some interesting context from the Globe
Hezbollah's sham excuse for fighting
MARCUS GEE
718 words
2 August 2006
The Globe and Mail
A15
English
All material copyright Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. or its licensors. All rights reserved.
If you want to understand what Israel is up against in this fight, consider the quarrel over a tiny patch of land called the Shebaa Farms. No one would claim that the dozen or so overgrown and abandoned farms on the western slopes of Mount Hermon are worth much to anyone. Israel occupied the area when it took the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and it has been in no man's land ever since. But if you listen to Hezbollah, this territory is at the very heart of its struggle against the Jewish state, a symbol of its ongoing occupation of Arab land and a rich justification for militant resistance.
Seldom has there been a thinner excuse for armed struggle. Israel, as everyone knows, withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000, ending an 18-year occupation designed solely to protect its northern border. Israel has no possible reason for wanting to hold a single inch of Lebanese soil except when that soil is being used to launch attacks on its citizens. When Israeli forces pulled out six years ago, most Israelis could not have been happier.
But the withdrawal presented Hezbollah with an embarrassing problem. If Israel was no longer occupying Lebanon, what, exactly, was this fierce resistance group resisting? What could justify crossing the border to kill Israeli soldiers or lob missiles at Israeli communities? What reason could it have for maintaining a guerrilla army with an arsenal of 10,000 missiles?
Lacking any real justification for harassing Israel, Hezbollah seized on the Shebaa Farms as a pretext to carry out its attacks, arguing that, as long as Israel held this sliver of land, its withdrawal from Lebanon was incomplete. The claim is absurd on its face. United Nations inspectors surveyed the border after Israel's 2000 pullout and certified that it had fulfilled the demands of Security Council Resolution 425, which called for Israel to withdraw to the internationally recognized boundary.
Hezbollah, supported by the governments of Lebanon and Syria, insists against all evidence that Israel has failed to satisfy that demand. The office of Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora has even claimed that, if Lebanon gets the Farms area, then it will be able to disarm Hezbollah, because the “Israeli occupation of Lebanese lands in the Shebaa Farms region is what contributes to the presence of Hezbollah weapons.â€
This is fantasy on a scale that would put Lewis Carroll to shame. Does anyone really believe that Hezbollah will lay down its arms and turn into a harmless Koran-reading society if Israel turns over a few weedy farms to Lebanon? It's far more likely that Hezbollah would cheer the handover as yet another triumph for the “resistance†and step up its attacks on Israel. That's what happened when Israel pulled out in 2000. Emboldened, Hezbollah stocked up on missiles and guns from Syria and Iran and began launching sporadic attacks on Israeli targets — culminating in the deadly cross-border raid three weeks ago that set off the current fighting. Israel also found itself under attack from the equally emboldened Palestinians, who launched their bloody second intifada just after the Lebanon pullout.
The lesson is clear: It's not “all about the occupation†after all. Hezbollah doesn't attack Israel because it occupies a scrap of alleged Lebanese land. It attacks because it abhors the very existence of Israel, a state that its leaders and their Iranian sponsors have pledged to eradicate. No territorial concession by Israel will extinguish the burning hatred that propels fanatics such as these.
The Israelis have completed two major withdrawals in the past six years, from Lebanon in 2000 and from the Gaza Strip in 2005. They now find themselves under attack from each. When they occupy, they are attacked. When they pull out, they are attacked. And when they hit back, as any nation would, they are labelled heartless brutes.
Made-up grievances such as Israel's occupation of the Shebaa Farms only disguise the real source of the Arab-Israeli dispute: the refusal of the Arab world to accept the presence of a Jewish state in its midst. If it has done nothing else, this conflict has clarified that.
mgee@globeandmail.com
