Lebanon — The Israeli Game Plan

On the face of things, as reported by mainstream media, the immediate plan is to decimate Hezbollah, and that plan appears tacitly to be approved by the United States, Western European countries and maybe a number of Arab governments.

While somewhat more than half of the Lebanese people are Shi'a Muslims, and an unknown number of them are members of Hezbollah, the Israeli attacks are being carried out forcefully against all Lebanese. At least 500,000 people have been displaced and the infrastructure to support Lebanon's approximate 4,000,000 people is being systematically destroyed. In short, as the Israelis have collectively punished all Palestinians for the existence of Hamas, the IDF is now collectively punishing all Lebanese for the presence of Hezbollah.

Such all out war is not possible on the spur of the moment. Israel obviously has been planning such a maneuver for some time, and building its inventory of American munitions and aircraft, such as Cobra helicopters, for launch on short notice. As several commentators have noted, it only needed a pretext. The actual pretext was not the capture of two Israeli soldiers, however, but the fact that Hezbollah had moved to help the Palestinians after weeks of IDF bombardment and harassment designed to cause the fall of Palestine's Hamas government. The Hezbollah reaction to Israeli attacks on the Palestinians was predictable. Thus, Hezbollah appears to have walked into a well-prepared Israeli trap.

The question therefore becomes: What was the Israeli game plan before Hezbollah played into their hands? The plan must be viewed through the window of long term Israeli goals.

Some Israelis have for decades sought occupation and ownership of all of Palestine. Israeli refusal to negotiate settlement of any critical issue (boundaries, compensation, right of return, Palestinian statehood, access to Jerusalem), has not been due to recalcitrance or steadfast refusal by the Palestinians to come to terms; it has been due simply to Israeli leadership's refusal to give on any issue where long term Israeli interests would have to be in some way reduced, prejudiced, redefined or given away.

The opportunity presented by failure to agree on any key issue has been used repeatedly by Israel to create new facts on the ground. The Palestinians have gained nothing from this process but accumulating losses, i.e., (1) reduced Palestinian presence in Jerusalem due to de facto expulsion, (2) increased Israeli presence in the West Bank through creation of settlements and exclusive roads to reach them, (3) increasing cooption of water resources by Israelis and decreasing allocations of water to Palestinians, (4) increasing time, distance, death of parties, and erection of competing rights to lands, buildings, olive trees and other valuable assets, (5) incremental shifts in boundaries due to settlements, the wandering wall and other boundary creep, (6) long term and systematic expulsion of Palestinians from their lands, villages and homes in present day Israel (7) systematic exclusion of Palestinians from the Jordan Valley, and other examples such as denial of citizenship to Palestinians who live in Israel.

If history is any guide, this same game plan will now be extended to Lebanon. Note the deliberate and generalized destruction of the Lebanese infrastructure: Roads, bridges, port facilities, airport runways and buildings, urban housing and roads. The Israeli argument for these attacks is that any feature of the Lebanese infrastructure is part of a terrorism support system. This destruction is all designed to assure that the Lebanon that exists after a ceasefire will not be capable for many years of any significant resistance. The plan could backfire, however, because the Syrians may decide to cross the Lebanon Mountains and re-enter what is left of Lebanon. Moreover, the sizeable Shi'a Amal population could be provoked by Israeli pounding into combining forces with Hezbollah in militant as well as in the political terms that already exist. The scale of destruction assures that Israel will have few, if any, friends in the future Lebanon.

The Israeli attack on Lebanon thus highlights a double standard that may permanently change the global attack on terrorism and insurgency, if not warfare in general. First, absent significant US, UN and European objections, the Israelis are being encouraged to virtually destroy Lebanon as a state. This establishes a precedent for any who care to use it of the deliberate disassembly of any state that willingly or unwillingly harbors an insurgent/terrorist group. However, any other government that follows this precedent should expect sharp criticism, not the tolerant indulgence being shown Israel. Second, the Israelis are attacking another country with American weapons in violation of US laws. Far from objecting, the US is undertaking emergency supply of smart bombs to compound the onslaught. Third, the Israelis are being given free rein to destroy Lebanon and Palestine on the pretext that Hezbollah has captured two Israeli soldiers and the Palestinians have captured one. At the same time, the world is silent about the fact that the Israelis hold hundreds of Lebanese and thousands of Palestinians, some who have been confined for decades, but few of whom have ever been charged with any specific crime or brought to trial. Fourth, Hezbollah is being encouraged to lay down its arms and stop fighting, but the Israelis are tacitly being given enough time, by the US particularly, to complete their destruction of any Hezbollah infrastructure; if the Hezbollah forces quit now, the Israelis are likely to decimate them. Fifth, Hezbollah, and implicitly the whole of Lebanon, is being charged with the sin of being supported by Syria and Iran, while it is patently OK for Israel to receive massive support from the United States, Britain and others.

Such double standards are working to polarize the planet in a manner we have never before witnessed. This is not about the traditional bi-polar collisions of great powers. This is about the rights and interests of the great majority of the world's people being abused and trampled upon by a small cluster of elites. That pattern of catering to Israeli aggression is dominated by, but not limited to, the United States.

In the meantime, Israel has been given perfect cover for achievement of a long held goal. If the Israelis have their way, key new facts on the ground will be created in what is now southern Lebanon. Israel has had its eye on that area for decades.

The prize is the Litani River, a stream that rises in the Lebanon mountain range, flows south for more than half its length, then turns west and enters the Mediterranean some miles north of the city of Tyre. As seen from Israel, there is no other comparable potential source of potable or irrigation waters in the region other than costly desalination of the sea itself. With that river in mind, in the 1930s Ben-Gurion, one of the founding fathers of Israel, conceived of boundaries for the fledgling state that extended from the Litani River in Lebanon across the Syrian Desert and Jordan and south into the Sinai Peninsula. Others have dreamed of the waters of the Litani and have concocted schemes involving pipelines and tunnels to bring the water to Israel. Ben-Gurion's map not only scooped up the Litani but grabbed the Yarmuk River as well, the only significant feed to the Jordan River from the Jordanian side.

In brutal terms, in a land where water is life, the Israelis are willing to kill, wound and displace many thousands of people, and remake the regional map to get water. That pattern has preempted most of the waters of the Jordan basin, both aquifers and flowing streams for Israeli use—at the expense mainly of the Palestinians.

It is clear that the Israelis now plan to take the territory and plant themselves on the banks of the Litani. Under the guise of ending the threat posed by Hezbollah to the northern areas of Israel, the idea will be to create a "buffer zone". As the Israelis see it, Hezbollah has underscored that necessity by successfully dropping missiles on Haifa in the current engagement.

The idea of a buffer zone is unlikely to be opposed by the US, the Europeans or the UN. The problem the Israelis have to solve is how to keep the buffer zone from being manned by foreign troops. Foreign troops in the zone will be no help to Israel's scheme. They must be in charge and able to create new facts on the ground that will make the occupied Lebanese territory part of Israel. Such tactics have worked successfully for the past acquisition of virtually every square inch of Israel, at no cost to the Israelis. So why adopt any other scheme? The starting gambit is to get the United States, the Europeans, and the UN to support Israeli occupation of the territory "for the time being", while the dust settles and the Lebanese in the rest of the country try to put their lives back together. That recovery process will take longer than the Israelis need to de facto finish annexation of southern Lebanon.

If it works, through yet another irrational appearing but calculated act of carnage, Israel will have pulled off a three part coup. It will have removed Hezbollah as a threat to Israel from Lebanon; it will have eliminated Hezbollah as a paramilitary and psychological source of support to the Palestinians; and it will have stolen the waters of the Litani River. To initiate such a grand design, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's strategic planners needed only an excuse to start. The Hezbollah capture of Israeli soldiers was plausible. Eliminating Hezbollah had resonance in the West. It can be hoped that neither reason lasts long enough to cover the Israeli plan to steal the Litani River and southern Lebanon from the Lebanese people.

Terrell E. Arnold is the author of A World Less Safe, and is a regular columnist on Rense.com. He is a retired Senior Foreign Service Officer of the US Department of State whose immediate pre-retirement positions were as Deputy Director of the Office of Counterterrorism, and as Chairman of the Department of International Studies of the National War College. He welcomes comment at wecanstopit@charter.net.

‡ Slightly edited at EP with the author's approval.