Nobody’s victory, but in the end Israel could not defeat Hizbollah | Peter Beaumont
The Observer 13 August, 2006
A month of fighting, more than 1,000 dead, upwards of 800,000 Lebanese displaced and $2bn worth of damage – for what?
Who wins in this bloody debacle, assuming it is coming to an end? Given the continued fighting, that is still a big assumption. Not Israel, certainly. Even while the authors of this military adventure continue to try to carve out some notion of victory to sell the Israeli public, increasingly fewer people are buying it.
The likes of deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres have tried to promote the notion that Israel has got everything it wants out of the war – and from Friday’s disgracefully late UN resolution calling for an immediate cessation of violence (on which Israel is still being permitted by the US to drag its feet) – but the reality is that the prosecutors of this war have lost more than they have won.
Whatever Israel does now, it is seriously diminished. In military terms it has been confronted successfully for a second time by the guerillas of Hizbollah.
Again and again, its heavily-armoured Merkava tanks have been rocketed to a standstill. All its technology and its large army have been shown lacking the deftness and determination of a vastly smaller force lacking armoured vehicles, bombers and aircraft. Most seriously, its vulnerability to missile attack has been amply demonstrated to any enemy, despite its possession of US anti-missile batteries. Israel has lost one of its most powerful weapons – the psychological sense of its military invulnerability.
It is something for which Israelis are unlikely to forgive those behind a war which evidence now suggests was being planned long before the kidnap of two Israeli soldiers. Even before the UN resolution was agreed, support for the conflict, though still substantial, was steadily beginning to erode, confronted by a constant stream of casualties from the fighting for little geographical and strategic gain. Indeed, Israel’s only major victory thus far was the ‘capture’ of the largely Christian town of Marjayoun – peopled with its former collaborators with Israel’s allies from the South Lebanese Army – a few kilometres across the border.
Instead, in the past two weeks both the Israeli military and its political masters have come under attack for their prosecution of the war. And if one figure now appears most at risk it is Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a cold fish who tried and failed to be tougher than his mentor, Ariel Sharon. For what Israelis have not been slow to notice is that Olmert has signally failed to achieve what he set out to do: destroy Hizbollah. The victory being claimed is diffuse and very partial: in securing a UN resolution sort-of-on-its-terms and by reducing (by who knows what amount) Hizbollah’s capability. Beyond that Hizbollah has survived largely intact, but pushed back a little further from Israel’s border.
Then there are the imponderables. The nature of the Israeli campaign in Lebanon, with its scorched-earth policy designed to drive out local populations, its mendacious claim that it had allowed humanitarian corridors when it had not, its lack of concern for the killing of civilians (and callous explanation that dead civilians should have fled when threatened) has amplified the increasing sense abroad that this is a country which does not care about international law.
Though the world has long demonstrated a habit of forgetting Israel’s misdemeanours, this war has dramatised the urgent need for a return to a proper Middle East peace plan, a negotiated process that will be less generous to Israel than its own unilaterally-applied ‘convergence’ plan. There is a danger too that if America’s unconditional support for Israel in this affair damages its wider policy in the Middle East – in Shia-majority Iraq, where there are tens of thousands of US troops, and over Iran – Israel may feel that it squandered a high point in its relationship with Washington for little real advantage.
So who has won? Not Israel. Certainly not Lebanon or its fragile democracy, the development of both of which will have been pushed back half a decade and more. But what about Hizbollah? What can be said is that, on its own terms, it has not lost. Not yet. It has resisted Israel and thus far at least has survived, which was all it had to achieve. If it continues to survive until an international force is deployed – which seems likely – then the issue of its disarmament will have disappeared again into some vague future. In psychological terms, it can claim that its few fighters have inflicted disproportionate damage on the Israelis for a second time, and put the issue of the Shebaa farms on the negotiating table.
But the real test for Hizbollah will be applied not by the international community but by Lebanon itself, which must decide if the price it paid for Hizbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah to claim bragging rights was far, far too high.
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