Wrestling with the logic of force

Passport is honored to introduce a new guest blogger: Gideon Lichfield, The Economist's correspondent in Jerusalem.–CO 

"Why do so many Israelis support the attack on Lebanon?" a journalist who had just flown in asked me.

I've spent the past few days trying to make sense of it. My friends abroad are horrified. In response to the kidnap of two soldiers, Israel is hammering half a country, sowing with its bombs a wrath that it will surely harvest some day. But most Israelis don't seem to care. My leftist friends who speak out feel ostracized.

There are the obvious reasons. The country is under the biggest attack in over thirty years. Israeli television concentrates on the death and destruction at home from Hezbollah's rockets. And every nation backs its boys in war, at least when the war is just beginning. Deeper, though, is a sense of vindication. When Israel was young and fought for its life, it was feted. When its soldiers began to fire on boys throwing stones, it became reviled. For two decades now, its main theatre of war has been the occupied Palestinian territories, a twilight zone where you cannot always see clearly the line between aggressor and defender, militant and civilian, right and wrong.

And now here comes Hezbollah—unashamedly hostile, unmistakably dangerous, and unambiguously on someone else's turf. Someone who didn't do the job of taming them as promised. For six years after its last troops left Lebanon, Israel kept mostly quiet when Hezbullah taunted, fired, kidnapped. Long enough. Those guys had their chance. They blew it. Time to go in and finish the job. And this time, nobody can say it was unprovoked.

Fine, fine; but why so hard? Why bomb the airport, the highways, the homes; why blow up relief convoys, block the ports, kill hundreds of civilians (but hardly any Hezbullah fighters, so far) and turn hundreds of thousands into refugees? Never mind right or wrong: now even Lebanese who hated Hezbollah are uniting against Israel. How does this help?

When I discuss such questions with Israelis, as we peel off the layers of reasoning and approach the core, what I most often meet is a kind of crude Pavlovian determinism. The Palestinians, the Lebanese, the Arabs in general—they understand only the language of force. Not showing force is a mistake. Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister, summed up the thinking well this week in his speech to the Knesset: "Our enemies misinterpreted our willingness to exercise restraint as a sign of weakness."

And since all of Lebanon, in Israel's eyes, is complicit in letting Hezbollah live unmolested, it won't do any harm for all the Lebanese to feel a little force too. Not too much, of course. Nothing gratuitous. But just enough, as a by-product of actions that might be justified (the two soldiers might be spirited away via the airport, after all), to make them think twice about allowing Hezbollah to flourish in the future. And the civilian casualties—well, that's what you get for letting bad, bearded men with guns live across the hallway.

It is, in fact, the way Israel has kept its enemies at bay since it was born: the notion that force will knock sense into them. Olmert again, in a press conference just before the Lebanon crisis, when asked why Israel had recently gone into Gaza with bombs and tanks after the kidnapping of a soldier there: "These are effective measures and it may take some more time, but I'm hopeful that at the end of the day, the dominant forces within the Palestinian community will impose the end and the cessation of these violent actions by Palestinians."

It worked in the old days, when the equation was simple: one country, one leadership, one army. Defeat the army, and that was that. But now things are messier.

Lebanon is rather like several countries pulled together; its government is a weak and fragile balance of groups, including Hezbollah. Israel's coalition is fractious too, but its groupings are political and fluid. Lebanon's are ethnic-religious and fixed—Hezbollah's supporters are Shia Muslims, the country's biggest religious group—so the balance doesn't just shift with the political winds.

Worse still in Gaza: there is hardly even a leadership left to "impose the cessation of these violent actions". And even if there were, to impose anything at all on the multitude of militant factions with their tangle of loyalties would be near-impossible. They will unite around peace only if there is something in it for all of them.

Lastly, people just don't think the way Israel expects them to. In a poll earlier this month, over a thousand Palestinians were asked about the kidnap that triggered the Israeli Army's incursion into Gaza. Only 37 percent thought the Palestinian people would gain anything from it; 47 percent thought they would end up worse off. But 77 percent supported the kidnapping and 67 percent said there should be more of them.

A few weeks ago I was struggling with this logic, just as I've struggled this week with Israel's. On a visit to Gaza, I asked Khaled Abu Hilal, once a senior figure in the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades and now a spokesman for the Hamas government, why Gazan militants kept firing home-made rockets that rarely damage anything or anyone to Israel but inevitably draw a much more destructive response. How could they, in effect, bring so much certain death to their own brethren?

Yes, agreed Abu Hilal readily, there was too much death; and for just that reason, "we cannot go to these resistance movements and ask them for calm. That would be treason and surrender." He went on: "We are aware that the means they are using are very weak and don't really harm the occupation. But this is the only means of a helpless people to say 'no, we will not give up'. It's the only thing that can provide a moral uplift."

Moral uplift aside, I asked, "isn't it just self-defeating?"

"We're ready to pay a heavy price, even if it's the loss of our blood for our honesty and freedom," said Abu Hilal. "We won't accept the logic of force that the Israelis are imposing."

And then he warned ominously, "If we are put in the corner we have nothing to lose. The whole world has to realize this."

Pop psychologists versus irrational desperados. Irresistible Israeli force meets immovable Palestinian object. That's why the conflict is so stuck.