Today's Situation

The ceasefire before the ceasefire Tuesday, August 01, 2006

The Israeli suspension of offensive air strikes and general Hizbollah restraint about firing Katyushas has held up now for more than 24 hours, but according to Israel, from the prime minister and defense minister, through the MKs and down to the northerners peeking out of their shelters, are all saying the campaign is not over -- and won't be over until Hizbollah is at least out of sight of the border with Israel, if not out of south Lebanon entirely.

The likelihood of that happening in the next six days, which seems to be the cautious assessment of the experts as about all the time left to Israel before the UN, with U.S. backing, signs off on a ceasefire order, is close to nil. For one thing, it will take more than a week to organize, recruit and outfit the 'robust' or 'effective' or whatever you want to call the international force that will have to go into Lebanon aware that it might get into real fighting with the Hizbollah. Indeed, it is not even clear that the Lebanese government coalition will have the strength to approve an international force. Hizbollah, not untypically, is threatening it will not accept foreign forces in Lebanon (though it was happy about the Syrian troops and relies heavily on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Iran's Beirut embassy) but others in Lebanon are cleverer than that: they say they'll accept a multinational force if it is also on the Israeli side of the border.

The international force under discussion is the first that Israel has ever asked for. Indeed, traditionally, Israel has never trusted international forces, except the American-backed multinational force in Sinai, there by virtue of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. True, the UNTSO forces on the Golan Heights have never given Israel a reason for anger -- and have even facilitated some interesting cross-border communications over the years. But UNIFIL, the blue-helmeted troops in south Lebanon since the late 1970s, after the Litani Operation, an essentially unsuccessful Israeli ground invasion meant to push PLO guerillas out of south Lebanon's 'Fatahland' have been a symbol not only of UN inffectiveness, but indeed of its complicity with Israeli enemies. The UNIFIL troops were the kind of watchdogs that watch as the robbers come and go -- they carry small arms, but have never been known to draw their weapons and often provided shelter-by-proximity to anti-Israeli forces operating in south Lebanon. Indeed, the deaths of four UNIFIL troops during the current campaign was explained by Israel by pointing out that the Hizbollah had a major encampment right next door to the albeit well-marked UN positions hit by Israel Air Force missiles.

But for the first time, Israel is actually asking for an international force, for the first time, ready to put at least some of its defense in the hands of strangers. Except the Israeli demands for the force, which U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calls a 'stabilization' force, go way beyond blue-helmeted 'peacekeepers.' The international force envisioned by Israel -- and perhaps the Lebanese government, which knows it needs help if it still wants to disarm Hizbollah (after the destruction Israel sowed in Lebanon, public opinion there has shifted in favor of Hizbollah's resistance, if not its Islamic Shiite fundamentalist ideologies), includes at least 10,000 battle-ready troops, led by a Western power, to be deployed not only on the Lebanese-Israeli border, but also on the Lebanese-Syrian border, to prevent arms deliveries to Hizbollah. Indeed, it's impossible not to wonder if the Israeli enthusiasm for an international force might end up being one of the reasons for knee-jerk Arab rejection of the force.

In any case, the Israeli vehemence about the need to 'finish the job' -- even though the job has apparently changed from eliminating Hizbollah entirely to damaging it so much that the Lebanese government is not afraid to take it on, to at least not allowing it to claim victory and keeping it atleast a kilometer away from the Israeli border -- is now as much about the diplomatic effort as it is about the military one. For one thing, Israel's official position is that there will not be any comprehensive ceasefire until an international force is in place, filling the vacuum that Israel is now controlling on the border.

True, Israeli troops are operating along that narrow 1-2 kilometer stretch of hilly territory just over the border fence Israeli built along the 'Purple Line' -- the internationally recognized border between Israel and Lebanon -- clearing out Hizbollah forts built there over the last six years. And there are probably still Israeli commandoes deep inside Lebanon, identifying targets for IAF attacks, if and when the ceasefire comes to an end, presumably at 2 a.m. Wednesday morning, 48 hours after it began.

But Rice and President Bush have their own schedules to keep, and one watershed moment on that schedule is Rice's own self-defined timetable to come up with a UN ceasefire order this week. The Americans, said to be very disappointed that the much vaunted IDF was unable to shock and awe Hizbollah into submission, probably have no problem with the continuing Israeli ground operations inside Lebanon, or at least along the border. But the Americans cannot afford another Qana, or another series of massively destructive Israeli air raids north of the Litani River. And if Hizbollah breaks the ceasefire, there's no way the Americans will be able to stop the Israelis from responding.

So, there was intense fire this morning just over the Israeli border in some Hizbollah-controlled villages inside Lebanon in all three sectors -- east, center and west. The security cabinet last night approved moving another 5,000 troops into south Lebanon and there is talk of building up a force as large as 20,000 in south Lebanon, all the way to the Litani River, pushing Hizbollah out and waiting there for the international force.

It is not clear that the UN decision will allow that. But Israel is trying to make as many gains as possible before the official comprehensive ceasefire order comes down from Washington, via New York. The betting now is that France will get the lead of the multinational force, even though its foreign minister was full of praise for Iran yesterday, in Beirut, just as the UN Security Council was agreeing that sanctions would be applied to Iran if it does not halt its nuclear development program.

Meanwhile, one sign of an attempt to return to normality is that there is beginning to be talk in Israeli political circles about who to blame for what meanwhile looks like poor management of the war. There are recriminations between Olmert's office and Peretz's, and they will either survive together or hang together. More likely, the army will end up the scapegoat for what the Israeli public might yet perceive as a premature end to a campaign that promised to be much more effective than it seems to have turned out to be.

On a more hopeful note, the Beirut Stock Exchange reopened this morning, and ever since the Rice announcement of the ceasefire and the move to diplomatic efforts, the main Tel Aviv Stock Exchange indices have been climbing.

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