Author: Editorial
Publication: The Australian
Date: August 08, 2006
URL: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20050245-7583,00.html
Israel's destruction is the name of the militants'
game
The quest for peace in the Middle East is
one of the most frustrating stories of the modern age. Unlike the Cold War,
which was decided by the hard and demonstrable realities of economics, conflicts
in the Middle East are conducted and judged in a far less objective arena,
where values of religion and honour are very often the ultimate arbiters of
right and wrong. This makes it very difficult for Western observers to take
the measure of the Hezbollah-Israeli conflict, despite it being a battle between
competing world views - medieval theocracy versus secular, liberal democracy
- that are the political matter and anti-matter of the 21st century. Understood
as such, the impasse at the UN over the wording of a resolution calling for
an end to hostilities in the conflict was inevitable. Certainly, no one wants
to see a continued loss of life on any side. But present efforts at the UN
were doomed to fail. The fact is, the UN's track record in southern Lebanon
is abysmal. Its mission to southern Lebanon, UNIFIL, consumes $133 million
a year and has consistently failed to enforce UN Security Council resolution
1559. That document, a binding Chapter 7 resolution, explicitly calls for
the disarming of all militias including Hezbollah within Lebanese territory.
In pursuing and rooting out Hezbollah, Israel is not only protecting its own
citizens - who have been subject to routine and often fatal harassment actions
against it since pulling out of southern Lebanon in 2000 - but it is also
enforcing international law where others have been unwilling or unable to.
But the second and broader problem behind
any treaty is that for Israel, a tiny, liberal democracy surrounded by fascist
autocracies, there can ultimately be no peace with Hezbollah - just a securing
of a buffer zone. Created in the turmoil of the Iranian revolution with the
goal of spreading radical Shia influence throughout the world, Hezbollah (aka
the Party of God) is devoted to the destruction not just of the state of Israel
but Judaism everywhere. Hezbollah will treat any deal as little more than
an excuse to rearm and hope for better luck next time. In 1994, the group
committed the deadliest act of terrorism ever on Argentinian soil, blowing
up the Jewish community headquarters in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people and
wounding about 300 more. Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah whose picture
is triumphantly carried by baying mobs at rallies around the world, has said
that if Jews "all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going
after them worldwide" and that "the Jews love life, so that is what
we shall take away from them. We are going to win because they love life and
we love death". Despite these lunatic ravings, Hezbollah is winning the
propaganda war in the West, where decades of postmodernism have atrophied
the culture's moral musculature and accorded the terrorist group privileged
victim status. That Hezbollah loves death can be seen in its barrage of the
past weekend, which hurt Israeli Arabs most of all. But if Hezbollah does
not care about people, it does care about history and its place in it. As
Nasrallah himself said in a recent rant in which he called Israel a temporary
country: "By God, you will not succeed in erasing our memory, our presence
or eradicating our strong belief." Middle Eastern broadcasters help by
connecting the conflict to a much broader sweep of Arab and Muslim history
that goes back to and beyond the expulsion of the Moors from Spain and portrays
victories against Israel as evidence of a supposed rising tide of Islam. As
such, those in the West who believe that world peace would be achieved were
Israel to retreat behind its pre-1967 borders (or disappear entirely) are
mistaken. Such a move would only embolden the likes of Hezbollah and its backers
in Syria and Iran. Here those who truly care about the future of the Middle
East and believe in the values of secular, liberal democracy and all the freedoms
that they entail should gain the confidence to speak up for them in the present
conflict. For, in the long run, there is nothing less that is at stake.
In the present conflict, all Hezbollah needs
to win is to not lose. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert acknowledged as
much on the weekend when he said it would not be possible to completely destroy
such a guerilla organisation. But that is not to say that Israel should not
fight Hezbollah and respond to its provocations. For until Hezbollah and its
backers in Tehran are deposed or have a change of heart, and the rest of the
Middle East sees the Jewish state as a neighbour with whom to coexist rather
than a cancer to eliminate, Israel has no choice but to defend itself. Any
peace that does not secure Israel's borders in the short term while also communicating
to its foes that attempts to destroy the Jewish state will be met with overwhelming
force will be a mortgage on future lives and a peace of the dead.
