Just Cause

Let's face it: Aside from fighting for themselves, the Israelis are also fighting for us. I do not mean to suggest their own struggle is at all inconsequential. On the contrary. But it is not over the usual stakes that pit peoples against one another. It is not about borders or natural resources or, for that matter, the settlements that have irritated so many of Israel's putative friends. This is, of course, how the peace processors have always seen it--and the fanciful conflict-resolution academics, too. Give a little here, give a little there, and, lo and behold, you'll be getting to "yes." Indeed, for the last quarter-century, many Palestinians (and many of their Arab cousins) pretended that their quarrel with the Zionists was over such quotidian details.But, at the moment that virtually all of their demands were met, in the last desperate moments of Clinton-time, they could not bring themselves to accept the hitherto unheard-of concessions. They could not even bring themselves to look twice at them. This was the end of Fatah; it had called its own bluff. It was psychologically incapable of walking through the open door. As for its successor, the ultramontane Sunni Hamas, and its even more chiliastic Shia half-ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah, they do not want any accommodation or compromise, and they do not pretend to. They would be waging war against the Jewish state even if it were contained within the precarious boundaries of the 1949 armistice agreements. Even, in fact, if Israel existed only within the even more precarious limits of the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan. What we are seeing from the two independent centers of "resistance" in Gaza and Lebanon is an existential clash between those who adhere to primitive ideologies and an intellectually curious, democratic society. It is this kind of society--scientific, free-spirited, and, yes, even fun-loving and life- loving--that threatens them and to which they cannot adjust. These traits may constitute the essence of the Zionist achievement, a joyous rejection of everything grim in the Jewish past. Hamas and Hezbollah made the identical mistake in abducting Israeli soldiers. (And do not forget the other soldiers who were killed at the same time as the kidnappings--and 18-year-old civilian Eliyahu Asheri, murdered, shot point- blank in the head within hours of being taken into captivity.) President Jacques Chirac, who--like Vladimir Putin--has learned very little about Muslim fanaticism despite his bitter experience with it, was perplexed by the ferocity of the Israeli reaction to these deeds. In their bafflement, they show how little they grasp, let alone sympathize with, Theodor Herzl's dream for free Jews, expressed in the elegant shorthand that we will "live at last as free men on our own soil and in our homes peacefully die." The Israeli military does not leave even its dead soldiers in enemy hands. And, given what finally awaits living Israeli captives, there is an even greater compulsion to retrieve the kidnapped. Let's call this ethic "leave no soldier behind." It is a different ethic than the one that animated the hapless administration of Jimmy Carter--with do-little Cyrus Vance in the saddle at State--which was confronted with the abduction of 52 American personnel of the U.S. Embassy for 444 days by the Iranian revolutionaries. No, that's unfair. We, like the weak-willed chief executive, wore yellow ribbons. This was the transformational moment for Islamic jihadists--and the United States. Henceforth, Muslim fascists were permitted to do anything they wanted. (Ronald Reagan enlisted the Sunni version of these fascists against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Taliban and its foreign allies--Al Qaeda, for example--went on to torment us even more than the flailing commissars.) I believe that, with wisdom and stealth, we could have brought down Ayatollah Khomeini's regime or sharply clipped its wings. Now it threatens the world with nuclear arms and has confirmed the reign of the backward and crazed in its own society. It is, of course, the prime patron of Hezbollah. For the Iranians, Israel is the first front in the war against the West, and they supply Hezbollah to do their fighting for them. The Bush administration seems to comprehend the importance of this fact. Moreover, it comprehends that Israel will not agree to any formula that leaves its population exposed to the weaponry and the weapon- wielders of Nasrallah's faithful. And, in a certain practical way, in fact, the army of the mullahs is already in retreat--a forced retreat from the Gehenna it established for southern Lebanon and in southern Beirut. Israel never had a quarrel with Lebanon. An old cliche had it that Beirut would be the second capital to make peace with Jerusalem. This was a little too facile. But Israel's difficulties with Lebanon were with the people who had hijacked Lebanese turf--first, the Palestine Liberation Organization and the other armed Palestinian schismatics who set up a vicious mini-state and operated across international borders southward into Israel. In 1982, Israel defeated these forces. Yasir Arafat and his men went into exile in Tunis. But, over the years, Hezbollah replaced them with Shia men of pious zeal and many rockets. After Prime Minister Ehud Barak took the IDF out of its last small salient of occupied Lebanon, Israel succumbed to a failure of will. That failure will not be repeated. Israel's reactions had been either pathetically symbolic (like shattering the sound barrier over Beirut) or altogether passive in response to an unending series of provocations (including indiscriminate rocketry over the frontier). No free country can tolerate this, and certainly no free country that has a sense of its enemy's undisguised intentions. Straining for profundity, the TV news people have now fixed on the question of proportionality. Of course, it's not only they who have done so. Putin, an exemplar of proportional response everywhere, especially Chechnya, has chastised the Israelis on this count. So has Chirac, who allowed that he would use nuclear weapons against any state that organized a terrorist incident in France. Nuclear weapons, mind you. But, as Chirac and certain reporters press the issue of proportionality, they generate a fog of cheap empathy that obscures basic logic. They preposterously assume that, in the casualties of battle, the outcomes need to be relatively equal. Even-Steven, one-for-one. Having started this war, Hezbollah and its unwitting apologists are, in effect, complaining that Israel is taking unfair advantage of its superior force. This is tantamount to saying the Allies ultimately had superior force in Europe during World War II and had the temerity to use it. The problem for Hezbollah in this war is that Israel does have greater force, and it will impose greater casualties on the enemy to win it. The problem for Israel in victory is that Hezbollah cannot ultimately be deterred by a military victory that is compromised by a desperate and temporary political solution imposed by the powers. Human life is cheap for millennarians. Israel can decapitate Hezbollah. But it cannot, over the long run and by itself, bar Hezbollah from rearming--especially if Syria and Iran are willing to renew the supply of arms. After all, neither of Hezbollah's benefactors is presently suffering. The administration has evinced stunning moral and military clarity in the face of international pressure to rush toward a premature resolution, and its Democratic opponents seem also to have accepted its logic, if some a bit squeamishly. Condoleezza Rice has been a compelling voice in the public argument and in the arguments among allies, as well. Yet even she has felt obliged to raise the need for progress toward the establishment of a Palestinian state when she knows it is not any longer the cause of Hamas or Hezbollah. By their actions and in their words, they have conceded that, for them, it is not the existence of Palestine that is at stake, but the very existence of Israel. Independent Gaza is the source of constant rocketry into Israel. It is clear that an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank would be followed by parallel rocketry from there. No, Israel's life is not in peril. It can cope. But it will not resign itself to cope with unending terrorism. That is not a way to live. The introduction of easily launched rockets and more advanced long-range missiles across the borders of Israel is an augury of what other countries could soon face internally: India, for example, and Russia, too. One day, and soon, ethnic and sectarian terrorists--operating out of relatively selfcontained regions (like southern Lebanon) or smaller population centers (like southern Beirut)--will catapult projectile weapons into adjoining cities and areas. The countries so attacked will not respond any more gently than Israel has.

By martin peretz