Moshe Yaalon- Former IDF Chief of Staff

We are beginning a 7-part series by Moshe Yaalon, former IDF Chief of Staff. Having had a personal conversation with General Yaalon, he granted us permission to offer this series on our blog. We thank him and the Jerusalem Center for Public affairs for allowing us to re-post this crucial message.


The Second Lebanon War: From Territory to Ideology

By Moshe Yaalon

2007
Part One

Introduction
If there remains doubt over the underlying reasons for the ongoing violence in the Middle East, the Second Lebanon War is one of the clearest illustrations in many years that "the Middle East conflict" does not stem from Israel's "occupation of Arab or Palestinian lands." This longstanding "root cause" argument has been popular in many international circles and even among some quarters in Israel. The strategic assumption has been that, since 1967, the Middle East's myriad problems can be traced to Israel's "occupation" of lands from which the Jewish state was attacked: the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and southern Lebanon.
But the summer 2006 wars – that included 4,228 Iranian- and Syrian-sponsored rocket assaults against Israel's home front and the kidnapping of one IDF soldier by Hamas and two IDF soldiers by Hizbullah – is perhaps the most recent evidence that this argument continues to be fundamentally flawed. The two-front war opened against Israel in 2006 – firstbyHamasfromGazaonJune26, 2006, and then by Hizbullah across Israel's northern border on July 12, 2006 – was launched from lands that are not under Israeli occupation. Israel had withdrawn unilaterally in both cases, from Gaza in September 2005 and previously from southern Lebanon in May 2000. Furthermore, the assessment that Hizbullah's assaults stemmed from unresolved border disputes over the Shaba Farms is unfounded. Lebanon's Hizbullah as well as Syrian claimants deny Israel's existence as a Jewish sovereign state within any borders.
In fact, the summer 2006 assaults against Israel are not remarkable in their lacking any clear territorial pretext. Since the 1920s there has been an unrelenting Arab Muslim rejection of any Jewish sovereign entity in the Middle East region, despite the international popularity of the notion in recent years that ending Israel's presence in the West Bank and Gaza and solving Palestinian refugee and border conflicts would spawn regional peace and stability. Quite remarkably, on September 19, 2006, only a month after the UN-brokered cease-fire ended Iran's two-front proxy assault against Israel via radical Islamic groups (Hamas and Hizbullah), UN Secretary General Kofi Annan told the General Assembly at the opening of its 61st session: "As long as the Security Council is unable to resolve the nearly 40-year (Israeli) occupation and confiscation of Arab land, so long will the UN's effort store solve other conflicts be resisted including those in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Notwithstanding Annan's fundamental misassessment, there are clearly different "root causes" that have been and currently are the main obstacles to Middle East peace and stability – namely, a regional Jihad led by Iran, enabled by Syria and the radical Islamists that both states sponsor. In fact, according to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khomeini and Iran's Syrian partners, the Second Lebanon War launched by Iran's Hizbullah proxy was a hostile probe of U.S. reflexes via the engagement of Israel, which for Iran and Syria is a direct extension of Washington's power and influence in the Middle East. To be sure, the Second Lebanon War was not launched against Israel for any specific national grievance.
In fact, Iran's goals in the Lebanon theatre go well beyond destroying Israel. Iran and Syria have for years used Hizbullah as a terrorist arm of their respective foreign policies against Western regional interests. Hizbullah's 1983 suicide attack that killed 241 U.S. Marines near Beirut is one example. Its 1985 hijacking in Beirut of TWA Flight 847 and murder of a U.S. Navy diver is another. The 1996 attack by Hizbullah's Saudi branch, Hizbullah al-Hejaz, on behalf of the Iranians that killed 19 U.S. Army personnel at Saudi Arabia's Khobar Towers is yet another case.
The Iran-Syrian-Hizbullah axis then is a partnership whose fundamental objective is to project Iranian power and influence across there going from Tehran, through Baghdad, via Damascus into Lebanon in order to achieve regional hegemony. Iran's offensive on two fronts, against both U.S. and Iraqi government forces in Iraq as well as against Israel, a key U.S. ally, reflects Tehran's strategic interest in neutering America's regional influence as a prelude to defeating the West. Syria, Iran's Arab ally and regional facilitator, has hitched its future to Ahmadinejad's strategy of becoming the region's hegemonic power under the protection of a nuclear umbrella as it marches toward a possible nuclear confrontation with the U.S. and the West.
The more the United States and it allies hesitate to confront Iran's current regional threat under a possible nuclear umbrella, the more emboldened Jihadi confidence becomes. The December 6, 2006, Iraq Study Group (Baker-Hamilton) Report proposal recommending a "softer" diplomatic approach via a U.S.-led diplomatic engagement of Iran and Syria, and Israel's reengagement of the Assad regime and the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, may paradoxically accelerate the process to military confrontation with Iran. Rather, full diplomatic and economic isolation, and, if necessary, military defeat of Iran and Syria, would pave a more secure road for the Middle East and the international state system.