Dying for a Second Round - Israel's New Plan to Attack Lebanon

By ALLAN NAIRN

Last Friday I asked a top-level Israeli, a former IDF
(Israel Defense Forces) elite unit man and prime-ministerial
confidante, whether the assassination of Hezbollah's
Imad Mughniyeh could have been done by a Lebanese group.

He snorted at the preposterous notion.
This was "way too sophisticated," he said.
"This [the car bombing] was a precisely
orchestrated international operation," and this
was the "third or fourth or fifth time in a year
that Israel has carried out a military operation in Syria."

When I asked him to repeat that last
part he added the word "allegedly."

But the message, or at least the boast,
was clear. So why is Israel doing this?

The man said of his colleagues: "There are a lot
of [Israeli] military and cabinet people just dying
for a second round with Lebanon. If given the
opportunity they'll take it," i.e. attack Lebanon
again, not in spite of "but because of" the perception
that their '06 attack failed.

Though the IDF leveled blocks and villages,
dropped 4 million cluster bomblets (some of which
are still exploding), and killed some 200 Hezbollah
combatants and 1,000 Lebanese civilians (roughly
40 Israeli civilians were killed by Hezbollah), they
apparently departed Lebanon feeling politically
inadequate.

The official feeling was that they either did not destroy
enough, or destroy enough of the right people and items,
to avoid the embarrassing perception that they
lost to Hezbollah.

So to have the option of solving this problem they've
apparently staged a provocative assassination in
hopes of goading Hezbollah into retaliating and
providing a pretext for new -- better -- destruction
that this time around will "succeed," i.e. soothe hurt
Israeli feelings.

There've been attempts to put this in strategic terms,
as educated killers (and those who study them) prefer.
'Israel must prove its strategic value to the United
States' (What? Washington is going to dump Israel?
Hezbollah's "victory" strengthened the Palestinians, or
Lebanon, or put Israel's existence in danger?). Or,
alternatively: 'Hezbollah must be eradicated'
(which everyone knows is impossible).

In fact, the closer you look the more it looks like
leaders' blood psychotherapy.
And the same thing goes for the publics that follow
them. Olmert is in political trouble. If he doesn't kill
some Arabs soon (who or where is secondary), his
governing coalition may well dissolve. The public has
to feel good, too.

The problem -- for the to-be-killed, and for the notion
of murder law, not to mention (and few do) decency --
is that the Israeli body politic is now set this way:
demanding -- with a few, brave, exceptions -- not just
daily, routine, killings of Palestinians, but periodic
dramatic strikes that thrill and let them strut like
hero/ victims.

It's as if the inhabitants of a US Fox News studio had
multiplied and become a nation.

It, of course, doesn't have to be that way, but it is
obviously that way now. All you have to do to see it
is pick up the papers or talk to a few Israelis.
(For representative quotations see Gideon Levy,
"Little Ahmadinejads, Haaretz," 10/06/2007).

Its one thing for a state to be murdering and/or oppressing
others when their local public doesn't know about it
(as was largely the case when Washington was
decimating Central America in the 1980s), but it's
another when the public knows about it and supports
the injustices and crimes (as was the case with US
whites and slavery, and in the first stages of US/Iraq,
where public support seemed to turn -- as it may still --
on the question of whether the US was "winning").

In the first situation, the killing policy is vulnerable.
If word gets out, the public might be angry. But in
the second it is more stable, and deadly, since the
public knows, and asks for more.

But people and states don't get to entirely
write their own histories.

They usually interact with others.

In the case of Israel, the key interaction is with the US,
their military guarantor/ mass subsidizer, and with
American Jews, where, among the young, opinion
appears to be slowly turning (see postings of
December 7, 2007, "Imposed Hunger in Gaza. The
Army in Indonesia. Questions of Logic and Activism,"
and February 13, 2008, "Big Killer Takes Out Smaller
One. 'Wipe Out a Neighborhood.' Life by Mafia Rules in
the Israeli - US Domain," particularly the plaint of
Malcom Hoenlein.).

Alternatively, Palestinians and groups like Hezbollah and
Hamas could join the US as important determinants,
but only if they too reset their outlooks
(and their willingness to kill or murder) -- as some
Palestinians and other Arabs at the grassroots level
are now urging, cautiously -- and switched to active,
but non-violent, or minimally violent resistance
(like the first intifada, or the Gaza wall-breaking)
and stopped letting themselves be used as a
"provocation-response" button that Israel can
press when it wants a thrill.

Allan Nairn can be reached through his blog.