Category: Lebanon

NATO and Lebanon

For many years now,
successive US administrations have been vigorously trying to  persuade as many Arab countries
as possible—especially those that are still in a state of war with
Israel—to undertake “confidence building measures” in a purported attempt
to “entice” Israel into being more forthcoming in the peace diplomacy…

Now, an episode
involving the respected Lebanese political scientist Dr Amal
Saad-Ghorayeb shows us that the US-dominated NATO
alliance has also been part of this campaign.

Unless you’re a
particular kind of a military-affairs afficianado you
may not be aware that NATO runs its own institute of higher learning, the NATO
Defense College (NDC) , in Rome.  Through the work of this college, as
well as in other ways, NATO has been trying for some years now to impose its
own form of (military-based) normalization on the relations between Israel and
several Arab states– including Lebanon, a country that (a) is still in a
formal state of war Israel now, as it has since 1948, (b) has been the victim
of numerous acts of Israeli aggression over those decades, including a string
of extremely lethal major military invasions, occupations, and assaults, the
most recent (and one of the most lethal) being that undertaken in 2006, and (c)
continues to this day to be subject to Israeli aggression, including in the
form of very frequent military overflights.

In these circumstances,
it is scarcely surprising that Lebanon has a law barring its citizens from
having any contact with Israeli military personnel. Ah, but now it turns out
that NATO—a body that proclaims its support for (a certain version of)
the rule of law—has been seeking to tempt Lebanese citizens to skirt or
break this law by meeting with Israeli military officials in a clandestine,
“off the record” kind of way.

I could digress a bit
here and write about the deep problems NATO has been experiencing ever since,
with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991-3, it suddenly lost its
foundational raison d’etre and had to start inventing
“missions” for itself in various places far distant from its originally
envisaged Central European battlefields. 
(As I’ve blogged quite a few times in recent months, the continuing NATO
“mission” in Afghanistan is one that’s particularly ill-suited to NATO’s
capabilities, and may well bring about the dissolution of the alliance in its
present, neo-imperial form.)

But
back to NATO and Lebanon. Sometime this summer, Florence Gaub, who
works with something called the NATO Regional Cooperation Course (NRCC), which
is run out of the Rome-based NDC, invited Amal Saad-Ghorayeb to give a lecture to the members of this
fall’s NRCC course. Saad-Ghorayeb agreed to do it.
She also, not surprisingly, sought the assurance of those inviting her that she
would not be expected to work with Israeli military personnel while she was
there.

This assurance was not
forthcoming. On September 8, Gaub wrote to Saad-Ghorayeb noting that Israel was a full partner of
NATO’s in the NATO-sponsored “Mediterranean Dialogue”, one of the co-sponsors
of the NRCC course. She also wrote that, “I can not ensure that any of the NATO officers present does not by
chance hold a second Israeli passport.”

(This latter statement is
intriguing. How many of NATO’s member countries allow
members of their militaries to have Israeli– or other—second passports?
Or is it only Israeli passports that are permitted? Also, several NATO members
have sizeable military units serving in the beefed-up UNIFIL peacekeeping force
in south Lebanon. Might some of those soldiers be holders of Israeli passports?
An interesting thought, right there… )

In her September 8 email, Florence Gaub added,

Continue reading “NATO and Lebanon”

M-14 win in Lebanon

The March 14 bloc in Lebanon, that is heavily supported by the US and Saudi Arabia, came out ahead in yesterday’s elections in Lebanon.
Qifa Nabki has done a great job of pulling together and assessing some of the dominant current western explanations for this outcome, here.
Qifa’s own main explanation is this:

    Far more decisive, in my opinion, seems to have been: (1) the high turnout of Sunnis in Zahle — many of whom came from abroad — coupled with a low turnout of Christians; (2) strong feelings of antipathy towards Hizbullah by the Christians of Beirut who voted decisively for March 14th’s list in the district of Achrafieh; (3) some rare rhetorical blunders by Nasrallah in the past couple of weeks, calling the events of May 7th [2008] “a glorious day” for the resistance.

This last point might well track with the one Paul Salem had made Friday, namely that “Hezbollah didn’t really want to win and give up its cozy seat in the opposition.”
Certainly of the “experts” Qifa refers to in the post, I would trust the judgment of Qifa himself and of Paul Salem considerably more than that of Andrew Exum, Rob Satloff, or Tony Badran.
The prime contest in the election was not, as many western analysts wrote, between Hizbullah and its opponents. Because of Lebanon’s blatantly gerrymandered and discriminatory political system, the Shiite Muslim community that is the largest single religious community in Lebanon, representing around 40% of the population, has only a tiny number of members in the confessionally constituted parliament. Hizbullah could only ever expect to keep the 11 seats in the 128-seat body that it had before yesterday; and it has done that.
The main contest, then, was inside the grossly over-represented Christian community. Here, Hizbullah’s allies in the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) apparently lost in a major way to supporters of March 14 who are also members of extremely well-entrenched political “families” and ardent supporters of the present system of Christian political privilege.
The FPM and its leader, General Michel Aoun, had offered a clear alternative to that system, as well as a strong political platform for this election. For those reasons, despite some other other misgivings I have about Aoun (and about Hizbullah), I wanted their alliance to win. Hizbullah, by the way, also supports a “de-confessionalized”, one-person-one-vote system in Lebanon.
It is truly anomalous that so many Americans, including Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, intervened in the election to support the anti-democratic March 14 coalition.
Now, I hope we can see another broad national unity government in Lebanon, like the outgoing one but hopefully a lot more effective in meeting people’s needs than that one.
There are, of course, several issues remaining from the election itself. Nicholas Kimbrell writes in today’s Daily Star that Carmen Jeha, the Deputy Coordinator of the Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections (LADE) said her organization had identified over 900 “critical violations” of the election law.
To his credit, Kimbrell leads with that news, and then mentions the efforts and assessments of the the Lebanese Alliance for Election Monitoring (CLOE), which fielded Lebanese-citizen observation missions “with 2,500 monitors countrywide”, and which also noted significant violations.
Kimbrell then goes on to note that the Lebanese Interior Ministry, which organized the elections, and the foreign election-monitoring teams fielded by the EU and the Carter Center, had all given the election process relatively high marks.
I expect that in much of the western media, the assessments of the foreign monitors will receive a lot more play than those of the indigenous Lebanese monitors. But why should westerners need to give undue weight to western monitors (whose reach inside the country is anyway miniscule compared with that of the indigenous Lebanese organizations)?
If we really support democracy for all peoples, shouldn’t we also highlight, celebrate, and respect the work and assessments of indigenous Lebanese democracy-supporting organization much more than those of western teams who just parachuted into the country for a tiny proportion of the whole campaign process?

Best Lebanese election coverage, from Qifa Nabki

In this post, which he promises to update throughout the day, Qifa gives an excellent description of the voting experience under Lebanon’s “new improved” system, and the general atmosphere in the country.
This is the latest in his series of excellent posts about the whole election process. The guy is a national treasure.
Highlights from today’s post:

    I was struck by how calm and orderly everything was. Soldiers and police manned the entrances and exits, checking every voter’s identification card before letting him or her in, one by one, to vote.
    …Leaving the election center, someone tried to slip me a “thank you” voucher for $20 worth of gasoline at the Sahyouneh gas station on the way out of Saida, but I politely declined the offer…

One apparent innovation in this election is that voters can write their own ballots– that is, they have the option not to simply vote for an entire preprinted list of candidates in each of the multi-seat constituencies.
QN voted some place south of Saida. Then he traveled to a few polling places in East and West Beirut and wrote this:

    More of the same: people making their way to voting centers in an orderly fashion; party representatives passing out ballots to people in cars at intersections; soldiers everywhere. I collected a few of these ballots as souvenirs. As you can see below, there isn’t a whole lot of room on each ballot to scratch out any names and replace them with others; this is, of course the point, such that voters are compelled to vote for an entire slate, “zayy/mitl ma hiyye” (just as it is).

It strikes me that the lack of standardization in the ballot papers can be a cause of huge confusion in the tallying process… Also, his report about the gasoline voucher offer is a huge concern.
Of course, the whole campaign process has been drenched in money, much of it apparently foreign.
But has all this money been poured in to ensure that the voting process actually is a fair and accurate one? Shouldn’t the election authorities in Lebanon have done more to ensure that this is the case?
And why is someone taking very visible steps (the gas vouchers) to subvert the process? Might this scheme actually have been intended, by those organizing it, to create evidence that “proves” that the election process is flawed, and thus a basis on which to challenge its outcome?
Lots of questions.
Let’s hope the election-monitoring teams sent by the Carter Center– headed by the former Prez himself– and other respected bodies will be able to sort it all out.

Hariri court orders generals’ release; case in disarray

A judge in the Hague-based Special Tribunal for Lebanon today ordered the release of the four senior members of Lebanon’s internal security services who were arrested shortly after the February 2005 assassination of Rafiq Hariri and have been held in prison since then.
Bloomberg’s Massoud Derhally reports:

    Judge Daniel Fransen of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon said the four generals held in Lebanon since 2005 are to be freed because there isn’t sufficient evidence to continue their detention, given that some witnesses have modified or retracted their statements. Proceedings were aired live from The Hague by Arab and Lebanese broadcasters and on the Internet.
    There were “inconsistencies in the statements of key witnesses” and a “lack of corroborative evidence to support these statements,” Fransen said.
    Former Canadian Deputy Attorney General Daniel Bellemare, who took over the investigation last year and became the court’s chief prosecutor on March 1, said he wouldn’t appeal the ruling.
    The judge ordered the immediate release of Mustafa Hamdan, former head of the Presidential Guard; Jameel al-Sayyed, the former general security chief; Ali al-Hajj, the former internal security head; and Raymond Azar, the former army intelligence director.

The Special Tribunal is a new kind of a mixed, national-international court that was established specifically to deal with the Hariri case. When the leaders of Lebanon’s US-backed ‘March 14’ movement worked for its establishment, they hoped that it would add the weight of the international community to the campaign they were trying to wage against Syria’s influence inside Lebanon, with which the four arrested generals were associated.
However, once the cool, fact-based analysis of Bellemare and Fransen were brought to bear on the case, the evidence against the four generals was judged too thin to justify their continued incarceration.
Hariri’s son Saad, one of the leaders of M-14, said he accepts and respects the STL’s decision.
Derhally quotes LAU prof and Hizbullah expert Amal Saad-Ghorayeb as saying,

    “This verdict underlines how politicized the investigation was… It also discredits the Lebanese judiciary and the politicians who accused these generals.”
    The ruling has “far-reaching political implications,” she said. “It may weaken the pro-Western coalition in the upcoming elections and strengthen Hezbollah and its allies.”

Hizbullah’s Al-Manar website reported (in somewhat tortured English), that:

    The decision was… immediately hailed by the national opposition that announced the day “a day of joy for the Lebanese,” regretting that such decision be made by the international justice not the Lebanese one.
    In this context, Hezbollah issued a statement in which it hailed the international tribunal’s decision to release the officers after a long arbitrary decision imposed unfairly by the March 14 authority without any charges. Hezbollah recalled that the detention of the four officers brushed aside all laws and legal procedures and caused a status of attenuation and politicization of one of the most important authorities responsible for the maintenance of life and law in the country which is the judicial authority.

The site also listed a number of Lebanese politicians who hailed the decision, including former president Emile Lahoud, former PM Selim al-Hoss, Vice President of the Higher Shiite Council Sheikh Abdul Amir Qabalan , etc.

Britain engaging with Hizbullah: Excellent!

Gordon Brown’s government in London is the first significant western government to– finally– break the taboo on political engagement with Hizbullah.
Yesterday, a spokesperson for the Foreign Office said,

    “We are exploring certain contacts at an official level with Hezbollah’s political wing, including MPs.”
    … The spokesperson said the UK was doing “all it can” to support Lebanon’s unity government, of which Hezbollah’s political wing is a part.
    “Our objective with Hezbollah remains to encourage them to move away from violence and play a constructive, democratic and peaceful role in Lebanese politics, in line with a range of UN Security Council Resolutions.”
    The spokesperson said Britain would continue to have no contact with Hezbollah’s military wing.

This is excellent news; and long overdue.
I have been arguing for many years now that all the world’s governments need to engage politically with Hizbullah, a significant Lebanese political movement that has participated (successfully) in Lebanese parliamentary elections since 1992 and has even had representatives in a number of Lebanese governments over the years, including now.
You can read two of my longer pieces on Hizbullah here (spring 2005) and here (Nov/Dec 2006).
So long as George Bush and his neocon allies were in power in Washington– and yes, also, before him, under Bill Clinton– no significant western power dared to break the prohibition that Washington and the Israelis kept in place on their allies and friends having any contact with Hizbullah, Hamas, Iran, or (to a certain extent) Syria. Indeed, George Bush’s Washington gave its full support to the brutal military campaigns Israel waged to crush and/or topple Hizbullah in 2006, and Hamas at the end of last year.
Now– with or without a nod of consent from Washington (though I suspect, with)– London has broken the taboo on dealing with Hizbullah.
Hillary Clinton is meanwhile urging that Iran be included in a peace-sponsoring conference she’s proposing for Afghanistan… And Washington is well on its way to restoring the level of political relations with Syria to what it was before George Bush and Elliott Abrams came along with their thinly veiled campaign for regime change in Damascus.
Hizbullah for its part sounds almost deliriously happy about London’s change heart, showcasing the Union Jack on ts website (behind Hizbullah’s own signature yellow flag), and writing that “the British-Hezbollah relations entered a new era!”
Things are definitely changing… and in a good, de-escalatory direction. Long may the trend continue.

Israeli analysts prepare next war against Lebanon

In the latest issue of its quarterly journal, Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) carries two (or three) articles debating in some depth whether– in the event of a new war against Lebanon that one writer describes as “inevitable”, Israel should actively target institutions and facilities of the Lebanese state, or just “restrict” itself to targeting Hizbullah.
The plainest case for targeting Lebanese national institutions directly is argued in The Third Lebanon War: Target Lebanon (PDF), by Maj.-Gen. (Retd) Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser to PMs Sharon and Olmert and before that head of the IDF’s planning and operations branches.
A more nuanced view– but one that concludes that launching a large-scale, and possibly also lengthy, ground operation in Lebanon is “inevitable”– is argfued by Yossi Kuperwasser in The Next War with Hizbollah: Should Lebanon be the Target? (PDF). Kuperwasser is a former head of the IDF’s intelligence research division.
Now, I understand that it’s the job of planners within the active-duty military to “plan for the worst.” But it’s fairly depressing that a publication that aims at a broad portion of the international political elite should give so much space to people making arguments completely based on the premise that Israel “has no alternative” but to go to war against Lebanon (or Hizbullah) sometime in the (possibly near) future. In addition to those two technical-military articles, the issue also contains one by Israeli exerts arguing– especially in light of Israel’s experiences during the 33-day war of 2006– that Israel should spearhead an attempt to get the laws of war changed to be more in its favor. (Surprise, surprise.)
Nowhere in this journal is there any hint that actually, within the context of a comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace settlement, there is a strong scenario whereby Israel might never “need” to go to war against Hizbullah or Lebanon ever again. (Ah, but if there’s not a salutary little war from time to time, how on earth can all the Israeli military companies that these men doubtless consult profitably with, ever keep their sales and profit figures up?)
Actually, the arguments both men make are really weak. They exhibit strategic short-sightedness, tactical idiocy, and severe historical airbrushing (mendacity.) Perhaps that’s because they’re writing here for an “international”, English-language audience that they expect– based on the rock-star welcome they get in most US think-tanks– will ignore the facts and just lap up every word that they write?
Strategic shortsightedness: Neither Eiland nor Kuperwasser can provide a convincing answer to the question, “Yes, but then what?” regarding all their arguments about how (not whether) to fight another war against Lebanon.
In his piece, Eiland makes a couple of arguments. He notes that Hizbullah has become stronger within the Lebanese state than it was at the time of the 33-day war. (Note, though, that he completely fails to explain that it was precisely the ferocity of the assaults Israel made on Lebanon during that war that spurred, that outcome…) So he concludes from that that, to fatally weaken Hizbullah it will be necessary to damage the Lebanese state a lot, too.
He also argues from the “precedent” of the massive, destructive campaign Sharon waged against the PA in June 2002. He writes that there, the real target was Hamas, but Hamas had won a lot of support from the PA, which had strong political support from the west.
“The US sanctioned an Israeli operation against Hamas,” he writes,

    but had a hard time accepting the operation as Israel planned it – an operation against the Palestinian Authority.
    The US at first demanded that Israel leave all West Bank cities (area A) within forty-eight hours. Notable Israeli steadfastness maintained that this time it was impossible to return to the familiar rules of the game whereby only the terrorists are targeted, and the sponsors (the Palestinian Authority) remain immune. Israel’s firmness, which stemmed from a lack of other options, was successful. Israel had to concede on one matter only, stopping the siege of the muq’ata in Ramallah, home to Arafat at the time. On the other hand, the new policy (Israeli control over all Palestinian areas) was well received and commended by the international community.

So, he writes, it would probably be similar with an attack on Lebanon. The “west” might complain a bit at first… but “Israeli firmness” in pursuing its own goals would win the day and even become “well received and commended” by the international community.
His conclusion:

    There is one way to prevent the Third Lebanon War and win it if it does break out (and thereby prevent the Fourth Lebanon War): to make it clear to Lebanon’s allies and through them to the Lebanese government and people that the next war will be between Israel and Lebanon and not between Israel and Hizbollah. Such a war will lead to the elimination of the Lebanese military, the destruction of the national infrastructure, and intense suffering among the population. There will be no recurrence of the situation where Beirut residents (not including the Dahiya quarter) go to the beach and cafes while Haifa residents sit in bomb shelters.
    Serious damage to the Republic of Lebanon, the destruction of homes and infrastructure, and the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people are consequences that can influence Hizbollah’s behavior more than anything else…

Yes, Gen. Eiland, but then what??
So Israel succeeds in completely or substantially destroying the entire physical infrastructure of the state of Lebanon… (Assuming that the post-2008 model “international community” allows it to do this, which I actually doubt.)
And then what?
Israel has a failed state on its northern border and substantial portions of the international community up in arms… And that’s going to “solve” your Hizbullah problem, how?
I believe that Gen. Eiland is urging coordinated use of air and ground force attacks against Lebanon. In which case we could assume that the ground troops might be in control of substntial chunks of Lebanese territory.
Which takes us Back to the Future! Israeli troops bogged down in Lebanon, for 22 long years after 1978, 18 years after 1982.
The very conditions that created and incubated Hizbullah in the first place.
Why should anyone buy your crazy, inhumane, and go-nowhere arguments?
And then there’s Gen. Kuperwasser, who is much more explicit about the need for the “large scale ground operation” in Lebanon, even if he questions whether all the facilities of the Lebanese state as such should be targeted along the way.
Here’s what he writes about the ground op that he argues for:

    If there is another round between Israel and Hizbollah, Israel will not be able to make do with standoff counter attacks on Lebanese targets, and will probably have to launch a large scale ground operation. While Hizbollah will be able to exact a not inconsiderable cost from Israel for such an operation, the IDF has the ability to take control of the organization’s operational territories in southern Lebanon, including north of the Litani River, and if necessary, also in Beirut and the Bek’a valley. Such an operation, together with inflicting damage on infrastructures that serve Hizbollah, is the only one that will stop the firing, create a new reality in the field, and enable examination of the possibility of establishing a different arrangement with regard to relations between Israel and Lebanon in general and the Shiite community in particular.

So, you “stop the firing” of Hizbullah’s rockets onto northern Israel. Okay. And you “create a new reality in the field”… which is one in which Israel is left in control of very large chunks of Lebanese territory…
And then what?
(See my note about the IDF’s post-1978 and post-1982 occupations of south Lebanon, above.)
All Kuperwasser tells us about the political-strategic goal to be sought through this operation is “examination of the possibility of establishing a different arrangement with regard to relations between Israel and Lebanon in general and the Shiite community in particular.” Whatever that means. May 17 agreement, anyone?
These guys are strategic-thinking kindergartners, honestly.
Regarding their tactical skills, they don’t seem much better, either. Eiland writes,

    There is one way to prevent the Third Lebanon War and win it if it does break out (and thereby prevent the Fourth Lebanon War): to make it clear to Lebanon’s allies and through them to the Lebanese government and people that the next war will be between Israel and Lebanon and not between Israel and Hizbollah.

Yeah, well. The military planning required to prevent a war (through deterrence) is quite different from that required to fight one. Actually, Eiland doesn’t seem terribly interested in trying to prevent the next “Lebanese War,” at all. Only, perhaps, the one after that. (See note on the Israeli military industries, above.)
And then, from Kuperwasser we have this truly hilarious and ahistorical explanation of how “the next war” against Lebanon that he favors could actually work out, politically, to help realize the fuzzily defined political-strategic endpoint that he seeks:

    the Israeli goal might be to weaken Hizbollah and strengthen the moderate parties in Lebanon, while damaging the organization’s ability to rehabilitate itself and continue controlling southern Lebanon and presenting itself as the defender of Lebanon, similar to Israel’s strategic objectives in the Second Lebanon War (even if they were not explicitly defined as such). Other objectives in this context could be strengthening moderate elements in the regional system and increasing Israeli deterrence, in part to increase the chances of achieving a favorable peace treaty with Syria and to weaken the extremist elements in the Palestinian system.

Note how he’s effortlessly adopted the misleading and content-free US label of “moderate” to describe what are, actually, pro-US forces within Lebanon. But then see how he is advocating an almost exact replay of what the Israeli leadership attempted to do in 2006: Namely, to attack Lebanon’s civilian state facilities with the aim of turning as many Lebanese as possible against Hizbullah… while “strengthening” Israel’s general deterrent p;ower throughout the region.
It backfired badly in 2006, didn’t it?
Why on earth should anyone assume it might work better next time?
And this brings me to the whole question of these two mens’ extreme historical airbrushing (mendacity).
Actually, from Willem Buiter, I just learned a new word that’s very handy in this context: Publikumsbeschimpfung, which means insulting the intelligence of your audience.
Both Eiland and Kuperwasser insult our intelligence primarily through their reliance on a crucial but completely false assumption about the 33-day war, namely that Israel did not, actually, target any non-military facilities pertaining to the Lebanese state during that war, and, by clear implication, that that very ‘restrained’ approach to warfighting helped deny Israel the victory it could otherwise have won. But just look at the record of that war, including both the roster of the sites that Israel attacked during it– road systems, bridges, civilian factories, a power station– and the extremely bellicose statements from military and political leaders spelling out that “Once it is inside Lebanon, everything is legitimate“, “we will turn Lebanon’s clock back 20 years,” etc.
So Eiland and Kuerwasser are asking us to forget all that… Asking us to forget, too, that Israel’s use of massive overkill tactics against Lebanon backfired badly in [’06, and that after 33 days of assaults they were still unable to impose their will on the Lebanese people or their political system.
This, though the war occurred less than 30 months ago.
Publikumsbeschimpfung, indeed. (Taking the public for chimps, perhaps?)
At one level, I suppose we could read these two guys’ fevered and ill-informed writings as further evidence– if evidence still be needed– of the sterility of what passes for Israeli strategic “thinking” in the present era. After all the INSS, formerly the Jaffee Center, is not chopped liver. It’s the flagship of Israeli strategic-affairs think-tanks.
The problem for these guys, and for all their counterparts in the military-industrial complex throughout the western world is that the world has changed a lot in the past 15 years. Foreign wars have become just about unwinnable. Israel’s performance in Lebanon in 2006 is Example A in that regard. They had overwhelming superiority over Hizbullah at every single step on “the escalation ladder.” But still, they were unable to achieve their strategic goals!
So if foreign wars are unwinnable, then people– taxpayers, conscripts’ families, and others– might soon start to ask, “Why wage them? And why invest such a lot of our country’s treasure in the military industries that help us prepare for them?”
But if that were to happen, what on earth would happen to the military industries and their hordes of nicely paid consultants??
A problem, I think, not just for Israel but also for the US, Britain, and the rest of NATO…
But here’s the good news: There are many, many better ways to resolve conflicts and address fears of insecurity than through war.,

France brokering Lebanon-Syria embassy deal

This is win-win-win all the way. The Lebanese people win by getting their national independence finally recognized by their Syrian neighbor. Syria wins by escaping both from the burden of its long-claimed “responsibilities” in Lebanon and from the useless and anomalous burden of that relic of its recidivist claim over Lebanon. Former colonial power France wins by being given the laurels for bringing off this deal.
Oh, and Bashar al-Asad wins again, of course, by further breaking out of his international isolation.

Quarantine Wall news, and an intriguing human story

It seems the recently negotiated prisoner swap agreement between Israel and Hizbullah might start to be implemented as early as tomorrow, Sunday.
The Israeli political system is, perhaps understandably, too preoccupied with the woes of PM Olmert to pay much attention to the progress of either this emerging (or already completed) agreement with Hizbullah, which has been mediated by German government officials, or to the possibly close-to-completion ceasefire agreement with Hamas, mediated by Egypt.
Whatever the final timeline on completion and implementation of these two agreements, however, the fact that the Israeli government has been very seriously engaged in these negotiations has already seriously undercut the “Quarantine Wall” that the Bush administration has long tried to maintain, to prevent its allies around the world away from having any diplomatic dealings whatsoever with either Hamas or Hizbullah (or, come to that, Syria.)
So let’s just quickly review which US allies have been chipping very seriously away at different portions of the Quarantine Wall in the past weeks and months:

    Israel (Hamas, Hizb., and Syria)
    Qatar (all three)
    Turkey (Syria)
    Egypt (Hamas)
    Germany (Hizbullah)
    Fouad Siniora (Hizbullah… also of note: as I thought might happen, a politically reconfigured Siniora is back again as Lebanon’s PM-designate)

Anyway, within the stories of prisoner releases there are always numerous very gripping human stories.
In Israel, Miki Goldwasser, the mother of the Hizbullah-held IDF soldier Ehud Goldwasser recently expressed her frustration about the neglect to which her family has been subjected by Israeli officials over recent weeks. She said that no official has visited her, “and that no one has reported any kind of new developments on the issue to her family.”
Ms. Goldwasser also expressed her conviction that her son and the other IDF soldier captured by Hizbullah in July 2006 are both still alive, though there remains considerable doubt about that.
My very best wishes to Ms. Goldwasser and the mothers of all the other people in that region who have been captured by enemy forces and held to be quite cynically used as bargaining chips.
Meanwhile, from Al-Manar’s English-language website we can learn some intriguing details about the family background of Nissim Nisr who, according to the website, has been detained in Israel (I believe on charges of acting as a Hizbullah spy), but “will be released on Sunday” as a preliminary step in implementation of the Hizbullah-Israel prisoner swap.
The site says:

    Nassim Nisr was born in 1968 to an Israeli-Jewish mother and a Lebanese Muslim father and left Lebanon during the Israeli invasion in 1982 to join his mother’s family near Tel Aviv. Nisr’s mother Valentine, 70, now lives in the village of Bazouryeh in southern Lebanon, and said that she had [unlike Miki Goldwasser] been informed of her son’s imminent release.

If I were in Lebanon, I would head straight down to Bazouriyeh– hey isn’t that Nasrullah’s home village?–to get an interview with this intriguing Israeli-Jewish woman, Valentine Nisr.
Is she being held in any form of confinement in Bazouriyeh, I wonder, or is she there of her own volition? And what is the story of her, an Israeli-Jewish woman, having married a Lebanese Muslim father, presumably some time before 1968? I hope it’s a good romantic story. Tell us, please!
… So then, in the horrendous Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (the same one that afterwards gave birth to Hizbullah), the 14-year-old Nissim, who had been living in Lebanon, left the country to go live with his mother’s family near Tel Aviv. What were his experiences like there at the time? Of course, with a Jewish mother, he too would have been considered Jewish and therefore immediately eligible for Israeli citizenship… Did his mom go with him or stay on in Lebanon, sending him to her relatives to gain some safety from the conflict raging all around?
Did he really later become a spy for Hizbullah? I’d love to hear more of that story, too.
But we may not hear the details of that one any time soon… It is the back-story of Valentine and her spouse’s romance, the boy’s childhood, and his abrupt displacement at age 14 to Israel that I’d love to hear right now.
Tangled webs, eh?