Here’s AP this evening:
- Hundreds of Israeli soldiers walked out of Lebanon on Tuesday — some smiling broadly and pumping their fists, others weeping or carrying wounded comrades — as a cease-fire with Hezbollah solidified after a shaky start. The process was expected to accelerate over the coming days…
Many of the infantry soldiers smiled with joy as they crossed back into Israel. Members of one unit carried a billowing Israeli flag. Some sang a traditional Hebrew song with the lyric: “We brought peace to you.” Others wept as they returned to their country, exhausted by the fighting.
Some of the troops had been so disconnected from the news that they asked if Israel had managed to free two soldiers whose capture by Hezbollah on July 12 sparked the fighting. Israel had not. Several tanks headed back into Israel as well, including one that had been damaged and was being towed by a military bulldozer…
Here’s my fellow Virginian Col. Pat Lang, posting on his blog ‘Sic Semper Tyrannis 2006’, yesterday:
- A basic lesson of history is that one must win on the battlefield to dictate the peace. A proof of winning on the battlefield has always been possession of that battlefield when the shooting stops. Those who remain on the field are just about always believed to have been victorious. Those who leave the field are believed to be the defeated.
Lee remained on the field a day after both Antietam and Gettysburg waiting to resume the fight. McClellan and Meade did not respond and Lee then moved away withdrawing to the south. He is thought to have been defeated in both battles although both could be argued to have been a “draw.”
I really have to put a link to Lang’s blog onto my sidebar here. He is a smart analyst of Middle Eastern military affairs and strategy.
As I understand it the main reason the IDF soldiers are flooding back into Israel is because they were all spread out in southern Lebanon and extremely vulnerable to renewed attacks from the Hizbullahis who remain embedded within the indigenous population of the region. Oh, also the IDF’s ground operations inside Lebanon had nearly all turned out to be a fiasco from start to finish, with the units ill-supplied and almost completely untrained in waging any kind of ground operations other than beating down the doors of cowering Palestinian families and staffing checkpoints throughout the whole West Bank. (See this great Akiva Eldar article on the IDF’s many problems.)
So yes, getting out fast maybe has been the better part of valor for them.
Meanwhile, South Lebanese who had earlier fled from the terror Israel was raining on them in their homes have been returning to their communities in a surge of slowly moving humanity. Hizbullah is from and of this population, so the pipe-dreams of the French, the Bushites, or other westerners who think that somehow they can build a Hizbullah-disavowing bastion among the South Lebanese will certainly remain just that.
(The people of South lebanon have had an earlier ugly experience with a too-zealous French component of UNIFIL before now, back in 1982, and rapidly sent it packing.)
Hizbullah knows how to rebuild war-shattered towns and villages, how to provide community services, how to meet the needs of the people. Their people have, after all, seen this movie of displacement and return, ruin and rebuilding, many times before over the past 28 years. All the western aid organizations are worlds behind them in trying to address the situation in the south.
Here’s another thing Lang writes in that post:
- What is clear is that Hizbullah’s forces remain in place all over the disputed zone and that its command and control of its forces remains effective. How can you know that? Easy. The day before the cease fire Hizbullah fired 250 rockets into Israel and since the cease fire has fired none. This represents unmistakable evidence of effective command.
Here, too, are some quotes on Hizbullah’s military effectiveness from my good friend Timur Goksel, former political advisor to UNIFIL in Lebanon:
- Goksel points out: “These people have been fighting the Israelis for eighteen years in south Lebanon. People forget that. They already know the Israelis. And they fought them when they occupied Lebanon and since then they have been preparing for a guerrilla war again.” In addition, Goksel highlights the remarkably dispersed nature of the Hizbollah guerrilla forces, which operate in small units with very little communication through to any overall chain of command. Much of what is done is according to previously agreed tactics; this makes it very difficult for the Israelis to disrupt communications because it is simply not very important for units to coordinate with each other or with a notional “centre”. (see “Hizbollah’s lack of structure its strength”, Asia Times, 10 August 2006).
And on Nasrallah:
- “He’s a very good student of everything to do with Israel: the politicians, the Army,” says Timur Goksel, a former senior adviser to the U.N. forces in Lebanon who has met the Hizbullah eader dozens of times. For religious guidance, Nasrallah relied increasingly on the heads of the Iranian revolution: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whom he idolized, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who in 1989 would become Khomeini’s successor as Iran’s spiritual leader and supreme political authority. In the 1980s, after Iran created Hizbullah to fight Israel’s troops in Lebanon, the militia also took up the struggle against Lebanon’s original Shiite movement, known as Amal. The two rival groups disagreed over the power of the ayatollahs and over which ones to follow. In 1988, skirmishes among the militias broke out into open combat—and Nasrallah was on Hizbullah’s front lines. “He was always on the ground with the fighters,” says Goksel, who was based with the United Nations in South Lebanon at the time. “They loved him for it. He has the full loyalty of the fighters from that time.” (see Babak Dehghanpisheh and Christopher Dickey, in Newsweek, Aug. 21-28, 2006 issue.)
(You can also see some interesting quotes from Goksel in my long Boston Review article on Hizbullah, last year.)
Hi Helena,
The IDF behave like our troops when they are confronted with a perceived enemy who is armed and fighting for their homeland-they collapse in disarray. Like our troops, the IDF are at their best when dropping ordnance from 30K feet on civilians. Were the US invaded, we would do as Hizbuallah or the Iraqis or Viets did-fight like mad for our freedom from an oppressor.
Unless the international force is there to protect the Lebanese people from Israel, what is the point of having them ? Seriously ? We can play the charade that Israel is defending itself against terrorism and all the mindless CNN/FOX/ claptrap-but in reality we all know Israel is a colonialist aggressor and has been since 1948. We KNOW this. Why go through the charade of debating nonsense ? Seriously. There are still people who insist Iraq had WMD’s. It’s pointless debating them.
Do we still have to go thru the same thing here, pretending that Palestine never existed and Israel magically appeared in 1948 ? Do we need to go on pretending that Israel doesn’t invade and occupy its neighbor but is just defending itself ?
Please. Reality. Let’s accept it, move on, and have a dialog.
Peace
Joe Osorio
Well OK Joesph you have a point. You are interested in discussing real long term solutions and discarding the endless, pointless, rhetoric. Amen to that.
As far as I can tell, and I’m new to this, the diplomacy got to Taba 2001. Here is a pdf on it. Could negotiations recommence from there, if this time Israel understands the Palestinians bottom line?
Roland,
I tend to agree with you that there should be an effort to pick up from where we left off at Taba.
One question: Do you think that it is also imperative for the Palestinian leadership to fully understand the Israeli’s bottom line?
Hi Helena,
Thanks for this new link; Pat Lang analysis are indeed interresting. Along these lines, I’ve just picked a rather surprising report in Le Monde and AFP. If we are to believe it, the first 2’500-3’000 French troops supposed to reinforce the FINUL in Lebanon aren’t going to arrive speedily. Second unnamed “diplomatic sources”, the French who are supposed to lead a force of about 15’000 troops (3000 from Italy, others possibly from Germany, Maroc, Indonesia, Turkey, Spain, Belgium, Portugal and Malesia) have set conditions which are still discussed right now. One of these conditions is that it shouldn’t have to disarm the Hezbollah ! (They want to leave it to the Lebanon army, I presume) The other troops aren’t yet secured either; they are apparently waiting for France. Well John C.. you were right when you wrote that the French wouldn’t fight against the Hezbollah.. they are telling so upfront.. I wonder what the Americans/Israeli will try now. This cease-fire looks more fragile/volatile every day. But if it holds, then it we will be sure that the cease-fire masks a clear defeat of the Israeli.
In complement to the former comment : this condition of France sounds very reasonnable : going after the Hezbollah right now would be akin to begin a fight against them and doing the dirty “job” the Israeli weren’t able to fulfill.
Repeat of 1973, every time there’s a significant advance in man-portable anti-tank technology, the IDF clings to its tanks and air, unwilling to risk the infantry casualties that result from proper combined-arms operations. The result is excessively high casualties and an excessively slow advance. You don’t fight man-portable anti-tank missiles with tanks, you fight them with with scout helicopters and APC-ferried infantry.
The pdf discusses I linked to discusses this JES.
…it’s towards the end of the pdf file linked to in my first comment -if you dont have time to read it all….
I wonder how it will feel to be one of the Lebanese regular army soldiers sent down South to police the Hezbollah fighters. Kind of a Barney Fife role, eh?
John you are showing your age. Or exposure to reruns. For thoe that missed the Andy Grffiths Show(by accident or design):
” The bullet(s) always seemed to find its way back into the pistol where predictably it would be accidentally discharged, sometimes when Barney was demonstrating his famous “fast draw”. There was a running gag on the show in which Barney would instruct inexperienced gun users on the safe use of firearms, show them how to properly handle the weapon, and then return it to its holster whereupon it would invariably fire into the floor. Andy, who would be silently standing by, would then hold out his hand, and Barney would once again have to hand over his gun.”
Roland,
Thank you for the link. It emphasized much of what I have been learning about various efforts towards peace. Very instructive.
John C-the Barney Fife allusion is very apt !
Joe
Roland,
I’m familiar with Ron Pundak’s piece. I was asking for your opinion.
For what it’s worth, I think that there is a bit of spite coming from Pundak in this particular paper for not having been invited to Camp David.
JES I obviously have hardly any experience or expertese on the history of negotiations compared to many other here.
In any real negotiation the parties come to the table with something to offer and their ears. On the table I was suggesting would already be the Taba Map and a genuine mutual recollection of where things got informally. That’s the staring point.
My reading of Pundik is that both parties bottom lines were by no means irreconcilable. That despite some mis-steps during proceedings. The bottom lines were evidently not mutually understood at the critical time. Pundik suggests the PA had little room to manoeuvre. There was certainly some kind of derailment even if Pundik isn’t totally reliable on this as you suggest.
“In the 1980s, after Iran created Hizbullah to fight Israel’s troops in Lebanon, the militia also took up the struggle against Lebanon’s original Shiite movement, known as Amal.”
Yab, as we seeing now in iraq iranian shiite hand in hand with US killing Iraqis, its all same stories but who blive in it………
So Sistani/Iran with US in iraq aganist Iraqis , and Nasralah with….??? aginst Lebanon….
Roland,
I would tend to agree. About a year after the breakdown of talks and the start of the intifada, one of the TV channels here produced an interesting program that was essentially a post mortem of the negotiations through Taba and their breakdown. They broadcast interviews with those who were actually there, including Saeb Erekat and other Palestinians who were members of the negotiating team.
According to all those present at Camp David, Taba and at intensive negotiations at Ehud Barak’s home, the sides were very close to an agreement, and had even worked out maps that included a coniguous Palsetinian West Bank and the demarkation of land exchanges to include the Ariel salient and Ma’ale Adumim within Israel while compensating the Palestinians with land for urban development.
My understanding after hearing what all parties had to say was that the “bottom lines” centered around the Palestinian “Right of Return” and a declaration of a formal end of hostilities. In other words, according to what the participants themselves stated, the breakdown in talks was not over the territorial compromise but rather over the political settlement. Arafat could not go to his people, particularly those in the diaspora, and say that he had agreed to a final settlement that did not include a literal Right of Return, while Barak could not go to his and say that he had agreed to a settlement that did not define an end to the conflict with no further claims from the Palestinian side. That’s how I understood it. (As an aside, Pundak, who was not present, had succeeded in negotiations precisely because the parties agreed to defer these final status issues.)
At any rate, if there is to be real progress made, I believe that both sides must be able to recognize and understand each other’s red lines. My concern here is that there are many who seem to believe that only the Palestinians have valid claims and “bottom lines”.
Fascinating interaction here between JES and Roland: thanks, friends!
My understanding is that the “Geneva” (i.e. Beilin-Abu Mazen) process that came after Sharon’s election victory went even further in clarifying how close the parties could get. In particular, Abu Mazen and others were able to do some v. constructive finessing on the Right of Return issue in a way that would satisfy Palestinians’ strong desire that their losses of 1948 be fully acknowledged, and also compensated for in a number of ways including a perhaps only symbolic amount of actual Return, while Israel’s strong desire not to be “swamped” by an inrush of non-Jews would also be respected. And so, too, would the desire of both sides that the peace settlement should represent the final satisfaction of all outstanding claims between them.
The Jerusalem issue is also of course a difficult one…
(Readers can see full consideration of these and all other issues in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking in the 2004 book that I co-authored with a bunch of fellow-Quakers.)
Of course, all those negotiations back in 2000-2002 were based on the assumption that the US was and would remain as the absolutely dominant external sponsor of the process, a feature which of course (given Washington’s intense partisanship toward the Israelis) skewed the outcome of all those negotiations in a notably pro-Israel direction.
Now, the US retains just as strong a pro-Israeli slant as ever but it is not in nearly such a dominant position in world affairs as it was at the turn of the century… thanks to over-reaching in Iraq, etc. Therefore it cannot expect to exercize nearly such a dominant position in the next round of serious Arab-Israeli peacemaking as it did throughout the 1990s. This means the Arab parties to the peacemaking (Syria, PLO) have a better chance of winning something much closer to a “full” land for peace deal than they could in 2000, but probably still not a complete Israeli withdrawal to the line of June 4, 1967– especially in the Old City of Jerusalem.
My bottom line for all this is viability. What does it take to envisage a Palestine that is economically and politically viable? And what, an Israel that is economically and politically viable? And with roughly access by both nations to the vital resources of the land of Mandate Palestine– especially water. No two-state outcome that is based on a gross inequality in thes vital dimensions will be viable over the long term. The attempt by Western powers to keep Germany in a state of economic backwardness after 1918 brought about the well-known terrible results and should definitely not be repeated… by any party to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The visionary policies that France pursued after 1945– of reaching out to rehabilitate Germany on an honorable footing that would also tie it into a regional economic revival– was far, far more successful, as generations of Europeans have appreciated ever since.
As I recall the Geneva initiative, which I believe was Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed Rabbo, was the first expression of joint responsibility for the refugee problem(s), in that it stipulated that Israel would not be required to accept a larger number of refugees than the average taken in by other countries. This seems to:
1. Recognize Israel’s part in creating the Palestinian refugee problem
2. Recognize the part of the Arab governments and Arab League, as well as the Palestinian leadership in creating the Palestinian refugee problem
3. Recognize that there was a second refugee problem comprising Jews from Arab countries
For what it’s worth, the Geneva Accords received a pretty favorable response among Israelis. I’m not sure what kind of response it received among Palestinians.
Again, I think that the problem is not one of territory. However, I think that there have been other changes, apart from the position of the US. Most notably the election by the Palestinians who openly contend that all of Palestine is part of the Muslim waqf where there is no place for an openly Jewish presence, let alone a Jewish state.
As I suspected I have a lot more reading to do and thanks for the pointers on the Geneva Accord JES and Helena. Helena I agree France has done a lot of wonderful things in Europe since 1945, but the EU remains a two-bit player considering the size of its economy. A lot of ironies for Germany there.
The present positions of all parties seem untenable. So the peace process has to go back to where it took the wrong fork in the road. Only the from that point can the future be changed. We cant restart the whole journey.
Internationaly, it’s all too clear there are a range of parties whose ME plans back aggresive military action over diplomacy. Arab disillusionment notwithstanding. Where those parties are democratic countries, it is up to voters to demand the choice to reject such foreign policies in favour of ME diplomacy combined with peace-directed aid and support. America is a modern democratic superpower where 50% of the population once again believes the IRAQ WMD were found. That’s not an encouraging signal about her voter awareness and intentions, or the existence of an effective opposition party.
Frankly, such renewed international support is critical for the ME to find peace, and achieving that is starting to feel like the harder job.
שָׁלוֹם س
I do not find evidence of majority Israeli support for the Geneva Accords from the sources I could find online:
“1. Attitudes Toward Accords and Drafters
* According to the most recent (October 2003) Peace Index survey released by Tel Aviv University’s Steinmetz Center for Peace Research, a considerable majority (64.7%) of Israelis consider the Geneva plan illegitimate and regard the drafters of the initiative as incapable of representing the Israeli national interest
* Only 18% of Israeli respondents believe that Beilin serves Israel’s national interests.
* The other Israeli participants in the Geneva plan — Avraham Burg, Amram Mitzna, Nechama Ronen, and Amnon Shahak — receive similarly low confidence ratings. (Burg-26%, Mitzna-22%, Ronen-7%, Shahak-33%).
* Fewer than 7% of respondents in the survey feel the initiative stands a chance of being implemented compared to 86.3% who say there is little to no chance of its being implemented.
* Israeli polls taken over the past month show minority Israeli support for Beilin’s Geneva plan, with percentages of those who support the proposal ranging from 25%-34%
Oct. 15-Shvakim Panorama poll, Israel Radio:
32.5% support (details of plan not fully disclosed) with 67% opposing extra-governmental negotiations.
Oct. 17-New Wave poll, Ma’ariv:
27% support (details of plan not fully disclosed) with 57% opposing extra-governmental negotiations.
Oct. 28-29-Peace Index poll, Steinmetz Center for Peace Research:
25% support, with 65% opposing extra-governmental negotiations.
Nov. 19-Maagar Mochot poll, Israel Radio:
Of the minority of respondents who received the report in the mail and read it, 12% support and 25% oppose
Nov. 30-Dialogue poll, Ha’aretz:
31% support, 38% oppose
Dec. 2-New Wave poll, Ma’ariv:
29% support, 45% oppose
Dec. 3-Maagar Mochot poll, Israel Radio:
29% support, 43% oppose
Dec. 4-9-Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, Hebrew University:
34% support, 43% oppose”.
The highest support suggested, and from only one source (Israeli Radio few days after its unveiling)was 47%, a figure significantly higher than any other source I located, including the later Israeli Radio result (above).
Roland,
Let’s not confuse things here. The Geneva Accords are, essentially, a private initiative. None of the Israeli side in these negotiations was either a member or official representative of the Israeli government. The polls, for the most part, did not ask about support for the specific content of the accords, rather about those who negotiated them and the method by which they were negotiated (as a private initiative not sanctioned by any official body).
BTW, did you happen to find any polls concerning Palestinian attitudes toward the Accords?
Good idea not to confuse things. I posted detailed and linked results of the Israeli polls. I did not claim they were govt. sponsored, or more popular with Palestinians. The link I already gave above to the CAMERA site provides background info.
I was trying to look into the quite relevant point about popular support you raised here:
“For what it’s worth, the Geneva Accords received a pretty favorable response among Israelis. I’m not sure what kind of response it received among Palestinians.”
So yes just in case anyone is confused the Geneva accords were indeed not an Israeli Government initiative. They were conceived and carried out by former Israeli justice minister Yossi Beilin, among others and carried out with Swiss assistance.
Apparently it was the very early polls that were discredited for not even saying, for example, which party would administer Jerusalem. After an education program detailed in my above link, “putting a draft in every houshold” popularity in Israel was very much in the minority as shown in regional surveys. Polls conducted among palestinians, also detailed in the link, showed wildly contradictory results, but which also appear unfavourable overall. Please note the seperate headings for polls of both parties:
” 1. Attitudes Toward Accords and Negotiators
2. Attitudes Toward Peace Negotiations’ and Current Leadership ”
My post was about the facts of the issue, thinking about the best starting point for renegotiation, as opposed to saying one side is good and one side is bad, which would of course be idiotic and cunterproductive to all legitimate interests.
I think that I too was relating to facts. The first being that most of the polls did not ask whether people agreed or disagreed with the content of the accords, but rather whether they agreed or disagreed with the way the accords had been achieved (i.e. through extra-governmental negotiations carried out by a group of individuals). Those are two very different issues and that was my comment in response to the poll results you posted.
Secondly, in terms of my previous remarks concerning the “generally favorable response by Israelis”, I would say that positive responses in the range of 30% – 40% can definitely be considered as “generally favorable” in a political climate where the two largest parties combined are able to garner less than 37% of the vote.