The Sixth War Israel's Invasion of Lebanon
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FOUNDER/EDITOR Maha Yahya BOARD OF ADVISORS Philip Khoury, MIT, Chair Lila Abu Lughod, Columbia University Nezar al Sayyad, UC Berkeley Sibel Bozdogan, BAC Leila Fawaz, Tufts University Michael J. Fischer, MIT Timothy Mitchell, NYU A.R. Norton, Boston University http://web.mit.edu/cis/www/mitejmes/ Roger Owen, Harvard University Ilan Pappe, Haifa University Elisabeth Picard, Aix en Provence William Quandt, UVA Nasser Rabbat, MIT Edward Said (1935 -2003) Ghassan Salame, Institut d'Etudes Politiques Ella Shohat, NYU Susan Slyomovics, MIT Lawrence Vale, MIT BOARD OF EDITORS Amer Bisat, Rubicon Amal Ghazal, Dalhousie University Nadia Abu el Haj, Barnard Jens Hanssen, University of Toronto Bernard Haykel, New York University Paul Kingston, University of Toronto Sherif Lotfi, Ernst & Young Joseph Massad, Columbia University James MacDougall, Princeton University Panayiota Pyla, U of Illinois Champagne Oren Yiftachel, Ben Gurion REVIEW EDITORS OTTOMAN HISTORY James Grehan, Portland State University ART AND CULTURE Kirstin Scheid, American University of Beirut CONTEMPORARY HISTORY/POLITICS Michael Gasper, Yale University ARCHITECTURE CULTURE Brian Mclaren University of Washington GRAPHIC DESIGNER: Rana Yahya THE SIXTH WAR ISRAEL’S INVASION OF LEBANON EDITORS Reinoud Leenders Amal Ghazal Jens Hanssen INTRODUCTION 6 ISRAEL’S 2006 WAR ON LEBANON: REFLECTIONS ON THE INTERNATIONAL LAW OF FORCE Karim Makdisi 9 WILL WE WIN? CONVERGENCE AND ISRAEL’S LATEST LEBANON WAR Robert Blecher 27 HOW THE REBEL REGAINED HIS CAUSE HIZBULLAH & THE SIXTH ARAB-ISRAELI WAR Reinoud Leenders 38 THE REFUGEES WHO GIVE REFUGE Laleh Khalili 57 HIZBULLAH AND THE IDF: ACCEPTING NEW REALITIES ALONG THE BLUE LINE Nicholas Blanford 68 THE PEACEKEEPING CHALLENGE IN LEBANON Augustus Richard Norton 76 POLITICS AND BUSINESS, STATE AND CITIZENRY: PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS ON THE RESPONSE TO LEBANON’S HUMANITARIAN CRISIS Jim Quilty 80 THE OUTLOOK FOR ECONOMIC RECONSTRUCTION IN LEBANON AFTER THE 2006 WAR Bassam Fattouh and Joachim Kolb 96 DECONSTRUCTING A “HIZBULLAH STRONGHOLD” Lara Deeb 115 Vol. 6, Summer 2006, © 2006 The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies 4 MEDIA IS THE CONTINUATION OF WAR WITH OTHER MEANS: THE NEW YORK TIMES’ COVERAGE OF THE ISRAELI WAR ON LEBANON Yasser Munif 126 GREAT EXPECTATIONS, LIMITED MEANS: FRANCE AND THE 2006 ISRAELI-LEBANESE WAR Elizabeth Picard 141 ISRAEL IN LEBANON: THE FOREIGN POLICY LOGICS OF JEWISH STATEHOOD Virginia Tilley 152 SIZE DOES NOT MATTER: THE SHEBAA FARMS IN HISTORY AND CONTEMPORARY POLITICS Asher Kaufman 163 EXPORTING DEATH AS DEMOCRACY: AN ESSAY ON U.S. FOREIGN POLICY IN LEBANON Irene Gendzier 177 REVIEWS REVIEW ESSAYS Lebanon’s Political Economy: After Syria, an Economic Ta’if? Reviewed by Reinoud Leenders 188 Hizbullah: Iranian Surrogate or Independent Actor? Reviewed by Rola el-Husseini 204 Making Sense of Al Qaeda Review Essay by John A. McCurdy 210 BOOK REVIEWS David Cook Understanding Jihad Reviewed by Amir Asmar 221 Fawaz A. Gerges The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global Reviewed by Mohamed Yousry 224 Vol. 6, Summer 2006, © 2006 The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies 5 Paul A. Silverstein Algeria in France. Transpolitics, Race, and Nation Reviewed by Margaret A. Majumdar 227 Lisa Pollard Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing and Liberating Egypt, 1805-1923 Reviewed by Omnia El Shakry 229 http://web.mit.edu/cis/www/mitejmes/ 6 Reinoud Leenders* Amal Ghazal† Jens Hanssen‡ On 12 July 2006, Hizbullah fighters kidnapped two Israeli soldiers and Hizbullah leadership asked Israel for an exchange of prisoners. Instead of a proposal for negotiation – what Hizbullah leadership had expected – Israel delivered a morning raid on Hariri International Airport in Beirut the next day , followed in the afternoon by a raid on the Beirut-Damascus Highway. The raids, while initially partially damaging their targets, were equally symbolic: Israel had started a full-scale war on Lebanon, its infrastructure and its complex web of national and regional relationships and networks. The war lasted for 34 days, leaving behind not another “New Middle East”, as the American administration had hoped, but an even more volatile Middle East. Between the declarations of a “Truthful Promise” of 12 July and that of “Divine Victory” on 22 September, the war bore no “birth pangs” but “bangs” of persistent and interconnected conflicts. Thus, our choice of “The Sixth War” as title for this emergency issue is not a mere imitation of al-Jazeera’s description of the latest war between Israel and Lebanon. The editors of this issue are convinced that, in both context and intensity, what happened between 12 July and 14 August 2006 (the formal end to hostilities) and 7 September (the end of Israel’s military blockade of Lebanon) should appropriately be analyzed and understood as a sequence to and a consequence of previous wars between Israel and its neighboring countries. Like most of Israel’s previous wars, this was a war of choice passed off as a struggle for existence. The G8 meeting in St. Petersberg, which coincided with the outbreak of the war, appeased Israel and offered a diplomatic carte blanche on virtually all its military operations. While there has been no shortage of media commentary and analytical essays that have tried to make sense of this war, we believe that this MIT-EJMES emergency issue was needed for two main reasons. First, it overcomes the superficiality and short-attention span that has characterized much of the war’s print and television coverage in the media. There have been free-lance journalists who braved Israeli aerial bombardments to break the silence on the dozens of ‘Guernicas’ across southern Lebanon. Where their stories made it into mainstream media they were mere fig leaves to embellish the bare, one-sided structure of news. Likewise, anti-American and anti-Israeli polemics simplify the complexity of the origins, causes and consequences of this war, let alone its day-to-day operational aspects. Second, during the course of the war and thereafter, it became clear to us that the actions, statements and decisions made by various parties involved or engaged in the war were going to have long-lasting implications on several countries of the Middle East, on the United States’ image in the Arab and Muslim world and future dynamics of the “War on Terror”. Putting those actions, statements and decisions under the microscope of independent professional analysts – long-term resident journalists, historians, political scientists and social anthropologists of * Reinoud Leenders is Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Amsterdam and was formerly a Middle East analyst for the International Crisis Group based in Beirut. † Amal Ghazal is Assistant Professor of history at Dalhousie University. ‡ Jens Hanssen is Assistant Professor of history at the Unversity of Toronto. Vol. 6, Summer 2006, © 2006 The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies 7 Lebanon and the Middle East – avoids the multiple refractions in imperial policy- making and media coverage. Our emergency issue aims at putting together a range of analytical essays, grounded in thorough empirical and conceptually sound research and tackling different facets of the war, in one volume made universally accessible online to interested readership around the world. A number of journalists and scholars, young and of older generations alike, based in the region and abroad, trained in various academic disciplines and Middle Eastern languages, were invited to draw on their intimate knowledge and research experience to present their analyses of the “Sixth War”. As Karim Makdisi demonstrates in this volume, Israel’s casus belli was an extremely weak one indeed, and strongly suggests other motives originating in both Israeli and U.S. government designs for the Middle East region that has pushed the latter into turmoil. In a subsequent article, Robert Blecher sheds light on some of these policies and rationales by reading Israeli perspectives. Reinoud Leenders explores in his contribution the circumstances that helped frame Hizbullah’s thinking and actions, while investigating how the war affected the ways in which Hizbullah views and presents itself in relation to Lebanon and the region at large. The outbreak of this war is closely tied to the still unresolved Israeli- Palestinian conflict, and the long-term effects of continuous Israeli expulsion of Palestinians from their land. Laleh Khalili focuses on the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and the degree to which the latest war and its underlying conflicts brought Lebanese Shiites and Palestinian refugees in Lebanon closer together. At a time when over a quarter of the Lebanese population became internally displaced by Israeli aerial bombardment the striking image of “refugees granting refuge” conjures up both the tragic longevity of Arab suffering and the remarkable humanity within it. Nicholas Blanford and Augustus Richard Norton each separately analyze the military and strategic dimensions of the veracious clash between Israeli armed forces and Hizbullah’s fighters. The two parties’ confrontation caused a shocking level of human suffering, which, in turn, prompted a humanitarian response in Lebanon, analyzed by Jim Quilty. Now the dust has settled of at least this phase of the war, Lebanon is once again left counting its losses and initiating efforts toward “post-war” recovery from a conflict that, given its enduring root causes, is likely to flare up again. Bassam Fattouh and Joachim Kolb examine the costs of the war for Lebanon and the vast challenges facing reconstruction, primarily in terms of this country’s shattered economy. In her article, Lara Deeb critically explores the Israeli justification for its assault and its pick of “strategic” targets in Lebanon; mostly of a pure civilian nature and often entirely unrelated to Hizbullah’s military operations. Subsequent articles focus on third parties or “external” actors, who, in fact, more often than not constitute an intrinsic part of the conflict. Yasser Munif forcefully demonstrates how in the current martial atmosphere media accounts are – subverting Clausewitz – a continuation of war by other means.