    After Lebanon, Israel is Looking for More Wars
    by Jonathan Cook
    www.dissidentvoice.org
    August 21, 2006

    Late last month, a fortnight into Israel's war
    against Lebanon, the Hebrew media published a
    story that passed observers by. Scientists in
    Haifa, according to the report, have developed a
    "missile-trapping" steel net that can shield
    buildings from rocket attacks. The Israeli
    government, it noted, would be able to use the net
    to protect vital infrastructure -- oil refineries,
    hospitals, military installations, and public
    offices -- while private citizens could buy a net
    to protect their own homes.
    The fact that the government and scientists are
    seriously investing their hopes in such schemes
    tells us more about Israel's vision of the "new
    Middle East" than acres of analysis.

    Israel regards the "home front" -- its civilian
    population -- as its Achilles' heel in the army's
    oppression of the Palestinians in the occupied
    territories, its intermittent invasions of south
    Lebanon, and its planned attacks further afield.
    The military needs the unconditional support of
    the country's citizenry and media to sanction its
    unremitting aggression against Israel's "enemies,"
    but fears that the resolve of the home front is
    vulnerable to the threat posed by rockets landing
    in Israel, whether the home-made Qassams fired by
    Palestinians over the walls of their prison in
    Gaza or the Katyushas launched by Hizbullah from
    Lebanon.

    Certainly Israel's leaders are not ready to
    examine the reasons for the rocket menace -- or to
    search for solutions other than of the
    missile-catching variety.
    The bloody nose Israel received in south Lebanon
    has not shaken its leaders' confidence in their
    restless militarism. If anything, their
    humiliation has given them cause to pursue their
    adventures more vigorously in an attempt to
    reassert the myth of Israeli invincibility, to
    distract domestic attention from Israel's defeat
    at the hands of Hizbullah, and to prove the
    Israeli army's continuing usefulness to its
    generous American benefactor.

    If Israel's soldiers ever leave south Lebanon,
    expect a rapid return to the situation before the
    war of almost daily violations of Lebanese
    airspace by its warplanes and spy drones, plus air
    strikes to "rein in" Hizbullah and regular
    attempts on its leader Hassan Nasrallah's life.
    Expect more buzzing by the same warplanes of
    President Bashar al-Assad's palace in Damascus,
    assassination attempts against Hamas
    leader-in-exile Khaled Meshal and attacks on
    Hizbullah "supply lines" in Syria. Expect more
    apocalyptic warnings, and worse, to Iran over its
    assumed attempt to join Israel in the exclusive
    club of nuclear armed states. And, of course,
    expect many more attacks by ground and air of Gaza
    and the West Bank, with the inevitable devastating
    toll on Palestinian lives.

    Despite its comeuppance in Lebanon, Israel is not
    planning to reconfigure its relationship with its
    neighbors. It is not seeking a new Middle East in
    which it will have to endure the same birth pangs
    as the "Arabs." It does not want to engage in a
    peace process that might force it to restore, in
    more than appearance, the occupied territories to
    the Palestinians. Instead it is preparing for more
    asymmetrical warfare -- aerial bombardments of the
    kind so beloved by American arms manufacturers.

    The weekend's swift-moving events should be
    interpreted in this light. Israel, as might have
    been expected, was the first to break the United
    Nations ceasefire on Saturday when its commandoes
    attacked Hizbullah positions near Baalbek in
    northeast Lebanon, including air strikes on roads
    and bridges. It was not surprising that this gross
    violation of the ceasefire passed with little more
    than a murmur of condemnation. The UN's Terje
    Roed-Larsen referred to it as an "unwelcome
    development" and "unhelpful." The UN peacekeeping
    force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, whose current job it is
    to monitor the ceasefire, refused to comment,
    saying the attack occurred outside the area of its
    jurisdiction -- an implicit admission of how grave
    a violation it really was.

    Meanwhile in the media, the Associated Press
    called the military assault "a bold operation,"
    and BBC World described it as a "raid" and the
    ensuing firefight between Israeli troops and
    Hizbullah as "clashes." Much later in its reports,
    the BBC noted that it was also a "serious breach"
    of the ceasefire, neglecting to mention who was
    responsible for the violation. That may have been
    because the BBC's report was immediately followed
    by Israeli spokesman Mark Regev accusing
    Hizbullah, not Israel, of violating the ceasefire.
    Predictably he accused Hizbullah of receiving
    transfers of weapons that the Israeli army
    operation was supposedly designed to foil.
    In fact, this was no simple "clash" during an
    intelligence-gathering mission, as early reports
    in the Israeli media made clear before the
    official story was established. Israeli special
    forces launched the covert operation to capture a
    Hizbullah leader, Sheikh Mohammed Yazbak, way
    beyond the Litani River, the northern extent of
    Israel's supposed "buffer zone." The hit squad
    were disguised not only as Arabs -- a regular ploy
    by units called "mistarvim" -- but as Lebanese
    soldiers driving in Lebanese army vehicles. When
    their cover was blown, Hizbullah opened fire,
    killing one Israeli and wounding two more in a
    fierce gun battle.

    (It is worth noting that, according to the later
    official version, Israel's elite forces were
    exposed only as they completed their intelligence
    work and were returning home. Why would Israel be
    using special forces, apparently in a
    non-belligerent fashion, in a dangerous ground
    operation when shipments of weapons crossing from
    Syria can easily be spotted by Israel's spy drones
    and its warplanes?)

    It is difficult to see how this operation could be
    characterized as "defensive" except in the
    Orwellian language employed by Israel's army --
    which, after all, is misleadingly known as the
    Israel Defense Forces. UN Resolution 1701, the
    legal basis of the ceasefire, calls on Israel to
    halt "all offensive military operations". How much
    more offensive could the operation be?

    But, more significantly, what is Israel's
    intention towards the United Nation's ceasefire
    when it chooses to violate it not only by
    assaulting Hizbullah positions in an area outside
    the "buffer zone" it has invaded but also then
    implicates the Lebanese army in the attack? Is
    there not a danger that Hizbullah fighters may now
    fire on Lebanese troops fearing that they are
    undercover Israeli soldiers? Does Israel's deceit
    not further weaken the standing of the Lebanese
    army, which under Resolution 1701 is supposed to
    be policing south Lebanon on Israel's behalf?
    Could reluctance on the part of Lebanon's army to
    engage Hizbullah as a result not potentially
    provide an excuse for Israel to renew hostilities?
    And what would have been said had Israel launched
    the same operation disguised as UN peacekeepers,
    the international force arriving to augment the
    Lebanese soldiers already in the area? These
    questions need urgent answers but, as usual, they
    were not raised by diplomats or the media.

    On the same day, the Israeli army also launched
    another "raid," this time in Ramallah in the West
    Bank. There they "arrested," in the media's
    continuing complicity in the corrupted language of
    occupation, the Palestinians' deputy prime
    minister. His "offence" is belonging to the
    political wing of Hamas, the party democratically
    elected by the Palestinian people earlier this
    year to run their government in defiance of
    Israeli wishes. Even the Israeli daily Haaretz
    newspaper characterized Nasser Shaer as a
    "relative moderate" -- the "relative" presumably a
    reference, in Israeli eyes, to the fact that he
    belongs to Hamas. Shaer had only avoided the fate
    of other captured Hamas cabinet ministers and
    legislators by hiding for the past six weeks from
    the army -- a fitting metaphor for the fate of a
    fledgling Palestinian democracy under the jackboot
    of Israeli oppression.

    A leading legislator from the rival Fatah party,
    Saeb Erekat, pointed out the obvious: that the
    seizure of half the cabinet was making it
    impossible for Fatah, led by President Mahmoud
    Abbas, to negotiate with Hamas over joining a
    government of national unity. Such a coalition
    might offer the Palestinians a desperately needed
    route out of their international isolation and
    prepare the path for negotiations with Israel on
    future withdrawals from occupied Palestinian
    territory. Israel's interest in stifling such a
    government, therefore, speaks for itself. And
    ordinary Israelis still wonder why the
    Palestinians fire their makeshift rockets into
    Israel. Duh!

    On the diplomatic front, Israel's ambassador to
    the UN, Dan Gillerman, rejected out of hand a
    peace initiative from the Arab League that it
    hopes to bring before the Security Council next
    month. The Arab League proposal follows a similar
    attempt at a comprehensive peace plan by the Arab
    states, led by Saudi Arabia in 2002 that was also
    instantly brushed aside by Israel. On this
    occasion, Gillerman claimed there was no point in
    a new peace process; Israel, he said, wanted to
    concentrate on disarming Hizbullah under UN
    Resolution 1701. Presumably that means more
    provocative "raids," like the one on Saturday, in
    violation of the ceasefire.

    Where does all this "defensive" Israeli activity
    leave us? Answer: on the verge of more war and
    carnage, whether inflicted on the Palestinians, on
    Lebanon, on Syria, on Iran, or on all of them.
    Iran's head of the army warned on Saturday that he
    was preparing for an attack by Israel. Probably a
    wise assumption on his part, especially as US
    officials were suggesting at the weekend that the
    UN Security Council is about to adopt sanctions
    that will include military force to stop Iran's
    assumed nuclear ambitions.

    In fact, Israel looks ready to pick a fight with
    just about anyone in its neighborhood whose
    complicity in the White House's new Middle East
    has not already been assured, either like Jordan
    and Egypt by the monthly paychecks direct from
    Washington, or like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf
    states by the cash-guzzling pipelines bringing oil
    to the West. The official enemies -- those who
    refuse to prostrate themselves before Western oil
    interests and Israeli regional hegemony -- must be
    brought to their knees just as Iraq already has
    been.

    What will these wars achieve? That is the hardest
    question to answer, because every possible outcome
    appears to spell catastrophe for the region,
    including for Israel, and ultimately for the West.
    If Israel received a bloody nose from a month of
    taking on a few thousand Hizbullah fighters on
    their home turf, what can the combined might of
    Israel and the US hope to achieve in a
    battleground that drags in the whole Middle East?
    How will Israel survive in a region torn apart by
    war, by a new Shiite ascendancy that makes the old
    colonially devised mosaic of Arab states redundant
    and by the consequent tectonic shifts in identity
    and borders?

    President Bush observed at the weekend that,
    although it may look like Hizbullah won the war
    with Israel, it will take time to see who is the
    true victor. He may be right, but it is hard to
    believe that either Israel or the United States
    can build a missile-catching net big enough to
    withstand the fall-out from the looming war.

    Jonathan Cook, a British journalist living in
    Nazareth, is the author of Blood and Religion: The
    Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State, to
    be published next month by Pluto Press. His
    website is: http://www.jkcook.net/.