Israel's maximal option

July 19, 2006 | Haifa and Beirut, both usually bustling Mediterranean seaports whose terraced chalk apartment buildings and hotels rise abruptly from the aquamarine waves, are shadows of their usual selves this week, their streets empty, bars closed and shops locked up. Panicked tourists are fleeing or canceling their reservations, and the sanitation crews have to deal not with shawarma wrappers and beer bottles but with rubble and body parts. Everyone is wondering about the military objectives of the Israeli and Hezbollah leaderships, whose rash and immoral actions have brought their countries to this dangerous pass.

Beirut, of course, has taken the far heavier punishment, with dozens of buildings razed, massive bomb-produced potholes in the streets and frantic rescue crews carting away bloody bodies, mainly of civilians, including families and children. But Haifa is in greater shock, its inhabitants unused to taking direct enemy missile fire. Nor are they accustomed to seeing a bombed-out Israeli warship towed into the bay. The big international companies with offices not far from where the rockets landed include Microsoft, and the danger posed to Israel of capital flight in the billions dwarfs in magnitude the Lebanese losses of $100 million a day, mainly in forfeited tourism.

Haifa and Beirut resemble one another a good deal at the moment, but that could change dramatically. One option being entertained by the Israeli leaders would have the effect of turning the Lebanese capital into a fetid slum, swamped by hundreds of thousands of cowering peasants expelled north by a vast Israeli human engineering project. And if this project produces a civil war between Shiite Lebanese and the central government, as the Israeli high command and the Kadima Party who are considering this plan believe, then all the better.

The current Israeli plan for Lebanon appears to seek to repeat Israel's success in Jordan in 1970-71. Palestinian refugees in Jordan, their ranks swelled by those who fled in 1967, had turned to guerrilla actions against Israel under the Palestine Liberation Organization. By bombarding and menacing Jordan, Israel forced King Hussein and his Bedouin tank corps to attempt to curb the PLO. When it fought back, the struggle turned into a civil war with Palestinian Jordanians, in which the PLO was crushed and thousands of Palestinians were massacred.

Lebanon, however, is far more fragile than Jordan. It is a multicultural society, sometimes called a country of minorities. In East Beirut, Jounieh and points north, into Mount Lebanon, Maronite Catholics are the majority. Sunnis are important in the port cities -- Tripoli, West Beirut and Sidon -- as well as in the Bekaa Valley and in the far north. In the Shouf mountains live the Druze, hardy adherents of an esoteric offshoot of Ismaili Islam. The deep south down near the Israeli border is orthodox (or a "Twelver") Shiite territory, though they are also a majority in the Bekaa Valley to the east, with Baalbak a major center, and decades of immigration to the capital have created a southern ring of Shiite slums around Beirut. Poor Shiites are the constituency for the fundamentalist Hezbollah Party, though in opinion polls most of them do not report their main political commitment as Muslim fundamentalism.

On July 12, members of the Lebanese militant group (and political party) Hezbollah attacked Israeli soldiers, killing three and capturing two. In the following days, the Israeli air force launched a massive response, repeatedly bombing the Beirut airport and fuel storage facilities, bridges, roads, ports, power plants, a television station, and even Internet servers. The Israeli navy blockaded Lebanese ports from the sea. The Israeli attacks have so far killed at least 245 people in Lebanon, including 216 civilians and 23 Lebanese soldiers, and wounded more than 500. Hezbollah replied with hundreds of mostly ineffectual Katyusha rockets, but it did kill two and injure a handful of Israelis and inflict damage on a warship. Then early Sunday, Hezbollah fired a rocket that struck Haifa, killing eight rail workers at the train station garage and wounding 20. Hezbollah continues to rain rockets down on northern Israel. Twenty-five Israelis have been killed so far.

Hezbollah emerged as the militarily most important group in Lebanon when 14,000 Syrian troops withdrew from the country in spring 2005. The Syrians had played the role of peacekeeper, or at least referee, during the Lebanese Civil War. When the warring factions made peace from 1989 forward, all the Lebanese factions disarmed their paramilitaries except Hezbollah, which was struggling against the continued Israeli occupation of the south. In the 1990s and early zeroes, a reduced Syrian force provided some security in the rest of the country at a time when the Lebanese army was being rebuilt. Following the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, which a U.N. investigation linked to Syria, a popular movement, known in the West as the "Cedar Revolution," led to a Syrian withdrawal last year. Although the anti-Syrian reformers did well in the elections held late last spring, so too did the Shiite parties, including Hezbollah and Amal, who together won 29 seats in the 128-seat parliament. Hezbollah became part of the government for the first time, but resisted demands that it disarm its militia in the south, maintaining that the continued threat of Israeli violence and renewed occupation made it necessary. It pointed out that Israel continues to retain control of the Shebaa Farms, a small border area claimed by both Lebanon and Syria. (If the Israelis had negotiated the return of this land years ago, it would have been much more difficult for Hezbollah to have justified not disarming.)

The Cedar Revolution was hailed by the Bush administration as a great achievement of democratization, but in fact it pushed the fragile Lebanese political system into a state of dangerous instability, in which the Lebanese ethnic factions no longer had a referee. As members of the reformist bloc such as Druze leader Walid Jumblatt began pressing for disarming Hezbollah, they threatened its prime source of political legitimacy and power. Within the arena of Lebanese politics, escalation of tension with Israel benefited Hezbollah at a time it was under this pressure.

On Sunday, Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah delivered a disturbing videotaped speech in which he gloated over his party's missile strikes on Israel. He said that the attack on Haifa had not been for revenge but for the purpose of deterring Israeli assaults on Lebanon. He contrasted his strikes, which he claimed deliberately avoided targeting civilians, with Israel's, which he claimed had targeted civilians. Since his missiles are inaccurate, this was a self-serving lie: Any Katyushas he launched could (and did) kill civilians. He sanctimoniously pointed out that he could have hit chemical plants and fuel plants and produced a much worse disaster for the city, but had refrained from doing so for the moment. He also promised further "surprises" for the Israelis. Nasrallah, soft-spoken behind his white-speckled soft black beard, exuded an adolescent nationalism, taking pride in this "Arab" achievement of striking back at last against the Israeli cities from which the Lebanese Shiites had taken decades of bombings. (In 1997, Nasrallah had lost his own son, Muhammad Hadi, in the fight against the Israeli occupation of Lebanese soil.)

Next page: Nasrallah's delusions of grandeur