Habakkuk on reality in the ME

 mo,

thank you for that most interesting explanation of why Hizballah may indeed, as Nicolas Noe suggested in Asia Times last month 'believe that the next war can and should be the last one between Israel and its enemies.' 

What you write, however, has the effect of further inflaming a suspicion which has been growing steadily stronger in me over the past weeks -- that the situation in the Middle East is rather like a smouldering volcano.  It may not erupt, but could well do so, and if it did, the eruption might come suddenly and unexpectedly, generating a conflict which could escalate out of control, possibly with totally catastrophic results. 

And the likelihood of catastrophe is, I think, greatly increased by the fact that many people are living in a fool's paradise, and do not grasp quite how dangerous the situation

A key part of the background here I take to be the change in Israeli attitudes described in the seminal 2008 Middle East Policy article 'Abandoning the Iron Wall: Israel and the "Middle Eastern Muck"' by Ian Lustick.

(See http://www.polisci.upenn.edu/faculty/faculty-articles&papers/Lustick_MEP_2008.pdf.)

The fundamental change whose implications Lustick explores in this paper is the effective abandonment over the last few years of the 'Iron Wall' conception, which Jabotinsky set out in 1925, and which was the basis of Israeli policy until recently.  In essence, this conception involved bludgeoning the Arabs into accepting that Israel could not be destroyed, as a prelude to negotiated accommodations.

What has now replaced this, Lustick argues, is an image of Israel as an isolated outpost of Western civilisation, in an Arab/Muslim world with which no accommodation is possible.  And this change opens up all kinds of possibilities for catastrophe.

According to Lustick, Israelis are 'coming to see the Middle East as a whole the way they came to see Lebanon in the 1980s.'  A 'natural feature of this overall outlook,' he writes, is:

'an image of the Arab/Muslim world, and the Palestinians in particular, as irrational, brutal and violent, imbued with intractably anti-Semitic hatreds fortified by deeply anti-Western, Muslim-fundamentalist fanaticism.'

This is relevant to the point made -- very fairly -- by Fred and 'different clue', that all kinds of other factors are involved in the increasing propensity of Israelis to emigrate, besides the growing military capabilities of Hizballah and Israel. 

 

While that is clearly so, the evidence presented by Lustick suggests that apprehensions about the security situation are an increasingly important motivation in causing Israelis to think their future may lie elsewhere.

And this is, surely, not surprising.  For implicit in this view of Israel as an isolated frontier post in a 'civilisational war' is an obvious question as to whether it makes sense to stay there.  Why live on Hadrian's Wall, when one could live in Rome -- or Seville, or indeed Londonium, as it once was called?

A further effect of this image of the 'Arab/Muslim world' as 'irrational, brutal and violent', obviously, is to make the increasing military capabilities of Hizballah and Iran look yet more threatening than they would otherwise seem.  It may indeed be that, as 'different clue' suggests, if the Israelis decided 'to think very slowly and clearly' they could live with these.

But if one sees the possessors of these capabilities in the terms in which Lustick suggests that Israelis see the whole 'Arab/Muslim world', then the threat does indeed come to seem 'existential' -- and the collapse into the all-too-easy and catastrophic analogy with genocidal aspirations of Nazi Germans follows. 

What further follows is that even a perfectly 'rational' Israeli strategist may be right in perceiving the threat from Hizballah rockets and possible Iranian nuclear weapons as 'existential' -- because if people believe it to be so, it becomes so.

In a kind of vicious circle, the maximalist definition of Israeli security requirements which results further diminishes the possibility of the kind of grudging acceptance of the presence of a Zionist 'settler state' from the 'Arab/Muslim world' which the 'Iron Wall' conception made the basis of Israeli strategy. 

So the route down which Israel has chosen to go makes it, from Nasrallah's point of view, too dangerous -- and perhaps also too sheerly insulting -- to be accorded even grudging acceptance.  And at the same time, it has also opened up the possibility of a perfectly 'rational' strategy to exploit the fears of Israelis to cause the state to self-destruct.

However, it seems to me that both their dramatic successes against Israel, and the fact that these do make it eminently possible to conceive of a strategy which will cause the settler state to self-destruct, may be inducing in Hizballah a combination alike of hubris and exaggerated -- or perhaps it would be better to say misdirected -- fear.

Ironically, this seems to me oddly similar to the combination of hubris and exaggerated and misdirected fear which, after their dramatic victory in 1967, blinded the Israeli leadership to the fact that any realistic prospect of making the 'Iron Wall' strategy work depended upon using the territorial gains it achieved as bargaining chips -- rather than trying to hold on to them.

You write of Hizballah's attitude to a war:

'They know it wouldn't be painless but I guess they are using a logic that the big hurt once is better than the continued hurt for centuries to come.'

But the fear of a 'continued hurt for centuries to come' surely is grotesquely exaggerated.  The Israel portrayed by Lustick is simply not one which has very good prospects of surviving 'for centuries to come' -- it is one in which an 'incapacity to imagine a future for Israel in the Middle East that is both positive and acceptable' has been spreading right across the political spectrum.  And again, this is a case where once something is imagined to be so, it is liable to become fact.

At the same time, there is a very real shift in opinion in the United States.  In particular, key military figures -- notably General Petraeus and Admiral Mullen -- are coming to grasp the depths of the problems that the way in which the Israelis have come to see the 'Arab/Muslim world', and the policies which result, cause for the United States.

Moreover, Israel's 'fear and loathing of Obama' -- to quote the title of a recent piece by the Financial Times foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman -- is very visibly helping the evolution of American opinion in directions unfavourable to Israel.

(See http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/310bdc10-5163-11df-bed9-00144feab49a.html.)

Actually, Rachman's article is a good example of the kind of 'fool's paradise' in which so many are now living.  Having noted a whole host of factors which make many of us believe that the time for the two-state solution has passed, Rachman goes on to assume that if the Israelis fell in with the rather small changes in settlement policy suggested by Obama, the road to a two-state solution might still be open.

Doing this blinds him, and many others, to the fact that a realistic perception that their society is facing a dead end is pushing some Israelis to take refugee in fantasy, while other -- perfectly realistic -- ones are driven to contemplate extreme solutions.  The recent article in Haaretz by Ephraim Sneh, which we discussed here some weeks back, is I suspect a kind of coded 'thinking aloud' about the possibilities and difficulties of such solutions by a perfectly 'rational'  Israeli strategist. 

Unlike Rachman, and much opinion in the supposedly 'rational' West, Sneh was facing up to the extreme intractability of the dilemmas which confront Israel.  And one route out of these dilemmas is indeed a war which, if not necessarily the 'last war' between Israel and its enemies, would be intended as a very radical 'game changer' indeed -- as Clifford Kiracofe has suggested.

It is fairly clear that Israeli military power is inadequate seriously to set back the Iranian nuclear programme, and deeply unclear that the balance of military power has shifted towards Israel so as to make possible the kind of decisive victory against Hizballah it so signally failed to achieve in 2006.

Accordingly it is likely that the only war which makes sense for Israel is one in which it can enlist the massive military power of the United States, in an all-out war in which it would hope to do the maximum damage possible both to Hizballah and to Iran. 

A possible further objective of such a war could be to create a situation whereby the vision of a civilisational clash became self-validating -- with the United States having so involved itself on the Israeli side that it could not easily retreat from the complicity thus created.

Among others, Colonel Sam Gardiner, in his recent report entitled 'The Israeli Threat', has argued that an Israeli strike on Iran could very well create a situation in which the Obama Administration could feel it had no option but to join in on the Israeli side.

(See http://www.foi.se/upload/nyheter/2010/FOI_Rapport%20G5_NY2_med%20omslag.pdf.)

Very often, if one sees signs that an adversary may be preparing to set a trap for one, the sensible response is to take steps not to fall into it -- and if possible, by failing to act as the adversary, to cause the attempted entrapment to backfire.

On this basis it would seem sensible for the Iranians to attempt to devise contingency plans aimed at responding to any Israeli attack, in ways which tilted the balance against intervention in the United States -- the kind of approach suggested by Lysander in a previous thread.  

And by cheeking Obama over the settlements, Netanyahu may have made this much easier -- both because this may make the President incandescent at any attempt to pressure him by Israelis, and because there is clearly a growing number of people in the United States who think that Israel needs to be taught who is the tail and who the dog.

It may be the Iranians are not in a position to wrong-foot the Israelis in the way Lysander suggests.  But if they were able to do so, the potential gains could be very great.  For Israel to suggest that the Iranian programme is such an 'existential threat' that it has to take unilateral action, and then to take action unsuccessfully, would be precisely the way to encourage its citizens to bolt.

Moreover, a restrained response could make it possible to turn the image of the Muslim world as 'irrational, brutal and violent' back on the Israelis.  If one thinks through the implications, one can I think see the possibility of a truly massive propaganda coup.

What then of Hizballah?

The appropriate strategy at the outset of any conflict seems obvious enough -- one of 'symetrical response', which at one of the same time establishes the Israelis as aggressors, and ensures that they suffer damage commensurate with -- and if possible tailored to -- that which they inflict.  It has to be demonstrated that Israel cannot now, and cannot realistically hope in the future, to destroy the retaliatory capability of Hizballah.

So far, the picture you give of Hizballah's strategic thinking seems to make excellent sense.  However, I remain puzzled by the calculations you suggest are behind the vision of this war as the 'last one' between Israel and its enemies.

What you say about the 'lessons of 1066' and the imperative 'don't join with the enemy where you haven't planned to' certainly seem to me to have been very much to the point in 2006, and to be very much to the point today. 

However, you seem to me to be suggesting that Hizballah thinks that this conflict is the likely to be a final and decisive one, precisely because they can realistically plan for circumstances in which they can advance into Israel.

In their shoes, I would certainly have contingency plans for all kinds of situations.  But I would still both think that the kind of immediate decisive victory you suggest is unlikely, that the dangers of attempting to achieve it are liable to be very great -- as well as believing that it is unnecessary.

For this there are several reasons:

1.  You suggest Hizballah believes that a 'symetrical response' could trigger the kind of panic which would produce an immediate exodus, which in turn could lead to an immediate military collapse: rather than simply accelerating a more extended process of disintegration. 

This may be so, but hopes that aerial bombardment could trigger a rapid panic have rather often not been vindicated.  The RAF and USAF devastated German cities in the latter stages of the Second World War, without having significant effects on German morale.

2.  You appear to suggest that, in response to these anticipated signs of disintegration, Hizballah might advance into Israel -- with Palestinian refugees behind them.  Whether they would enjoy the kind of advantages they enjoy when fighting on the defensive on their own territory seems to me unclear.

3.  The key to the strategic position of Israel is the alliance with the United States.  In recent years Israeli governments and the American Zionist lobby have been very successful in marginalising scepticism about unconditional support for Israeli politics -- but at the same time their actions have greatly increased such scepticism.  Since I started reading and commenting on this blog back in 2005, the underlying change in the climate of opinion in the United States has been palpable.

The conduct of Hizballah in 2006 encouraged the erosion of sympathy and support for Israel -- not least because it turned so many familiar stereotypes on its head:  Israel looked less like David than an inept and brutal Goliath.  A re-run of 2006, with Hizballah forces not crossing over into Israel, would be likely to continue this. 

Any advance into Israel, particularly if Palestinian refugees followed in its wake, would risk reactivating all the old stereotypes of Arabs dreaming of pushing Israel into the sea -- and validating the Israeli vision of themselves as an isolated outpost of Western civilisation.

4.  Last but hardly least, advancing into Israel would surely needlessly exacerbate the danger of Israeli use of nuclear weapons.

And I must admit to being puzzled by some of the reasons you give for being reasonably sanguine about the danger of these weapons being used if indeed the Israelis were confronted by the kind of rapid disintegration you suggest is possible.

You suggest that it is unlikely that the Israelis would be in a position to use nuclear weapons, because 'the Liebermans of Israel, those that use the nationalist agenda would be long gone.'  But if the rapid disintegration you suggest Hizballah anticipates materializes, then how are 'those that use the nationalist agenda' going to have had time to get out? 

Surely this is an argument for not attempting to secure a decisive victory now -- but leaving the implications of defeat to sink in, thus encouraging the disintegrative tendencies evident in Israeli society?

5.  Moreover, another point made by Ian Lustick seems relevant. He suggests that rather than force against Arabs and Muslims being conceived of as 'a persuasive instrument in service of political or diplomatic aims', it is now increasingly treated by Israelis as 'a kind of rattonade'.

Apparently this is a term drawn from French practice in Algeria, whose literal meaning is 'rat hunt', and which signifies a violent strike on the enemy, 'for purposes of punishment, destruction and psychological release.'

And here, one also comes up against the question of whether the Israelis may be tempted to cope with their intractable demographic problems by attempting 'ethnic cleansing'. 

In an earlier thread, you and I have disagreed on the possibility of the Israelis resorting to 'ethnic cleansing'.  My view remains that -- in normal circumstances -- this remains extraordinarily unlikely.  It is precisely however in the circumstances of a war which runs out of control that the unthinkable becomes thinking. 

So, for example, the transition in Hitler's policy from 'ethnic cleansing' to 'genocide' in relation to the Jews of Europe comes in the early stages of the Russian campaign.

 

How much significance one should accord to the famous interview given back in 2003 by the Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld is a moot point.  This is frequently misunderstood, because people fail to grasp that that his key point is that by failing to retreat to the 1967 borders, Israel has left itself with no good options -- and may end up with only catastrophic ones.

But I think it does give one reason to fear how Israeli leaders might act, in the context of a war running out control.  The question as to whether the world would allow the kind of 'ethnic cleansing' to which van Creveld suggested Israel might be driven produced the following exchange:

"Interviewer: Do you think that the world will allow that kind of ethnic cleansing?

"Creveld: That depends on who does it and how quickly it happens. We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force.

"Interviewer: Wouldn't Israel then become a rogue state?

"Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother." I consider it all hopeless at this point. We shall have to try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible. Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen, before Israel goes under.

"Interviewer: This isn't your own position, is it?

"Creveld: Of course not. You asked me what might happen and I've laid it out. The only question is whether it is already too late for the other solution, which I support, and whether Israeli public opinion can still be convinced. I think it's too late. With each passing day the expulsion of the Palestinians grows more probable. The alternative would be the total annihilation and disintegration of Israel. What do you expect from us?

(See http://www.rense.com/general34/dutchisraelimilitary.htm.)

And I think that although van Creveld may be blustering, one should be cautious about assuming that both an attempt at 'ethnic cleansing', and also the use of nuclear weapons, would be impossible in the course of a new Middle East war -- and in particular, one which Israel was losing catastrophically.

The conclusion to which I have come -- with deep regret -- is that the 'disintegration of Israel' over the next few years if by far the most likely eventuality.  But if this is so, the political problem becomes how to manage the winding up of the Zionist project, without this generating a total and utter catastrophe. And as the catastrophe could indeed be total and utter, it seems to me that a lot of people who are at daggers' drawn actually have a common interest in avoiding it.

And for this reason, the best strategy for Hizballah would be to try to make 'deterrence' work, while, obviously, being prepared for it failing.  If it fails, however, they should, even if the war goes their way, be extremely cautious about any ideas about advancing into Israel.

Eschewing hopes of a final victory now would certainly involve accepting the possibility that this might not be the last and final conflict.  But a successful defensive war could well create a situation whereby the winding up of the Zionist project could be achieved without a further war -- and also make it likely that, if such a further war materialised, it would be less apocalyptic than an all-out war in present circumstances might turn out to be.