Winning every battle – losing every war

As the Middle East looks set to implode yet again This Green and Surprisingly Pleasant Land looks at why endless wars have mainly produced endless wars

Is this the only vision of the future?

The central paradox of Israel’s formidable military prowess is that despite being able to win wars it has singularly failed to achieve the stated objective of securing peace and security for the Jewish state.

As a consequence Israel remains the most dangerous place in the world for Jews to live and it is why the Palestinians have suffered higher levels of fatalities, endless displacement and medieval levels of misery.

The saga of the wars between Israel, the Palestinians and its other neighbours began in earnest at the moment of Israel’s birth in 1948 when it was invaded, resulting in what  Palestinians describe as the ‘nakba’ or catastrophe.

In Israel’s most dramatic military victory, the 1967 Six Day War, the Jewish state managed to occupy vast swathes of land. From that time onwards these lands have become the source of friction, death and destruction.

Now the focus of attention has moved from Gaza, one of these occupied lands, to Lebanon where six Israeli invasions and six Israeli military victories have produced mountingly worse outcomes. The first invasion in 1978, was designed to clear Palestinian forces from Israel’s northern border, it marked the start of the process where various militias ruled Southern Lebanon engendering massacres but no peace.

In 1982 another invasion reached all the way to Beirut forcing the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s leadership to move to Tunisia. Instead of destroying the Palestinian resistance  the grounds were laid for the establishment of Hezbollah and Hamas, far more uncompromising and dangerous than the PLO. Two further invasions ended with Hezbollah solidifying its control of the south and establishing itself throughout Lebanon as a government within the government. By 2006 another bloody war caused mass displacement of both Lebanese and Israelis. What was gained? Little more than a hiatus  paving the way for the current invasion.  

Israel’s leaders have convinced themselves that if only more people could be killed and displaced the security of the state would be secured. This is the exemplar of Einstein’s alleged definition of insanity which involves doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

The alternative, of tackling the root cause of the problem, the denial of statehood to the Palestinian people, has been ignored.

As the wars mount with increasing ferocity a little place in hell is reserved for those who think that apportioning blame for starting the fighting matters more than finding a way of stopping the bloodshed. This reduces the tragedy of war to schoolyard pointing of fingers at ‘who started it’. Moreover focusing on this kind of blame totally ignores the war’s victims, ordinary people who most emphatically did not start the fighting.

Many Israelis have paid with their lives in this decades long conflict, but their losses pale in comparison with those of the Palestinians.

As a result Palestinians who have called for peaceful co-existence with the Jews have been marginalised almost to the point of extinction. They are replaced by extremists who can see no further than the end of a Katyusha rocket. Israel has also succumbed to extremism producing the most extreme government in its history. Moderate voices in Israel can still be found but the gravity of politics has shifted decisively to the intractable nationalists. They have no policy for ending the endless wars, only a policy of suppression and revenge.

Israeli leaders continually repeat the mantra that their people deserve to live in peace, free of attacks from its borders. At best wars designed to secure this objective have yielded some respite from violence, punctuated by brief outbursts of optimism as some Arab states edge towards reconciliation. But the respite is never more than brief.

The Netanyahu government insists that it is now in a position to finally resolve the issue. To do so it has had to engage the armed forces on all its land borders and beyond by sending rockets to Yemen, Iran and Syria. This is a military undertaking of herculean proportions made all the more herculean because its stated objectives are simply unattainable.

Even if, at the end of the day, both Hamas and Hezbollah are defeated, history clearly demonstrates that new forces will arise to take their place. Israel’s objectives elsewhere in the Middle East are even more difficult to understand – is regime change in Tehran really on the table as, in the face of external attack, the hardliners who rule have their position enhanced.

Thus the current situation lies somewhere beyond grim. It is hard to avoid the temptation to succumb to total pessimism, indeed gloom and doom is the only currency shared by all sides to this conflict.

Yet, the Qur’an stipulates that pessimism is a sin and Israel’s national anthem, Ha Tikvah, translates as The Hope. Is it therefore possible to imagine that things have reached such a disastrous stage that optimism and hope might prove to be the only viable alternatives?