The Next War, Likud and the Ghosts of Entebbe, Lieberman and Eban………..
Aljazeera and other Arab media speculate about Israel and Hezbollah preparing for another war. Some Europeans media have been reporting on that as well. While Hezbollah saw the 2006 War as a victory, Israel sees it as a near-defeat for her soldiers who were not well-trained. Odd, to speak of “untrained” Israeli soldiers, implying that Hezbollah Lebanese fighters were better trained.
I suspect these reports of another war proliferate because now the “real” Israeli war party is in power, the Likud. Especially now that the idea may be forming in Washington that real peace goes through the Shi’a heartland of Southern Lebanon and the Southern Suburb of Beirut, rather than through the Palestinian heartland of the dissected West Bank and East Jerusalem. This idea has been encouraged by what are called the “moderate” Arab oligarchies for some years now. Their bet on the Israeli Right in the summer of 2006 backfired when the Hezbollah militia withstood what no Arab army ever had and extended its political grip over Lebanon. Their bet on the Israeli Right failed again in Gaza (2008-2009) when the Israeli army did not achieve the goal of the Arab regimes to wrest Gaza away from the fundamentalist Hamas and hand it over to the remnants of the PLO, the kleptocracy in Ramallah.
Our oligarchs hitched their wagons, camels would be a better term in this context, to the Israeli Right, not necessarily because they love peace, but to dispel any notion that a mere lightly-armed militia can out-perform their expensively-armed and highly ineffectual fat armies, always led by fat potentates or their sons. Especially a Shi’a militia that is more beholden to the mullahs in Iran than to the oligarchs in Arab capitals. They need to save face: if they could not do it, nobody else should be able to.
They would love to be able to rely on the Israeli Right again, these oligarchs. Netanyahu, a democratically-elected leader who shows nothing but utter contempt for Arabs, especially for the oligarchs, or maybe it is just his own ghosts of Entebbe; and Lieberman (Avigdor, current foreign minister, former Russian bouncer and very likely future convict for corruption, cuts a very un-Eban-like figure). They may be right, these oligarchs and lifelong despots. Never mind that all Israel’s military victories came under the Labor Party (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973), and that all her defeats and near-defeats came under the right-wing Likud or Kadima (Lebanon 1982, Lebanon 2000, Lebanon 2006, Gaza was more havoc than war).
They have now given up hope that American boys and girls will become cannon fodder for their dynastic dreams. The only realistic hope is in Tel Aviv (okay, Jerusalem). So they make the right noises publicly while not-so-secretly hope for an Israeli double strike: either against Hezbollah in Lebanon or, better yet, against the main patron and bank-rollers of Hezbollah in Tehran. Tehran is a problem, no doubt, but an Israeli strike, highly unlikely and futile, will not solve that.
The problems the mullahs represent for the Arab region cannot be solved in Washington, Tel Aviv, or even in Tehran. They can only be solved, really solved, in Arab capitals. That is what worries the oligarchies: because the solution means giving up power or some of it- essentially sharing with their peoples what they have usurped for themselves. That would be very un-Arab, well, un-Arab-oligarchy-like, behavior.
Cheers
mhg
Mon Email
Comments