popular distrust. He lacked credibility among many Israelis—which explains, in part, his inability to win general and internal Labor Party elections. Rabin repeatedly beat him, in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, in contests for the Labor leadership. One result of the bad blood between the two was that Rabin called Peres an “indefatigable underminer” (hatran bilti nil’eh), a description Peres thought unjustified. But the charge stuck and thereafter shadowed his political career. Though the two men apparently worked well together during Rabin’s second premiership, in 1992-1995, when Peres served as foreign minister, Peres proved unable to shake off their troubled history. Rabin’s martyrdom reinforced what he had left behind as his legacy. Peres eventually, only on his second try, won the presidency—not by popular majority but by Knesset vote.

How deeply he believes in his oft-proclaimed vision of a “new Middle East” after a decade of disappointment and terror is anyone’s guess. The hard core of “Mr. Security” surely remains: Hamas rocketeers and Turkish “peace flotillas,” and, possibly, Iranian nuclear madmen need to be forcibly contained and faced down. Beneath his polished, world-weary exterior, he is still the ex-defense minister who believes that for a stable Israel, security concerns must take the highest priority and that any chance of peace is ultimately contingent on Israel’s strength, and he seems to carry considerable clout as adviser and elder statesman with the current brood of politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Despite his repeated failures to win election as prime minister, Peres is now a highly popular president, distanced from the daily toil of politics in the largely ceremonial head-of-state role, with a steady 78 percent public approval rating.

I interview Peres in his office, seated around a coffee table. He wears a suit and tie, about which he complains (“I meet diplomats all day”). His media adviser, Ayelet Frish, and her assistant sit with us throughout the two interviews, which were conducted in the Presidential Mansion in Jerusalem’s Talbiyeh quarter in early July and lasted for approximately 80 minutes each. Ayelet occasionally interjects, “That’s off the record,” when she feels her boss has said something excessively revealing. I’m not sure he remembers that I had interviewed him in the past, when I worked at the Jerusalem Post in the 1980s and he was Israel’s foreign minister. I can clearly picture a briefing he gave to journalists accompanying him to Alexandria, where he was to visit Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak. Peres had sat in an armchair in the center of his hotel room, and the journalists were draped over assorted chairs or seated on the carpet. I remember that he was brilliant. A quarter of a century on, he appears more tired, his voice weaker; perhaps altogether not quite as sharp.

I ask him about the 1948 war, in which some 700,000 Arabs fled or were driven out of the area that became the Jewish state. (Over the past three decades, I have written extensively about the war, devoting three books to the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem in 1947-1949. Peres, as far as I know, has never publicly commented on my books—though I have sensed, over the years, a certain displeasure on his part with my findings, which many viewed as critical of Israel and Ben-Gurion.)

A few months ago, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a handwritten letter from him praising a highly critical review I had written of a book by an anti-Israeli British historian. (At the start of our first interview earlier this month, Peres commented on my recent book, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, saying it highlighted for him the failings of personal memory. But he did not elaborate.) The war ended with Israel having an Arab minority of some 160,000, representing 15-20 percent of its citizenry. Today, Israel’s Arab minority, 1.3 million strong, identify themselves as Palestinians, occasionally riot, and support Israel’s enemies during bouts of hostilities (as when Israel fought Lebanon’s Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in Gaza in 2008-2009).

Morris: Perhaps ending the 1948 war with this demographic was a mistake?

Peres: No, moral considerations took priority over demographic considerations. Ben-Gurion knew that every war and conflict takes place twice—once on the battlefield and then in the history books. He didn’t want things to be written in the history books that were in dissonance with the foundations of Judaism. He really believed that without a moral priority there is no existence for the Jewish people. To expel he saw as contrary to his moral values.

But in 1948 he sometimes gave orders to expel.

He did not give orders to expel.

I suggest that Ben-Gurion did in fact give such orders, as when, on July 12, 1948, he authorized the expulsion of Arab inhabitants of the towns of Lydda and Ramleh on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road. Peres shakes his head. “I remember sitting in the room, when the matter of the expulsion of the Arabs from Haifa began, when Ben-Gurion telephoned [Labor Party strongman, later Haifa mayor] Abba Khoushi and told him to do all he could to get the Arabs to stay [in Haifa]. I heard this myself. I was there.” (It is worth noting that the Arabs of Haifa were not expelled but fled the city at the end of April 1948, due in part to a decision of the local Arab leadership.)

Next: The first decade of the Jewish state

• What exactly are the U.N. soldiers in southern Lebanon supposed to do? No one is actually sure, and Hezbollah is exploiting the confusion. [LAT]

• Israel’s “Iron Dome” rocket-defense system is ready and will be deployed starting in Sderot this fall. [NYT]

• An update on the play that imagines a meeting between Elie Wiesel and Bernard Madoff, which opens upstate later this week. [NYT]

• A womens’ group periodically drives Palestinian children from the West Bank to an Israeli town on the Mediterranean coast in order to give them a day at the beach. [WP]

• Head-Jew-in-charge (and contributing editor) Jeffrey Goldberg nominates editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse to be his replacement following her essay on the Rotem Bill. [Atlantic]

Media consumers in the United States are by now well aware that Hezbollah and Hamas provide “social services” for their communities. For the writers and television personalities who push such supposed palliatives on their audiences—“Yes, they do chant ‘kill the Jews!’ and they do act on their rhetoric, but they also educate poor kids in clean, well-lit schools (please ignore the slogans painted on the walls)”—respect for the resistance is a polite way of indicating one’s tolerance for murderous anti-Semitism. The issue is whether this attitude is in danger of seeping into the mainstream of the U.S. public. Poll numbers show that U.S. support for Israel is consistently high—in February Gallup found that a near-record 63 percent of Americans were more sympathetic to the Jewish state than to the Palestinians. But ideas can change, and it’s intellectuals who often lead the way. Remember that Israel was a popular cause among the intellectual classes until the 1967 war. It is true that the American people and the bulk of their intellectual class are far apart on the subject of Israel, but all the massive and popular evil of the last century started among a small ideological elite.

A common explanation for the turning away of the intellectuals from Israel is that the Jewish state forfeited the world’s sympathy once it was no longer perceived as the underdog in its conflict with the Arabs. Israel’s sin, in this reading, is that it didn’t lose. However, this would suggest that intellectuals misunderstand a uniquely American concept: The underdog does not win the pity of the chorus because he is crushed by his tormentors; rather, he is the champion who perseveres because the stubborn stars that rule his nature will not permit him to choose otherwise. Perhaps his friends will abandon him, and maybe his family, too; neither his wife nor children signed on for such an arduous journey. If he intends to follow this hard path, he may well travel alone. Such is the stuff of big-ticket American heroism. It is odd that the American intelligentsia cannot recognize in Israel the likeness of our literary models, Melville’s Ahab, Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne. Rather, the intelligentsia is more like Hester’s hypocritical neighbors. If Israel is portrayed as the Dirty Harry of nations, then its accusers are the tepid bureaucrats mistaking cowardice for compassion, who chide Clint Eastwood’s Callahan.

In reality, of course, Israel isn’t all that heroic. No one and nothing is. Israel’s men and women of honor do not accomplish Homeric deeds in south Lebanon or Gaza to the beat of martial songs, like the resistance; instead they ride the bus home on the weekend to see their parents, go out drinking with friends, and pick up the wrong guy or girl in a smoky bar with awful pop music. “Our warriors,” says one former tank driver, “are Jewish boys who are bossed around by their wives.” And yet during the war with Hezbollah four years ago, the country’s incompetent political and military leadership sent too many of those Jewish boys to their deaths, without sufficient training or a strategy for victory. It seems like almost every day there is news that another of Israel’s chief political leaders is under investigation for corruption charges, which is to say the system is rotten and the system works. To say that Israel is normal is to say that it is, like all democracies, mediocre.

Intellectuals are not interested in the quotidian mediocrity of a functioning democracy. They are interested in ideas. Once an idea is realized in the form of a political organization that must function on a day-to-day basis, it is difficult for men and women of ideas to stomach the result. For instance, it is very exciting that the United States is founded on an idea—one that upends classical political theory. Whereas the ancients believed the role of the state was to promote virtue, the moderns took a more realistic view of human nature. The United States is founded on the idea that men are mediocre when they are not murderous and that it is the role of the state to protect them from each other’s predations. For such an optimistic country like the United States, this is a very unpleasant picture of human nature, and quite a boring idea. Universal equality is not the kind of idea, in practice even more so than theory, that is apt to excite intellectuals.

Of course, intellectuals on the right and the left have been wrong about politics these last hundred years more than they have been right (or righteous). George Orwell, after all, is not a major figure who was right about communism; rather, he is a major figure because he was one of the few who was right about communism. Among the great names of U.S. and European literary modernism, it is difficult to number more than a handful who did not flirt with fascism or who were not openly anti-Semitic.

The same search for novelty and individual originality, the same disenchantment with democracy, the same desire to stand outside the mediocrity of mass culture that fueled the modernist revolution in the arts also gave rise to a dispiriting number of mass-murdering political cults, from communism to fascism and Nazism to a number of Western-inspired ideas that were realized elsewhere, from the genocidal regime of Pol Pot to Arab nationalism. Anything to change the status quo, for the West was “a botched civilization,” wrote Ezra Pound, the American poet, “an old bitch gone in the teeth.” This proudly fascist and anti-Semitic modernist master, who made radio broadcasts on Mussolini’s behalf, won the Bollingen prize for poetry in 1949—never mind Pound’s crazy politics, said his defenders, the man was a poet of genius.

You could argue that Israel is a nation of obvious appeal to the intellectual classes, even on their own terms. For instance, the rebirth of Hebrew as a living national language was the work of intellectuals. Zionism itself is an idea. If you were a person of faith, you’d simply take the restoration of the Jews as proof that God is real and acts in history. But as a man of reason, you’d see the rebirth of Israel as evidence of human progress: After 2,000 years of wandering and suffering, the Jews have a modern nation-state—things do get better. If you were a man of reason, you’d take Israel as proof that enlightenment is real.

But intellectuals are no more rational than the rest of us, and none of us are wholly rational in our politics. The attractiveness of the resistance takes place on an emotional level, for like all of the most intellectually captivating modernist grand concepts it is a rejection of the Enlightenment, the boredom and the mediocrity of regular politics. The Enlightenment did away with the blood, the magic and mysticism of the great leader, he who decides life and death with a word. And this is what is to be recovered in the resistance: the charisma and authenticity of the human being unrestrained by what Nietzsche called slave morality. From Pound and T.S. Eliot to Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault and their disciples, for a century the West’s greatest minds have taught that the privilege, and duty, of the Western intellectual is to unmake the West, even—or especially—through violence, even if someone else, like the resistance, must serve as the agent of apocalypse and rebirth. The notion that Israel is condemned because it is more powerful than its adversaries is patently false: The intellectuals are nothing if not spellbound by the economy of force, and equally so in the purgative bloodshed that ensues. The aspect of eros that Pound found in Il Duce and Foucault found in Khomeini is what the Western acolytes of the resistance see in Hamas and Hezbollah.

Some journalists shed tears when Arafat died, others are smitten by the beauty of Islamist militants: The “green eyes” of Hezbollah’s deputy Naim Qassem “are framed by thick, dark lashes and he has long elegant hands.” Saddam Hussein, we are told, did much to advance the rights of women. In Cairo I knew a former CNN producer whose first affair with an Arab intelligence officer was in Saddam’s Baghdad—a great city, she explained, if you didn’t mind the constant surveillance and widespread torture.

But this attraction of the intellectuals to the flame of the resistance is not simply based on eros alone. There is also the aspect of thanatos, the death instinct. The sad reality is that all organisms—men and the nations they populate—carry within them the seeds of their own end. While the normal run of men unwittingly nurture their demise through the wrong that has become habit and custom, the suicide overruns all limits. In reality, it is not Israel that our intellectuals despise, for that hatred is simply the latest pattern in a long century that the West’s self-loathing has taken. It is ourselves that we cannot abide.

Three fields, and particularly the “Leviathan” site discovered earlier this month, are estimated to be able to turn Israel into a net energy exporter.

Yesterday, Tablet Magazine columnist Lee Smith predicted that Israel’s newfound energy resources could be the spark that lights what many consider to be an inevitable second round of the 2006 Lebanon war. A member of Hezbollah’s executive council told Smith, “If Lebanon needed to pile up hundreds, thousands of rockets to protect our sovereignty, dignity, and hydraulic resources, then the need to protect our hydrocarbon assets motivates us to enhance the Resistance’s capacities.” Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, a Hezbollah ally, added to Smith, “The arms of the Resistance are crucial for defending Lebanon’s offshore petroleum resources.”

For years, according to Smith, Hezbollah has justified its armed presence with reference to the Shebaa Farms, “an insignificant piece of land in the Golan Heights.” “The natural gas fields,” Smith notes, “are Shebaa on steroids.”

Landau: We Will Defend Gas Field [JPost]
Related: The Next Lebanon War

With the exception of a brief suspension during the George W. Bush presidency, the notion of Syrian centrality has dominated U.S. thinking—and often Israeli thinking—about the Middle East, and the Obama Administration is no exception. The idea that it is important to appease Syria at all costs appears to be behind the lack of any notable response to recent reports indicating that Syria may have passed Scud-D ballistic missiles to Hezbollah in Lebanon. This dangerous development comes after a tripartite summit in Damascus between the leaders of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah in February at which the Syrian and Iranian presidents openly mocked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her comment about wanting to see Syria distance itself from Iran. Instead, Damascus and Tehran waived visa requirements between their two countries.

The model for what U.S. and Israeli policymakers hope from Syria is the Camp David accord with Egypt, which established what some refer to as the “Pax Americana” in the Middle East. The Egyptian model was and remains the premise behind approaching Syria, as was evident during Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman’s testimony before the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia in April, when Rep. Dana Rohrbacher wondered in his remarks what it would take to turn Syria around to becoming a more moderate Arab country “like Jordan or Egypt.”

While Cold War efforts to remove Syria from the Soviet orbit failed, a similar, enduring subplot has emerged regarding its 30-year-old alliance with Iran. The ubiquitous argument was summarized in a 2009 essay by Richard Haass and Martin Indyk in Foreign Affairs:

Syria is the principal conduit for Iran’s influence in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. Israeli-Syrian negotiations threaten to sever these ties. Drawing Syria away from Iran would also deprive Tehran and its Hamas and Hezbollah proxies of a critical ally. Such a strategic realignment would weaken Iran’s influence in the region, reduce external support for both Hamas and Hezbollah, and improve the prospects for stability in Lebanon. A U.S.-brokered peace between Israel and Syria would remove Damascus as an enemy and, in the process, likely cause the breakup of the Iranian-Syrian alliance.

Advocates for pursuing Haass and Indyk’s recommendation include a list of revered former officials, often identified as Realists, such as former Secretary of State James Baker, former national security advisers like Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, a coterie of former ambassadors and peace processors, not to mention a host of policy mavens in the think-tank world.

Their argument rests on a basic linkage theory, which, incidentally, also accepts key aspects of the Syrian official line: The problems in the region are related, and they revolve around the Arab-Israeli conflict and Israel’s occupation of Arab lands.

In this conceptual universe, Syria is at the center of the conflict. A weak country, unable to match Israeli power and American penetration of the region, it struck a realist, defensive alliance with Iran as well as with non-state actors Hamas and Hezbollah in order to avoid isolation, but also to gather assets to pressure Israel and the United States to the negotiation table to recover the Golan Heights. In doing so, Syria manages to frustrate any regional deals that ignore its interests. Therefore, any deal in the region has to be “comprehensive,” i.e., involving the Syrians. After all, you cannot make peace without Syria, as the adage has it.

***

Another part of the idea that Syria is the key to regional peace, and can be won over to the West, has to do with the nature of Syria’s rulers. The Assads—who have ruled Syria since 1970—aren’t ideological, like Iran, the theory goes, but are secular and pragmatic horse traders. As former Secretary of State James Baker, one of the ardent supporters of this worldview, put it, “a deal is there to be had.”

Once the Syrians get what they want, Baker and his cohort believe, they will become more cooperative, leading to at least a reformulation of their ties to Iran and allied militant groups. Syria will ultimately embrace the West, they believe, because Iran cannot satisfy Syria’s serious economic woes. Only the West can offer Syria the investments it needs. This gives rise to other convictions about Assad himself, who is portrayed as a secular modernizer who, in the words of Brent Scowcroft, “cannot be comfortable clutched solely in the embrace of Iran.”

Secretary of State Clinton made this premise explicit at a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on the heels of a trip to Damascus by William Burns, the undersecretary of state for political affairs: “We have laid out for the Syrians the need for a resumption of the Israeli/Syrian track on the peace process, which had been proceeding through the offices of the Turks, and generally to begin to move away from the relationship with Iran, which is so deeply troubling to the region as well as to the United States.”

Assad’s reaction was swift and unambiguous: He hosted a tripartite summit with Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah during which Assad and Ahmadinejad specifically ridiculed Clinton’s statement. Assad told reporters he and Ahmadinejad “misunderstood” Clinton’s comments, “maybe because of translation error or limited understanding.” Instead, he said, Syria and Iran signed an agreement canceling visa requirements between their countries. Ahmadinejad piled it on: “Clinton said we should maintain a distance. I say there is no distance between Iran and Syria. We have the same goals, same interests and same enemies. Our circle of cooperation is expanding day after day.”

Assad’s rhetorical slight was matched by his escalating transfer of advanced weaponry to Hezbollah, namely anti-aircraft systems and long-range missiles, culminating in the recent Scud crisis.

Given the conceptual framework within which the Administration is operating, it was unsurprising that the reaction to Assad’s behavior was one of befuddled confusion. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg shrugged off the Damascus summit as “theater.” Optimists even saw it as evidence of Iranian “insecurity” and “nervousness.”

After the reports of Scud missile transfers from Syria to Hezbollah, Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman offered the following commentary on the Damascus summit to the Lebanese daily An-Nahar: “First, it seems that there is a pattern, as I mentioned in the [House] hearing, that after every visit [to Syria] by a U.S. or Western official, an Iranian official visits Damascus, or a Syrian official visits Tehran. I don’t know what this pattern means, but it could signify some very important things.”

Feltman had made the same observation during a stormy hearing of the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia a few days earlier, in response to a remark by Rep. Dan Burton, who described Assad’s summit with Ahmadinejad as “spit in our face.” Feltman retorted that the pattern suggests that the Iranians are worried or that something was going on behind the scenes. He neglected to mention that this same pattern has been going on for 30 years, without any real impact on the endurance of the Syrian-Iranian alliance, which seems as solid as—if not more solid than—it has ever been.

The fact that the Administration’s hopeful understanding of Syrian motivations fails to make sense of actual Syrian behavior has not been lost on U.S. policymakers, who nevertheless seem stuck in the same old box. As one official told Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin, “We do not understand Syrian intentions. No one does, and until we get to that question we can never get to the root of the problem. Until then it’s all damage control.” Why Assad behaves the way he does was dubbed “the million-dollar question” by the same official.

***

At the heart of the Administration’s flawed conceptual framework is an acceptance of the idea that Syria’s behavior is ultimately reactive, driven by grievances against Israel and the West, the occupation of the Golan Heights chief among them. By accepting the centrality of the United States and Israel, policymakers miss far more powerful local factors that motivate regime calculations.

What is often referred to as a transient “marriage of convenience” between Syria and Iran is now in its 31st year, having enjoyed its silver anniversary during the Bush Administration. In fact, the relationship between the Assad regime and Ayatollah Khomeini predates the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Hafez Assad cultivated ties with the cadres of the Iranian opposition to the shah and even offered to host Khomeini in Damascus when the Iraqi Baath regime expelled him from Najaf in 1978. One figure that played an initial role in the relationship was the Iranian-Lebanese cleric Musa al-Sadr, who had sided with the Syrians in Lebanon in order to balance Palestinian influence.

Sadr had bestowed a measure of religious legitimacy on Assad’s Alawite sect (deemed heretical by orthodox Islam), declaring Alawites to be Shiite Muslims in 1973. Sadr was also hosting a number of Iranian opposition cadres in Lebanon, where they were able to train and assist the opposition movement to the shah. These figures, who went on to assume leadership positions in Iran’s newly founded revolutionary regime in 1979-1981, would move through Syria and were offered Syrian-issued passports to facilitate their movement. One such activist, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, who went on to become Iran’s foreign minister, was given a Syrian passport and cover to work in Paris as a correspondent for the Syrian government paper, al-Thawra.

The Assad court historian, Patrick Seale, reports that on a visit to Tehran in August 1979, then-Syrian Foreign Minister Abdel Halim Khaddam boasted that Syria had supported the Islamic Revolution “prior to its outbreak, during it and after its triumph.” Well before Jordan’s King Abdullah warned of a “Shiite Crescent,” Seale had already written that Assad pursued a policy “to confront the world of Camp David” through an alliance with revolutionary Iran.

Far from recoiling from a Shiite Islamist “awakening,” Assad welcomed it. The “secular” Assad congratulated Khomeini over the victory of the Islamic Revolution and dispatched his information minister with a present for the new Iranian leader in Qom: an illuminated Quran.

The current effort to lure Syria away from Iran through incentives (political and economic) is hardly the first. For example, in 1986 the Iranians were “nervous” about an attempt at rapprochement with Syria led by Jordan, whose King Hussein also attempted achieving a reconciliation between Assad and Saddam Hussein. Between 1985 and 1988, there was a concerted effort backed by Saudi Arabia, the United States, and even Syria’s Soviet patron to entice Damascus into the so-called “Arab fold.”

Much like today, Syria’s economy was in dire straits, and the country was diplomatically isolated. Western observers figured that Assad’s choice was an easy one to make. And yet to their befuddlement, Assad refused, despite serious Soviet and Saudi pressure. The Syrian-Iranian alliance not only survived, it was consolidated during the subsequent two decades. Clearly, what outside observers have been arguing was Syria’s best interest was not in sync with its leadership’s calculation.

***

There is an immense gap between Syria’s grandiose self-image and the reality of its weakness as a second-tier regional actor. Damascus has always liked to invoke grand memories of its relatively brief imperial moment when it served as the seat of the Umayyad caliphate. This was a historical exception to geographical Syria’s status as a buffer zone and invasion route for larger, neighboring empires. But illusions of grandeur persist. The latest extravagant version of this charade being peddled by Assad is one that paints Syria as the nexus of “a single, large perimeter [with Turkey, Iran and Russia] that combines five seas: the Mediterranean, the Caspian Sea, Black Sea, the Arabian Gulf and Red Sea,” as the Syrian president grandly proclaimed in a May 24 interview with the Italian daily La Repubblica. “We’re talking about the center of the world.”

Continue reading: “a redefining of defeat as victory.” Or view as a single page.

• A Hezbollah camp in Syria is a transit point for missiles that are trucked into Lebanon. This is not promising for the prospect of a peaceful summer. [Times of London]

• An Israeli journalist points out that the Israeli military’s hyperactive, loud, and at times asinine response to the Gaza-bound “Freedom Flotilla” is probably not as wise as just quietly diverting the completely non-threatening boats or letting them through the blockade. [Ynet]

• Progressive political group Democracy for America said it will continue to back Marcy Winograd, who is challenging staunchly pro-Israel Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) in the primary, despite Winograd’s support for a one-state solution and her demand that Harman and others “pledge allegiance to this country.” [Ben Smith]

• JDub Records CEO Aaron Bisman reports from yesterday’s White gala. [Jewcy]

• Brandeis University will try to manage its financial difficulties without selling off parts of its art collection, as it had planned. [NYT]

• Am I the only one who thoroughly enjoys it every time some public figure who says something stupid or worse has to prostrate himself in front of the ADL and insist he is not a Nazi? Anyway, it’s Newt Gingrich’s turn. [ADL]

From our Irish friends, have a happy Memorial Day. Please think of those who protect us and then do not return home.

• We learned that Australia’s expulsion yesterday of a Mossad representative related to the Dubai/Hamas assassination followed the country’s intelligence chief’s personal trip to Israel. Israeli diplomats called this “a very serious crisis.” [Haaretz]

• Others joined Shimon Peres in denying the report that Israel offered to sell nuclear weapons to apartheid-era South Africa. [NYT]

• U.S. envoy George Mitchell revealed that he intends to set a “deadline” for a peace agreement to emerge from the proximity talks. [Foreign Policy]

• Israeli police suggested that the attorney general indict Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman for allegedly attempting to subvert a corruption investigation. His indictment for alleged corruption has previously been recommended, though not followed through on. [WSJ]

• The guest list to Thursday night’s White House Jewish Heritage reception is beginning to trickle out. Hopefully invitee Sandy Koufax will show. (We will have a report afterward.) [AP]

• Hezbollah is mobilizing to prepare for a large Israeli military drill beginning Sunday. [Haaretz]

• France and Germany’s foreign ministers both hit the Mideast this weekend to talk peace. [Ynet]

• Moshe Greenberg died at 81. An Israel Prize winner, he was one of the first Jews who critically taught the Bible in the American academy. [NYT]

• Newt Gingrich’s new book says President Obama’s policies are as “great a threat to America as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.” The AJC wants an apology. [American Jewish Committee]

• And while we were out for Shavuot, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pennsylvania) lost this year’s Democratic primary. So much for the party switch. [JTA]

One reason why is that Israel had pledged to treat the state of Lebanon as the enemy next time around, even if it is technically Hezbollah that is doing the fighting. Another reason is that Hezbollah has significantly upgraded its weaponry (in violation, I’m fairly certain, of a United Nations resolution), to the point that Tel Aviv may not be safe:

Reports over the past year suggest that Hizballah has received advanced Russian shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles, and some fighters have been trained in Syria on larger truck-mounted missile systems. U.S. and Israeli intelligence sources say Hizballah has also augmented its arsenal with larger, longer-range rockets with guidance capabilities. Many analysts believe that in the event of another war, Hizballah plans to strike strategic targets deep inside Israel.

Although last month’s Israeli claims that Syria transferred Scud ballistic missiles to Hizballah remain unsubstantiated — and some military analysts are skeptical, given the rocket’s size and cumbersome logistical requirements — the group is believed to have acquired Syrian-manufactured M-600 guided rockets. The M-600, a copy of an Iranian rocket, can carry a 1,100-lb. (500 kg) warhead a distance of 155 miles (250 km), and its guidance system allows Hizballah to target Israel’s Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv from hidden bases in the northern Bekaa Valley.

The bellwether to watch, Time adds, isn’t Israeli-Lebanese relations, or really Israel’s relations with anyone. The thing that will have the greatest bearing on whether and when Israel and Hezbollah duke it out again are the tensions between Iran and the United States.

Hezbollah Prepares for the Next War [Time]

We only learned this today, because before then Israel had imposed a gag order on the case (remember, they can do that), and there were only scattered reports that Makhoul had been arrested from his home in Haifa late last week at 3 in the morning, held lawyerless for 48 hours, and remanded for six days. (Electronic Intifada also organized a petition protesting his arrest.) JTA noted that Ittijah was involved in the infamous 2001 Durban conference, and that it refuses to condition aid based on being from non-terrorist sources.

2 Nabs for Spying for Hezbollah [JPost]
Rights Orgs. Condemn Arrest of Palestinian Civil Society Leader [Electronic Intifada]
Arrest of Arab Leader, Gag Order Are Protested [JTA/Baltimore Jewish Times]

It is hardly surprising, then, that commanders of U.S. armed forces who during the last decade have spent more time on the ground among Arab and Muslim populations than American diplomats also subscribe to the concept of linkage and have even made it into a tenet of U.S. military strategy. For instance, in his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March, CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus explained that, “The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests” in the region.

Petraeus’s comments were used by some to advance the linkage-based argument that Israeli actions were endangering U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Petraeus himself has clarified his remarks, and last week Defense Secretary Robert Gates jumped into the fray to explain that, “Petraeus did not say that the lack of progress in the peace process is costing American lives.” According to Gates, the issue is that:

The lack of progress in the peace process has provided political ammunition to our adversaries in the Middle East and in the region, and that progress in this arena will enable us not only to perhaps get others to support the peace process, but also support us in our efforts to try and impose effective sanctions against Iran.

Gates and Petraeus, then, are adherents of what might be called “soft” linkage. This is the idea that since, in Petraeus’s words, “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel,” it’s the work of U.S. policymakers to keep working on the peace process that will lead to a Palestinian state in order to show U.S. good faith to the Arabs. The soft linkers don’t believe that all the regional problems will melt away with a resolution to the conflict, but progress on the peace process will render regional U.S. allies more willing to cooperate on matters of U.S. national interest. Robert Malley is a soft linker, so are Aaron David Miller and Dennis Ross and almost everyone else who has ever worked on the peace process in a U.S. presidential administration.

And then there are the apostles of “hard” linkage, most of whom do not like Israel and believe, like John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, that popular anger over the Palestinian issue actually motivates the policymaking decisions of Arab rulers. As preposterous as it may seem—that hard security regimes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt really care that much about popular opinion—there are plenty of moderate Arab leaders who keep feeding ammunition to the hard linkers. For instance, King Abdullah of Jordan is the latest in a long line of Hashemite leaders who warns that failure to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli crisis endangers moderate rulers like himself. The difference between Abdullah and the hard linkers of the U.S. policy establishment is that the latter want Washington to sever its relationship with Jerusalem, while the Jordanian king knows quite well that a weakened Israel, less capable of stopping Palestinian militants on his border, could bring his regime down.

Having written a book that describes the Middle East in terms of a clash of Arab civilizations, I give no credence to the notion that the Arab-Israeli arena is the region’s defining issue. Rather, it is one among many conflicts that plague this conflict-prone area, and so I see the Arabic-speaking regions in terms of intra-Arab clashes, or an Arab cold war, where regional actors—not just nation states, but also regimes and their domestic rivals, in addition to competing sectarian groups—are warring with each other at varying levels of intensity. There is the Palestinian civil war between Hamas and Fatah that has cooled for the time being; in Lebanon, Hezbollah has routed the pro-democracy March 14 forces; the Houthi rebellion taking place on the Saudi-Yemen border is effectively a proxy war between the Saudis and the Iranians; in Syria, the ruling Alawite minority simultaneously fears the country’s Sunni majority even as it uses Sunni militants to advance its interests in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and the Palestinian territories; and in Iraq, Sunnis and Shia seem to be poised for a continuation of the civil war that will ensue after the U.S. withdrawal. That’s the real Middle East, where the Arabs’ fight for power among themselves takes priority over whether or not Washington negotiators have the percentages right in proffered land swaps between Israel and the Palestinians.

Nonetheless, I can hardly help but recognize the central role that U.S. Middle East policy has given to the belief that, from the Persian Gulf all the way to Western North Africa, a region encompassing many thousands of tribes and clans, dozens of languages and dialects, ethnicities and religious confessions, the Arab-Israeli issue is the key factor in determining the happiness of over 300 million Arabs and an additional 1.3 billion Muslims outside of the Arabic-speaking regions. Where does such an extraordinary idea come from? The answer is the Arabs—who might be expected, in the U.S. view of the world, to give us an honest account of what is bothering them. However, this would ignore the fact that interested parties do not always disclose the entire truth of their situation, especially when they have a stake in doing otherwise.

In all relations, intimate as well as international, the goal is to convince the other side to see the world in the way that you have chosen for them to see it. As Zionist immigration started to pick up in the 1920s and 1930s, long before the United States was even a factor in the Middle East, Arab rulers explained to the British that the creation of a Jewish state would cause deep anger among the Islamic umma, or community. The notion that all Muslims could feel strongly about one particular issue that did not touch on them directly was not necessarily false, but neither was it invariably true. Religious affiliation is only one form of identity in the region, where tribal and clan loyalty often trump everything else: It tests credulity that, say, the Saud clan of the Nejd on the Arabian peninsula was more concerned with protecting wealthy Jerusalem families than with defeating its own local adversaries, such as the Hashemites.

Linkage is the narrative the Arab rulers—specially Ibn Saud, the Hashemites who ruled Iraq and Transjordan, and the Egyptian monarchy—used to compete with each other to represent the Palestinian file to the British, a privilege that would enhance the winner’s power and prestige at the expense of his rivals. If the Saudis, say, owned the right to speak for the Arabs of the Palestinian mandate, then the British would have to go through the Saudi king to win concessions, a path that the British would need to pave with gold and concessions of their own to the Saudis. The competition for the role was stiff.

In the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, many of the British Foreign Office’s bureaucrats were, following in the footsteps of T.E. Lawrence, obsessed with the notion of a great and unified Arab nation. But even as the Foreign Office’s advice to Whitehall was largely based on sentimental, or irrational, grounds, London was not entirely foggy-headed. Recognizing that war with Germany was on the horizon, the Brits did not wish to risk their position in the Levant or energy sources in the Gulf by pushing the Arabs over to the Nazis. After the war, with the Brits losing their holdings and discovering that they were incapable of continuing to balance the Jews and the Arabs, the American moment in the Middle East began in earnest. The U.S. Department of State inherited the Foreign Office’s Arab nationalist inclinations and with it the idea of linkage. President Harry S. Truman’s Secretary of State Gen. George Marshall was the first in a long line of American military men reaching up to the present who subscribed to the idea that U.S. support for the Zionist state would antagonize the world’s Muslim population. Marshall was a proponent of hard linkage who not only warned the president against recognizing Israel, but also threatened to vote against him if he did so.

So, how did Washington manage to navigate these dangerous shoals, balancing not only the Arabs and Israel, but also a large segment of its own foreign-policy establishment that was suspicious, if not downright hostile, to the Jewish state? An even neater stunt than convincing the other side to accept your perspective is to turn their idols upside down—that is, to take their worldview and use it against them. This is exactly the trick that Washington accomplished in the wake of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the energy crisis. Henry Kissinger’s State Department began exploiting the Arab narrative for the United States’ own benefit: The United States told the Arabs that it, too, believed in linkage, and that if they wanted anything from Israel, they’d have to come through the United States to get it. The Arabs were happy to go along for the ride, especially the Saudis, who wanted to avoid a repeat of the oil embargo that OPEC imposed on the United States for siding with Israel.

Those who say they see through the myth of linkage note that the Palestinian issue can’t be that important because in fact the Arabs don’t really care about the Palestinians and just use them as a political football for their own benefit. That’s both true and not true, but what’s more instructive is that the Palestinians have caused a lot of trouble in the region for their Arab brethren. Palestinian refugees started civil wars in Jordan and Lebanon and sided with Iraq when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. If, like me, you see the region in terms of an Arab civil war, then these Palestinian uprisings are simply evidence of how one group has fought its rivals for power. But if you see the Middle East in terms of linkage, you would argue this proves your circular logic: If the Palestinian issue was resolved these wars never would have happened in the first place.

The myth of linkage owes its power in part in part to the nature of the Middle East, where American policy walks a fine line between reason and faith. For instance, the United States supports Israel because Israel is a strategic ally with whom the United States shares liberal democratic values—and because Israel is the national homeland of a people whose line of prophets culminates with the Christian messiah who was resurrected three days after his death. Similarly, the United States dares not dismiss the Arabs’ claim to Jerusalem, a city revered as the third-holiest city in all of (Sunni) Islam because the prophet of Islam’s flying horse touched down there during his night journey to heaven.

As the origins of any myth fade into the past, the myth, paradoxically, becomes more and more powerful, sometimes even taking on the appearance of truth. Two generations removed from the American policymakers who turned linkage to the advantage of U.S. regional interests, a dangerous stage begins in the history of a myth invented by one Arab tribe to gain the support of the British in their battle with another Arab tribe and that Washington turned around to make itself the power center of the Middle East.

Consider this statement taken from Petraeus’s Senate testimony: “Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of US partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR [Area of Responsibility] and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world.” This is boilerplate material that could have been written for any U.S. official over the last 40 years, and it’s totally uncontroversial, except for the fact that it’s not true and has never been true. Moderate Arab regimes do not enjoy political legitimacy as liberal democracies do; rather, their legitimacy is proportionate to the capacity of their security services to repress domestic opposition, especially of the Islamist variety, and deter intra-Arab enemies. Their legitimacy depends only on their ability to stay in power. Washington’s regional partnerships—with Arab regimes and not with Arab peoples—are to ensure that these regimes do stay at the helm. For example, $2 billion annually of the U.S. taxpayers’ money helps Egypt’s military and security chiefs stay loyal to President Hosni Mubarak, while the Bahrain-based U.S. Fifth Fleet makes sure that oil receipts fill the coffers of the Saudi royal family and the Gulf Arab emirates. In other words, Washington’s Arab allies are not willing to commit suicide over the Palestinian question by telling Washington to stop supporting them.

Indeed, the American position in the Middle East is founded on the idea that Arab regimes are incapable of defending themselves against anyone. Washington made sure these regimes can’t defeat Israel; the United States protected the Saudis from the Soviets and then from Saddam, when the American presence in the desert made the Saudis vulnerable to their own domestic opposition in the form of Osama Bin Laden. What the Saudis want now is to be protected against the Islamic Republic of Iran, but they can’t say that publicly any more than they can explain that the myth of linkage was always more about intra-Arab politics than it was about the fate of the Palestinians.

Nor apparently can the Americans admit that linkage was just a strategic instrument that leveraged the Arab narrative to the advantage of the United States. The further U.S. policymaking gets from the origins of the myth, the more magical and enticing it has become. The myth of linkage has grown to such legendary proportions at this point that it is the extent of the current White House’s Middle East policy. We have no other strategy to stop the Iranian nuclear program but linkage. Movement on the peace process, the Obama Administration believes, will get the Arab regimes to help us with Iran. The problem is that the Arabs will not help us with Iran. They want us to deal with Iran ourselves, but if we keep forcing the issue of linkage they have no choice but to go along with the ruse that everything is linked to the Arab-Israeli crisis. After all, it’s their narrative, and they can’t disown it now.

In reality, the reason the Obama Administration, Gates, and Petraeus are pushing linkage into overdrive is that there is no Iran strategy, and nothing—not even linkage—is going to stop the Iranians. They are telling the Arabs that they are going to do what they can about the Palestinian question, because they are not going to do anything about Iran. That’s the Arabs’ consolation prize for being an American ally. What a cruel joke fate has played at the expense of Arabs, who have been talking out of both sides of their mouth about the Palestinians and linkage for almost a century, a myth that came to link the fate of the Americans to that of the Arabs, and theirs to ours. Since we have no other policy than a magic trick, the Arabs have no choice but to pretend to believe it’s real.

• Arguments took place over former Agriprocessors head Sholom Rubashkin’s sentencing for bank fraud charges. Federal prosecutors’ request for life have struck many legal experts as excessive. [NYT]

• A leaked State Department memo found that officials in Damascus have no idea how actually to impose the United States’s economic sanctions on Syria. [WP]

• Egypt convicted 26 alleged Hezbollah operatives for planning to commit terrorism against tourists passing through the Suez Canal and to smuggle weapons into Gaza. [WSJ]

• Speaking of which, Egypt gassed four smugglers then in tunnels under the Gaza border to death. It is not clear if it was poison gas or crowd-dispersal gas, which caused them to suffocate. [AP/Yahoo!]

• One of the last living prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials, a Navy officer named Whitney Harris, died at 97. [NYT]

While each study adds its own twist to the plot, they are mostly all in agreement on the basic narrative that would follow any preemptive Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities: Iran would initially retaliate by lobbing ballistic missiles at Israel, while Tehran’s proxies Hezbollah and Hamas would bear most of the burden by launching corresponding rocket attacks from Gaza and Lebanon. Most predictions also include some Iranian attempt to wage economic warfare by sealing off the Strait of Hormuz to stop the flow of oil. The common denominator that laces the various scenarios together is the belief in a relatively short confrontation. It is in light of this conventionally shared assessment that yet another recent study, which has not been translated into English but is receiving a good deal of attention in Israeli policymaking circles, manages to stand out.

“The Length of a Future War between Iran and Israel and the Conditions for its Conclusion,” is the title of a paper published several months ago by the Israeli Physicist Moshe Vered of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. The study not only challenges the widespread notion of a short war but seeks to overturn it: “The length of the war would have to be measured in years, not weeks or months,” Vered concludes.

Vered opens his paper by quoting from a conversation that took place in the Japanese Imperial Council a short time before the Pearl Harbor attacks, during which the Japanese military brass ensured the emperor that a war with the United States would be over “within three months.” Although Vered’s own primary intention is to alert Israeli policymakers of the need to get the public “mentally prepared” for the challenges of prolonged military confrontation—something Israelis have never really had to experience—the more profound implications of his study have to do with the fact that the consequences of human actions are unknowable and are often much worse than we imagine.

Vered is not alone in making such dire predictions. Ali Larijani, chairman of the Iranian Parliament, and formerly a member of the national security coterie that dictates nuclear policy, recently warned that the Iranian response to an Israeli attack would be “far beyond the imagination of the Zionist enemy and would be a nightmare.” Vered takes Iranian threats seriously and translates them into military terms. He suggests that an Iranian retaliation may include boots on the ground—an Iranian expeditionary force coming through Lebanon or Syria in order to link up with Hezbollah and buttress Syrian forces. This brazen move, he suggests, would aim at impeding a likely Israeli attempt to reconquer southern Lebanon in response to Hezbollah rocket fire. But Vered also raises the possibility that Iranian Revolutionary Guard units stationed in Eritrea might prey on Israeli shipping in the Red Sea while Iranian intelligence instigates a global terror crusade against Israeli and Jewish targets. Add to that, finally, an Iranian cyber-blitz meant to curtail Israel’s electronic advantage. As daunting as it sounds, Vered concludes that such an elaborate response “would not burden Iran in a manner that it cannot handle, while inflicting upon Israel costly and continuous damage.”

***

Vered’s argument is grounded in what he sees as the uncompromising nature of the fanatically religious Iranian regime, in that regime’s mostly irrational behavior during the Iran-Iraq war, and in a compilation of supporting statistical and theoretical models that analyzed the duration of past wars.

The primary obstacle to ending any military confrontation with Iran, Vered says, is located in the extremist version of Iran’s Shiite Islam. “In Iranian eyes, the mere existence of Israel is a dire wrong that must be put right in order to achieve eternal redemption” he writes. “Such an ideology compels to fight, and if need be to sacrifice, so that the injustices that had befallen upon Islam can be corrected.” It is this uncompromising nature of the Iranian brand of Islam that would enable the regime to disregard realpolitik calculations that would naturally serve to shorten the war and replace them instead with utopian considerations. (Such reasoning has long been a concern for Iranian scholars, among them the famed Islamic historian Bernard Lewis, who has repeatedly sounded warnings against an incipient Iranian brand of Shiite apocalypticism).

Since the Iranians would most likely consider any Israeli strike to be the harbinger of a colossal struggle of biblical proportions between “good” and “evil,” it’s not surprising that in the minds of the Iranian leadership such a confrontation would quickly transform into an all-or-nothing engagement to which there could only be one acceptable outcome: the destruction of Israel.

“The Iranian animosity towards Israel is ideological and religious, and is deeply rooted in Israel’s sins against Islam,” Vered concludes. “In the Shiite-Khomeini world view, justice could therefore only be achieved by the purgation of these very sins through the annihilation of Israel and the return of its lands and government to Muslim hands, a condition that leaves no room for compromise.”

***

Despite such formidable ideological incentives to fight to the very end, Vered identifies one single circumstance that would justify an Iranian suspension of hostilities: an existential threat to the regime. He has good reasons to think so: The eight deadly years of the Iran-Iraq war, which lasted from 1980 to 1988, supply his argument with some solid empirical foundations.

While the Iraqi aggressors showed a consistent inclination to accept mediation in the hope of arranging a ceasefire, Vered points out that the Iranians time and again obstinately refused such efforts. Having quickly turned the tide of war and taken the offensive, Tehran repeatedly conditioned any cessation of fighting upon the removal of Saddam Hussein from power and other unrealistic demands. Needless to say, the pursuit of such unattainable goals did not deter the regime from sacrificing hundreds of thousands of its own soldiers on the battlefield. But in 1988, after the pendulum on the battlefield had swung once more in Baghdad’s favor, an increasingly nervous Iranian regime, sensing the imminent collapse of its army and its withering public support, finally “succumbed to pragmatism,” in Vered’s words, and accepted mediation efforts to end the war. “Half a million deaths, an additional million injured, two million refugees and trillions of dollars in estimated economic loss were not enough to convince Iran to halt what was perceived as a just though useless war in her own eyes,” Vered explains. “Only the palpable fear from the revolutionary regime’s collapse forced her to accept a cease fire.”

If eight years of debilitating conflict with Iraq could not induce the ayatollahs to put down their arms, asks Vered, what could Israel do to Iran (short of annihilation) that would elicit a different result? Not much. With the exception of introducing nuclear weapons into the confrontation—something that Israeli leaders have historically vowed never to do—Vered posits that even targeted assassinations of its leadership, the infliction of considerable structural damage to oil facilities, and international diplomatic pressure would probably not succeed in convincing Iran to cease hostilities.

***

Vered’s conclusions are as compelling as they are disturbing, though they also remain questionable for a number of reasons. First, the verdict is still out regarding the place of ideology in Iran’s foreign policy. Given that many still consider President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fiery anti-Israel rhetoric as an instrument with which to score internal political points, it’s unclear whether the ayatollahs who actually frame Iran’s national security policy share his views. The U.S. Administration has continued to hold steadfast to its view that Tehran is indeed a rational actor, which may explain why the White House continues to invest so much diplomatic currency in pushing for rapprochement.

Noticeably absent from Vered’s otherwise meticulous study is a consideration of the potential influence of Iranian opposition forces during a future war. Although an Israeli strike would most likely spark an initial rally around the Iranian government, any prolonged conflict could quickly erode that primarily superficial layer of solidarity and reignite the animosities that remain latent in Iranian society since last June’s contentious elections, which were followed by months of protest that shook the regime.

Vered may also be misreading the nature of the Iran-Syria connection. If Iran were to attempt to transfer forces through Syria into Lebanon, the move would most certainly justify a harsh Israeli retaliatory strike on those troops. Any sizable Iranian infantry force the type of which Vered envisions would therefore very likely be neutralized by Israeli firepower while still in Syrian territory and before ever having the chance to reach the front (as was the case with the Iraqi expeditionary force in the 1973 war). Furthermore, the assumption that the Syrians would allow such a force to enter their borders in the first place remains highly tenuous. If the Iranian leadership is indeed irrational, as Vered suggests, then Bashar Assad’s regime in Damascus is its perfect binary opposite. Having long ago succeeded in translating Machiavelli’s political utilitarianism into an everyday routine, it is highly unlikely that the fervently secular (and mainly Sunni) Assad regime would put its life on the line for a fundamentalist Shiite agenda.

Just as the Japanese could not contemplate the four deadly years of war awaiting them, it would serve Israeli policymakers to remember that once you pull the trigger, there is no telling if, how, or when you will ever be able to let it go. “Every war is ironic, because every war is worse than expected,” observed Paul Fussell in his masterpiece The Great War and Modern Memory.

One lesson we can therefore draw from this latest run of war games is that the continuously evolving nature of modern warfare guarantees that we cannot and will not be able to really imagine the devastating consequences of a future Israel-Iran war. In an age of preemptive warfare, it may very well be that man’s inability to know the future is the most important lesson of them all.

Yoav Fromer is a New York-based journalist and a former columnist for Maariv.

• Backed by U.S. officials, President Shimon Peres accused Syria of giving Scud missiles to Hezbollah (Syria denies it). These weapons could easily reach Tel Aviv and Jerusalem from Lebanon. [WSJ]

• Remember how U.S. officials said yesterday that China had come around on economic sanctions against Iran? Chinese officials say that’s not so much true. [LAT]

• More than three-fourths of both the U.S. House and Senate signed bipartisan letters arguing for strong U.S.-Israeli ties. AIPAC applauded the signers. [JPost]

• Israel issued an unprecedented travel warning urging citizens to leave Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula immediately due to specific plans for a kidnapping. [WP]

• They’re fighting over the names of streets. [NYT]

Note regarding the first item: The relevant section is buried in an unrelated News Analysis, but it struck me—as well as Laura Rozen—as very important.

Perry, who has lived and traveled in the Middle East for several decades, started talking to terrorists during the second intifada, when he built relationships with Hamas leaders like Ismail Haniyeh, Abdul Azziz Rantissi, and Mahmoud al-Zahar. These contacts would eventually lead to Perry’s partnership with former British intelligence official Alastair Crooke of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum, an organization that regularly meets with terrorists and arranges meetings with non-active Western policymakers and diplomats. Perry left Conflicts Forum in the wake of Iran’s June presidential election, when he and Crooke found themselves on opposing sides. “He wrote an article on the June elections that showed disregard for the demonstrators,” says Perry. “And I wrote a piece castigating the regime and showing admiration for the opposition.”

Still, Perry has not lost his enthusiasm for the Iranian regime’s violence-prone proteges, like Hezbollah. How, I asked him, can the Party of God be considered democratic if its forces overran Beirut in May 2008, when the democratically elected government made a decision that Hezbollah didn’t like? The government, explained Perry, “wanted to take away Hezbollah’s privileges, so they pushed back.” Apparently, the fact that Hezbollah members only killed a few dozen of their fellow Lebanese before handing over their positions to the Lebanese Armed Forces makes them democratic.

“I’m not a reconciliation freak,” says Perry. “I’m not a pacifist. The vulnerability of my book is that people may come away thinking that simply by talking or listening, the scales will fall from our eyes. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Sometimes, you sit down with them and you’re thinking, Holy cow—conflict is inevitable.” Still, he believes that Hamas may be willing to make a transition similar to that of the Iraqi insurgency and come to the negotiating table with Israel.

* * *

We are in the midst of a golden age of engaging with our enemies, and while the Obama administration still refuses to talk to terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, the president’s key foreign policy goal is to reach out to their state sponsors, Syria and Iran. The White House counterterrorism czar John Brennan doesn’t want to talk to terrorists—not just yet, but he excitedly notes moderating influences within Hezbollah and suggests that it would be wise “to increase Hezbollah’s stake in Lebanon’s struggling democratic processes.”

Of course enthusiasm for democracy has little to do with the reasons why journalists and policymakers love talking to terrorists and their sponsors: Compared to boring democrats in suits, terrorists are hard men whose power and sex appeal issues from their willingness to use violence. Hence, they are attractive to Western media, and they know how to play the media. A famous terrorist like Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah is well aware that an interview with him is a form of currency, and he enhances the value of his interviews by granting them sparingly—and only to those who can be counted on to deliver a positive spin. It is hardly an accident that while Nasrallah has harsh words for the Jewish state, he likes to use Jews, like Seymour Hersh and Noam Chomsky, to convey his more polite-sounding messages. It’s good PR, and the attachment of Hezbollah’s Jewish messengers to their counter-ethnocentric mission makes it unlikely that they would ever risk making Nasrallah mad.

It was the conviction that there was altogether too much talking to terrorists that led some Lebanese friends and me to bring some American journalists and analysts to Beirut to speak with the other side of Lebanon’s political equation: politicians and activists who were not at present shooting at their countrymen or dragging the rest of the country to war. We had some successes, with articles placed in various U.S. media outlets, but we also came to recognize that even with the least hostile of interlocutors there are limits to the power of positive engagement.

First, we learned that it was difficult to control our message: We introduced one delegation member to Lebanese officials, journalists, intellectuals, and activists who detailed how, counter to what the delegation member believed, there was little similarity between Hezbollah and the Irish Republican Army. Still, even after a week’s worth of exposure to our arguments, he published an article contending that Hezbollah could be persuaded to put down its weapons in a process much like the one that disarmed the IRA.

We also learned that some Western reporters and analysts have such a deeply personal stake in their desire to understand “the other” that any suggestion that groups like Hezbollah might actually be motivated by a dangerous political ideology that has nothing in common with secular democratic norms is quite literally unbearable. One night at dinner, one of our hosts, an anti-Hezbollah Shia political activist, was criticizing the Party of God when a member of our delegation became anxious and annoyed. A researcher who has interviewed the leadership of other Islamist parties in the region, she snapped at our host and asked if he had “ever actually met someone from Hezbollah.” “Why yes,” replied the host, laughing. “I live in a Hezbollah neighborhood and have family members in Hezbollah, even Hezbollah martyrs.” Ideally, the messenger’s credentials would have at least persuaded her to listen to the message; instead, she got up and walked away from the table.

While the researcher in question was hardly displaying a devotion to open-minded inquiry, her behavior was founded on an undeniable truth: Talking to your enemy can be risky business. The greatest danger in talking is the possibility that you will be controlled by the other side’s message; or, if he’s yet more skillful, that your adversary will manage your perceptions to his advantage. Let’s consider Perry’s argument that the groups we should be talking to, like Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iraq’s Sunni Awakening, have constituencies, believe in democracy, and play roles in governance, all of which distinguish them from al-Qaida.

Iraq’s Sunni tribes turned against al-Qaida in Iraq and made common cause with the Americans only when the foreign fighters started to spill tribal blood. Therefore, the tribal Awakening in Iraq was not an act of national resistance but a tribal reaction to interference by murderous outsiders. This distinction is hardly trivial since the Middle East is a region where national affiliation is only one among many possible types of identity, including sub-national affiliations like tribalism and supranational attachments like religion. Al-Qaida in Iraq also had a constituency, a regional and sectarian one. As long as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killing Iraqi Shia, an Al Jazeera audience approving of his bloody project confirmed that his constituency was actually quite large across the Sunni-majority Middle East. There are plenty of reasons not to talk to al-Qaida, but not because it doesn’t have a constituency.

It’s a mistake, says Perry, to see Hezbollah and Hamas as Iranian stooges, “just like we thought Ho Chi Minh received his marching orders from Moscow.” Like many American journalists and academics of a certain generation, Perry has a worldview that is shaped by the U.S. experience in Vietnam—and our adversaries are well aware of how we see the world and happy to exploit our tendency to extrapolate from past wars in parts of the world that have very little in common with the Middle East.

In intelligence work, the effort to sort through the disinformation of your adversaries is called counterintelligence. This is one of our intelligence community’s famous weaknesses, but the issue runs much deeper than the flaws of Washington bureaucracies. Americans value transparency, in part because we are incapable of sustaining any other mode for very long: We believe in the absolute divide between lies and truth, and we think that the truth is always more productive and interesting. That belief is a dangerous liability when talking to your adversaries. The Obama administration’s engagement policy is premised on the notion that diplomacy is preferable to bloodshed. However, more often than not, diplomacy in the Middle East is an instrument of warfare, one that can be used to stall, exact concessions, or confuse the other side.

Information warfare is the art of splitting your opponents on issues that you have selected for them to fight over. For instance, Perry writes, incorrectly, that, “the most serious claim leveled against Hezbollah [is] its reported ‘virulent anti-Semitism.’ ” Obviously, the most serious claim leveled against Hezbollah is that it’s a terrorist group—one whose members are responsible for the deaths of thousands, including Lebanese citizens, U.S. soldiers, and diplomats, as well as Israelis. Omitting the fact that Hezbollah is alleged to be responsible for killing 85 people in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Perry devotes several pages to a quasi-theological debate in the U.S. media about whether Hezbollah really hates Jews or not.

As far as Hezbollah is concerned, the argument over whether the organization’s desire to wipe Israel off the map is truly a form of anti-Semitism is a godsend, because it distracts the press from the actual threat that the organization poses to U.S. interests. The fruits of this rather deliberate rhetoric of distraction can be seen every day in the press, as well as in more sophisticated discussions by policymakers and analysts. Having been fed a diet of this stuff, it is no accident that the U.S. intelligence community’s dangerously inaccurate assessment of Hezbollah reads like a Conflicts Forum press release. Hezbollah, the document asserts, “which has not directly attacked US interests overseas over the past 13 years, is not now actively plotting to strike the Homeland.” What this sentence somehow elides is the obvious fact that America’s allies are our chief interests abroad; these allies include not only Israel and Lebanon, but also Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, Kuwait, and Azerbeijan, all countries where active Hezbollah cells have been rolled up in the last two years. Add to this Hezbollah’s involvement in “direct” attacks on U.S. military personnel in Iraq, and we have a clear picture of an American enemy with an international reach.

Hezbollah’s anti-Semitism is not particularly important when evaluating the threat that the organization poses to U.S. interests. But Hezbollah’s well-documented hatred and fear of Jews (recently the group demanded profiling at Beirut airport for “Jewish-sounding” names) cuts to the heart of the problem of talking to terrorists regardless of their public statements and past behavior. If what your dialogue partners have said and written in the past doesn’t matter, then talking is not a method of gathering information; rather, it is a matter of personal dogma, an active affirmation of faith in the innate decency of all mankind. As theology, this is weak stuff. As a principle of American foreign policy, it defies belief.

But Mark Perry thinks otherwise. “Here we are refusing to talk to the great moderate middle in the Middle East,” Perry says of his interlocutors in Hamas and Hezbollah. “Maybe the environment isn’t right with Hamas right now; I think it is.”

For my grandmother, there is no real difference between a Jew and an Israeli. There are no distinctions to be drawn among the Israelis themselves. “They all despise us, and all they want is to see us powerless and defenseless,” she has told me since I was 6 years old.

My grandmother does not like questions and arguments that would challenge her comforting bubble of stereotypes. It is very simple for her: Jews are evil; Hezbollah is good. Black-and-white reasoning is the easiest way to live in the south of Lebanon, under constant threat of another war between Hezbollah and Israel. Either you question Hezbollah and its divine power, and thus face fears of what another war could bring, or you believe blindly in the “wisdom and power of the Party of God.”

All her life my grandmother struggled to raise her seven children and create a home for herself and her family—a home that is at risk of being demolished each time a military conflict erupts. Yet she cannot tolerate arguments related to Hezbollah and its credibility. “Hezbollah is defending our land. They know what they are doing,” she tells me with the confidence of an elder who knows better. “The Iranians are helping us and we can only thank them for their support.”

She believes strongly in wilayat al-faqih, the doctrine that the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran embodies the will of God. You cannot doubt the sacred.

And yet despite invocations of the sacred and the ancient, the mood that prevails among the Shia in Lebanon today is new, formed by the Israeli withdrawal of 2000—what is known as the “liberation of the South”—and the war with Israel of 2006, known as the “divine victory.” These two events gave my grandmother and many other Shia a strong sense of identity that shields their inner fears of war, destruction, and death.

“Hezbollah made us proud when they liberated the South in 2000 and then defeated the Israeli army in 2006,” Walid, a cell-phone shop owner in my village told me. “And be assured, the Sayyed”—an honorific referring to Nasrallah—“made it very clear to the Israelis that they can never instigate another war on Lebanon.”

I love my grandmother. But every time I go to the South, a sense of sadness fills me. It is not the South that I know. It is not the South where I lived as a child. Slogans of death and martyrdom fill the streets, and people stopped laughing long ago.

Black is everywhere. More women are draped in abayas, and segregation between the sexes is almost a rule in public ceremonies. Colors have faded inside houses, where pictures of Khomeini and Nasrallah prevail. If you’re not religious, you’d better hide it; otherwise, you will not be regarded as a decent person. People drink in private, dance in private, and scorn Hezbollah in private.

My village is not small. It is a coastal town near Saida, a port city about 25 miles south of Beirut. The village’s population is close to 50,000, but the heavy weight of war and Hezbollah’s arms keep personal plans on hold. Hezbollah controls the only public spaces for young people or families to meet. People tend to stay indoors, leaving the streets bereft of life.

I left the village at the beginning of the 1990s to pursue my undergraduate studies in Beirut. I was fleeing to a new life. Two wars with Israel have happened since I left, and with each one, I felt more distant from my people and my family, not for lack of love. The increased infatuation with Hezbollah, the repeated justification of its violence, pushed me away. I feel that I am open to other opinions, but it is difficult to communicate with people who have been imprisoned, who have imprisoned themselves. The rhetoric and reasoning of the Party of God have turned them into different people.

How fast can people and their individual and collective memories change? The question fascinates me. In 1982, during the Israeli invasion of the South, I was 8 years old. I remember one scene from the beginning of the invasion vividly. I was on my grandmother’s balcony with all my aunts and uncles, watching the Israeli tanks force themselves through the narrow streets of my village. All the neighbors’ balconies were full of people throwing rose petals and rice at the Israeli tanks.

I remember my mother telling me that people were happy because the Israelis were helping us remove the Palestinians. It was not that people no longer believed in the right to resist or the validity of the Palestinian cause. It was that the Palestinians failed to integrate into the Shia community. After the Israelis, too, began to overstay their welcome, Hezbollah convinced the Shia that resistance was essential to their political and social empowerment. That is why the 2006 war was endurable. My village was bombed, and many people died. But destruction and death are endurable if they are perceived to be necessary costs of achieving a common cause.

The people of my village say they are not afraid anymore. “Because Israel will never dare to start another war with Hezbollah after its defeat in 2006,” my grandmother, uncle, and cousin attest. All three generations live in denial of the defeat that we, as Lebanese, as people of the South, suffered.

Who lost more lives? Whose houses and infrastructure were destroyed? The facts don’t lie. Yet they refuse to see the reality, because Hezbollah has convinced them over the past two decades that “dignity is above all.” Slogans of dignity and honor flood their everyday lives through Hezbollah’s media channels, Nasrallah’s speeches, and street slogans.

But who can blame them? Without the conviction that they won, the pain of loss and the fear of more agony would be too much to bear.

Yet the rhetoric of fearlessness, so often heard in the South, vanishes the moment a security incident happens. A single rocket launched toward Israel could cause a traffic jam of people trying to flee from the South to Beirut. “We cannot tolerate another war,” Rasha, my childhood neighbor said. “Look around you. We haven’t finished reconstructing our houses yet. But what we think does not count.”

Hezbollah’s “divine victory” in the summer of 2006 provided a sense of closure to the years of grief the people of my village suffered; but Hezbollah cannot afford another “divine victory.” “I feel that because of the resistance, we are risking our land, houses, and lives,” Rasha tells me, adding that she doesn’t express her feelings out loud.

My grandmother loves Hezbollah, but she also loves peace. She hates Israel, but she also hates war, death, and destruction. The collective dignity of the community makes her proud. She knows that it is not enough to be proud, because she had to suffer the humiliation of fleeing under bombs in 2006. However, the closure of the “divine victory,” mixed with dignity and pride, offer her a way to go on living a life in which she feels comfortable and, in a strange way, secure.

Hanin Ghaddar is a Lebanese journalist based in Beirut.

Recently, Syrian President Bashar Assad, who once held out hope for negotiations with Israel, said that peace will only come “through resistance.” Earlier this week, Hassan Nasrallah, the Iran-backed head of the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, which now holds 10 of the 30 seats in the Lebanese government, upped his rhetoric against President Barack Obama, who he says has facilitated “absolute American commitment to Israeli interests, Israeli conditions, and Israeli security … while disregarding the dignity or feelings of the Arab and Muslim people.” Even Israel’s old friend Egypt has increasingly turned against it, both culturally and politically. Also not helping: The fact that the Obama administration has increasingly backed away from its initial insistence on an Israeli settlement freeze in the Palestinian territories, not to mention Israel’s hawkish Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who, says the AP, “has said Israeli-Arab lawmakers who meet Palestinian militants should be executed and the president of Egypt could ‘go to hell.’”

All of this is music to Iran’s ears: “[W]ith peace efforts stalled, the first time Iran uses its leverage in the Arab world to support another armed conflict against Israel, the election debacle will be quickly forgotten.”

Mideast Radicals Fill Space Left by Peace Impasse [AP]

While the Israel-Lebanon border had seen several months of quiet, the accompanying war of words had not. Israel has accused Hezbollah of re-arming, and even the United Nations has found that the group violated the 2006 ceasefire by maintaining a weapons depot near the border. A spokesperson said today that the IDF “views this incident very severely and we hold the government of Lebanon responsible.”

Rocket Fire From Lebanon Sparks Israel Retaliation [NYT]
Global Jihad Group Likely Behind Katyusha Attack on North [JPost]
Earlier: Hezbollah Broke U.N. Ceasefire
Related: Forbidding Sequel [Tablet]

According to Eyal Zisser, a senior research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, any possible sequel to 2006’s Israel-Lebanon War would be “ten times worse.” This is due, he and other experts agree, to three factors: Hezbollah’s re-amped military capability, its top-down infiltration of Lebanon’s political system, and Israel’s adoption, since the end of the last war, of the so-called Dahiya Doctrine, which stipulates that Israel now makes no distinction between terrorist or paramilitary groups and state government in the event that the former is in any way represented in the latter. “What Israel is doing now,” said Tony Badran, a research fellow at the Center for the Defense of Democracies, “is trying to remind everybody, ‘If you start a war, this time we’ll destroy the place.’” Indeed, according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “If Hezbollah joins the Lebanese government as an official entity, let it be clear that the Lebanese government, as far as we are concerned, is responsible for any attack—any attack—from its area on the state of Israel. It cannot hide and say: ‘It’s Hezbollah, we don’t control them.’”

How likely is Hezbollah to provoke Israel into war again?

It pays to revisit how the last war, known to Israelis as the Second Lebanon War (the first was in 1982), broke out three years ago. On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israeli border towns to distract from a more carefully coordinated attack: a cross-border raid by Hezbollah agents, who ultimately killed three IDF soldiers and kidnapped two more. Although Beirut, under the premiership of Fouad Siniora, officially disclaimed responsibility for these assaults, Israel ultimately placed the blame on his government, which included two Hezbollah ministers in Siniora’s cabinet. Thus, particularly after the first week of targeted aerial bombardment of known Hezbollah strongholds and weapons depots, the IDF began destroying large swaths of Lebanon’s infrastructure to preclude the enemy’s maneuverability. In the end, 400 miles of roads, 73 bridges, 350 schools (said to house Hezbollah militants), two hospitals, 15,000 homes, and Beirut’s Rafiq Hariri International Airport were all hit or destroyed by Israeli war planes. Over 1,000 Lebanese—mostly civilians—were killed and a million more displaced. Israel lost 44 civilians and close to 100 soldiers, and up to half a million Israelis in the southern border towns were displaced. The war ended officially with the passage of United Nations Resolution 1701, which called for the complete disarmament of Hezbollah and Israel’s full withdrawal from Lebanon, and the joint deployment of the Lebanese Army and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) to patrol southern Lebanon.

At the international level, Israel’s allies cited its right to self-defense and George W. Bush included the conflict in the broader “war on terror,” but it precipitated massive protests in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. Inside Israel, the self-recriminations were particularly searing. By August 25, 63 percent of Israelis polled wanted Olmert to resign because of his perceived mismanagement of the fighting, which failed to rescue the kidnapped IDF soldiers (whose remains were later transported home). By October, the IDF’s chief education officer was the first military or government official to publicly declare that Israel had lost the war—an assessment that was validated by the Winograd Commission Report, which found that the war was a “missed opportunity” that ended “without a defined military victory.” And yet, Israeli introspection, according to Zisser, should not be mistaken for weariness or hesitation. “There is agreement in Israel that a war against Hezbollah can’t be won. You can’t occupy Lebanon, you can’t destroy an Iranian proxy,” he said. “The question is: how painful the blow should be dealt.” The current Israeli strategy, he pointed out, is to avoid another escalation but to conclude it much more quickly if it does happen. “One of the problems last time was that Bush gave Israel a free hand,” Zisser said. “The war would have come to an end three days after it started. As far as Israel was concerned, two or three weeks were a waste of time.”

And since 2006, little inside Lebanon has changed to forestall Hezbollah from committing further acts of adventurism, according to Lee Smith, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute. As he indicated, even though the pro-Western, Sunni-aligned March 14 Alliance won a decisive victory in June’s election, the nature of Lebanon’s pluralist political system means that Hezbollah, whose own Shiite-Islamist alliance came in second, is still accorded influential roles in the upcoming government. According to Haaretz, it is widely expected that newly elected Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s 30-member cabinet will include 15 ministers from his own coalition, 10 ministers from Hezbollah’s, and five independents to be chosen by Lebanon’s Maronite Christian President Michel Suleiman. To get a sense of how precarious and vulnerable such a system is, Smith said, Hariri is forced to include a terrorist group widely rumored to have planned and executed the 2005 car-bomb assassination of his father, Rafiq Hariri, whose murder was the event which sparked the Cedar Revolution and ended Syria’s decade-long occupation of Lebanon.

“The government, whether under Siniora or Hariri,” said Smith, “can’t restrain Hezbollah from doing whatever it wants, whether it’s starting another war with Israel or going through West Beirut and murdering Sunnis. Lebanon isn’t really a functioning democracy, it’s a place where a terrorist organization has weapons and sets the agenda.”

However, Hezbollah is restrained by one entity: Iran, its patron and arms dealer. “There’s no such thing as a non-state actor,” Badran said. “If Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khameini decides to activate Hezbollah—either to retaliate against a future Israeli bombing of Iran’s nuclear program, or for some other reason—then another war will happen.” He added that a “game-changer” that might prompt a preemptive strike by Israeli would be Hezbollah’s acquisition of certain anti-aircraft weaponry which could take out IAF warplanes. At all events, Badran said, the Dahiya Doctrine makes any future conflict nationally encompassing.

Coined by Maj. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, the Dahiya Doctrine refers to the IDF’s destruction of a Shiite quarter of Lebanon in 2006 after that quarter had been overrun by Hezbollah commandos. The rules of engagement for that operation, said Badran, have now been expanded into both a means of deterrence as well as a broad-stroke plan of attack should deterrence fail. In that grim contingency, he added, where government buildings and civil institutions in Beirut are pounded, Lebanon’s center would likely fall, creating a power vacuum or civil war. “The result would be sectarian religious warfare, which nobody wants—certainly not the Israelis.”

Zisser said that within hours of any future war, Israel would take out Lebanon’s electricity, its main airport would be incapacitated, and major roads and bridges would be destroyed. Strategically, Badran noted, this makes sense because Hezbollah’s defenses are stationed mainly in the north, above the Litani River. Citing the Dahiya Doctrine, and the IDF’s release of a video allegedly showing Hezbollah agents trying to commandeer residential homes in a southern Lebanese village (before being turned back by the villagers and Lebanese soldiers), Badran painted a hypothetical scenario in which Hezbollah had to mobilize. “Let’s say Hezbollah tries to move weaponry and personnel into the Shouf Mountains, which they did in 2006 when they moved into Mari, a Druze village. The villagers denied them access then, and the Israelis worked with them by hitting various access routes which Hezbollah was using. Now what happens if next time the villagers prefer to avoid skirmishes with Hezbollah? What will Israel do then—level the village?”

U.N.: Hezbollah Violated Lebanon War Ceasefire [JTA]
U.N. Official: Arms Cache That Exploded in Lebanon Was Hezbollah’s [ynet]
Hezbollah: No More Border Demos [JPost]

However, the Haaretz article doesn’t specify perhaps the most important aspect of the poll of roughly 2,000 Palestinians: when it was taken. Was this before or after the revolt in Iran and the international scorn heaped upon the theocratic regime there, which been the chief sponsor and encourager of both Hamas and Hezbollah?

Most surprising of all may be how Palestinians view Barack Obama. More than 49 percent think he’ll have no impact whatsoever on the peace process. Though for perennial peace optimists, a Fatah victory would finally give Israel a negotiating partner that recognizes Israel’s right to exist, which may be an auspicious complement to Benjamin Netanyahu’s grudging about-face on Palestinian statehood.

Poll: Hamas popularity falls in both West Bank and Gaza [Haaretz]

French-Jewish Comedian Cancels Lebanon Gig After Rumors of IDF Service [Haaretz]

Nonetheless, Hariri must suspect, as do many other regional observers, that Syrian-affiliated Hezbollah played a role in the murder of his beloved father. Hariri fils has refrained from shouting about the perfidy of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad since the establishment in March of an international tribunal to try the suspected killers, though judging by this latest meeting of the minds, his reticence may now owe also to political calculation.

Hariri set to become Lebanon PM, meets with Nasrallah [Haaretz]

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Guardian Council, which oversees elections, reiterated his earlier assertions that the violently contested results of the June 12 presidential election contained “no major violations” despite initial admissions of discrepancies in as many as three million ballots—which means Ahmadinejad is expected to be formally certified the winner on Monday, after which he will be free to continue questioning the Holocaust, comparing Israel to a cesspool, and dodging airborne clown noses at big international summits.

Reuters is reporting that hardline cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami told worshipers at Friday services that “leading rioters” should face execution. The AP reports that opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, who remains out of sight and possibly under house arrest, has agreed to request permits for any future demonstrations; Mousavi’s Web site, the main tool for communicating with his supporters, has been hacked and wiped clean. The Guardian reports that 25 journalists who worked at Mousavi’s newspaper, Kalemeh Sabz, remain under arrest, along with another 15 reporters for other agencies.

Outside Iran’s borders, world leaders gathered at the G8 summit in Italy issued a statement “deploring” the deaths of civilians, but failed to outright condemn the religious leadership of the Islamic Republic for the violent crackdowns of the past two weeks; this following a statement from Russia—which earlier this week endorsed Ahmadinejad’s re-election, a possible indication the country, a member of the United Nations Security Council, will not support new sanctions to deter Iran from building nuclear weapons—defending the Iranian “exercise in democracy.” (Iran had initially been invited to Trieste to participate in discussions about stabilizing Afghanistan, but withdrew as the violence escalated.)

But the most telling diplomatic fallout may be in the Muslim world. Reuters reports that in Lebanon, U.S.-backed politician Saad al-Hariri (son of Rafik Hariri, whose 2005 assassination triggered the Cedar Revolution), is set to be nominated as prime minister, and is rejecting demands from Iranian-backed Hezbollah for a parliamentary veto. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that Lebanese Shiites are among many across the Muslim world suddenly seeing cracks in the absolute moral authority of the Iranian ayatollahs. “The infallible leader is all of a sudden making a lot of mistakes, and this creates a lot of doubt,” Ghazi Youssef, a Shiite member of parliament in Lebanon, told the paper.

(If you’d like to review the developments of the past two weeks, The New York Times has posted an exceptionally useful timeline.)

Bush spoke on May 15, 2008. He began by quoting Ben Gurion’s proclamation, declaring that Israel possessed a “natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate.” The president of the United States called it “the redemption of an ancient promise given to Abraham and Moses and David—a homeland for the chosen people: Eretz Yisrael.” He recalled how America recognized the Jewish state 11 minutes after the declaration. He characterized the “alliance between our governments” as “unbreakable” but he asserted that the “source of our friendship runs deeper than any treaty.” He spoke of the “bonds of the Book” and the “ties of the soul.”

The president recalled that when William Bradford stepped off the Mayflower, he quoted the words of Jeremiah: “Come let us declare in Zion the word of God.” He spoke of how the founders of America “saw a new promised land” and gave their towns names like Bethlehem and New Canaan. His words were those of a man who has read and thought about how the idea of Israel was intertwined with the idea of America going back to James Madison, say, or Samuel Adams and of why, as he put it to the Knesset, “many Americans became passionate advocates for a Jewish state.”

Bush also spoke of the “suffering and sacrifice [that] would pass before the dream was fulfilled.” He spoke of the “soulless men” who perpetrated the Holocaust, and he quoted Elie Wiesel. He described the joyous tears of a “fearless woman raised in Wisconsin,” Golda Meir, when the dream of a state was fulfilled. He spoke of touching the Western Wall, seeing the sun reflected in the Sea of Galilee, of praying at Yad Vashem and visiting Masada and he swore the oath that Israeli soldiers swear: “Masada shall never fall again.”

Then the president turned to the principles that guide American policy—“shared convictions,” he called them, “rooted in moral clarity and un-swayed by popularity polls or the shifting opinions of international elites.” That led to an articulation of democracy as “the only way to ensure human rights,” and he spoke of how the United Nations has singled out Israel as a target of its human rights resolutions and declared that Americans consider it “a source of shame.”

He expressed the belief that George Washington had spoken of more than two centuries previously—that, as Mr. Bush put it, “religious liberty is fundamental to a civilized society.” He declared that Americans “condemn anti-Semitism in all forms—whether by those who openly question Israel’s right to exist, or by others who quietly excuse them.” He disputed that terrorists acting in the name of religion are religious men. “No one who prays to the God of Abraham could strap a suicide vest to an innocent child, or blow up guiltless guests at a Passover Seder, or fly planes into office buildings filled with unsuspecting workers,” he said. “They accept no God before themselves.”

He spoke specifically of Hezbollah, Hamas and the Iranians and of calls for Israel to be wiped off the map. “There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words.” He called such reactions “natural” but “deadly wrong.” He remarked on how “[s]ome seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.” Then he quoted the American senator who, in 1939, declared, “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.”

This is where he warned of the “false comfort of appeasement.” He rejected the suggestions of some that “if the United States would just break ties with Israel, all our problems in the Middle East would go away.” He argued that permitting “the world’s leading sponsor of terror to possess the world’s deadliest weapons would be an unforgivable betrayal for future generations.” Then he marked the point that was so prescient in respect of what is happening on the streets of Tehran today.

“Leaders who are accountable to their people will not pursue endless confrontation and bloodshed,” he said. “Young people with a place in their society and a voice in their future are less likely to search for meaning in radicalism. Societies where citizens can express their conscience and worship their God will not export violence; they will be partners in peace. The fundamental insight, that freedom yields peace, is the great lesson of the 20th century. Now our task is to apply it to the 21st.”

So the president declared that America “must stand with the reformers working to break the old patterns of tyranny and despair” and “give voice to millions of ordinary people who dream for a better life in a free society.” He warned of “violent resistance.” But said with faith in our ideals he could imagine “Israel celebrating the 120th anniversary as one of the world’s great democracies, a secure and flourishing homeland for the Jewish people.” And he foresaw the rest of the Middle East as having been transformed, the terrorists defeated, and the region entering “a new period of tolerance and integration.”

Bush’s remarks were greeted by derision and controversy in the Arab press. One website that tracks foreign press reports ran a headline calling the speech an “act of lunacy” and quoted the chairman of Egypt’s Al-Ahram newspaper as complaining that the president’s remarks “appeared to have been lifted almost word-for-word from the Torah.” When reporters asked Senator Joseph Biden about Mr. Bush’s speech, the then-Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee reacted by swearing, according to the New York Times. The Democrats were apparently under the impression that Bush was talking about President-to-be Obama. But now blood is running in the streets of Tehran and a new American president is debating whether to speak in a way that might be construed as meddling. One way to judge whatever he says would be to compare it to the standard President Bush set a year ago in Jerusalem.

Journalists are already speculating that President Obama’s Cairo speech, addressed to all Muslims, is due for some of the credit. But that’s unlikely. For one thing, yesterday’s contest was waged in the predominantly Christian districts of Lebanon, where a violent, sharia-minded party of God has never had much appeal. And Hezbollah has used its authority to alienate those who may have once been sympathetic to it. It has repeatedly exercised a so-called “blocking minority,” or veto, as a member of the country’s Fouad Siniora-led unity government, a power that’s like a filibuster on steroids. And last year Hezbollah waged a mini-civil war in Beirut that completely shut down the government and prompted international fears of a bloody coup. No one requires a reaffirming pronouncement from a U.S. president to see that democratic jihadists are masters of their own misfortune.

March 14 Coalition Retains Majority After Parliamentary Elections [The Daily Star]

The story of Ehud Olmert’s ascension to prime minister is a bit Gogolesque. The Kadima party was established to be a more moderate alternative to the Likud, from which it had broken away. Its electoral strength was based on fondness for its founder, Ariel Sharon. When Sharon suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in 2006, Olmert became the party’s default leader. Kadima’s campaign was built around Sharon and his doctrine of disengagement. In some sense, voters cast their ballots for Kadima and got Olmert as prime minister—the same Olmert who, as mayor of Jerusalem, had succeeded in turning the capital from a vibrant, intellectual, young metropolis into a sad, grey city with an ever-growing ultra-Orthodox population.

Every political leader has a public image that determines his actions and method of operation. Sharon was the father, the one who takes responsibility, hides things from his children (even lying to them), but always has their best interests at heart. Bibi Netanyahu and Ehud Barak were the smooth-talking, high-tech CEOs, the kind who ran the country as if it were a problematic start-up, who are obligated to their shareholders, but no more so than to themselves. And Olmert was and has remained the sports fan.

If you stop the average Israeli on the street and ask him to tell you something about Olmert, it’s doubtful he would know anything about the series of parliamentary functions he filled, the list of criminal allegations he’s been questioned about, or even the seemingly endless number of collections in his possession, including apartments sold to him at low prices and under suspicious circumstances and expensive pens. What that passerby can tell you for sure is that Mr. Olmert has been Beitar Jerusalem’s number one fan. He not only regularly attends their soccer games, but always makes sure to tell interviewers about his loyalty to the club, especially when he’s trying to bolster his just-one-of-the guys image.

Beitar Jerusalem is a soccer club with a clear right-wing affiliation (the name “Beitar” is taken from the hawkish youth movement founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky), and its large fan base is known for being the most violent of any in the country. In the 1980s, comic Gavri Banai performed a popular sketch in which he played a Beitar fan in a TV interview who dictates a series of ultimatums to the team owner about how the club should be run, ending each sentence with the words, “… if you don’t, we’ll burn down the clubhouse.” At a certain point, the interviewer asks Banai why he keeps threatening to burn down the clubhouse, and after a bit of thought, he answers, “Because it’s made of wood.”

That, if you will, is Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. He is always angry and insulted by the way everyone behaves, from the police chief to the Hezbollah chief, from Tzipi Livni to Condoleezza Rice. Ehud Olmert is the kind of guy who insists on interrupting the president of the United States mid-speech, knowing that he will quickly take the Beitar fan’s call, before the fan burns down the clubhouse. What’s interesting about this Bush anecdote is that Olmert saw the need to share it proudly on television, even at the cost of the obvious damage it would cause to the relationship between the two countries. And why was he actually so proud of that moment, the sort of moment Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon, and even the arrogant Ehud Barak, if they were in his place, would have kept secret? Because his pride isn’t that of a leader, but of a rabid sports fan whose greatest accomplishment is his ability to bully the people around him.

Olmert’s current club, unfortunately, is not Beitar, but the Middle East. It isn’t made of wood, but he’s already managed to burn it down twice, and the reason is exactly the one in Gavri Banai’s sketch: it’s made of flammable material. In both the second Lebanese War and the Gaza offensive, it was clear that Israel had to resort to a military response. In both cases, Olmert was surrounded by experts who explained to him that a much more moderate attack would cause fewer casualties on both sides and achieve exactly the same objectives. And in both cases, Ehud Olmert ignored that advice and pulled out all the stops. Did the ground attack in Lebanon significantly impair Hezbollah’s fighting force, and did the continued bombing of Gaza, long after the Israeli army had achieved its bank of objectives, help arrive at a better agreement or solution? I doubt it. But the person behind the decision-making wasn’t a responsible adult or even a smooth-talking CEO. It was an angry and violent Ehud Olmert who, rather than venting his rage on his team, turned every regional clash into a war.

On Tuesday, the citizens of Israel will vote in a new prime minister. The polls now predict victory for Bibi, and the alternatives don’t exactly thrill me either. Still, I prefer to look at the bright side of February 10, 2009. It’ll be the day Ehud Olmert finally vacates the prime minister’s chair and goes back to his natural habitat—the VIP stands at Beitar’s stadium. There, between criminal investigations and bribery trials, he can be angry again, insult and even curse the players or the referee, and do all of it without losing a single human life.