Iran takes lead in 60-year war to destroy Israel

25 July 2006

THE international clamour grows for a ceasefire in the latest Middle East hostilities; Israel seems determined to ignore it as its men and armour gather for what looks like a major incursion into Lebanon; the condemnation of Israel grows ever louder for what is now generally agreed is a “disproportionate” response to Hezbollah provocation. Pause before joining this global consensus (which does not yet include the United States and Great Britain, though both are under increasing pressure to join it). Consider two matters.


THE international clamour grows for a ceasefire in the latest Middle East hostilities; Israel seems determined to ignore it as its men and armour gather for what looks like a major incursion into Lebanon; the condemnation of Israel grows ever louder for what is now generally agreed is a “disproportionate” response to Hezbollah provocation. Pause before joining this global consensus (which does not yet include the United States and Great Britain, though both are under increasing pressure to join it). Consider two matters.

First (and less important), those who are so sure Israel’s response has been “disproportionate” (the buzz word of Israel’s critics) are least able to tell us what a “proportionate” response would have been. When a terrorist group too powerful to be destroyed by its host country (Lebanon) and bent on the destruction of another (Israel) kidnaps your soldiers, kills others in the process, then rains down hundreds of rockets indiscriminately on your towns and cities, what exactly is the “proportionate” response? It is not clear that turning the other cheek or token retaliation quite does the trick. After all, Israel has been restrained during previous Hezbollah provocations, prepared even to trade an inordinate number of terrorist prisoners for a few abducted Israeli soldiers; but that has hardly earned it brownie points with Hezbollah, as the citizens of Haifa and other parts of northern Israel on the receiving end of its rockets can no doubt testify. Those who seek your destruction do not think more kindly of you when you show compromise and compassion; they see both as signs of weakness and redouble their efforts to destroy you.

Second (and paramount), what exactly would a ceasefire achieve? In the short term, of course, it would stop the civilian death toll on both sides of the border, but especially in Lebanon, where the fatalities and grief have been greatest and where Israel (like America in Iraq) has not done enough to minimise civilian casualties (though let it not be forgotten that Hezbollah places its rockets and terrorist cells in urban areas – using the local population as human shields – precisely because it knows Israel will inevitably kill civilians when it comes to destroy them). But a ceasefire now is likely to mean far more civilian casualties on both sides of the border – and probably far beyond – later.

It is important to realise the wider significance of what is happening: in the 60-year war to destroy the state of Israel, Iran is now in the lead. Those who used to be in the vanguard of Israel’s destruction – Egypt, Jordon, Saudi Arabia, the PLO – have retired from the field with bloody noses and are even tut-tutting at Shi’ite Hezbollah’s antics, which they fear are also a threat to their Sunni regimes. Now Iran has stepped up to the plate, with Syria in supporting role. It is using Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south to fight a proxy war against Israel and it is doing so as part of a wider strategy. In leading the fight against Israel and developing its own nuclear arsenal, Iran is aspiring to become the regional superpower and bidding for the leadership of Political Islam – a leadership it will use to rid the Middle East of Western influence (which requires, among other things, the destruction of Israel) and create a new Shi’ite imperium. No wonder it is not only Israel that is nervous.

A ceasefire for the sake of it would not deflect Iran from its proxy war with Israel and the West. Tehran would regard it merely as a breathing space to equip Hezbollah with bigger and better missiles that could wreak havoc in a few years’ time in Tel Aviv or even Jerusalem; then we would witness what indiscriminate civilian casualties really look like. Iran and Syria realise that Israel cannot be defeated by mass armies on the battlefield; that way has been tried often and failed every time. Now it faces the worst threat since the nearly fatal 1973 Yom Kippur war from Iranian-backed Islamic terrorists bent on its destruction and armed not just with AK47s and explosives but the latest in rocketry – and the ability to whip up an often fickle and ignorant Western public opinion against its enemy.

Israel faces the new threat at a time when anti-Israeli sentiment in the West has never been stronger or more strident. A rampant Political Islam headed by an Iran with nuclear ambitions is as much a threat to the West as it is to Israel; but even though Israel is in the frontline against this threat the irony is that it can count on less support than ever from the West, whose political and media elites on the Left and Right are increasingly consumed by rampant hostility to Israel. Those who lead the charge against Israel, of course, come from the same debased intellectual heritage that believed you could negotiate with Hitler and that Stalin was committed to world peace. But for Israel, the soft underbelly of Western opinion is as much a threat as Hezbollah’s rockets.

Western capitals are rife with the view that, if only a ceasefire to current hostilities can be arranged, the so-called roadmap to a two-state solution can be revived and a peace settlement achieved. Underlying this approach is the belief that Israeli intransigence is the real roadblock to peace. It is a view straight from cloud-cuckoo land. There is no prospect of a peace process worth its name now that Iran and its surrogates are in the driving seat. Neither Iran nor Syria nor Hezbollah nor Hamas believe in the two-state solution; they believe in the destruction of Israel and the humiliation of the West. Those who do believe (to varying degrees) in a two-state solution – Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, PLO – are increasingly marginalised. Yet Western capitals and commentators persist in believing that the old diplomatic game can be revived. It is self-delusion on a massive scale.

In the current situation, a ceasefire will mean only a lull in hostilities as long as Hezbollah remains a state-within-a-state in Lebanon, the Beirut government remains too weak to dismantle it and Iran-Syria believe they are winning. The military destruction of Hezbollah, of course, is not easy; but the price of not trying could be incalculable: if Hezbollah is not neutered now, it will have to be very soon by whatever it takes, before it is able to commit an unimaginable atrocity with Iran’s help. A continued Israeli assault on Hezbollah is the only practical way to reduce its power and military capability and to make Iran and Syria realise that not everything is going their way in the proxy war they are currently waging; a limited ground intervention by Israel, of the sort which now looks increasingly likely, in addition to aerial bombardment, will be required to destroy underground bunkers and missiles caches. Then we can start to look at longer-term solutions, including an international presence on the Israeli-Lebanese border strong enough to deter Hezbollah from a repeat performance of the past 10 days (unlike the present pathetic UN force) and a government in Beirut strong enough disarm Hezbollah’s military wing, as it is required to do under UN resolution 1559, which was part of the last “peace” deal.

Neither of these solutions will be easily arranged; indeed the odds are against them because solutions require goodwill on both sides – and there is precious little goodwill emanating from Tehran these days, a blunt truth that ˇliberal-left commentators in the West seem determined to ignore. So consider this, a speech made last week by the Iranian Parliament Speaker, Gholam-Ali Haddad Adel, which summarises the false narrative being spread across the Islamic world which portrays Israel at the heart of a Western conspiracy against Islam: “England, and then America, wished to have control over the Islamic world, to prevent Muslim unity, and to have control of the oil resources in the Middle East. Therefore, following the Second World War, they established an artificial, false and fictitious state called Israel in this region … They mobilised the racist Zionists, who are not accepted even by many Jews. They came to Palestine and, under the pretext of wrongs supposedly done to them during Second World War, they carried out terrorism, conspiracies, massacres and bloodshed in this region.” Such sentiments are widespread not just in Iran but across the Middle East, thanks to years of state-sponsored propaganda along similar lines. They are hardly mood music for a revived peace process.

Indeed, with Iran and its proxies now in the driving seat, the so-called “roadmap to peace” is dead in the water, however much Western politicians try to pump life into it. Six years ago, Israeli pulled out of southern Lebanon, handing back what had been a buffer zone; the land was immediately seized by Hezbollah and used as a launch pad for attacks. Israel’s unilateral withdrawal last year from the Gaza Strip, where the army evicted 8,000 Israeli settlers, has been repaid in similar kind (rockets and abduction) by Hamas. Instead of pocketing their gains and beginning a new peace process which would bring more, Hamas and Hezbollah have interpreted Israel’s retreats as a sign of weakness and used them as a springboard to renewed hostilities. There is no peace in this process.

Indeed there are only signs that Iran is now fighting on a broad front. Prime Minister Tony Blair said last week that the missiles supplied by Iran to Hamas and Hezbollah (via Syria) are “very similar if not identical to those used against British troops in Basra”; thus did he make explicit something the British military has known – but dared not say – for over a year now: that Iranian munitions are killing British troops in the south of Iraq. The British and Israeli armies are being struck with arms made from the same Iranian factories. Iran is fighting a proxy war not just on the border of southern Lebanon but on the borders of southern Iraq.

Largely because of the mess that is Iraq, the West is not yet of a mind to see the wider threat that events on the Israel-Lebanon border represent, much less is it prepared to respond. But, as Iran evolves into the undisputed regional superpower and its proxies wreak havoc on Israel and the West, there will have to be a belated and tough Western response. Until then, those who have neither the courage nor foresight to act now should not get in the way of those who do.