GAZA, July 12 – The expansion of the Gaza crisis
into southern Lebanon, confronting Israel with a
conflict on its northern and southern borders,
has demonstrated that the central issue at stake is regional, not local.
For Israel the issue is not simply the
Palestinians and their actions, including the
rocket fire into Israel. It is the broader
problem of radical Islam – of Hamas, as a part of
the regional Muslim Brotherhood, and of Iran, a
serious regional power with considerable
influence on Syria, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and the military wing of Hamas.
While Israel and the United States still hope
that Hamas, which is a largely homegrown
Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood,
will respond to the responsibilities of elected
leadership and moderate its rejection of Israel
to bring a better life to its people, they have no such hopes for Iran.
Iran’s president has famously denied the
Holocaust and made countless provocative
statements about Israel. But even before his
election, Iran committed itself to undermining
any prospect of real peace between Israel and the
Palestinians through proxy forces like Hezbollah
in southern Lebanon and the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad.
Iran is also considered to be the main sponsor of
Khaled Meshal, the exiled Palestinian leader of
Hamas’s political bureau and the man widely
considered to be in charge of Hamas’s secretive
military wing – which was instrumental in
carrying out the seizure of Cpl. Gilad Shalit,
touching off the latest explosion.
That seizure came as the Hamas government, led by
Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, was finishing
negotiations with the more moderate Palestinian
Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, on a
political document that might have allowed the
renewal of negotiations with Israel.
On June 22, only three days before Corporal
Shalit was abducted, Mr. Abbas and the Israeli
prime minister, Ehud Olmert, were hugging and
kissing each other, however reluctantly, at a
breakfast whose hosts were King Abdullah II of
Jordan and Elie Wiesel, a Nobel laureate. There,
the two leaders promised to meet in two weeks,
and both have said since that Mr. Olmert promised
an important release of Palestinian prisoners to celebrate a new relationship.
But the soldier crisis has drowned that
initiative, as it has drowned the internal
Palestinian negotiations and reduced Mr. Haniya
and Mr. Abbas, at least for the moment, to near
irrelevance. It has bolstered the power of Mr. Meshal and the militants.
The tactics of the raid into Israel, through a
tunnel, to capture a soldier for a bargaining
chip, come straight out of the playbook of
Hezbollah, which has successfully negotiated
prisoner exchanges with Israel in the past. While
Mr. Olmert says he wants to change the equation
by refusing to negotiate, Hezbollah proved
Wednesday with its border raid and seizure of
Israeli soldiers that it had refined its tactics.
So there is considerable speculation among
Israelis and Palestinians about whether Hezbollah
and Mr. Meshal, and through him the Hamas
military wing, coordinated the manner and timing
of the raid to capture the corporal or whether,
ultimately, the decision was Iran’s.
An Arab intelligence officer working in a country
neighboring Israel said it appeared that Iran –
through Hezbollah – had given support to Mr.
Meshal to stage the seizure of Corporal Shalit.
The officer said the Shalit case, even before the
capture of two more Israeli soldiers, amounted to
Hezbollah and Iran sending a message: “If you
want to hurt us, there are tools that we have and that we can use against you.”
Israeli intelligence officers and analysts say
they believe that the message is primarily
Iran’s, acting through Hezbollah and Mr. Meshal.
Itamar Rabinovich, former Israeli ambassador to
Washington and chief negotiator with Syria on a
peace treaty that never quite materialized, sees
Iran “on a roll, looking for regional hegemony.”
Even without nuclear weapons, Iran is acquiring
considerable influence in Lebanon, in Syria and
with the Palestinians, not to speak of Iraq.
“It can directly operate Hezbollah in southern
Lebanon through Syria, and with Hamas and Islamic
Jihad in the territories it can detonate the
situation whenever it wants,” Mr. Rabinovich said.
On a more local level, Israeli officials complain
regularly of what they call the Palestinians’
inability to take responsibility for their own
welfare and for policing themselves and, particularly, the militant groups.
Palestinians regularly complain that Israel has
made it impossible to exercise authority under
conditions of occupation, even in the Gaza Strip,
where Israel controls the borders, seacoast and
airspace. They also insist that as long as Israel
occupies the West Bank and intends to keep a
portion of land it took in the 1967 Arab-Israeli
war, the Palestinians must continue to fight for a just settlement.
The loss of confidence on both sides is extreme,
which is why Mr. Olmert has decided that Israel
must act to control its own security in Gaza and
not expect Egypt or the Palestinians – especially
not Hamas – to do it for them, suggests Gerald M.
Steinberg of Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv.
“Israel is in a long-term operation to reassert
security control,” Mr. Steinberg said. Mr. Olmert
must try to stop the firing of Qassam rockets on
Israel and the smuggling of weapons and expertise
from Egypt if he hopes to carry through his plan
to pull up to 70,000 Israeli settlers out of the West Bank.
In Gaza itself, Mr. Steinberg suggests, Israel is
in a bind. Some want to ensure that the Hamas
leadership, with its ties to the Muslim
Brotherhood, Syria and Iran, does not become entrenched in power.
Others want to try to split or moderate Hamas,
saying that if Hamas and the Palestinian
Authority are destroyed, the result could be a
chaos of gangs, clans and global terrorism that
would be harder to deal with than the Hamas government.
“It’s a tough decision, and I don’t think the
government has decided yet,” Mr. Steinberg said.
But the events in Lebanon are likely to make Mr.
Olmert’s choices even more complicated.