After four weeks of violent but inconclusive warfare, there were almost as many diplomats as missiles flying overhead in Beirut in the last few days, signalling a shift from fighting to negotiating, as the war's true dimensions and stakes suddenly become more evident. This is not one war, but five, and in the political arena they will all be fought simultaneously.
On the surface, the situation seems clear. Israel and Hizbullah have effectively fought each other to a draw, despite Israel's huge advantage in military power and its savage will to pummel all of Lebanon. Destroying Lebanon and slowly eroding Hizbullah 's capacity to fire missiles would entail a very high political cost for all concerned, and so diplomacy must take over now.
The first draft of the UN resolution to end the war agreed by the French and Americans is significant but flawed. It is significant because it mentions all the key issues that are important for both sides and that have not been resolved through war: occupied lands, cross-border attacks, return of prisoners, mutual respect of sovereignty and the 1949 armistice line.
The resolution is flawed because it favours Israel on all the key issues: It says Hizbullah started the conflict; it demands unconditional return of only Israeli prisoners; it allows Israel to keep attacking and does not demand immediate Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon, or subsequent Israeli withdrawal from the Shabaa Farms area that Lebanon says is Lebanese land; and, it demands an international force in south Lebanon and disarmament of Hizbullah before all of Lebanon's legitimate demands are met.
The Lebanese government decision to send 15,000 troops to the south -- once Israel withdraws -- will spur movement towards a more balanced resolution. This is an important signal that Lebanon and Hizbullah are prepared to respond to reasonable and legitimate demands by the international community, but only if Lebanese demands are met simultaneously.
Still, the problem is that a cease-fire and political resolutions on this front solve only one of our five wars around here. The other four wars are:
-- the coming internal battles inside Lebanon to define the country's future character and orientation;
-- the continuing antagonism between Israel and regional players like the Palestinians, Syria, Iran and probably a majority of Arab public opinion;
-- the struggle for legitimacy and leadership between established Arab regimes and powerful non-state actors like Hizbullah and Hamas; and,
-- the global tug-of-war over the soul and identity of the Middle East, symbolised by the tensions between the United States-Israel-United Kingdom-led camp and the Iran-Syria-Hizbullah -Hamas-led camp.
Most of the key actors in this conflict see themselves fighting these five wars simultaneously, even though Lebanon-Israel is the only active battleground. Lebanon and Israel should be able to resolve their bilateral disputes as easily as Jordan and Egypt resolved theirs with Israel. But a weak Lebanese government in recent decades has precluded such a step because of Syrian dominance of Lebanon, repeated Israeli attacks and occupations in Lebanon, the rise of Hizbullah , and the Lebanese sect-based consensual governance system that inherently breeds a weak central government.
Israel has repeatedly used its military power in the past 40 years to stop attacks against it from south Lebanon, always to no avail. Hizbullah 's impressive performance to keep fighting and attacking during the past month suggests that a historic turning point has been reached. In a narrow but ferocious engagement, an Arab force has militarily fought Israel to a draw, and thus perhaps neutralised Israel's historical reliance on its military deterrence to impose its will on its neighbours.
This may be why Israel is attacking civilian installations throughout Lebanon, making a wasteland of the country: a lesson to anyone else who might consider challenging it militarily. This strategy probably will not work either, because savagery, like occupation, only begets resistance and defiance.
Hizbullah will emerge stronger politically from the cease-fire diplomacy if Israel is forced to comply with the key Lebanese demands of exchanging prisoners, leaving Sheba Farms, and stopping cross-border flights and attacks, in return for no more attacks against Israel from Lebanon. If and when Israel is no longer a threat to Lebanon, Hizbullah will no longer need to remain an armed resistance movement beyond the control of the government.
Israel and the United States now focus their energy on preventing Hizbullah from emerging from this war strengthened politically -- because a stronger Hizbullah with widespread support in the Arab world and Iran would make the Israeli-American position in the other four wars immeasurably more difficult. Hizbullah in Lebanon is the embodiment of all five wars, which is why it must be defeated for ever in the Israeli-American eyes, as well as those of many Lebanese and other Arabs who mistrust Hizbullah and fear its local and regional aims.
The Israeli expansion of assault suggests that destroying Hizbullah is not easy, which is why the political battles now shaping up will be so important. They will see the five wars in this region being fought simultaneously, unlike this one-front Lebanese-Israeli clash.-Agence Global/PPI Feature.
(Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.)
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN OF COUNTERPUNCH ADDS: Thousands of Lebanese, Palestinians and others made a kind of pilgrimage to Fatima's gate in the summer of 2000 to celebrate the end of Israel's 22-year occupation of south Lebanon. 'Fatima's gate' denoted a stretch of land on the Lebanon-Israel border newly controlled by Hizbullah after it pursued the retreating Israeli forces back into Israel. Yellow Hizbullah flags flew everywhere. The atmosphere was festive and light. People set up souvenir stands selling Hizbullah memorabilia - flags, key-rings, postcards, pens - to commemorate the historic event. Families strolled up and back along the road parallel to the border, pointing out the Israeli towns in the distance.
The bustling streets of Haret Hreik are gone. Where families lived and thrived, struggled and laughed, is an emptiness of rubble - the bombed ruins of a greedy imperial war that stops at nothing. Today Lebanon stands behind Hizbullah . The Lebanese have become the bitter, cheering onlookers of the resistance which lobs its out-dated missiles relentlessly across the border as the Israeli war machine refuels again and again.
But US precision guided bombs, cluster bombs, white phosphorus, unmanned aerial drones, drones to guide the bombs, helicopters armed with missiles, F-16s, gun ships and state-of-the-art armed and trained ground forces with night vision surveillance and combat goggles have succeeded in uniting far more than the Lebanese behind the daring defiance of Hassan Nasrallah.
Sixteen years of civil war, of murderous sectarian acrimony, of inter-ethnic killing, suspicion and paranoia and today - after 28 days of hell unleashed upon it by the arrogant racism of a militant and ideological Zionism - 89% of Lebanon's Sunni Muslims, 80% of its Christians, 80% of its Druze and 100% of its Shiite populations support Hizbullah 's resistance against Israel and the United States.
At least as telling are statistics showing that 97% of Palestinians support Hizbullah 's position toward Israel including 95% of Christian Palestinians. Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian territories and Iran are not the only places where support for Hizbullah has increased dramatically in the last month. Among the populations of the American-backed Arab states, notably Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, there is also widespread support.
Indeed, seizing! Upon the corruption and obsequiousness of these regimes and their tacit support of Israel, Nasrallah intoned in a recent address, "there will be no place for [you] if you abandon your moral and national responsibility.... For the sake of your thrones I say to you gather [up your humanity] and act for one day in order to stop this aggression on Lebanon."
He understands, as do they, that their unwillingness to condemn the insouciant murder of more than a thousand people will cost them dearly. Suddenly these merciless, sell-out regimes are left scrambling to help author a cease-fire agreement less embarrassing than the Bolton-Gillerman diktat that left the Israeli military in place in south Lebanon while seeking to disarm Hizbullah .!
Are we really surprised by the vast, Hizbullah -led resistance? By the linkage it makes with people across the boundaries of national insult, defeat and humiliation? Are we really surprised that 40 years after Israel's occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights and 6 years into its continued occupation of the Shebaa Farms in Lebanon that people are have had enough?
Are we really surprised that 3 and a half years into the US occupation and devastation of Iraq, 5 years after the US invasion and destruction of Afghanistan and decades of killings, intrusions, violations, abductions, assassinations, meddling, economic sanctions, pilfering and exploitation of the people, lands and resources of the Middle East that the reckless, racist, power-drunk mercenaries of empire should finally be met with a legitimate popular resistance? - not an outgrowth of displaced fanaticism, not an al Qaeda gang of killers, but the beginnings of a grassroots pan-Arab and pan-Islamic movement seeking to heal the wounds of perpetual subjugation?
What message have the purveyors of state power brought with them that their listeners should wish to continue to bow in subservience? The conditions are not right for a cease-fire, say George Bush and Condoleezza Rice. First burn down the house and then we can discuss how to put out the flames. We are not just fighting Hizbullah , says Israeli Prime Minister Olmert, but Syria and Iran as well.
Accept our vision of a Starbucked-MidEast; a Middle East with sanitised Muslims appointed by the corporate board of Ziocondriacs who break into hives at the words "Islam" and "Arab;" whose peace imposes fast food franchises; whose freedom is the right to purchase arms at the Great Mall of the Gulf States; whose riches are the oil w! ells mortgaged to Texas; and whose water resources run through the processing plants of the Ariel and Gush Etzion settlement blocs.
They tell you that three soldiers captured by Hamas and Hizbollah are worth the collective destruction of Palestine and Lebanon but that civilians kidnapped by Israel are not worth the price of a printed page; that the tens of thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails and the hundreds of Afghanis, Pakistanis, Arabs and others at Guantanamo Bay are worth less than the abandoned pets of the residents of North Israel fleeing to the bomb shelters. They sing sanctimonious hymns to the glory of international law as they veto it into the oblivion of a million shell fragments.
Don't count the blackened bodies of the peach farmers of Qana laid out in the afternoon sun along the roadside. Don't weep for the petrified, death-stolen children under the concrete rubble of Qana. Don't suffer the incinerated of Marwaheen, the blasted of Srifa and Khiam and Tibnine. Don't list the villages lost or the homes destroyed; don't number the dead of Beirut and Tyre.
Don't listen to the wailing on the beaches of Gaza. Don't mourn the lost lives of Khan Yunis or Beit Hanoun, people of the sand and the dust; of corrugated iron and uprooted orange groves. Don't number the fallen in Nablus or Jenin: the old shepherds, the young rebels, the pregnant wives and weary husbands, the somber schoolgirls and the angry boys in the lost alleys of the camps.
We will hear all of their voices again; see their likenesses in the shattered streets of the Levant. They will gather beneath the cedar and the minaret; carry with them the kuffiyeh and the Qur'an; they will speak the language of the resistance that we have breathed into them like fire.
(Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.)
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