The showdown

Israel has decided to put a final stop to Hezbollah and its leader Hassan Nasrallah -- and for once the world supports it. But even if it wins this war, another is probably coming.

By Aluf Benn

Read more: War, Iran, Politics, Israel, News, Lebanon, Hezbollah

Photo: AP/Wide World

Photo composite of Hassan Nasrallah.

July 19, 2006 | TEL AVIV, Israel -- The wisest of all Israeli statesmen, Moshe Dayan, once made a prescient comment about the inexplicable nature of Arab-Israeli wars. "All our wars started when afterwards we needed very thorough research to explain and understand why they had started at all," he said in a closed Cabinet consultation in April 1973. Indeed, several months later, the Yom Kippur War took Dayan and the rest of Israel's political-military elite by total surprise.

Dayan died in 1981, but had he lived today, he would undoubtedly have repeated his age-old analysis. This summer started out as the best one that Israel has had since the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada six years ago. Tourists filled Tel Aviv beaches, the stock market hit its all-time high, and the government, flush with unexpected budgetary fat, lowered taxes and discussed cutting defense and beefing up welfare programs that had been cut in previous years.

Alas, by mid-July Israel found itself engaged in a two-front war in Gaza and Lebanon -- two areas that it had left unilaterally in recent years. Enemy rockets hit deep in Israeli territory, killing several civilians and scaring thousands of others. Israel's Defense Force (the IDF) returned in full gear to the ruins of the former Gaza settlements, evacuated last year, and to the skyline of Beirut. Unlike previous rounds of violence, however, this time the world has mostly supported Israel's military response, hoping it would deliver a painful blow to the regional troublemakers, the Palestinian Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah.

The road to war began in early June, when the tacit cease-fire between Hamas and Israel began to crack. Smaller Palestinian groups kept firing their Qassam missiles at the Israeli border town of Sderot. The IDF responded with targeted killings of suspected perpetrators, unfortunately killing innocent bystanders as well. Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister, put the brakes on military plans to escalate the fighting, and so did the Hamas leaders. But on June 25, a small Hamas unit attacked a military outpost on the Israeli side of the border, abducting a soldier and killing several others. Olmert decided against exchanging prisoners and hit back at Hamas, aiming to crush its military wing, halt the Qassams and weaken the civilian Hamas-led Palestinian government, which, despite enormous external pressure, has refused to recognize Israel and forswear terror.

Olmert's decision to fight back was in part a result of his political weakness: Israel's new Cabinet, sworn in on May 4, is led by a freshman team lacking battlefield experience and hangs on a loose coalition. It is a byword of Israeli politics that weak governments tend to hit harder. A former war hero like Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Rabin or Ehud Barak, "Mr. Security" at the top, could afford politically to be more flexible. But Olmert, who was smeared by his right-wing adversary Benjamin Netanyahu as a leftist weakling, could not. Along with the new defense minister, Amir Peretz, Olmert had to show the weary public and the military leaders that he had balls.

The world stood by as Israeli tanks returned to Gaza, and Washington intervened only to tell Israel to avoid hitting key civilian facilities (after the IDF destroyed Gaza's only power plant) and to spare Mahmoud Abbas, the powerless president of the Palestinian Authority and America's darling. But Israel has failed to this day to achieve its goals in Gaza. Its abducted soldier, Gilad Shalit, is still missing, the Qassams keep hitting Sderot, and the Hamas government has stuck to its positions despite the arrest of dozens of its ministers and legislators in the West Bank.

Then, on July 12, the Lebanese front erupted. Breaking a six-year balance of terror across the border, Hezbollah surprised an IDF reservists' patrol on the Israeli side, abducted two servicemen and killed several others. It was copycatting the earlier Hamas operation. But unlike Hamas with its short-range and inaccurate Qassams, Hezbollah possesses thousands of Iranian- and Syrian-supplied rockets capable of hitting about half of Israel, from Tel Aviv northward. In previous cross-border clashes since Israel pulled out of Lebanon, former Premiers Barak and Sharon refrained from massive retaliation against Hezbollah, fearing a second front during the intifada and deterred by Hezbollah's massive firepower. Sharon even negotiated (indirectly) a controversial prisoner exchange deal with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in late 2003.

Olmert heard the news about the Hezbollah attack when he was meeting the parents of Gilad Shalit, the abducted Gaza GI. This was his ultimate leadership test. As he said later, "There is a moment when a state says: No." Decisive by his nature, he instantly resolved to hit back forcefully and use the opportunity to reduce Hezbollah's capability for "holding Israel hostage" through its arsenal of rockets.

This was not an easy decision. Olmert was putting at risk not only the abducted soldiers but also the lives, property and welfare of hundreds of thousands of Israelis within the rockets' range. The country's hard-won economic boom and tourism revival were at stake too. But he sensed correctly that the public expected him "to hit the bastards" and therefore would support his actions, and that given the circumstances, Israel would receive unprecedented international backing even for forceful attacks.

Olmert, Peretz and Dan Halutz, the IDF chief of staff, decided to launch a Kosovo-style air campaign to destroy Hezbollah's headquarters and the south Beirut neighborhood where it is centered, its ammunition and rocket hideouts and village bases, as well as targeting Lebanese infrastructure like roads, power stations and bridges to prevent Syrian resupply. A ground invasion was ruled out as too risky: The current generation of IDF commanders came of age in Lebanon's "security zone" quagmire, and had no intention to go back there. (Only small special operations units were allowed in.) Another key decision was to keep Syria out of the conflict. Israel blamed Damascus for its sponsorship of Hamas in Gaza, but looked the other way on its involvement with Hezbollah, in order to avoid dangerous escalation on a third front. Instead, Olmert blamed Iran for instigating Hezbollah's attack to divert the G-8 leaders' attention away from its nuclear program. "Unfortunately, the Iranian trick succeeded," said Olmert.

Nasrallah apparently underestimated Olmert's resolve. He probably believed his own rhetoric about Israel's internal weakness. Olmert wanted to show Nasrallah that Israel was not as weak as a "spider's web," as the Hezbollah leader said following Barak's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, and that it carries out its deterrent threats. Nasrallah also miscalculated the Arab world's opposition to his usurpation of the Palestinian struggle.

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