The Lebanon War, a Post-Mortem
Israeli Militarism and the Necessity of a One-State Solution
By Alan Hart
CounterPunch, August 17, 2006
I'm going to suggest to you that what we might now be witnessing
is the long beginning of the end of the Zionist state of Israel. In
the next 10 minutes or so I will talk my way to an explanation of
why I think so; and then I'll address the question of what the most
likely consequences would be. I can see two--One State of Palestine
for All and real, lasting peace, or Catastrophe for All... and by
"All" I don't just mean Israeli Jews and the Arabs of the region, I
mean all of us, everywhere. I thought I would be the first to give
voice in public to the idea that Israel might be planting in Lebanon
the final seeds of its own destruction, but while I was working on
my text for this evening, I came across an interview given by
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was PresidentCarter's National Security
Adviser. He said: "Eventually, if neo-con policies continue to be
pursued, the United States will be expelled from the region and that
will be the beginning of the end for Israel as well."As Israel's
bombardment of Lebanon unfolded, a great deal of nonsense was
written and spoken by pundits and policymakers throughout the mainly
Gentile Judeo-Christian world about why it was happening. The main
thrust of the nonsense was that Hizbullah started the war and that
Israel was merely defending itself. I think the truth about
Hizbullah's role in triggering the war can be summarised as
follows--bearing in mind that the border incident of 12 July was one
of many since Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, and
which more often than not, according to UN monitors, were provoked
by Israeli actions and/or Israeli violations of agreements. By
engaging an IDF border patrol, killing three Israeli soldiers and
taking two hostages, and firing a few rockets to create a diversion
for that operation, Hizbullah gave Israel's generals and those
politicians who rubber-stamp their demands the pretext they wanted
and needed to go to war--a war they had planned for months.
I was reminded of what was said to me on the second of the six days
of the 1967 war when I was a very young ITN correspondent reporting
from Israel. One of my sources was Major General Chaim Herzog. He
was one of the founding fathers of Israel's Directorate of Military
Intelligence. On the second day of that war he said to me in private
conversation: "IfNasser had not been stupid enough to give us a
pretext for war now, we would have created one in the coming year to
18 months." Hizbullah's purpose in taking Israeli prisoners/hostages
was to have them as bargaining chips - to secure the return of
Lebanese prisoners Israel had refused to release in a previous
prisoner exchange. As former President Carter implied in an article
for The Washington Post on I August, it was not unreasonable for
Hizbullah to assume that an exchange would be possible because "the
assumption was based on a number of such trades in the past." But on
12 July 2006 the government of Israel was not interested in trades.
It did not give a single moment to diplomacy or negotiations of any
kind. It did not even consider a local retaliation to make a point.
Israel rushed to war. As Defence Minister Amir Peretz put it: "We're
skipping the stage of threats and going straight to the action."
On the subject of Hizbullah's rockets, (which are hit-and-miss low
tech weapons when compared with Israel's state of the art
firepower), it is right to ask-Why, really, were they there? What,
really, explains Hizbullah's stock-piling and its bunkering down?
The honest answer, which has its context in the whole history of the
Arab-Israeli conflict, and Zionism's demonstrated designs on
Southern Lebanon in particular, is this: Hizbullah was strengthening
itself militarily for the same reason as Eygpt did when President
Nasser, with great reluctance after America had refused to supply
him, accepted weapons from the Soviet Union. Nasser did not upgrade
Eygpt's military capabilities to make war on Israel. He wanted to be
able to demonstrate to Israel that attacking Eygpt to impose
Zionism's will on it was not a cost-free option. In other words,
Hizbullah had been improving its military capability to deter
Israeli incursions and attacks, which was something the Lebanese
army was incapable of doing. Am I suggesting that Hizbullah would
not have let loose its rockets if Israel had not gone for the war
option? YES! The notion that, on 12 July 2006, Hizbullah was joined
in conspiracy with Iran and Syria to wipe Israel off the face of the
earth is nothing but Zionist and neo-con propaganda nonsense--to
justify Israel's latest war of aggression and also, perhaps, to
justify, in advance of it happening, war on Iran.
It's true that the rhetoric of Iran's President gave and gives a
degree of apparent credibility to Zionist and neo-con spin--but only
to those who are unaware of, or don't want to know, the difference
between the facts and documented truth of the real history of the
Arab-Israeli conflict (as in my book) and Zionism's version of it.
To those who really want to understand why the Zionist state of
Israel behaves in the way it does, and is (as described in a recent
article courageously carried by The Independent) "a terrorist state
like no other", I say not only read my book, but give special
attention to page 485 of Volume One. On it I quote what was said
behind closed doors in May 1955 by Moshe Dayan, Israel's one-eyed
warlord and master of deception. He was in conversation with
Israel's ambassadors to Washington, London and Paris. At the time
the Eisenhower administration was pressing Israel to abandon its
policy of reprisal attacks.
Eisenhower was aware that Nasser did not want war with Israel, and
that he would, when he could, make an accommodation with it.
Eisenhower also knew that Israel's reprisal attacks were making it
impossible for Nasser to prepare the ground on his side for peace
with Israel.
In conversation with Israel's three most important ambassadors to
the West, Dayan explained why he was totally opposed - whatever the
pressure from the West - to the idea that Israel should abandon its
policy of reprisal attacks. They were, he said, "a life drug." What
he meant, he also explained, was that reprisal attacks enabled the
Israeli government "to maintain a high degree of tension in the
country and the army."
What, really, did that mean? Israel's standing or full-time army was
(as it still is and must be) relatively small, not more than about
23,000 souls in all. The other quarter of a million fighting men and
women who could be mobilised in 48 hours were reservists from every
walk of Israel's civil society. The real point? Without Israeli
reprisal attacks and all that they implied--that the Zionist state
was in constant danger of being annihilated - there was a
possibility that some and perhaps many reservists would not be
motivated enough to respond to Zionism's calls to arms.
Put another way, what Dayan really feared was the truth. He knew, as
all of Israel's leaders knew, that Israel's existence was not in
danger from any combination of Arab forces. And that was the truth
which had to be kept from the Jews of Israel. Dayan's fear was that
if they became aware of it, they might insist on peace on terms the
Arab regimes could accept but which were not acceptable to Zionism.
Among those present when Dayan explained the need for Israeli
reprisal attacks as a "life drug" was the Foreign Ministry's Gideon
Rafael. He reported what Dayan told the ambassadors to Prime
Minister Moshe Sharret-in my view, and with the arguable exception
of Yitzhak Rabin, the only completely rational prime minister Israel
has ever had. And we know from Sharret's diaries what Rafael then
said to him: "This is how fascism began in Italy and Germany!"
Ladies and gentlemen, I think future historians may say that was how
fascism began in the Zionist state of Israel.
The idea of Israel as a fully functioning democracy is a seriously
flawed one. It's true that Israeli Jews are free to speak their
minds (in a way that most Jews of the world are frightened to do),
and to that extent it can be said that Israel has the appearance of
a vibrant democracy... But in reality, and especially since the
countdown to the 1967 war, it's Israel's generals who call most of
the policy shots, even when one of them is not prime minister.
In June 1967 Israel's prime minister of the time, the much maligned
Levi Eshkol, did not want to take his country to war. The war, was
imposed upon him by the generals, led by Dayan. As I explain in
Volume Two of my book, what really happened in Israel in the final
countdown to that war was something very close to a military coup in
all but name.
And that's where we are today--the generals effectively calling the
shots in Israel, to the applause of the neo-cons. Why, really, did
Israel's generals want to make war on Lebanon? There was obviously
much more to it than the collective punishment of a whole people as
part and parcel of a stated objective - the destruction of Hizbullah
as a Moslem David which could hit and hurt the Zionist Goliath. I
think there were two main reasons. The first was that Israel's
generals believed they should and could restore the "deterrent
power" of the IDF (Israel's war machine). They believed, correctly,
that it had been seriously damaged by Hizbullah's success in not
only confronting the IDF following Sharon's invasion of Lebanon in
1982, but eventually forcing it to withdraw, effectively defeated
and humiliated... I think it is more than reasonable to presume that
for most if not all of the past six years, Israel's generals were
itching to make war on Lebanon to repair that damage--to restore the
IDF's deterrent power. Put another way, it was time, Israel's
generals believed, to give the Arabs (all Arabs, not just Hizbullah)
another lesson in who the master was.
The second main reason for the insistence of Israel's generals on 12
July this year that war was the only option...? I think it's also
more than reasonable to presume that they saw the opportunity to
ethnically cleanse Lebanon up to the Litani River, with a view,
eventually, to occupying and then annexing the ethnically cleansed
territory. For Zionism this would be the fulfilment of the vision of
modern Israel's founding father, David Ben-Gurion - a Zionist state
within "natural" borders, those borders being the Jordan River in
the East and the Litani River of Lebanon in the north. Israel gained
control of theJordan River border in its 1967 war of expansion, but
prior to its rush to war on 12 July, all of its attempts to
establish the Litani border had failed. Since 1982 because of
Hizbullah's ability to cause the occupying IDF forces more
casualties than Israeli public opinion was prepared to tolerate.
According to those currently calling the policy shots - Israel's
generals and politicians, the neo-cons in and around the Bush
administration and their associate in Downing Street - the name of
the game is creating a "new Middle East". It is happening. A new
Middle East is being created.
But what kind of new Middle East will it actually be? In my analysis
it will be one in which the Zionist state of Israel, having rejected
a number of opportunities to make peace with the Palestinians and
all the Arab states, will become increasingly vulnerable and, at a
point, actually for the first time ever in its shortish history,
could face the possibility of defeat. In my view the seeds of that
possible defeat have just been sewn in Lebanon. The fact is that
Israel's latest military adventure has been totally
counter-productive in that it has caused Hizbullah to be admired by
the angry and humiliated masses of the Arab and wider Moslem world.
That being so, would it really be surprising if, in growing numbers,
Arabs and Moslems everywhere begin to entertain- if they are not
already entertaining-something like the following thought: "If 3,000
Hizbullah guerrillas can stand up to mighty Israel for weeks and
give it a seriously bloody nose, what would happen if we all joined
the fight?" (Do I hear the sound of pro-Western Arab regimes being
toppled? Yes, I think so). I imagine that even the thought of Israel
being defeated one day will bring joy to very many Arabs and other
Moslems. But there ought to be no place for joy because there's no
mystery about what would happen in the event of Israel actually
being on the brink of defeat. I want to quote to you now from one of
my Panorama interviews with Golda Meir. (It can be found, this
quote, on the second page Volume One of my book, in the Prologue
which is titled Waiting for the Apocalypse).
At a point I interrupted her to say: "Prime Minister I want to be
sure I understand what you're saying... You are saying that if ever
Israel was in danger of being defeated on the battlefield, it would
be prepared to take the region and the whole world down with it?"
Without the shortest of pauses for reflection, Golda replied: "Yes,
that's exactly what I'm saying." In those days Panorama went on-air
at 8 o'clock on Monday evenings. Shortly after the transmission of
that interview The Times had a new lead editorial. It quoted what
Golda had said to me and added its view that "We had better believe
her." How, actually, would the Zionist state of Israel take at least
the region down with it? It would arm its nuclear missiles, target
Arab capitals, then fire the missiles. Such an End-Game to the
Arab-Israeli conflict, if it happened, and which I would describe as
a self-fulfilled Zionist prophesy of doom, would probably take many
years to play out. But the countdown to such a catastrophe would be
speeded up if, as Brzezinski put it, "neo-con policies continue to
be pursued." If they are, and if Iran is attacked, I think that a
Clash of Civilisations, Judeo-Christian v Islamic, would become
unstoppable.
Is there no way to stop the madness and create a "new Middle East"
worth having? Yes, of course, there is, but it requires the agenda
of the neo-cons and their associates to be thrown into the dustbin
of history, in order for there to be a resolution of the Palestine
problem, which I describe as the cancer at the heart of
international affairs. Unfortunately, and because of the facts
Zionism has been allowed to create on the ground in
Israel/Palestine, it's already much too late for a genuine two-state
solution, one which would see Israel back behind more or less its
pre-1967 borders with Jerusalem an open city and the capital of two
states. The conclusion which I think is invited is this:
If the countdown to catastrophe for all is to be stopped, the only
possible solution to the Palestine problem is One State for All.
That would, of course, be the end of Zionism's colonial enterprise
and of Zionism itself. But in my view that's what has to happen if
there's to be a "new Middle East" in which there can be security and
peace for all, Arabs and Jews. Ladies and gentlemen: I'm not a
politician or, any more, a working journalist and broadcaster who
must write and speak in way that doesn't offend very powerful vested
interests. I am a reasonably well informed human being who cares and
who is free to say what he really thinks. (Which probably makes me a
member of a very small club!)
And in summary of all that I've said this evening, what I really
think comes down to this: The equation is a very simple one: No
justice for the Palestinians = no peace for any of us.
Alan Hart is a well-known Middle East scholar.
