After Lebanon: Peace process or war?
By Gwynne Dyer
LONDON (JP): "I thought of leaving," said Gen. Antoine Lahad, commander of the Israeli-controlled South Lebanese Army (SLA), last month. "But I am staying there no matter how bad it gets ...Just like you (Jews) at Masada, we will fight to the last." Well, not exactly.
When Israel began pulling out of its "security zone" in southern Lebanon recently after 22 years of occupation, the SLA disintegrated in days.
Gen. Lahad was last spotted sipping Coke alone, except for a bodyguard, in a cafe in northern Israel. By last Wednesday, the Hizbollah guerrillas whose attacks finally forced an Israeli withdrawal (over 200 Israeli troops and 652 SLA men killed since 1985) were firing celebratory bursts into the air a stone's throw from Israel's northern border -- and everybody tensed for the next act in the drama.
"Lebanon today, Palestine tomorrow", read the placards carried by jubilant Palestinian demonstrators in the Gaza Strip. "In the Arab world, more and more people are saying that the only language Israel understands is the language of force," wrote leading Israeli military analyst Ze'ev Schiff in the paper Ha'aretz. And there is some truth in that.
Just as the Palestinian "intifada" of the early 1990s finally made Israel start negotiating with Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), so the hemorrhage of casualties finally forced Israel to pull out of Lebanon.
The question therefore arises naturally in the minds of Arabs who still have unfinished business with Israel: does the retreat from Lebanon mean that Israel is now ready to make deals that they can live with, or does it mean that more force needs to be applied first?
Not too much should be made of the chaotic final stages of the Israeli pull-out from Lebanon. Israel suffers from the same popular aversion to military casualties that now affects every country with well-developed mass media, but it could still pay the price in lives if Israelis thought their national survival was at stake (as it certainly was not in Lebanon).
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak may be embarrassed at the moment, but he has actually kept his electoral promise to evacuate Lebanon by July. His next deadline is Sept. 13, when he must conclude the final status' agreement that defines the borders and powers of a Palestinian state in the territories that Israel has occupied since the 1967 war.
This is not as hopeless a project as it would seem from recent outburst of frustrated violence by young Palestinians in the West Bank, and the lunatic threat by Gen. Shlomo Oren, head of Israeli security on the West Bank, to attack Yasser Arafat's headquarters with Cobra helicopter gunships if he did not call the demonstrators off.
According to the last opinion poll, 71 percent of Palestinians still support the peace process, though only 13 percent think that Barak can deliver an agreement.
Their doubts are understandable, since Barak's popularity with the Israeli electorate has fallen below 40 percent, but press leaks suggest that the deal on offer may be more acceptable to Palestinians than was previously assumed: 90 percent of the West Bank, and not just two-thirds.
That deal could still be sold to Israelis -- if they are convinced that peace and security will really be the result. But that now depends critically on whether there is peace on Israel's northern borders for the next six to 12 months.
That choice lies in the hands of Syria's ailing President Hafiz Assad. Through his control of Hizbollah's supply lines, he has a big say in whether there is peace or war on Israel's northern frontier -- and it comes down, in the end, to two insignificant patches of land.
One is a stretch of shoreline about six miles (10 kilometers) long and 100 yards (100 meters) deep at the north-eastern corner of the Sea of Galilee, from which Israel draws almost half of its fresh water.
The other is some 40 square miles (100 square kilometers) of land at the foot of the Golan Heights known as Sheba'a Farms, now the site of Israel's only ski resort and home to a large number of resettled Ethiopian Jews.
The Galilee shoreline, where Assad swam as a child, was the stumbling block that killed an Israeli-Syrian peace deal last January. It was all Syrian land until June 5, 1967, and it should have gone back to Syria with the rest of the Golan Heights as part of the deal, but Barak held it back because many Israelis feared that Syria might pollute the lake or steal the water or something.
The Sheba'a Farms block of land was also captured from Syria in June 1967, but both Syria and Lebanon now insist that it belongs to the latter, and must be evacuated as part of Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon.
If not, according to Hizbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, then the guerrillas will be obliged to continue their attacks on Israeli troops.
That would give Assad "leverage" against Israel, since only he can call Hizbollah off. But it would also kill not only the chance of an Israeli-Syrian peace treaty, but even the somewhat brighter prospect of a "final settlement" between Israel and the PLO this year.
If the above arguments seem so petty that they verge on surreal, that's because they are. You cannot expect rationality to rule in a region that has been at war for over 50 years.
A comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace is practically inevitable sooner or later, because the Israelis are too powerful, and the Arabs too numerous, for any more dramatic outcome to be possible. It would not be a just peace, and everybody involved would hate it, but it could even be made to last. It may still be within reach this year. But it could be war instead.