In direct contravention of my wife's explicit instructions, herewith I inaugurate my first blog. Long may it prosper.

For some reason, I think I have something to say to you. You think you have something to say to me? Email me at: gideonsblogger -at- yahoo -dot- com

 
Oh, one more aside. The two dominant strains of commentary I've read on Israel's performance have been: Israel lost and this is a catastrophe; and, on the other hand, Israel didn't lose because Hezbollah was badly weakened, and if you say Hezbollah won you are buying into Hezbollah spin and letting them win the PR war.

I think I've answered the "catastrophe" position as well as I can. This was a clear and bad loss, but Hezbollah is not about to overrun Israel. As for the second, contrary argument: Hezbollah's assets are men and missiles. They don't appear to have lost any of their key leadership, and they will easily recruit more men with the propaganda victory they have achieved. And missiles are cheap; Iran has plenty, and Hezbollah still had some themselves at the end of the war, as they were launching right up to the date the cease-fire went into effect. I think the right way to score this is in terms of who achieved their objectives, and on that score it's pretty clear that Israel failed to achieve its objectives while Hezbollah achieved its objectives quite well. The other side isn't the only team to use spin, you know. Olmert and his team have every reason to want us to believe that they did a good job. The Israeli people aren't buying it. We shouldn't either.

Links to pieces I thought were good about the war:

Ze'ev Schiff in Ha'aretz
Yuval Steinitz in Ha'aretz
Yossi Klein Halevy in The New Republic
Andy McCarthy in NRO
posted by Noah at 12:06 PM

 
Sorry to be posting so sporadically, but I've barely been around, away much of last week and going away again today. Lots to talk about, but I'm going to stick for now to the situation in Israel.

Three things that, to me, seem pretty clear about the Israel-Lebanon war just ended:

One: Israel lost, unequivocally.

Two: It's just a battle, not the war, that was lost. Israel's security situation is marginally, not profoundly, worsened by their failure in Lebanon.

Three: The biggest setback is not to Israel's security situation but to Israel's democratic culture, and we'll see soon how big that setback was.

To the extent that Israel had anything resembling a concrete war aim in attacking Lebanon (which I don't believe they did - as I argued just before Israel launched their ground offensive, Olmert launched this war largely for domestic political reasons, and seems not to have bothered trying to figure out what the military objective was or how it might be achieved), that war aim was to cripple Hezbollah operationally, and incidentally to retrieve the two kidnapped soldiers. These aims were not remotely achieved. Hezbollah survives as an organization and will quickly rebuild both its ranks and its supply of missiles. Hezbollah's position internally within Lebanon and its clout with its Syrian patrons have both been significantly enhanced by its performance in the war. The new UN force will not forcibly disarm Hezbollah, nor will the Lebanese army. And not only have the kidnapped soldiers not been returned, their return is not a condition of the cease-fire. Hezbollah's objective was to provoke Israel into attacking, survive the attack sufficiently well to easily rebuild, and end hostilities on terms that would allow it to flourish. It achieved its aims, Israel failed to achieve its aims - so Israel lost, unequivocally.

The cost to Israel in terms of lives lost is not terribly significant. The economic cost is more so, and we'll see how badly the investment climate in Israel is damaged by the continued threat of attack. But Israel can survive both of these things. The neighboring Arab states have seen the IDF fail decisively for the first time, but they are not so foolish as to think either that they now can win a traditional ground war with Israel (to recover the Golan, say) or that they themselves can attack Israel with impunity (the leaders of the various states have a lot more to lose than Nasrallah does). What they will do is show Hezbollah more respect formally and informally, and will not again trust Israel to "solve" a terrorist problem for them.

The big cost to Israel is in terms of its relationship with the United States - or, at any rate, I hope that is the case. The U.S. gave Israel an extremely free hand in this conflict, and Israel quite clearly failed to deliver. Interestingly, I have heard from more than one Israeli the not-terribly-plausible theory going around Israel that Bush put Olmert up to this war - that we encouraged him to attack Lebanon as a sort of proxy-war against Iran. As I say, I find the story implausible. Domestic pressures are quite sufficient to explain Olmert's decision to take the war aggressively into Lebanon, and it's not at all clear how Israel bombing Hezbollah would either weaken Iran or strengthen America's position in its burgeoning confrontation with that country - and the ways in which the Lebanon war would complicate our position in Iraq were immediately obvious. This Israeli theory strikes me as another instance of a people wishing away their own failures by blaming the United States, a common enough strategy world-wide. But if it were true (and it isn't impossible, just unlikely) it seems to me that this would make the damage to Israel's relationship with the United States worse.

But, as I say, this is just a battle. Israel's geopolitical situation is not greatly changed. Hezbollah's primary strength comes from its financial backers, and these were as motivated before as they are now. Hezbollah is a Shiite power originally created by and still backed by Iran, the would-be Shiite regional hegemon. Syria, controlled by an obscure minority religious group and allied with Iran, has equal reason to be supportive. But Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan: these are all states that are dominated by Sunnis, fearful of their own restive Shiite minorities (especially in Saudi Arabia), and traditionally enemies of Iran. An Israeli victory would have met with quiet toasts in Cairo and Riyadh. But while the Israeli loss will make these powers more respectful towards Hezbollah, it will not make them into supporters.

Nor is Israel's security situation much changed. Before the war, Hezbollah threatened Israel with rockets; they will soon be able to do so again. Before the war, Lebanon could not, practically, control its territory; there is no sign that they will be able to do so now. The presence of an international force complicates Israel's ability to respond to future provocation, and that is a loss, but it doesn't actually prevent an Israeli response, just complicate it. If Hezbollah fires rockets at Israel, Israel will respond, blue helmets or no. (This is one major reason that, so far, the blue helmets have not materialized.) Hezbollah, meanwhile, has not demonstrated that they can defeat the Israeli army, much less seize and hold Israeli territory. Terrorist groups in Ireland and Algeria achieved many of their political objectives by means of terror, but they are a poor analogy to Israel because they were fighting to expel what were, effectively, colonial powers (though both Algeria and Ireland were integral parts of France and Great Britain respectively); Israel, by contrast, is fighting for its home. (The pied noirs and Protestant Irish were, of course, home, but they were not in a position to retain control of their countries without the assistance of the metropole.) So long as Israeli Jews are unwilling to be ruled (or, in the worst case scenario, be massacred or expelled by) Arabs, Israel will endure, and short of a nuclear attack that would completely change the complexion of the Israeli response (Israel reportedly has upwards of 200 atomic warheads, and was prepared to use them in 1973 when national survival was at stake) Hezbollah cannot plausibly "eliminate" Israel - its stated goal.

Nor, finally, is it obvious that Israel starts the next war in a worse position than it did this most recent one. On paper, the diplomatic end-game is surprisingly favorable to Israel. This reflects the fact that nobody but Iran actually wants Hezbollah to be victorious, and that a broad array of states recognize that Israel was, indeed provoked. (Israel has been condemned in many quarters for the conduct of the war, but in most of these she has not been condemned for "aggression" - and those who have condemned Israel for "aggression" are from the quarters that reject Israel's right to exist per se, so what can you expect.) The significance of this basically positive diplomatic context is that Israel has a clear path to resume hostilities in response to any new provocation.

All of this explains why I say that Israel lost unequivocally, but that the loss was not as significant as many commentators have suggested.

So what do I think the most significant consequences of this war will be?

I see four, all ominous for Israeli democracy. In increasing order of importance:

First, Israel is currently governed by a center-left coalition. It is not clear that there is another coalition capable of governing Israel, but it is imperative that Israeli voters hold Kadima (and Labor) accountable for the failure of this war. It is difficult to see how the electorate in Israel will square the circle they are presented with, and punish the current leadership without opting for an even less-plauible leadership. If they fail to do so, Israeli democracy will suffer in one fashion or another - either because the leadership is not held accountable or because Israel will come to be governed by an unstable or even bizarre coalition of special interest groups that hollows out the always fragile center in Israeli society.

Second, Israel is currently governed by a man who has fewer in the way of military credentials than possibly any prior Israeli leader. And he has proved incompetent in handling his first war. The lesson I expect Israelis to take home - and probably should take home - is that Israelis cannot trust their security to a Prime Minister who is not also a general. (The most optimistic scenario for the next government is that Kadima knocks off Olmert and replaces him with former Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz.) It is very hard to paint such a conclusion as a good thing for democratic culture.

Third, the class divisions in Israeli society have been brought home with a vengeance. Ehud Olmert is known as Israel's first "yuppie" Prime Minister, a proud member of Israel's overclass. His chief of staff, the man responsible for the notion that Israel could beat Hezbollah using air power alone, is similarly typecast. As happened before in the 1970s, Israelis are realizing that their leadership class is in a meaningful sense divorced from the people. The country did not have a good plan for protecting civilians, and they used the IDF not the way it has traditionally been used but more akin to the way Clinton used America's military - Olmert appeared to be more afraid of Israeli military casualties than of whether he would win or lose the war, and this will be interpreted as an expression of the elite's self-interested rather than collective-minded mentality. The same is true of the chief of staff's air-power-centric plan for dealing with Hezbollah in the first place. The same is true in spades of his decision to sell his stock portfolio before launching an attack. All of this will give a strong boost to Israeli populism, and populism is the favorite food of demagogues, not generally good for orderly democratic governance.

Fourth, and most significantly, it is worth noting that a large fraction - I suspect a majority - of Israel's Arab population supported Hezbollah in the war. Several Arab members of the Knesset vocally supported Hezbollah, and even relatives of civilians *killed* by Hezbollah's rockets were quoted supporting Hezbollah. Israeli Jews are not going to forget this. Among the Jewish population of Israel there was wall-to-wall support for the war in Lebanon - in contrast to the situation in the territories, where there are a variety of opinions and usually a clear majority in favor of withdrawing from most of Judea and Samaria. Hezbollah has no legitimate grievances against Israel; their grievance is Israel's existence. For Israeli Arabs to support Hezbollah is as much as to declare themselves not only alienated from the state and eager to change its character but an active fifth column, assisting those who would destroy Israel by violence. I have been growing steadily more pessimistic about the prospects for Israel's survival as a Jewish state with a substantial Arab Muslim minority as that minority has grown steadily more hostile to the state of which they are citizens. It is now hard to convince me that there is any plausible future but re-division of the country. The big winner, long-term, is going to be Avigdor Liberman of Yisrael Beiteinu, who has advocated "trading" the triangle region of the Galilee - the most concentrated Arab region in Israel, and also the home of the most radical Islamist groups - to the Palestinian entity in exchange for retention of key settlement blocs in Judea and Samaria (Ariel, Ma'ale Adumim, etc.). Unless this were accomplished by referendum, however, such a "trade" would be a clear violation of international law, as well as a profound violation of democratic principles, as it would entail summarily stripping hundreds of thousands of Israeli Arabs of their citizenship and forcing them to be citizens of a different polity. Nonetheless, that is where I think Israel is heading. This is the most profound reason why I think this war's most significant casualty is Israeli democracy.

Israel, for its own reasons, wants to get out of the bulk of the territories, because it does not want to suffer the fate of South Africa. Precisely because an Israeli withdrawal would also be a victory for Israel's enemies, those enemies will do everything they can to create conditions that reinforce the - plausible - interpretation that Israel has been driven out by Arab heroes and martyrs. Their attempts to create such conditions will be the spark for the next war, which will come sooner or later, probably sooner. One hopes that Israel will learn enough from their mistakes in the current conflict to be better prepared when the next conflict comes.
posted by Noah at 4:04 PM

 
Apologies to my long-suffering readers (if I still have any) for being incommunicado for so long. July was much busier than I expected, with business trips to London and Southern California and a surprisingly hectic schedule when in the office in New York. So, again, my apologies.

There are a lot of things I've wanted to say. Unfortunately, the topic you probably most want to hear about - the war in Lebanon and Gaza (remember Gaza? thought not) - is one that, frankly, I'm not sure how I feel about.

So perhaps I should air my thoughts in a relatively haphazard way, and see where they land.

- Israel's response, in the north especially, was, at the inception, extremely popular. Even now, there is virtually wall-to-wall support for a war with Hezbollah, albeit an increasingly loud chorus of outrage at the conduct of the war (its ineptness, not its violence).

- This should not be surprising, as the war was, to a considerable extent, launched for political reasons. The proper comparison of this war is not the 1982 Lebanon War, much less World War II (ridiculous comparisons to which continue to proliferate), but Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, Shimon Peres' strike on Lebanon that was intended to shore up his position in the run-up to that year's elections (it didn't work). By making that comparison, I don't mean to suggest that either the current operations or, for that matter, Operation Grapes of Wrath were unjustified. Hezbollah's naked aggression is manifestly unacceptable; Israel could with perfect justification respond with far greater force, including operations against Syria or even Iran. Justification is not the point. The point is: what is the objective of the war? It seems to me manifest that the primary objective of the war was political, and that the primary audience was Israel's own people. Prime Minister Olmert understood correctly that a failure to respond forcefully to brazen and unprovoked attacks from Gaza would discredit the idea of unilateral withdrawal, an idea he still fully intends to extend to much of Judea and Samaria. So he struck back to prove that Israel was still willing to defend itself - indeed, would defend itself more forcefully now that there were no Israeli civilians in the way (which was one of the primary rationales for the withdrawal from Gaza). And when Hezbollah responded, Olmert had to open a northern front as well.

- As I say, there's nothing unjustified about Israel's actions. But there's a problem with wars fought for domestic political purposes: they don't have a clear military objective. And once begun, the only acceptable way to end a war is to win it. And if you don't have a military objective that bears some relation to your offensive operations, then pretty much by definition you cannot achieve victory. And that's where Israel is today, on both fronts but more dramatically in Lebanon.

- Some have described this as a war to reestablish deterrence. But it is not obvious that Hezbollah is deterrable. On the contrary: so long as the political dynamic whereby Israeli responses strengthen Hezbollah's hand, there is no way to deter Hezbollah. If Israel ignores Hezbollah, they strengthen; if they respond, they strengthen. So why would Hezbollah not attack whenever war is useful to it or to its sponsors in Damascus and Tehran? Note that I am *not* saying that religious warfare is more "irrational" than other kinds of warfare, and that this is the reason they cannot be deterred. I think they cannot be deterred because it is not clear how Israel can respond in a way that clearly weakens them, and they know this. Lots of non-religious populations - Stalin's Soviet Union? Ho's North Vietnam? - have suffered immensely in war without breaking. If you that war not only will not break you, but will strengthen your position, why avoid war?

- For this reason, I am skeptical that Nasrallah or Assad or Ahmadinejad had some kind of "grand plan" in provoking this war that has either gone awry (assuming Hezbollah is suffering badly under the current campaign) or spectacularly well (assuming it isn't). No grand plan need be posited. These characters are more likely to benefit than not from disruption of the existing order. All they had to calculate is that the time was opportune to create a measure of chaos. That's not much of a plan, but it's sufficient to explain their behavior.

- Well before Israel withdrew from Gaza, I predicted that the IDF would return within a year. I nonetheless favored withdrawal and the dismantling of the settlements, because the settlements implied an Israeli *claim* to Gazan territory, and I thought that for both reasons of justice and prudence it made sense for Israel to renounce those claims. I never expected unilateral withdrawal would mean peace; I thought it would mean the continuation of war under altered conditions.

- A lot of commentators argued that withdrawal would make deterrence work better, because once they had Gaza the Palestinians would have something to lose, and would not lose that something readily. But I never bought this because the Palestinians have consistently chosen no loaf rather than settle for half. And precisely because there is no way to "eliminate" the terrorist infrastructure in a permanent way, I assumed that Israel would have to resume the occupation in order to protect its citizens from rocket attacks and other aggression. That's what's happening now, but it's not clear that Israel has set the stage for its ability to remain in place; indeed, Israel has made it pretty clear that it does not intend to remain in place.

- Similarly, after the withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, I presumed that Israel would have to return. Israel had no territorial claims on Lebanon; its presence was entirely security-driven. Yes, the long occupation produced Hezbollah. But there was no reason to think that withdrawal would result in Hezbollah withering away, as indeed it has not. So now Israel has had to launch a full-scale war merely to "degrade" Hezbollah's capabilities - capabilities that can be rapidly rebuilt, at a fraction of the cost for Israel to degrade them. Israel's stated objectives are to make it possible for the Lebanese army and some unspecified international force to come in and "control" the region in which Hezbollah operates. But Hezbollah is more popular than ever in Lebanon, and it is inconceivable that an international force will actually use, well, force. In terms of restraining Israeli action any such force will be worse than Israeli settlements, and in terms of restraining Hezbollah they will be inferior to the Syrians who, if they chose to, certainly could force some restraint.

- Which brings us to Syria. Various hawkish voices have called for Israel to take the war to the source - that is to say: to Damascus, which never seems to suffer adequately for the wars it provokes (see, e.g., 1967, 1973). But there is no mystery about why Israel has declined to take any action against Syria directly: because the Assad regime is the best Israel could plausibly expect in that country. Were the Syrian regime to fall, it would be replaced not by a friendly Arab democracy but by one of three possibilities: a new military dictatorship (not obviously better than the current regime), a radical Sunni Islamist regime (obviously worse), or a state of anarchy such as obtains in Iraq (also obviously worse). If Israel were certain that the Syrian regime could survive a direct Israeli attack, then, perhaps, Israel might launch such an attack, which would make the Assad regime *fear* collapse and take the necessary actions to prevent it, even if these meant acceding to Israeli objectives such as reining in Hezbollah. The fact that Israel is being very careful with Syria is a testament not to Israeli weakness but to their perceptions of Syrian weakness, and their recognition that the fall of the Assad regime would be unlikely to benefit Israel. Israel will not turn decisively against Damascus until such time as it appears that Assad has been "captured" by Hezbollah, and has forgotten who is the patron and who is the client. That doesn't appear to have happened yet.

- (Side note: some*might* think it in Israel's interests for there to be an *American* effort to topple the Syrian regime, on the assumption that America can simply *impose* a more friendly government on that country. I think that since the Iraq campaign, no one serious in America or Israel still believes that America has that ability.)

- So this is how Israel got where they are. The Israeli government understood that it could not stand idly by while its citizens were murdered. But it did not want to reinstate the expensive occupation of either Gaza or south Lebanon. Nor did it want to seriously threaten the Syrian regime that it would ultimately have to count on to preserve some semblance of order. So it launched a war with no rational military objective, and it now has to figure out how to salvage the situation.

- The short-term consequences for Israel are likely to be quite negative. Israel launched this war with, initially, a surprising amount of support from Europe and the major Arab states. No one especially *wants* Hezbollah to succeed. But the botch job they've made of the campaign so far - which, in my view, stems from the lack of clarity about militarily achieveable objectives at the start - has squandered this goodwill and turned it to hostility, and undermined Israel's position with the Bush Administration as well. On the other hand, the long-term consequences are not likely to be terribly significant. The diplomatic context will have changed many times by the time the next war rolls around. The most significant medium-term consequence - for Israel - of this war is likely to be a substantial setback for Ehud Olmert, and hence for withdrawal from Judea and Samaria - precisely the opposite of the intended outcome when the operation was launched.

- The consequences for the United States could be more significant. In Iraq, Americans are fighting and dying for a Shiite-dominated government that supports Hezbollah verbally if not materially. Maintaining our position in Iraq's burgeoning sectarian conflict just got a whole lot harder; if we force Israel to stand down, we hand a victory to our enemies (not good for our position in Iraq); if we don't force Israel to stand down, we support their war against Lebanese Shiites (not good for our position in Iraq); and if we impose a "solution" in the form of an international force, then we "own" yet another crisis that can't actually *be* solved (which is incidentally also not good for our position in Iraq).

- I do not think that the manifest sympathy of the Iraqi government for Hezbollah materially constrains *Israel's* freedom of action, but it certainly should be an eye-opener for Americans, both as to the character of that regime and the nature of politics in the region. The Middle East is still, and will remain for the forseeable future, a "who/whom" region, where politics boils down mostly to who gets to do what to whom. That isn't the way the whole world works all of the time, nor is it the way one would like the world to work, but it's the overwhelmingly dominant mode of the Middle East. (Th flip side of the Iraqi government's response - and I should point out that not only the Iran-friendly Iraqi government, but also Ali Sistani, the leading Iraqi Shiite cleric opposed to sectarian war in that country, came out on the side of Hezbollah in this war with Israel - is, of course, the response of the Saudis, who, at least initially, blamed Hezbollah for the war and argued that a "proportional" Israeli response would be legitimate. This, again, is not warmth towards Israel or America, nor antipathy to terrorism, but "who/whom" - Saudi Arabia's oil region is predominantly Shiite, and the Hezbollahfication of that region is probably the worst thing that could happen to that kingdom.)

- As for the United States' democracy project: I continue to believe that elites are the motor of history, and republican governance depends on the existence of a patriotic elite willing to subordinate its private interests to the interests of the nation. The Middle East spectacularly lacks such elites, which makes successful republican governance very difficult if not impossible. How to nurture the growth of such an elite is a difficult problem as well, and I suspect an insoluble one; in any event, it seems clear at this point that adventures like the Iraq War are not the way to do it. In the absence of such elites, and of a realistic prospect for republican governance (which if it were realistic would, indeed, change the civilizational dynamics of the region), we're left with management of the conflict, which means working through the self-interested elites that exist, supporting those that seem more congenial against those that are transparently hostile. America is terrible at this sordid game, and always has been. But it's the only game in town.

- There has been a lot of commentary about how tough the Hezbollah fighters have proved. Piffle. Hezbollah is proving hard to defeat not because they are great warriors but because guerillas who have the support of the populace are *always* hard to defeat. To defeat them, you have to be either willing to destroy the populace - Israel is not, nor should it be - or able to separate them from the populace - Israel is unable to. Ironically, an authority perceived as legitimate can get away with - and get positive results from - the kind of brutality that can cause an illegitimate authority to lose a war. Thus, France lost their war in Algeria against the FLN - but the far more inept and corrupt but more legitimate Algerian military regime, the FLN's heirs, basically won their war against the Algerian Islamists, employing more than comparable brutality against a fairly comparably popular insurgency (the Islamists did, after all, win a popular election; the FLN did not enjoy majority support in polls for most of the Algerian war of independence). Hafez al Assad, the current Syrian President's father, was able to destroy the Syrian arm of the Brotherhood in about a week, with 20,000 casualties, and his regime survived; Israel's much less sanguinary and longer-lasting effort against Hezbollah has so far made Hezbollah more popular. Israel's problem fighting Hezbollah - and Hamas - is not that Hezbollah and Hamas are so mighty or so clever but that they are legitimate and popular, and Israel cannot separate them from the populace the way another legitimate authority might.

- Many pundits have pointed out that Hezbollah wants civilians casualties, and fights in such a away as to maximize such casualties on both sides. All true. They go on to argue that therefore it is perverse to reward this barbaric calculus on Hezbollah's part. True - and yet, on another level, entirely understandable. Because, after all, the reason why people are outraged by incidents like Qana is not only because they are biased against Israel, or against the West generally, or because they hold Western countries to a higher standard of civilization, or because people are just idiots. The outrage also follows from the outrage of the Lebanese people. They are not (today, anyhow) blaming Hezbollah; they are blaming Israel. This is a who/whom problem: the Lebanese don't ask whether Israel is justified, they just ask whether Israel is *other* and, if so, then its attacks are illegitimate. Lebanese outrage speaks to Israel's illegitimacy in their eyes, and the world understands that, if the war is not considered legitimate, then it is unlikely to succeed in any meaningful sense. I'm not saying people think this all through consciously. But there is simply more going on than stupidity and prejudice. There is a kind of cold wisdom operating as well.

- What to do now? Israel has just announced that it will expand its ground operations. That's probably a good thing; there's at least some chance that they will at least find out how much damage they did to Hezbollah's weaponry, and so long as Israeli troops remain in place during any cease-fire that is pressed on them they will at least know that violations of that cease fire will mean war on Lebanese territory rather than their own. And accepting more Israeli military casualties in exchange for fewer Lebanese civilian casualities is probably a trade Israel simply must make if it is to salvage anything from the current war. But within a few weeks this war will end, and I am very pessimistic that any solution imposed on the parties will end the threat from Hezbollah either to Israel or to stability in Lebanon. I ultimately don't think the most important aspect of this war is the PR war to decide who "won" - what really matters is whether there *was* a victor, whether anyone's war aims have actually been achieved, and I doubt that Israel's will have been. For that reason, I expect war, on both fronts, to recur.

- The biggest technical problem of any proposed cease-fire is how to make it difficult for Hezbollah to strike Israel. I'm not sure there's a straightforward solution to this technical problem. Shimon Peres has been fond of arguing for years that in the age of the ballistic missile, strategic depth no longer exists, and therefore there is no vital reason for Israel to retain the heights of the Golan or Samaria or the Jordan Valley. Well and good, but the corollary is that in the age of the ballistic missile, there are no borders, and Tel Aviv becomes the front line. Israel is in a novel position, but not a unique one; the rest of the world is trending their way, as it becomes easier and easier for "entrepreneurial" groups to foment violence on a large scale for low cost. Hezbollah's budget is tiny compared to any state military budget, but it can do more damage than most Arab armies have been able to inflict on the Jewish state. This is not a testimony to Hezbollah's greatness, but to the power of modern military technologies.

- But the most difficult problem for Israel is how to get the major Arab states - Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia - to begin to play a constructive role. I can't think of a good reason for any of them to help Israel in any meaningful way, but they are the key to Israel's geopolitical situation, because there is no way to satisfy the radicals - including all significant factions among the Palestinian Arabs - without destroying Israel as an independent sovereign entity. Israel is not going to consent to self-destruction, and for all that Hezbollah would love to wipe Israel off the map, they can't. Israel is probably going to have to learn whether nuclear deterrence works against Iran; even if it does, an ever-bolder Iran will surely try to provoke additional wars between Israel and Hezbollah, and between Israel and Hamas, and these proxies will be ever better armed. Even so, this is the continuation of the long war of attrition that Israel has been fighting since the pre-state period, a war that looks like it will continue for another generation. That's a very sad reality, but I don't see what is to be done about it but to face it.
posted by Noah at 10:23 AM