Today's Situation

Waiting for the UN Friday, August 04, 2006

The international force will apparently will be led by France, which already has 2,000 tough troops in Lebanon, providing humanitarian relief. Germany is said to be prepared to position troops on the Lebanese-Syrian border, to watch out for arms smuggling attempts to reinforce Hizbollah, and there is talk about Indonesia and Malaysia, as a Muslim states, sending troops as well. Ukraine has been mentioned, as has Poland. But so far, all the talk seems as speculative as it is narrative; nobody really knows what it going on behind the closed doors of the diplomatic efforts.

The asymmetric war between the IDF and Hizbollah is as much a war about image as it is about the grim realities of blood, sweat and tears, destruction, devastation and death. All Hizbollah has to do to claim victory is for Hassan Nasrallah to emerge from the bunker where he has found shelter and continue pulling strings in Lebanon, or get lucky with an anti-tank grenade launcher like it did yesterday, killing four men in a crew. The mere fact that Hizbollah has held out longer than the combined armies of Egypt and Syria in 1973 is making Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah leader, crow that his war has been an historic ‘first defeat’ of the ‘unbeatable’ Israeli army.

Israel, on the other hand, will come out of the war with a military upper hand, but it already appears to have lost the battle for international public opinion, if not the opinion of colder minds in those capitals around the world where the current campaign against Hizbollah is considered part of the much larger war being waged by jihadists against the West and modernity, or by the West against jihadism and its cult of murder in the name of martyrdom, depending on one’s view.

The ‘clash of civilizations’ view, which lumps together all terrorism by Arab-Islamic groups into one overarching conspiracy seemingly run from Tehran and personally directed by the messianic Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a Shiite (or by Osama bin Ladin, a Sunni, wherever he is hiding), is very simplistic, of course, considering the deep split between Sunni and Shiite Islam and the hosts of local reasons for anti-Western politics and ‘resistances’ in various parts of the Arab and Islamic world. No less simplistic is the view that an Israeli military machine has spun out of control, and now rampages through Lebanon (and Gaza) on some kind of vendetta, deliberately targeting civilians, particularly children, while serving as a proxy for the Americans and more specifically President Bush, who himself has a reputation for being, well, simplistic.

But those two views of the war, which seem to dominate the media, and particularly TV, leave much more out of the frame than in it. And in this kind of war, perception is nine-tenths of the strategy. Thus, for Israelis, watching Western media reports of the war, it seems as if their suffering -- a million Israelis have either spent the last three weeks in shelters or on the road, trying to escape the lottery-type gamble of life in the north as rockets shower down -- is being totally ignored, while the suffering in Lebanon is being exaggerated. In Lebanon, meanwhile, the man in the street being interviewed by the Western press, seems to feel the same way -- that their misery is going unnoticed, that nobody is doing anything to prevent it. Lebanese civilians living in buildings used by Hizbollah know to get out of their homes but in northern Israel, the rocket fire is entirely random, aimed at towns and villages, with Jews and Arabs both ending up as casualties. True, there are ten times as many casualties in Lebanon as in Israel, but that does not mean the tragedy is ten times less for each Israeli casualty.

Last night, Nasrallah warned that Hizbollah would fire at Tel Aviv, if Israel resumed bombing of Beirut. Hizbollah TV station al Manar and Nasrallah last night have been making the kind of exaggerated claims that used to be the hallmark of Arab reporting about clashes with Israelis. They’re claiming to have sunk Israeli ships, destroyed dozens of tanks, and killed many Israeli soldiers. The politicians and generals could not ignore the Nasrallah dare, apparently believing that he is bluffing -- and wanting to prove it. Indeed, the army has been saying for weeks that within the first 48 hours of the air campaign it wiped out almost the entire stock of long-range Hizbollah missiles.

So, Hizbollah-affiliated buildings in Beirut were hit again by warplanes overnight, though with very few casualties. And Katyushas slammed into northern Israel this morning. It is becoming increasingly difficult to predict on the basis of what happens in the morning what will happen by nightfall. Yesterday, for example, there were barely 30 Katyushas in the morning, but just after 4 p.m. more than a hundred flew into northern Israel, taking eight lives. That means Hizbollah obviously still has some kind of command and control center. The army keeps saying it needs just a little more time. The last time it was in Lebanon in such numbers that ‘little more time’ lasted 18 years.

And in Gaza, Israeli operations against ‘terrorists and their infrastructure’ continue. At least two gunmen were killed overnight when they approached the border fence, apparently planning to plant a mine, and were spotted by an Israeli patrol; and a Hamas man was killed by an airborne missile this morning. The Israeli operations, which also include nightly arrests of suspected West Bank terrorists based on information gleaned from people arrested previously, is going almost totally unnoticed by the media, in Israel at least. In Jerusalem, by the way, the police shut the Temple Mount to Jews and tourists earlier this week on Tisha B’Av, to prevent provocations against Arabs by militant Jews marking the destruction of the First and Second Temples, and today, the mount was off-limits to everyone except Israeli Arabs over the age of 40, lest the Muslim prayers turn into violent protests against Israel’s actions in the north and the south.

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