Today's Situation

The internationalization of the conflict Friday, August 25, 2006

The French announcement came as Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was in Rome meeting with Italian officials to shore up the Italian mission. It prompted government sources this morning to tell Israel Radio that it now appears that the combined strength of the new UNIFIL and the Lebanese Army troops still flowing into south Lebanon will enable Israel to withdraw all its forces from south Lebanon 'within a few weeks.'

A 'robust' or 'effective' international force on Israel's borders, meant to enforce a ceasefire rather than just monitor it, is a brand new development in this part of the world. Never before has Israel agreed to such a force, but this time, it was a main proponent of such an arrangement. True, it fought to make sure that the force would not be mandated by Chapter 7 of the UN charter, which allows the UN force to use force against violators, lest the UN forces end up firing on Israeli forces. But UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, due in Beirut and Jerusalem next week -- and possibly going to Damascus and Tehran -- has made clear that the UN force will be able to intervene in violent incidents. It won't be disarming Hizbollah -- that's up to the Lebanese government -- but supposedly the UN mission will not tolerate any show of arms other than by the Lebanese Army in the areas where it patrols.

The Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema told Haaretz this morning that if the new UNIFIL force works well in south Lebanon, it could serve as a model for Gaza. For years, the Palestinians under Yasser Arafat sought some form of internationalization of the conflict, with Arafat pleading with the UN to send a force to serve as a buffer between Israeli troops and Palestinians. Time and again, Israel rejected such a proposal, fearing just such internationalization would be biased against it.

But as the Italian foreign minister pointed out in the Haaretz interview, American failures in the region due have paved the way for the UN and Europe to step into the region with diplomatic initiatives. He said he hopes that the new UNIFIL will prove to Israel that it can count on the international community to help it with its security problems.

Obviously, Israel is not going to give up its intimate ties with Washington, though there are some in Israel wondering if Jerusalem placing all its eggs in the U.S., and more specifically, George W. Bush's basket was very wise.

There are some developments on the Syrian and Iranian fronts. Syrian President Bashar Assad keeps giving interviews in which he says that Syria has chosen peace as a strategy but that Hizbollah has shown the Arabs how to defeat Israel, while Israel's Air Force Commander Maj. Gen. Eliezer Shkady has been assigned to be the 'coordinator' for any confrontation with Iran. There is a growing debate inside Israel about whether Israel should undertake to pry Syria away from Iran, to both isolate Tehran and to complete the perimeter of peace around the Jewish state.

But that debate is less vociferous and certainly less glamorous for the media than the protests against the government and army. Some families that lost sons, husbands and fathers in the latest war, were heading to Jerusalem in a convoy today to join reservists and the Movement for Quality Government in Israel, who have set up two separate protest tents opposite the Prime Minister's Office. The bereaved parents and reservists planned to stop at Golda Meir's grave on Mt. Herzl, saying they regarded her as a paradigm of a prime minister who took responsibility for her failure in the Yom Kippur War, and that Prime Minister Olmert, Defense Minister Peretz, and Chief of Staff Halutz should follow suit. The protestors are apparently all too young to remember that for months after the war, Golda fought the demand she resign for months, and that the Agranat judicial commission of inquiry that her government appointed was very specifically limited to investigating only the military, and not the political echelon.

That ignorance about history is typical of the protests underway, which have still not managed to come up with a unified message. The protesters include combine angry reservists upset they were not properly equipped for battle or given what they say were confused commands, relatives of soldiers killed in accidents and friendly fire, and 'orangers' -- settler politicians who anyway wanted to bring down the government because of its now defunct unilateral West Bank withdrawal plan and wanted vengeance against chief of staff Halutz for his role in leading the disengagement from Gaza. Nobody is protesting the fact the government jumped into war within hours of the kidnapping of the two soldiers, without any substantive debate, or apparently any thought devoted to what it wanted to accomplish.

One interesting development emerging from the war is how personal digital technology -- cellphones with built in cameras and recorders -- were used by soldiers to document not only their experiences but their commanders in action. Thus, all the TV news programs have sound and in some cases video recordings of brigade commanders admitting that they did not know what their orders were, and yesterday, Channel 10 carried a sound recording to Halutz explaining to some soldiers and officers that it took him three days to grasp that Israel was at war and not in the midst of an ongoing operation. He also was heard saying that the 'plasmas' -- meaning the war-room TV screens carrying live video from the planes conducting the war's initial aerial bombardments -- got in the way of understanding what was happening on the ground.

There seems to be no doubt now that some kind of state commission of inquiry into the conduct of the war will be formed. The question is whether Olmert will give the job to outgoing Supreme Court President Justice Aharon Barak, due to retire in the first week of September. (He'll be replaced by Justice Dorit Beinish, a tough former prosecutor, the first woman to serve as the court's president). Barak alone right now has the moral authority to head a commission that might dare to point fingers at the political echelon. Halutz, in any case, already appears to be a lame duck, far from the cocky -- and sometimes arrogant -- first air force commander to head the IDF.

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