Financial Times Editorial - Reckless adventure

Financial Times Editorial - Reckless adventure
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Published: August 18 2006 03:00 | Last updated: August 18 2006 03:00
Israel's Lebanon war was fought on the simple, if flawed, assumption that punishing a country for the actions of Hizbollah would inevitably turn the population against the Shia militia.

Four weeks of fighting and a ceasefire later, however, it is the Israeli government that is facing a political backlash while Hizbollah appears to have been emboldened.

Opinion polls published this week show a dramatic fall in the popularity of Ehud Olmert, prime minister, with approval ratings of only 40 per cent, compared with 78 per cent at the height of the war. Amir Peretz, defence minister, is in even deeper trouble, with 57 per cent of respondents to the same poll in the Maariv newspaper saying he should resign.

Lacking military experience in a country traditionally led by warriors, Israel's top leaders were driven to a military overreaction that has proved a costly miscalculation. In spite of years of intelligence warnings about Hizbollah's capabilities, they underestimated the strength of an elusive and well-trained guerrilla force. And they deluded themselves into believing that weeks of death and destruction in Lebanon would convince people, particularly in the Shia community, to reject a militant group that is also a deeply entrenched political movement.

Strangely, the government ignored Israel's past experience in Lebanon: the 1982 invasion that led to the creation of Hizbollah as a resistance force, to the 1996 offensive that had tried and failed to crush the militia.

Instead of reinforcing Israel's strategic deterrence, the Lebanon war has allowed Hizbollah to claim victory and bolstered its already heroic status in the Arab world. The outcome of the war may well allow Hizbollah's backers in Syria and Iran to expand their influence in the region, and further undermine the Middle East's more pro-western regimes.

Israel can claim some comfort from a United Nations-brokered ceasefire resolution that will create a 20km buffer zone in southern Lebanon, where the Lebanese army has started deploying and should soon be joined by international peacekeepers. Whether this progress produces a lasting ceasefire, however, is far from clear. Hizbollah is likely to retain its rockets and it claims to have worked out a deal with the Beirut government allowing it to simply keep weapons off the streets.

With Israeli troops fighting in the Gaza Strip a year after their withdrawal, and drawn back into south Lebanon, which they left only in 2000, domestic support for the strategy of unilateral withdrawals espoused by Mr Olmert looks severely damaged. The alternative, however, is not to erect more walls and rely on heavier military force. Israel's security can only be achieved through an end to occupation in a just peace settlement with Palestinians, and a comprehensive peace with the rest of the Arab world.