During the recent conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, Jews were enjoined to recite Psalm 83. ‘Your foes are in uproar, and those who hate you have raised their head. They say, “Come let us cut them off from nationhood so Israel’s name will not be remembered anymore.” For they take counsel together unanimously ... the tents of Edom and Ishmaelites, of Moab and Hagrites, Geval and Ammon, and Amalek, Philistia and the inhabitants of Tyre.’ No change there, then.
As the guns fell silent in south Lebanon this week, there were claims of victory from both sides. Israel’s military brass claimed to have destroyed the infrastructure of Hezbollah, while Hezbollah, supported by Iran and Syria, trumpeted a historic victory over the Zionist enemy. In fact, the result is still too early to call.
The outcome of this war will be in the eye of the beholder. When the dust has settled, what will count — the factors that will really determine victory and defeat, success and failure — will be perceptions. On that basis, the outlook does not look good for Israel. Not only has Israel lost the battle for hearts and minds in Europe, but it has also lost its aura of invincibility in the Arab world.
Israelis are accustomed to winning swift victories over coalitions of Arab states. They are perplexed and anxious about the result of a war in which they possessed overwhelming military strength, in which their political leaders seemed to dither, in which their generals appeared distracted and unable to discern clear war aims.
The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, promised his citizens that the Israeli army would bring back their two soldiers who had been abducted by Hezbollah in the cross-border raid that triggered the crisis. And he promised that the army would remove Hezbollah’s presence — and its ability to menace Israel — from south Lebanon. Neither of those objectives was achieved. Instead, Israelis emerged from their bomb shelters to find that nothing much had changed, apart from the devastation that was caused by about a thousand Hezbollah missiles. The message that greeted them was that their protection against future attacks would come not from their army but from a United Nations resolution which promises much but is unlikely to deliver. There is little confidence among Israelis that a UN resolution can succeed where the combined might of the Israeli army, navy and air force failed.
Most Israelis do not believe that Hezbollah will be disarmed. Nor do they believe that its fighters will be removed from south Lebanon, that its appetite for taking on the Israelis is diminished, and that the Lebanese army will be deployed along the frontier with Israel. And there is not much confidence that an international peace-keeping force will remain for long. Israelis well remember the precipitate departure of the American and French peace-keepers from Beirut after Hezbollah launched devastating suicide attacks on their bases in 1983.
Most worrying of all for Israel and its allies is the perception that its deterrence has greatly diminished. This was a war in which the limits of power were brutally exposed. How does a conventional military force confront an enemy that does not wear a uniform and conducts its operations from civilian population centres? The United States, with all its might, has demonstrably failed to have its way in Iraq and Afghanistan, just as it failed in Vietnam.
It was an acknowledgment that Israel could not be defeated on the battlefield that led Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Jordan’s King Hussein to throw up their hands and sign peace treaties with Israel. Their successors are unlikely to abrogate those treaties, but they — along with their counterparts in Saudi Arabia and a dozen other Arab capitals — will be deeply concerned that Israel was unable to deal with a proxy guerrilla force, albeit one that was well equipped, trained and financed by its co-victors, Iran and Syria.
At the outset of hostilities, Arab officials were quick to issue statements condemning Hezbollah and describing its attack on Israel as ‘risky and uncalculated adventurism’. As the conflict dragged on, their resolve weakened. Their later statements were amended. They still did not offer any succour to Hezbollah, but in response to their ‘street’, they castigated Israel. Israel’s war with Hezbollah has been a watershed in the Middle East. The perception of Israel’s diminished deterrence will greatly encourage Syria and Iran. Any perceived dent in Israel’s deterrent capability is a triumph for Islamism, and it will accelerate the Islamisation of the region. The jihadis will have the wind behind their sails. The conflict will embolden Islamist movements throughout the region, not least within the ranks of Hamas.
When I met Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, six weeks ago, she spoke confidently of Israel following its evacuation of Gaza with an evacuation of virtually all of the West Bank — by negotiations if possible, unilaterally if necessary. There is little chance now, if ever there was, of bringing these Palestinian zealots to the negotiating table. And it is difficult to see how the Israeli government can move ahead with its plan to evacuate most of the West Bank unilaterally, leaving a de facto Palestinian state behind. If a week is a long time in politics, six weeks is an eternity.
What happens next? There will be pious words about strengthening the sovereignty of the Lebanese government, which means extending its rule throughout the country and curbing Hezbollah’s power. That is not going to happen. There will be pious hopes for the international force, which simply won’t work unless the constituents are actually prepared to die in rather large numbers. And, finally, there will be vigorous attempts by the Europeans to co-opt Hezbollah. That, too, is doomed. The Hezbollah jihadis, like their al-Qa’eda cousins, are marching to a drumbeat that defies conventional political and military sense. They are seeking not only to destroy Israel, but also to realise a supernatural mystical vision that will spread Islam across the face of the earth. It is, no less, a messianic vision that produces a final victory of the forces of good over the forces of evil, presaging the return of the Hidden Imam.
There is a Jewish saying that ‘if you are kind when you should be cruel, in the end you will be cruel when you should be kind’. The international community, stricken by television images of suffering, imposes a solution that provides no solution at all. It simply guarantees that the next round will be even more devastating, vicious and deadly.
When the Hezbollah leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, says Hezbollah will win ‘because the Jews love life and we love death’, he is really on to something. He knows that every dead Lebanese baby, the pathetic fruit of Hezbollah’s cynicism and death cult, will be laid in righteous anger at Israel’s door by Europe’s political and media classes. The one certain prediction is that the terrible harvest of dead innocents has not ended. This is just time out for the sowers and reapers of destruction.