Israel and Lebanon: a long and bitter entanglement

Steinberg also says the belief of some historians that Israel's presence led to the creation of Hizbullah, and that it will now contribute to further radicalization, is incorrect.

"The main similarity is Lebanon was then, and is now, a very weak state, so it provides an arena for terrorist groups to operate against Israel ... My view is that if Israel hadn't invaded, we probably would have seen a group like Hizbullah emerge because all of the other factors were there."

Mr. White disagrees, and says he's concerned that open-ended conflict will not only win Hizbullah more support, but runs the risk of energizing Sunni as well as Shiite radicals inside the country. The sprawling Ein Helwah Palestinian refugee camp near Beirut, for instance, has become a breeding ground for Sunni jihadis seeking to fight the US in Iraq, and there are also disgruntled Sunni communities in the north of the country, and in southern cities like Tyre.

White says the logic of Israel's incursion is likely to pull them ever deeper into the country, as in 1982, and that in doing so, they're likely to create new recruits to radical causes.

"In north Lebanon for 30 to 40 years, there has been a Sunni militant tendency centered in Tripoli. This militancy has grown significantly and it has been fueled by guys who have gone and participated in the jihad in Iraq," he says. "This move could also reenergize those huge Palestinian communities in Tyre and Sidon to become jihadis and join the fight."

He also argues that the relative weakness of Syria this time around ironically works against Israel's interests since Syria, a secular Baathist regime, has reasons of its own to fear Islamist militants.

"When Syria was there it was possible to do stuff if it chose to play ball," he says."In the late 1980s Amal and Hizbullah were duking it out and the Syrians were backing Amal, a more secular Shiite option than the Iranian-backed Hizbullah. So the Syrians sent an infantry company out to a neighborhood where they knew a house was being held by Hizbullah, woke up some sleepy militiamen and then machine-gunned them up against the wall. That got people's attention. They can't do that anymore."

The religious differences between Sunnis and Shiites had kept Sunni radicals largely quiet about the current conflict. But on Thursday, Al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri released a video tape to Al Jazeera in which he vowed his organization would fight alongside Hizbullah and Hamas.

Mouin Rabbani, a senior Middle East analyst for the International Crisis Group, says he's alarmed by the prospect that Israel may pursue the same strategy it has deployed in Gaza to box in Hamas, the militant party elected to power there early this year, and says the best course in Lebanon now would be a cease-fire. He argues that an open-ended assault on Hizbullah could destabilize Lebanon further and perhaps drive it back into civil war.

While Israel's conflict with Hizbullah needs to be treated separately from its fight with Hamas, the ongoing strategy has been far from a recipe for peace and security, he says. Instead, Hamas, which has been internationally isolated since it won power, he says, is being made more committed to violent confrontation.

After continued shelling of Gaza by Israel this summer, Hamas renounced its unilateral cease-fire on June 9, and kidnapped an Israeli soldier last month, beginning this two-front confrontation.

"Political integration and democratic politics were and remain for Hamas an experiment," Mr. Rabbani says. "It was based on the premise that they could achieve more of their objectives through pursuit of political power than through militant opposition ... now their message is let us govern or watch us fight."

The lesson of Israel's approach in both cases is not a positive one, he argues. "Both of these crises demonstrate that unilateralism based on superior power and based on seeking to resolve problems by refusing to acknowledge even the existence of a partner [but] based rather on the concept that Israel has sufficiently overwhelming superior force to produce the outcome that it wants ... fails."

Page: 1 | 2 | 3