Israel's surge of despair

Feb. 15, 2007 | Hezbollah operatives plant explosives along the disputed border area between Lebanon and Israel. The Israeli military moves in and destroys them. Israeli and Lebanese forces engage in sporadic gun battles.

It may sound like the prelude to the war waged last summer between the Israeli military and Hezbollah, but it happened just last week. Tensions are running high along the Israel-Lebanon border again, and political and intelligence analysts are predicting another major flare-up of hostilities this spring or summer, or perhaps even sooner. According to Israeli military intelligence, Hezbollah remains firmly rooted in Lebanon and has successfully rearmed -- the Iranian-backed Shiite militia now has even more missiles than it had before last summer's war. To many Israelis, it seems as if that war, and the destruction it brought, were all for nothing.

The level of gloom inside the Israeli government is accompanied by a creeping sense of paralysis -- one that could be dangerous not just for Israel, but for U.S. interests in the region, and for the Middle East as a whole. A recent conversation with a senior member of Israel's diplomatic corps -- someone with extensive experience in Israel's foreign policy establishment -- left me stunned by the degree of negativity. I have known him personally for several years and have never seen him so down on the country's prospects. "We lost the war," he told me, regarding last summer's conflict. "We all know that," he continued, adding that the failure against Hezbollah is the "core reason" for the deepening pessimism inside the government. This contrasts sharply, of course, with the official government line. As recently as Feb. 1, speaking to an Israeli commission investigating the war effort, Prime Minister Olmert, according to his aides, insisted once again that "Israel won the war."

The senior Israeli diplomat in part blamed Olmert's politics. "Do you know why we lost? Because soldiers don't want to die for these leaders. Who wants to die for Amir Peretz?" he said, referring to the Israeli defense minister, whose qualifications for the job have been called into question. Peretz, the leader of the Labor Party, but who had no real security or defense credentials, was appointed by Olmert last year to ensure the Labor Party's involvement in Olmert's coalition government.

Every year, an influential assessment of the security situation in the Middle East is published by Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center, one of Israel's premier think tanks. This year's assessment, published in January, was not only bleak, but also openly critical of U.S. policy. "The threats to Middle East security and stability worsened in 2006," the assessment announced, because "the American failure in Iraq has hurt the standing of the U.S. in the Middle East." It went on to state essentially that American actions in the Middle East over the past few years have harmed Israeli security. It also argued that the United States should withdraw from Iraq in the near term, rather than add more troops, as Bush's surge plan is now doing. As one of its authors, Mark A. Heller, explained after the report was published, "There is no Israeli interest being served by a continued American presence in Iraq."

These sobering conclusions might provide a jolt to those in the United States -- whether American Jews or conservative evangelicals -- who have supported the Bush administration's policies in part because they were supposedly intended to help Israel.

While the U.S. and Israel clearly are united in the goal of stopping Iran from gaining nuclear weapons, some Israeli leaders have lost confidence in Bush's leadership when it comes to that crucial concern. In the aftermath of the release of the assessment, Uzi Arad, the former director of intelligence at the Mossad, added, "With American attention so much focused on Iraq, it comes at the expense of its ability to blunt the slow Iranian progression toward nuclear capability." Last week, I raised these assessments with Eitan, himself a former spymaster who led the Israeli capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1960, and who was the handler of the infamous spy Jonathan Pollard in the 1980s. "Sooner or later, a year or two, America will go out from Iraq," Eitan said. "Iran will unite with the Shiites of Iraq -- with or without force -- and then with the Shiites of Syria. Is this good for Israel? No, it is bad for Israel."