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  Israel Goes to War: With an Iron Fist

Israel Goes to War With an Iron Fist

Part 3: Continue reading about the chaos in Beirut on page 3.

Beirut, the metropolis that was hoping to regain its status as a Paris of the Middle East, looks as if it has been thrown back into the darkest days of the Lebanese civil war -- an urban nightmare. Mountains of garbage are rotting in the streets, with the power grid only sporadically providing electricity.

The dark streets of the capital itself are practically empty in the evening and at night, as residents behind closed doors and windows listen to Israeli bombs predominantly hitting the city's otherwise hopelessly overcrowded Shiite southern districts.

Conversely, a few hotels in downtown Beirut are relatively full, not with tourists from the Gulf region, whose drivers would normally be fighting for parking spaces at this time of the year, but with the few wealthy families from southern Lebanon who have sought shelter here and are paying for the privilege to the tune of $100 a night. They wait here to see if the storm passes and they can return to their homes, or else leave the country altogether. The going rate for a taxi ride to Damascus, which would normally be about $200, is now $750.

The city's parks and schools are also filled to capacity, especially in Christian neighborhoods in downtown Beirut, where exhausted refugees from the bombing in the south have come for safety. But even in the Lebanese capital's Christian districts, the refugees are no longer safe from Israeli attack. Last Wednesday, an aerial bomb struck in Ashrafiya, Beirut's largest and best-known Christian area, tearing apart a truck that was carrying well-drilling equipment. Israeli officials later said that on the air force's reconnaissance images the equipment looked like an anti-aircraft gun. "Do the Israelis seriously believe that Hezbollah would drive a rocket launcher around Ashrafiya?" asks one of the residents, an American. "I thought they had the world's best intelligence services."

But even such horrible mistakes and vehement international criticism of the Israeli campaign's lack of proportionality have been unable to stem Jerusalem's will to press on. The operation Israel calls "Just Reward" has already wreaked greater havoc than 15 years of civil war in Lebanon. The power supply, drinking water and transportation system have been severely curtailed and are already virtually nonexistent in the south. And now that even filling stations are being targeted, gasoline prices have risen sixfold in some areas. On top of it all, the campaign against Hezbollah is only the northern flank in Israel's fight against terrorism.

In the shadow of the war in Lebanon, Israeli troops continue to fight on the Gaza front, which Hamas opened last month when it kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. The Israeli army launches new attacks each day into the completely isolated, poverty-stricken strip of land along the Mediterranean coast. F-16 fighter jets constantly roar across the skies above the tiny territory, which, with its 1.4 million inhabitants, is one of the world's most densely populated regions. Tanks roll through the winding streets of Palestinian refugee camps, the navy shells targets from the sea and special forces engage in house-to-house combat with the militant Palestinians of Islamic Jihad, the Al-Aqsa Brigades and, most of all, Hamas.

And almost every day, the Palestinians launch their home-made Qassam rockets at Israeli border towns like Sderot, killing Israeli civilians.

The southern front

Qassam rockets are simple do-it-yourself weapons. The parts are smuggled in from Egypt and the rockets are assembled in basements and apartments and then launched from vehicles or mobile launching pads. It's a child's game, but a deadly one at that, especially as the Palestinians are constantly improving the Qassam's range. Starting with a range of three, then eight kilometers, the Qassams are now capable of striking Ashkelon, 12 kilometers from the border and the site of one of Israel's main power plants.

About a hundred rockets fly across the border each month. That number will soon increase, at least according to a bearded young man who goes by the name Abu Their and says he is the spokesman for an Al-Aqsa Brigade fighting unit. "We have started a campaign, together with the other martyrs," says the self-proclaimed resistance fighter. "Together we will fire 1,000 rockets against the occupation -- in solidarity with Hezbollah's struggle." He sits on a plastic chair, against a backdrop of concrete walls decorated with posters of former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and the yellow flag of the Al-Aqsa Brigades, which depicts an assault rifle. "Hezbollah is defending their country," he says, "and of course we support their fight," says Abu Their, his eyes flashing.

To decisively weaken these enemies, both in northern and southern Israel, the country's most powerful ally has assured the Olmert government that it will only insist on a cease-fire once Israeli forces are able to achieve their military goals.

For US President George Bush, the war is more than just another round of fighting in the endless Middle East conflict. Instead, Bush sees Israel's battle against Hezbollah as a new front in the worldwide war on terror. Indeed, the president and his administration see the new Middle East crisis less as a threat than as an opportunity. The White House once again sees a struggle between good and evil unfolding in the Middle East, with Israel battling the powers that have blocked peace in the region. "Sometimes it requires tragic situations to help bring clarity in the international community," the US president said coolly.

This alone was reason enough for Bush to show little interest in the cease-fire proposed by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. In his view, Israel should be allowed to go about its business -- at least for the additional week the administration in Jerusalem told Washington it would need to significantly weaken Hezbollah. "The support we are receiving is exemplary," said an overjoyed Olmert advisor. As UN diplomats in New York realized last week, America has apparently abandoned once and for all its role as an honest broker in the Middle East.

Even US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a visible effort to postpone the date of her trip to the region to begin peace talks until this week.

Bush blames Syria and Iran

Bush sees constant troublemakers Syria and Iran as the driving force behind the outbreak of violence. In Washington's interpretation, the two countries have joined forces with Hamas and Hezbollah in an effort to plunge the Middle East into what President Bush calls "chaos" -- which the president interprets as a highly personal declaration of war. Indeed, Bush still clings to his dream of entering the history books, in the wake of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, as the reformer of the Middle East.

As part of this worldview, Washington has set its sights on the regime of young Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. In recent years, Assad has revealed his colors as one of Nasrallah's most ardent supporters. The ruler of Damascus will do almost anything for the head of Hezbollah. He allows the Iranian weapons that are critical to Hezbollah's success to pass through Syria. He provides Hezbollah officials with safe haven and, if necessary, comfortable living quarters in Damascus. Hezbollah fighters are even permitted to hold parades in Syrian cities, to enthusiastic applause by local residents -- the kind of applause Assad's own soldiers never receive.

Most of all, however, Bush's policies in the Middle East are currently guided by his fixation on Tehran's mullahs. On the one hand, the US president is convinced that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president and notorious Israel-hater, has sent Hezbollah into battle to prevent further escalation of the conflict over Tehran's nuclear ambitions. US government officials said last week that Tehran hopes to use the current crisis to drive up oil prices to a point where the West will think twice about imposing painful economic sanctions.

Bush also believes that the Hezbollah attacks are merely a taste of what the region can expect if the mullahs are not stopped. This is another reason Bush has given the Israelis free rein, calculating that if it does come to a military confrontation with Iran, at least Ahmadinejad will be unable to count on support from his backup troops in Lebanon. Washington says it will only support efforts to achieve a political solution to the crisis, including the deployment of UN peacekeepers, if UN Resolution 1559 is fully implemented. The Security Council resolution calls for the disarming of all Lebanese militias, including Hezbollah.

Washington seems relatively unfazed by the fact that the conflict is steadily destroying Lebanon. In April Bush, smiling broadly, promised Lebanese Prime Minister that his country would be a "shining model" for a new, democratic Middle East. The destruction, while regrettable, is unavoidable from Bush's standpoint.

The difference between Hezbollah and the PLO

But Israel's hope that it can destroy Hezbollah in Lebanon by force could prove to be illusory, even if it is fueled by memories of the country's successful ouster of the PLO in 1982. At the time, Yasser Arafat and the entire Palestinian leadership fled Beirut ahead of an Israeli invasion, traveling on five Greek ships flying the UN flag, first to Athens and then to exile in Tunisia. Although the PLO's influence in Lebanon was destroyed, the Israelis' success did not bring peace to the region by any stretch of the imagination.

But this time the prospects for success are even slimmer. Arafat was a Palestinian and therefore a foreigner in Lebanon. Hezbollah leader Nasrallah is Lebanese. "Arafat was fighting for Palestine," says Nabih Berri, the president of the Lebanese parliament and the country's highest-ranking Shiite. "Nasrallah is fighting for Lebanon." This also applies to the rest of Hezbollah's leadership and its entire combat force.

The PLO was the enemy of all Lebanese factions in that country's civil war, even fighting against Syria. Although Hezbollah was isolated for a short time after the Syrian withdrawal last year, it still has allies in Lebanon and especially in Syria.

The 1982 Israeli invasion took the PLO by surprise. Hezbollah, on the other hand, appears to have been preparing for the current war for years. It has established weapons and ammunition depots throughout the country, mainly in southern Lebanon, but also in the Bekaa Valley and in the northern Hermel region.

Hezbollah's combat strength isn't the only reason Nasrallah continued to issue defiant statements from his apparent hiding places late last week despite the large-scale Israeli bombing campaign. The Hezbollah leader's rise to prominence also reflects the self-confidence of an entire denomination whose world changed fundamentally after the 2003 Iraq war. The world's approximately 150 million Shiites, from Lucknow in India to the Biblical hills of southern Lebanon, minorities in most of the countries where they live, have since felt buoyed by current events.

As Jordan's King Abdullah II warned a year and a half ago, a nightmare scenario for Sunni Arab leaders would be the development of a "Shiite crescent" from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean, a wedge inserted between Sunni populations across the Islamic world.

The Shiite threat

A new concept of the enemy is emerging -- and not just in the West -- a concept promoted for self-serving reasons by the leaders of the major Sunni states, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, whose regimes find themselves facing challenges from extremists. The evil Shiite, carried to the grave in 1989 with the death of Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, is reemerging from the depths -- in the form of Iranian President Ahmadinejad, Iraqi Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr and now Hezbollah leader Nasrallah.

For its part, a frighteningly pragmatic Tehran is attempting to wipe aside the differences between Sunnis and Shiites, seemingly insurmountable in the past, to expand its own power even further. In addition to supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Iraq and Shiite groups in Syria, Azerbaijan and Qatar, Tehran has no trouble lending its support to Hamas, a deeply Sunni movement whose fringes overlap with al-Qaida's ideology. "There is a deep divide between Sunnis and Shiites, says Mustafa Alani of the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. "But they have one concept in common: jihad, or holy war." It's a war in which the ultimate goal is to crush the decadent West and its most powerful outpost in the Middle East: Israel.

The Jewish state certainly feels more threatened than it has been in years, which is why Israel has also been highly critical of the idea, proposed by Annan and British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the G-8 summit in St. Petersburg, of stationing a peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon. After all, UNIFIL, the current UN mission in Lebanon, has been unable to reduce the threat from Hezbollah.

Possibly the only solution acceptable to Jerusalem would be a NATO-led peacekeeping force based on the Kosovo model, a force that would be set up in a buffer zone and authorized to use its weapons to prevent attacks on Israel. But whether Beirut, which only managed to shake off the Syrian occupation last year, would agree to such a powerful foreign military presence once again is highly questionable.

To Israeli critics of operation "Just Reward," who see the war as unwarranted, this all comes as a foreboding sign. "Only a strong government would have been able to make it clear to the Israelis that the kidnapping of two soldiers isn't worth a war," said Israeli historian Tom Segev, who has been highly critical of his prime minister.

Israelis united

But aside from a few critics, Israelis have rarely been more unified. In an opinion poll conducted last Friday, 95 percent of respondents said they felt Israel's reaction to the Hezbollah abduction was correct, while 90 percent were in favor of continuing the war.

The current mood reminds many older Israelis of the country's solidarity and unity in June of 1967, when the Jewish state successfully defended its right to exist against the armies of Jordan, Egypt and Syria -- in a conventional war.

This time even pacifist writer and intellectual Amos Oz supports the Israeli military action. "Israel," says Oz, "is right in waging this war." Though well aware of the fact that many in other countries disagree, the author, winner of a German book industry peace prize, defiantly adds: "Every decent person must support this war."

Given this amount of public support, Israel even plans to expand its attacks, calling up thousands of reservists. By all indications, the Israeli military plans to attack Hezbollah in a ground offensive. The warnings Israeli officials distributed among the population of southern Lebanon triggered a widespread panic. In leaflets, radio broadcasts and text messages sent to local officials, the Israelis warned civilians to leave the region south of the Litani River as quickly as possible -- unless they planned to risk their lives.

Reported by Dieter Bednarz, Erich Follath, Siegesmund von Ilsemann, Georg Mascolo, Mathieu von Rohr, Christoph Schult, Daniel Steinvorth, Volkhard Windfuhr and Bernhard Zand.

Translated from German by Christopher Sultan