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What appears to be a civil war is beginning in Lebanon, with Hezbollah — a radical Shiite group — trying either to mount a traditional coup in which the present somewhat pro-Western government will be replaced with a Hezbollah-dominated one, or simply to give their state-within-a-state de facto control of the country.

Probably it’s the latter, which can be accomplished without providing an excuse for embarrassing Security Council resolutions. One of the triggers for the current crisis was Hezbollah’s private telecommunications network, which the government rightly sees as a way for Hezbollah to coordinate and direct their forces without interruption or interception of communications. Another was the government’s attempt to remove a pro-Hezbollah airport security administrator.

Lebanon has parties (and militias) representing various factions of Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Christians, and Druze. It also has an ‘official’ army that supposedly takes orders from a government in which Hezbollah’s strength has increased significantly as opposition politicians are murdered (8 since 2005), probably by Hezbollah ally Syria. Hezbollah’s militia is well-trained and well-armed, and it also has many sympathizers in the Lebanese army. The army has already agreed to backtrack on some of the government’s demands regarding the communications network and airport manager.

Hezbollah is funded by Iran and supplied through Iran’s satellite, Syria. Syria also has her own interests in Lebanon, having colonized that nation for almost 30 years until being forced to remove her forces in 2005 after the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri (almost certainly by Syrian agents).

In 2006 the US and Iran fought a proxy war by way of Israel and Hezbollah. Results were inconclusive enough to encourage Iran to rearm Hezbollah and attempt to develop a similar army from Hamas in Gaza, although there is reason to believe that the IDF woke up and smelled the coffee, and will do better next time.

The next time may be coming soon if the present civil strife spills over into an attack on Israel, or if Israel gets nervous enough to intervene.

Noah Pollak sees similarities between the behavior of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, and sees Western observers making the same fundamental mistake in both cases:

What does the crisis in Lebanon teach us about Hezbollah? It teaches us the same lesson we learned from Hamas when it took Gaza: Islamic supremacist groups, despite their claims to the contrary, cannot be integrated into states or democratic political systems…

We have heard for many years from an array of journalists, scholars, and pundits that Hamas and Hezbollah are complicated social movements that employ violence in the service of their political goals, and that they are therefore susceptible to diplomatic engagement…

In the streets of Beirut, with Kalashnikovs and RPGs, Hezbollah is making it abundantly clear that its participation in Lebanese politics ends when Hezbollah is asked to submit to the state’s authority. How many more Middle East “experts” are going to proclaim that the answer to Islamic supremacism is dialogue and political integration?

No one knows exactly what Hezbollah intends. What is certain is that the Lebanese government does not have the strength or the will to resist, and that therefore another domino will shortly fall to the Iranian axis.

Update [11 May 2008 0713]: For an excellent analysis of Hezbollah’s recent actions, see Jonathan Speyer, “The Question of Power“.

Technorati Tags: Lebanon, Hezbollah

Another Israeli civilian has been killed in a Hamas bombardment, in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, close to the Gaza strip. Several others were wounded. Nine rockets or mortar shells fired from Gaza struck Israel today, including this one.

Meanwhile, indirect negotiations for a cease-fire continue in Egypt. Although we don’t know the details, suggestions are that it would include a hugely unbalanced prisoner exchange with Hamas and possibly other concessions.

Israel’s government is at the same time super-rational and entirely irrational. Super-rational because it is capable of making the decision to accept the continuing attrition of the rocket attacks, the humiliation of allowing Hamas to depopulate part of the state and prove to the world that Israel is incapable of defending herself, so as not to deal with the short-term consequences of putting an end to Hamas.

And irrational because it is prepared to trade one kidnapped soldier — who will quickly be replaced by another — for the release of hundreds or even more than a thousand prisoners, many of them with blood on their hands (the requirement to only release non-murderers was dropped some time ago).

A few simple facts need to be recognized:

1. Hamas will not go away by itself and it is not ever going to become a Zionist organization. Its reason for being is to destroy Israel and kill Jews. The question is not if to fight it, it’s when. And Hamas isn’t getting weaker.
2. The rocket barrage is an attack on more than the unfortunate victims. It is an attack on the sovereignty of the State of Israel. It cannot be allowed to continue.
3. Israel is in a war for survival. Soldiers are lost in war. I have three children, all of whom served in the IDF, one for an extended period. I know the feeling when the telephone rings at night. But a lopsided prisoner exchange will encourage further kidnappings and remove the deterrent against terrorist murder.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Hamas, Gaza

American policy has always been ambivalent on Israel. I’ve written about the tension between the promises of President Bush and the demands of Condoleezza Rice. I’ve mentioned the State Department commitment to a smaller Israel.

Now Richard Holbrooke has pointed out that back in 1948 State Department big shots, particularly Secretary George Marshall, weren’t so happy about the creation of Israel either:

…opposition really came from an even more formidable group: the “wise men” who were simultaneously creating the great Truman foreign policy of the late 1940s — among them Marshall, James V. Forrestal, George F. Kennan, Robert Lovett, John J. McCloy, Paul Nitze and Dean Acheson. To overrule State would mean Truman taking on [Gen. George C.] Marshall, whom he regarded as “the greatest living American,” a daunting task for a very unpopular president.

Beneath the surface lay unspoken but real anti-Semitism on the part of some (but not all) policymakers. The position of those opposing recognition was simple — oil, numbers and history. “There are thirty million Arabs on one side and about 600,000 Jews on the other,” Defense Secretary Forrestal told [Clark] Clifford. “Why don’t you face up to the realities?”

As we know, Truman indeed took on Marshall and others, and the US cast its vote to recognize the Jewish state, although the State Department sandbagged Truman on the earlier vote to partition the former Mandate. Holbrooke writes,

In March, Truman privately promised Chaim Weizmann, the future president of Israel, that he would support partition — only to learn the next day that the American ambassador to the United Nations had voted for U.N. trusteeship. Enraged, Truman wrote a private note on his calendar: “The State Dept. pulled the rug from under me today. The first I know about it is what I read in the newspapers! Isn’t that hell? I’m now in the position of a liar and double-crosser. I’ve never felt so low in my life…”

This may have been the first time that the State Department tried to screw Israel, but it wasn’t to be the last.

In 1967, Egypt had closed the Strait of Tiran, cutting Israel off from its outlet to the Red Sea and much of its oil supply (which at that time came from Iran). Nasser had requested the removal of UN troops from the Sinai and massed troops and tanks there. Although the US had made a commitment to protect Israel’s freedom of navigation in the Strait when she withdrew from the Sinai in 1956, when push came to shove we did not stand behind it, and the State Department tried to convince Israel to make concessions to Egypt instead. Secretary of State Dean Rusk advised President Johnson not to pressure Egypt and to discourage Israel from a preemptive attack.

And now of course, we have Ms. Rice trying to get Israel to sign a peace agreement, any peace agreement, with the Palestinian Authority — regardless of the damage to Israel’s security.

It’s fair to say that while a majority of Americans have always supported Israel, the foreign-policy establishment has been downright hostile. And this is often reflected in tensions between elected officials like the President and Congress who are accountable to the people, and the State Department which is not. And in some — but not by any means all — important cases, the pro-Israel side has won.

Israel’s enemies are presently doing their best to change this, in a multifaceted campaign. Jimmy Carter, Mearsheimer and Walt, the prosecutions of AIPAC’s Rosen and Weissman and now Ben-Ami Kadish, are all doing their parts to promote the position that the interests of Israel and the US are divergent.

Their effort is complicated by the fact those who perpetrated the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor happen to be Israel’s greatest enemies as well. One would think that the question of who is America’s best friend in the Middle East should have been settled conclusively after 9/11.

Unfortunately, the supposedly pro-Israel US government’s sheer incompetence in its response to 9/11 and everything else has given ammunition to those who say that we need a ‘new’ policy, which (surprise) should not be pro-Israel.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Technorati Tags: Israel, State Department, Truman

News item:

RAFAH, Gaza Strip (Reuters) – By day, Awad al-Qiq was a respected science teacher and headmaster at a United Nations school in the Gaza Strip. By night, Palestinian militants say, he built rockets for Islamic Jihad.

The Israeli air strike that killed the 33-year-old last week also laid bare his apparent double life and embarrassed a U.N. agency which has long had to rebuff Israeli accusations that it has aided and abetted guerrillas fighting the Jewish state.

In interviews with Reuters, students and colleagues, as well as U.N. officials, denied any knowledge of Qiq’s work with explosives. And his family denied he had any militant links at all, despite a profusion of Islamic Jihad posters at his home.

But militant leaders allied to the enclave’s ruling Hamas group hailed him as a martyr who led Islamic Jihad’s “engineering unit” — its bomb makers. They fired a salvo of improvised rockets into Israel in response to his death. [my emphasis]

The UN agency which operates the school is UNRWA, of course. UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) was set up by UN resolution 302 in 1949 specifically to deal with Palestinian refugees; no other refugee group has had its own UN agency. The UNRWA 2007 budget was $487 million. The largest contributors are the US, the European Commission, Sweden, the Norway and the United Kingdom. UNRWA has more than 27,000 employees, 99% of whom are Palestinians, almost all ‘refugees’.

UNRWA is a major employer in Gaza and other locations, and one of the biggest contributors to the Palestinian ‘economy’ (the other is Palestinian Authority salaries, mostly for ‘security’ forces).

More details about the ‘refugees’, from the UNRWA site:

One-third of the registered Palestine refugees, about 1.3 million, live in 58 recognized refugee camps in the area of operations in Jordan, Lebanon, the Syrian Arab Republic, the West Bank and Gaza Strip…

The other two-thirds of the registered refugees live in and around the cities and towns of the host countries, and in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, often in the environs of official camps. While most of UNRWA’s installations such as schools and health centres are located in refugee camps, a number are outside camps and all of the Agency’s services are available to both camp and non-camp residents.

UNRWA’s mandate is to provide services to the 4-5 million descendants of the 750,000 1948 refugees, not to resettle them. Resolution 302 clearly intends it to be a temporary agency, and the implication is that the host governments will ultimately take responsibility for the refugees and also, reading between the lines, that they would eventually be resettled.

As everyone knows, the Arab nations (except Jordan) refused to allow any change in the status of the refugees, and chose to keep them and their descendants miserable in order to create an army that they hoped would ultimately overwhelm Israel either as an inexhaustible source of terrorist recruits or by way of a ‘right of return’. There is no precedent for a refugee situation lasting 60 years, and none for refugee status to be passed to descendants. Yet somehow the Palestinians are different.

UNRWA is the mechanism by which this unnatural growth is fed and nurtured. Were it not for UNRWA, the original refugees would have found homes and employment in host countries (and indeed, had the Arabs been prepared to make peace, many would have been able to return to Israel).

The Arab nations haven’t had to pay for the development of this army. We have, and continue to do so, just as we pay for the Palestinian Authority security forces, many of whom are terrorists or gangsters.

The Palestinian employees of UNRWA share the politics of Palestinians everywhere, and that means that a majority of them approve of ‘armed struggle’ as the best way to ‘liberate Palestine’ and solve the refugee problem. So it entirely unsurprising that rocketry buffs like Awad al-Qiq are UNRWA employees.

But the irony of a teacher moonlighting as a terrorist that the Reuters dispatch plays on is actually not ironic at all.

Because there isn’t any contradiction between the mission of UNRWA and that of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Technorati Tags: Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, Qiq, Gaza, terrorism

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is in big trouble, being investigated by police for bribery allegedly committed when he was mayor of Jerusalem.

This is not the first time that Olmert has been accused of financial wrongdoing, but from what is said in the papers, it’s apparently the most potentially damaging accusation.

This is happening exactly when he is negotiating with the Palestinian Authority and under pressure from the US to commit to a ‘peace’ agreement that will result in a Palestinian state before President Bush leaves office. Unconfirmed reports suggest everything from ‘there is no progress’ to ‘he is agreeing to evacuate most of East Jerusalem and offering some form of right of return’.

It seems to me that a PM with the threat of jail hanging over his head, one who is massively unpopular and kept in office only by the self-interest of Knesset members who themselves do not want to face elections, is not in the best position to negotiate a ‘deal’ that will change the borders of the State of Israel.

Many in Israel believe that the judiciary is highly politicized — left-wing — and that decisions to prosecute Olmert or not, when to prosecute him and what to charge him with may well be made in order to push him to make certain decisions in the ongoing negotiations.

We can also note that the elements in the US government who would like to see an agreement favorable to the Palestinians now also have a way to apply pressure to Olmert, especially since a key figure in the investigation is a US citizen.

The continuance of Olmert’s government is dependent on his coalition partners. The best thing that could happen now would be for enough of them to resign and thereby force new elections, before Olmert is indicted — or worse, in the event that he is not indicted.

The Nightmare Continues — courtesy of Dry Bones