Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Get down from the high horse

July 1, 2008

Get down from the high horse

Israel and Lebanon's Hizbollah have agreed on a prisoner exchange deal after nearly two years of negotiations. It is not the first such deal between the two sides, but it highlights the folly of Israel's belief in military action as the answer to its conflict with the Arabs.
Under the agreement, Hizbollah will release the remains of the two Israeli soldiers whose capture had triggered the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon and provide information on an Israeli air force navigator who went missing while in action over Lebanon 22 years ago. In return, Israel will free five Lebanese, the remains of Hizbollah fighters and an undetermined number of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons as well as provide information of four Iranian diplomats who went "missing" in Lebanon at the height of the Lebanese civil war.
Predictably, Hizbollah hailed the deal as a victory for itself.
"The world could not achieve the Israeli goal of recovering its soldiers without the resistance dictating its terms: the release of prisoners," according to Hizbollah executive council chief Hashem Safieddin.
The agreement certainly highlights that the Israeli aggression against Lebanon in the summer of 2006 could have been averted had the Jewish state's leaders listened to reason.
Israel cited Hizbollah's capture of the two Israeli soldiers as the reason for having ordered a massive military blitz against Lebanon that caused the death of more than 1,000 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and some 140 Israelis, mostly soldiers and security men.
It was as if Israel was waiting for an opportunity to launch military action with a view to destroying or at least seriously weakening Hizbollah's power as a group waging armed resistance. It refused to accept repeated calls for a cease-fire and negotiations to have the two captive soldiers freed in exchange for Arabs held in Israeli jails.
Then it became clear that the Israeli political leadership was acting under American pressure not to accept a cease-fire and press ahead with military power to destroy Hizbollah, a potent power that could pose a serious threat to US and Israeli interests in the event of military action against Iran.
However, Hizbollah surprised Israel and indeed the rest of the world with its resilience and withstood 34 days of fierce military assaults that caused, apart from the civilian deaths, extensive damage to Lebanon's infrastructure. For the first time in the region's history, a war was taken to the people of Israel, forcing them to take to bomb shelters in the face of mortar attacks against their towns. Indeed, Israel seemed to have been shocked as anyone else that Hizbollah could sustain itself in a such a military campaign that pitted the group against a country deemed to be the fifth or sixth strongest in the world. And that shock led to the eventual cease-fire that came after more than a month of military action that resulted in heavy suffering for the people of Lebanon and Israel for no fault of their own.
The Lebanon experience of 2006 and the agreement it has now struck with Hizbollah should be an eye-opener for Israel that there are no military solutions to its problems with the Arabs and that it would be better off climbing down from its military high horse and sitting down to negotiations based on justice and fairness.