Parries → Notes and chords on the Levant right now 

Things in the Middle East are always developing, eh? People dismiss it as the same old conflict, but what’s happening today is nothing like what has ever happened before. Palestinian Arabs, quasi-sovereign for the first time, are descending into civil war in Gaza. Lebanon, acting militarily for the first time, is going after al-Qaeda cells within its Palestinian camps. Israel is undergoing political convulsions, at the beginning it seems of hammering out a new political system, the mechanics of which may involve direct representation at last and a change in the role of the political parties. And all these developments among the neighbors are in play each with the other.

And there is Iran. Currently, the Iraq war is both a success, in that it took the battle to a place of America’s choosing, and a failure, in that it is failing to win that battle. Failing to win that battle encourages rather than squelches militant Islamism, suggesting that militant Islamism can succeed anywhere it is extensively applied. This can only give Iran a swelling sense of success, particularly since it is now publicly assisting that battle. For America to announce and go on announcing that Iranians are assisting the terror campaign in Iraq, yet do nothing about this, suggests that America is on the path to surrender and withdrawal in Iraq. We’ll see. Certainly, mainstream politicians still say it’s vital to stay the course in Iraq—to wit, John McCain’s eloquent plea—but that is becoming an isolated position.

Given that it seems likely Iran will be able to continue to expand its harassment, either America or Israel will go to war with Iran. America and Iran at war we can almost conceive of. But Iran and Israel? Can soldiers of either power even confront each other? Iran will use the Palestinians and Lebanese to fight its war on the ground and with short-range missiles; if Iran does get involved, it can only be by missile. Chemical? Whereas Israel, with the flight codes from the United States, will bomb Iran. Bombs vs missiles. And the Arab countries? On the one hand, their war objectives are identical to Israel’s: stop Iran from getting the Bomb. On the other, each would rush in to grab a piece of Israel if she appeared sufficiently bedraggled. (Flourish and honor only appear similar.)

Which is why everyone— not just the Europeans but the US, even Israel—is asking: Can we live with an Iranian bomb? Stopping them from having it will require a big war that may not be actually necessary; the Pakistanis have it, Allah help us all, yet we’re all still here; and it seems sensible to assume the Iranians wouldn’t actually drop their bomb on anyone, but instead use it as a large pair of testicles allowing them to continue and expand with more impunity their current murderous but non-WMD undermining of other nations. And that, it could be argued, may not be worth launching a war over. But it certainly is; even that best case scenario—is intolerable.

This, it seems, is the true issue facing the allies, but in Israel it seems doubtful the current government is capable of addressing it. According to a Ynet Update, four Knesset motions of no confidence just failed! These are motions about a government that the public feels less confident about than any other ever, so why are the motions failing? And why four of them, incidentally? Couldn’t the various parties tabling them have gathered their forces and drafted a single motion that actually passed? What is going on there? Why are all the opposition parties defying the public to keep Olmert and Kadima in there? Is it because the only conceivable alternative is Netanyahu and the Likud, and the entire Knesset believes ‘Anything but Bibi?’ Hey, if we’re still talking fulfilling Sharon’s legacy, Netanyahu was as senior a minister of Arik’s as any, tasked with an economy about to collapse Argentina-style, as Netanyahu puts it—a vital fiefdom at a crucial time, and he succeeded royally.

Meanwhile Israel’s response to Hamas’s rockets is returning to form, the pressure growing gradually in a way far more ominous to an enemy, it seems to me, than bombing Beirut Airport. Israel can pretty much seize any Palestinian it wants, because Israel is still the legal occupier, and it just has. The media, for all its bias towards the Palestinians, still uses the verb “arrest” when Israel takes Palestinians, not “capture” or “kidnap”, with Israel always doing it according to her own procedures, always with legalistic and bureacratic cover, always with a charge. But these charges can be absurd, as Isabel Kershner reports for the Herald Tribune: among the charges against the detainees is membership in Hamas, which is probably still criminal in Israeli military law, so Israel can arrest whichever Palestinian leader it wishes to. This power is one of Israel’s key military assets in its struggle to meet the Palestinians.

This ability to disdain the spirit for the letter of law indefinitely is the rocklike, sophisticated side of the elite Israeli mind that I never acquired. Law, like anything and everything else, is subservient to national survival. Even as I respect, admire and am grateful for their tenacious grip on values—to me Herzl’s Israel is up there with Darwin’s natural selection and Adam Smith’s invisible hand in the pantheon of great modern creations—nonetheless, I have hostility to these methods, even if I can’t conceive of anything different or better. There are dangers, as Yishayahu Liebowitz warned: abuse of law to attend to enemies will in time coarsen a young society’s love of law.

That said, I believe prudence is valued highly in Israel’s security elite, even as initiative is correctly considered the key to advancement (I’m speculating, having never allowed my interest in officership past my belly).

One recent Israeli move I do very much admire is Disengagement. In order to defuse the Palestinian national movement, Israel is trying to have Gaza revert back to its natural state as a sphere of interest of Egypt’s, and the West Bank to Jordan. Already there are tantalizing lines in the papers pointing to the eventual success of this audacious withdrawal. Egypt objects to the possibility of foreign peacekeepers in Gaza, while Israel does not. Jordan has floated the idea of confederacy with the West Bank. This is how any improvement in the Levant will come about—Palestinians demonstrating to everyone, not just to Israel, that they are too weak, unstable and violent to be a constructive entity on their own—and Egypt, Israel and Jordan acting in concert to keep all four populations on a path towards peaceful prosperity.

What a fugue it is.