As the UN-brokered ceasefire takes hold in Lebanon (or perhaps does not), what are the lessons of the fourth - or is it the fifth or sixth - Arab-Israeli war?
Some things are obvious. The myth of the invincibility of the Israeli military machine expired somewhere in South Lebanon and the equally tenacious myth of the the cowardice and incompetence of Arab resistance - already weakened by the Palestinian intifada - died with it. Just as the coalition has found in Iraq, so the Israelis have learned in the last few days: asymmetric warfare cannot be won by shock and awe, and cannot be won at all by purely military means.
Likewise the moral pretentions of the Israelis and their backers in the White House and Downing Street. The civilian casualty figures in this war and the rubble of Lebanese homes, power stations, hospitals and roads show the truly disproportionate and extreme violence they were prepared to use to gain their geopolitical ends, part of a long and reprehensible history from Hanoi to Fallujah. It is of course true that Hezbollah fired rockets which killed civilians in Israeli cities, and that (perhaps deliberately) they endangered Lebanese civilians by their presence. They must be held accountable for that but, if so, the Israeli generals and politicians ought with greater reason to be looking over their shoulders when the International Criminal Court comes to call.
For this was flagrantly a war of aggression, launched by Israel on the flimsiest of pretexts and deliberately prolonged by the inaction of its supporters at the UN. That it has ended without the victory the aggressors assumed would be theirs is in one sense a cause for relief; but in another sense it is a source of horror. Once again - just as with Iraq - the anti-war movement in the West has proved wiser than their rulers. Once again what is obvious to the man or woman on the bicycle in Clapham - that relations between the West and the Arab world need to be based on respect and pursued through negotiation with the aim of achieving results recognised by more or less everyone as just - is regarded with contempt by Bush, Blair and those who endorse their project. That is the horror of it: except rhetorically they simply do not recognise the human and moral framework which lasting international settlements require.
What then is the lesson? For some it will be that the West can be defeated, for others that the "threat" of fundamentalist Islam has grown stronger. Another conclusion is less obvious but more urgent. It is that we do not have to accept the terms of this insidious "either you are with us or against us" fork which is so often thrust at us. We do not need to choose between radical Islam and brutal imperialism masquerading in the colours of Western values. Instead we can choose respect, negotiation and the rule of law.
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