Untenable choices, courtesy of Hizbullah
In the early days of this war on Hizbullah, I wrote the kind of letter to the editor that flows so easily off the fingertips of pro-Israel activists these days. I declared that Israel is facing a deadly enemy that has no compunctions about striking at Israel’s civilian population. That no country would countenance such attacks. That Israel is doing everything it can to avoid the deaths of Lebanese civilians. And that if Hizbullah has been unsuccessful in killing more Israelis, it’s not for want of trying.
That was the easy part. In fact, while the target of my letter may have been critical of Israel, the weight of editorial opinion in this country was actually on the side of those of us who fully believe that Israel has a right and necessity to wage war on the terrorists to its north.
Two weeks later, mine seems an oddly hollow victory since it does nothing to change the fact that, for all of the justness of Israel’s war, it has so far accomplished so little. While pro-Israel activists have been tilting at the usual crowd of anti-Israel critics (and often ignoring the wide support Israel enjoyed in the early days of the war), the war itself has gone terribly wrong for Israel.
You can gauge the turning of the tide even in places that are reliably pro-Israel, such as the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal. On Monday the paper carried an op-ed by one of its editors, Bret Stephens, laying out in excruciating detail the opportunities he thinks Israel has squandered in the first 21 days of the fighting.
“So far,” Stephens writes, “Israel has nothing to show for its efforts: no enemy territory gained, no enemy leaders killed, no abatement in the missile barrage that has sent a million Israelis from their homes and workplaces.”
Stephens, the former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post, blames a “string of intelligence failures” and, most pointedly, “a military and political strategy that mistakenly assumes that Israel can take its time against Hezbollah.” Almost since the start of the war, Stephens has supported a full-scale ground invasion, fast and merciless.
The lead editorial in the same issue of the Journal also picked up on the rhetoric of defeat. The IDF, according to the editorial, “clearly underestimated Hezbollah’s capabilities and overestimated their [own] ability to degrade them from the air.”
Nevertheless, the Journal opposes a “premature” cease-fire, saying that it would send a message to Iran, Syria, and the rest of the Muslim world that America and Israel are not up to the fight on terror. The editorial, like Stephens, wants Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to “finish the job he started.”
It’s frightening as hell when one of the most reliably pro-Israel editorial pages in the country allows talk of the fallibility of Israel’s leadership in a time of war. But among right-wing pro-Israel activists, the Journal wins a bye for its general support of Jerusalem’s positions in normal times (and for refusing talk of a cease-fire, which a good many activists view as cowardly and self-defeating).
A question for the entire Jewish community, however, is whether we — hawks, doves, moderates, you name it — are willing to tolerate advice from other news outlets that don’t take a reliably right-wing line on Israel, or that see signs of Israeli missteps and conclude that perhaps it is time for a cease-fire. For example, the Journal’s uptown rival, The New York Times, looks at the same worrisome evidence on the ground and concludes that a full cease-fire is necessary “while the United Nations Security Council works to create an international armed force to secure Lebanon’s border.” The Times sees Hizbullah, Syria, and Iran gaining “huge propaganda gains” not from a cessation of hostilities, but rather from a lengthy Israeli offensive that would undoubtedly leave more dead civilians in its televised wake.
In essence, these two powerful newspapers are offering a choice between two irreconcilable and untenable choices (not that either editorial page represents the pinnacle of thinking on the Middle East, but they do neatly distill the essence of the mainstream divide on these and other issues).
The challenge to Israel’s supporters boils down to this: Are we prepared to support an extension of this war that is bound to result in the deaths of many more Lebanese civilians and Israeli soldiers, in pursuit of an illusive victory? Or will we support a cease-fire that risks leaving Hizbullah triumphant and Israel humiliated, its vaunted deterrence in tatters? The despicable genius of Hizbullah is that they have dragged all of us down to their level, where “honor” is more highly valued that humanity, and where progress can only be measured in stacks of corpses.
I don’t remember a choice as terrible as this in the 25 years that I have paid close attention to Israel — not during the first Lebanon War, or the First Intifada, or the Al Aqsa reprise. Nothing is helping make my decision any easier — no lesson from history, no ideological dialectic, no front-line analysis from one of Israel’s famed military experts. In all these years that I have cared deeply for Israel, I have been scared, angry, depressed, and frustrated. But I have never been paralyzed.
Of course, I have no “decision” to make; that decision rests alone with Israel’s cabinet, which as of this writing has decided to go ahead with a ground invasion and to extend the war for as long as it takes. I will defend Israel, whatever the outcome, and will do so with sincerity and conviction. Yet I have spent these grim weeks envying the pundits and activists who rarely seem torn by self-doubt and for whom the path in the Middle East seems clear-cut. I pray that my path — our path — gets easier.
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