09.03.06
A threat of peace
From Rad Green
Globe and Mail September 2, 2006
What caused the Lebanon war? Perhaps a threat of peace
By Hugh Graham
The question is still left dangling in the air: Why ever did Israel attack
all of Lebanon, and with such force? Even Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah
said last Sunday that he was so baffled by Israel’s actions he regretted
ordering the kidnappings that led to the catastrophe.The answer, now lost in obscurity, may be that Israel — like the radical
wing of Hamas, as well as regional powers Syria and Iran — wanted to dampen
the glimmer of an emerging two-state solution for Israel and the
Palestinians.In May, five Palestinians jailed in Israel put together a document proposing
a state based on Israel’s 1967 boundaries, but also on respect for the
“green line” that defines those borders — implying recognition of Israel’s
right to exist.If the two feuding Palestinian factions, Fatah and Hamas, could agree to the
“Prisoner’s Document,” the international funding that had been denied the
Hamas government, for refusing to recognize Israel, would flow again. It
would also discourage Israel’s President, Ehud Olmert, from unilaterally
marking out his own boundary on the premise that the Palestinians would
never negotiate a two-state solution.Print Edition - Section Front
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Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Fatah faction,
presented the document as the basis for a unity government with Hamas, and
declared it would be ratified by referendum.The radical wing of Hamas objected that this process would lead to more
concessions to Israel. It also feared that a successful referendum would
give Mr. Abbas political dominance. Nevertheless, the initiative gained
momentum, until the wars in Gaza and Lebanon conveniently derailed it. You
need only look at the order of events.On June 22, at a breakfast given by the King of Jordan, Mr. Abbas and
Israel’s Mr. Olmert committed themselves to future peace talks. Next, Mr.
Abbas told Hamas leaders that he would cancel the referendum if Hamas would
join him in a unity government.On June 24, perhaps fearing that Mr. Abbas had seized the upper hand in
sparking a two-state solution, the Israeli army kidnapped two Palestinian
civilians. But the Palestinians weren’t provoked. On June 25, Ismail
Haniyeh’s moderate, political wing of Hamas agreed to a unity government
based on the Prisoner’s Document. It was historic, if fragile.Not all of Hamas was happy. The party’s military wing is run by the radical
Khaled Meshaal from Damascus. It gets support from Iran and Syria. It may be
that Mr. Meshaal and his sponsors were trying to scuttle the unity
agreement, with its tacit recognition of Israel, by ordering a raid in which
militants tunneled from Gaza into Israel and kidnapped an Israeli soldier.But on June 27, Mr. Abbas went ahead with the public announcement of a unity
administration. Israel publicly called it “a step forward,” but was
otherwise dismissive. On the following day, Israel invaded Gaza. It went on
to bomb Mr. Haniyeh’s Hamas offices.In a letter to The Washington Post, he later wrote that “the invasion of
Gaza and the kidnapping of our government leaders and officials are meant to
undermine the recent accords reached between the government party and our
brothers and sisters in Fatah and other factions . . .”Israel bombed Gaza heavily enough to weaken any chance that the unified
Palestinian negotiating front — whose absence had long been a major Israeli
complaint — might come into existence. On July 5, Washington backed
Israel’s apparent spoiler tactics by describing as “unbalanced” a draft
resolution of the UN Security Council calling for Israeli withdrawal.On July 10, Hamas’s radical Mr. Meshaal and Israel made tentative moves
toward a prisoner exchange. It might have prevented things from getting
worse had not Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers and killed eight on
July 12, near Lebanon’s border with Israel. For Israel, it was the perfect
time to invade Lebanon and destroy Hezbollah: Any truce or exchange of
captives would have risked reviving the Prisoner’s Document, and with it
renewed pressure on Israel to give up territory.Therein lay Mr. Nasrallah’s miscalculation. Taken by surprise, Hezbollah
started raining rockets down on Israel. It may have been acting in concert
with Iran, which would be happy to see the prospect of a two-state solution
obliterated. (According to the Israeli journal Forward, Iran’s President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad met back in January with Syria’s President Bashar Assad
along with the leaders of Hezbollah, Hamas, Hamas’s Iranian-backed cohort
Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian groups.)According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Iran, which
had long ago dismissed the Palestinian struggle for being secular, has been
building solid links with the intensely religious Hamas since the first Gulf
War. Hezbollah and Hamas also have their ties (and their rivalries).And it seems grimly likely that all of them — Israel and the United States,
Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas militants — wanted the world to forget
once and for all that peace and compromise were for a moment possible.Hugh Graham is a Toronto writer.