Today's Situation

Just a lull in the fighting Friday, August 18, 2006

The entire focus is on how the Lebanese Army, deploying some 15,000 troops in south Lebanon for the first time since the 1970s, and the ‘new UNIFIL' -- which suddenly is only going to have only 200 new French troops and not the 2,000 that had been touted by a variety of sources, including the French, for the past month -- will not dare confront Hizbollah, how Hizbollah will keep its arms and probably acquire more through Syria, and how Hizbollah is preparing for the next round. And of course, the main issue on the Israeli agenda is the demand for ‘investigations' into why Israel ‘lost' the war, with accompanying demands for soul-searching by politicians, indeed everyone must return to the old values of yore, to meet the Iranian nuclear challenge.

The underlying assumption of Israeli politics right now, is that the moment the Iranians get the bomb, they'll load one on a long range missile and fire it at Israel. Since military censorship prevents open discussion of Israel's own bombs, there's no discussion of a MAD policy, or to what extent the Iranians will have to worry about an Israeli or American bomb in retaliation. And few believe that Iranian politics is any more complex than ‘the axis of evil' from Ahmadinejad to Nasrallah. Almost all discussion of international diplomatic efforts to constrain the Iranians is accompanied by profound skepticism that anything except military action will actually prevent the Iranians from getting their bomb.

One national level politician -- Defense Minister Amir Peretz -- proposed trying to engage Syria in some form of way to pry it out of the grip of its Iranian masters. But he was immediately put down -- including by party colleagues -- with critics saying his call was just more proof of his incompetence as defense minister. True, former ambassador to Washington, Itamar Rabinovich, and former Military Intelligence chief Uri Saguy, who under Ehud Barak conducted the ultimately failed negotiations with Bashar Assad's father, Hafez, both say that Israel should be trying secret -- or not so secret -- diplomacy with the Syrians. Former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy meanwhile keeps reiterating his view that Israel should be trying to engage the Iranians.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has meanwhile finally admitted that his unilateral convergence/realignment plan for the West Bank has been shelved. He seemed to have won the elections on the basis of that plan to evacuate as many as 70,000 settlers from isolated settlements, but between the Palestinians home-made Qassam rockets flying from Gaza into the Negev and the Hizbollah's Katyushas and longer range missiles, nobody nowadays in Israel is buying the idea of another unilateral withdrawal.

Although the media keeps saying the public has turned sharply Rightward, polls so far do not show any dramatic rise for the parties to the Right of the Likud, like Yisrael Beitenu or the National Union-National Religious Party. It is not at all clear if it is withdrawal or the unilateralism (meaning no attempt to reach an agreement with the other side) that is now so offensive to mainstream Israeli political thinking. The occupation remains unpopular, but Palestinian issues are barely mentioned in the press, and when mentioned, it is mostly to emphasize the failures of PA President Mahmoud Abbas -- like today, after Abbas announced a new tahadiye had been reached among all the Palestinian factions, and within hours, Islamic Jihad and Hamas' military wing denied it. Ismail Haniye and his Hamas government remain beyond the pale -- but there is a consistent thump of reports about negotiations underway for the release of Cpl. Gilad Shalit, in exchange for a few hundred Palestinian prisoners. But those reports are almost exclusively in the Arab press, and when noted by the Israelis, official reactions here are to deny it. After all, both the military operations in Gaza that began with Shalit's kidnapping and which so far have killed more than 200 people, and the Lebanon war, which began with the capture of soldiers Goldwasser and Regev, were touted by Israel's establishment as a way to get back the soldiers without any preconditions, and without any negotiations.

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