On Wednesday (6 Sept), I attended this year’s inagural event of the Brandeis University Crown Center for Middle East Studies, a panel discussion titled, “The Hezbollah-Israel War: What’s Next?” The panel consisted of Shai Feldman, director of the Crown Center, Dr. Abdel Monem Said Aly, a Senior Fellow of the Crown Center and director of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, and Charles Radin, the Boston Globe “Specialist on Religion and Society” and former Middle East correspondent to the Globe (a journalist who has been given the “thumbs up” by the Zionist media tormentor, CAMERA) . The speakers were introduced by Robert Art, Professor of International Relations in the Politics Department. The speakers were each given about a half hour to lecture, then the floor was opened to questions. In Art’s introduction, he tried to paint the discussion as a meeting of Israeli and Arab views, represented by Feldman and Aly, respectively, plus a journalist’s perspective for good measure.
“Shai” (everyone referred to him on a first name basis) scoffed in his seat at Art’s suggestion that he represented the “Israeli view.” He was the first to speak and took up this misrepresentation as the first item on his agenda. “You will find very quickly that my views do not express the Israeli perspective.” Appearances must be maintained, it seems. He first discussed how Hizbollah had effectively “won the battle of the narrative.” This, apparently, was Shai’s departure from the Israeli line and proved his objectivity and intellectual integrity. He then went on to enumerate the strategic victories that Israel enjoyed as a result of the conflict.
The conflict, in Shai’s view, was the result of Hizbollah’s violation of an unspoken agreement between it and Israel, which he coined as “the balance of terror.” According to the “balance of terror,” small border conflicts between Israel and Hizbollah were tolerated on the Eastern part of the border, near the Shebaa Farms and Golan Heights. Hizbollah violated this pact by kidnapping and killing soldiers on the Western part of the border. This taken together with the political climate in Israel, which was suffering from the fall-out of Sharon’s unilateral disengagement plan having resulted only in consistent violence from its places of “withdrawal,” namely Southern Lebanon and Gaza, had forced the government’s hand, according to Shai.
The strategic victories of Israel came in the form of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, the ensuing land and sea blockade, the war’s ability to effectively take the Golan Heights occupation out of the conversation, and exhausting a majority of Hizbollah’s long range rockets. The last point is an interesting one. Shai believes that diminishing Hizbollah’s long range capabilities, spending somewhere around 70% of their supplies, according to Shai (as compared to its Katyusha supplies, which are still plentiful), emboldens the US and Israel to engage Iran militarily. This was surprising to me. No doubt, the US looked eagerly upon as the events unfolded between Lebanon and Israel, hopeful that Hizbollah could be crippled and thus a major deterrent to a war on Iran would be eliminated (Hizbollah represented a deterrent to war on Iran in the sense that it is widely believed they would strike Israel in retaliation to a US attack on Iran). Just a few days before the panel discussion, I wrote in the introduction to the Ballistic Helmet zine that I hoped the disaster would prevent US violence against Iran based on the model of Israel and Hizbollah. At least according to Shai and other hawkish analysts and commentators, this is not the case—quite the opposite, in fact.
Shai’s view that Hizbollah had won the “battle of the narratives,” but lost strategically, has become the zeitgeist of his fellow commentators. Just a few days ago, I received clippings from my father that included Charles Krauthammer’s 2 September Houston Chronicle article “A promising moment not to be missed in the Mideast.” (My father’s clippings are a tried and true bellwether of the influential right’s opinion). Krauthammer quotes Nasrallah’s now famous “1 percent” statement saying essentially that, had he known the severity of Israel’s response, he never would’ve authorized the July 11 operation that captured the Israeli officers. Krauthammer wrote of the statement:
So much for the “strategic and historic victory” Hassan Nasrallah had claimed less than two weeks earlier. What real victor declares that, had he known, he would not have started the war that ended in triumph?
Nasrallah’s admission, vastly underplayed in the West, makes clear what the Lebanese already knew. Hezbollah may have won the propaganda war, but on the ground it lost. Badly.
Apparently, the propaganda war is far from over. Counter to his claim that Nasrallah’s statement has been underplayed in the West, a quick LexisNexis search for “Nasrallah” and “1 percent,” just within major US newspapers, reveals the statement was reported in the New York Times, the St. Petersburg Times, the Star Tribune, Newsday, the Washington Post (K’s own article), etc. What’s disturbing about this trend, although not at all surprising, is that these commentators are taking Nasrallah at face value (when convenient). Far more convincing than the rhetorical espousing of Nasrallah is what Robert Fisk wrote in his 16 July Independent article “Hizbollah’s response reveals months of planning“:
It now appears clear that the Hizbollah leadership [...] thought carefully through the effects of their border crossing, relying on the cruelty of Israel’s response to quell any criticism of their action within Lebanon. They were right in their planning. The Israeli retaliation was even crueler than some Hizbollah leaders imagined, and the Lebanese quickly silenced all criticism of the guerrilla movement.
Fisk, when later asked about the Nasrallah quote during an interview on DN!, said “Hizbollah, I think, is telling us a whopper.” He goes on:
They had clearly, with massive bunkers, underground storage depots, planned that war. They hit a warship. They hit an Israeli warship and almost sank it. They hit it on midships, killed four sailors and set it on fire for 15 hours. That wasn’t because some guy got up in the morning and ate his morning minutiae with cheese and said, “Oh, let’s hit a warship today.” No, that had been planned weeks, months before. You can’t just set that up, like that. And, of course, now, according to Seymour Hersh, we are led to believe and it’s possible that the Israelis planned their war for months before.
But to get back to the point—Shai’s analysis is totally devoid of considerations of what is right, just, or humane. Rather we are to consider only strategic victories and losses. It is our side versus their side (where our side surely means the state of Israel), and what passes for critical evaluation need only concern itself with the structures and operations of power.
In short, the Crown Center is engaged in realpolitik at its worst.
Taking this perspective, all sorts of abhorrent things become acceptable if the ends justify the means. With this in mind, its no surprise that Israel’s illegal use of cluster bombs—90 percent of which were dropped in the last days of the conflict leaving 100,000 unexploded bomblets—was mentioned during the talks. It’s no surprise that the continuing strangulation of Gaza was not mentioned. It’s no surprise that the refusal to grant a ceasefire while the Mediterranean was being poisoned by an oil leak caused by strikes against critical Lebanese infrastructure was mentioned. To the extent that these afford Israel strategic currency, they are perfectly acceptable to influential commentators such as Shai.
When asked about the unilateral disengagement plan for Gaza, Shai responded that it was motivated by the occupation causing an existential crisis for Israel—it challenged Israel’s self-identification of a democratic nation. Mind you it was not motivated by humanism or a respect for the dignity of the Palestinians living there—or a respect of Israeli dignity for that matter, either—after all, military occupation is dehumanizing to both the oppressor and oppressed. The democratic existential crisis is well-founded and much needed, however ethnic cleansing—be it under the name of a “peace process” or “unilateral disengagement”—is hardly the appropriate response.
