Hizballah's Risky Gamble

Last Monday, Nov. 21 at just before 15:00 hours local time, Hizballah launched the biggest and fiercest attack that it has ever carried out against Israel's northern border.

According to DebkaFile's military sources, 500 shells and rockets were fired in five hours, at the rate of 100 per hour against military and civilian targets. The main objective of the plan though was to try to kidnap Israeli soldiers and/or civilians and to display them at Lebanon's independence day parade which was this past Tuesday, Nov. 22nd.

While Hizballah for years claimed that it was simply a national liberation movement aimed at driving Israeli troops out of southern Lebanon, its justification for still possessing arms now are a little less convincing after Ehud Barak made good on his pledge to withdraw Israeli troops back to the international border. While Lebanon claims that the Sheba farms region, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967 still belongs to Lebanon, the United Nation agreed that Israel has in fact withdrew its troops to the international border with Lebanon and that the future of Sheba farms should be negotiated with Syria.

This week's past offensive however had nothing to do with Israel or the Sheba farms and had everything to do with internal Lebanese and Hizballah politics. Hizballah hoped to achieve a few main goals. The main goal was against the anti-Syrian Lebanese government led by Fouad Siniora. The fact that a militia could operate so freely and carry out such brazen violations against a neighboring country independently of the Lebanese government would be a huge embarrassment to the government. He and his government would be dismissed by the Lebanese people and the Arab world as nonentities and this would significantly derail the inquiry of the Hariri murder which depends on the Lebanese government's cooperation. It would also take the increasingly unbearable international pressure and spotlight off of the Assad government in Syria and perhaps teach a lesson to any future Lebanese government that would pressure Hizballah to disarm.

Israeli intelligence had picked up communication and gotten word of Hizballah's plans and therefore had publicly increased its warnings to all residents and soldiers along the northern border as early as 2 weeks ago and even sent its information to the government in Beirut which was impotent to stop Hizballah.

Hizballah's plan was to assemble a special kidnapping team on motorbike that would ride into the village of Ghajar and kidnap an Israeli soldier dead or alive. Haaretz describes the village of Ghajar as follows:

When Israel left Lebanon, it scrupulously withdrew exactly to the international border. That border, however, runs right through Ghajar. The result is that the village has become both a major security breach in Israel's northern border and a conduit for drug smuggling from Lebanon into Israel. In an effort to cope with these problems, the Israel Defense Forces built a fence around the Israeli side of the village, set up army outposts and maintains a massive troop presence there. (More information on the unique situation of this village can be found here)

Due to Israeli intelligence warnings, the IDF was ready for the offensive and as such had left its usual outpost empty. When Hizballah saw this they started to head to the entrance to the village while shooting in all directions only to be ambushed by an IDF ambush squad who had been stationed there waiting for the gunmen. Four of them were shot dead.

In response, Israel ordered airstrikes against Hizballah positions in Southern Lebanon and also added in a bit of psychological warfare. They dropped leaflets from planes and helicopters in southern Lebanon printed in Arabic that read:

"O citizens of Lebanon
Who is 'protecting Lebanon'?
Who is lying to you?
Who sends yours sons into a battle for which they are not prepared?
Who wishes for the return of ruin and destruction?
Hizb Allah brings on the worst kind of damage.
Who are the tools in the hands of the Syrians and Iranians?
The state of Israel is awake, watching over the protection of its citizens and sovereignty.
The State of Israel"

Hizballah had its last chance to salvage its plan when Adam Wexler an Israeli civilian paraglider went paragliding at Tzuk Manara, a regular paragliding site near Kibbutz Manara. The site is located not far from the Lebanese border, and there were very strong easterly winds yesterday. Kibbutz Manara members saw him get blown just across the border into Lebanese territory and alerted the army. Galilee Division commander Gal Hirsch ordered a Golani unit to get him out at all costs. The soldiers cut through the border fence as three armed Hezbollah men raced forward to snatch him. The soldiers started exchanging gunfire with Hizballah to provide cover for the paraglider who just managed to escape the kidnappers by mere seconds. Wechsler found the police waiting to arrest him on the charge of bringing lives in danger by a reckless escapade that could have re-ignited a highly sensitive border.

The latest round of clashes initiated by Hizballah even earned condemnation by the UN Security Council which expressed "deep concern" over Hezbollah's "acts of hatred" and urged the Lebanese government to impose order in southern Lebanon and prevent Hezbollah from operating there. Both Hizballah and the Lebanese government made formal requests to Israel for a ceasefire to which Israel agreed only after it was sure that Hizballah had ceased it's offensive.

Oud Festival in Jerusalem

Every year the Confederation House of Jerusalem with the help of the Jerusalem Foundation and the municipality present an Oud Festival which consists of some of the best oud concerts of all different varieties. This year's festival included such works as "The Arab-Jewish Ensemble", "The Algerian Tradition", and "A Tribute to Oud Artist Mounir Bashir". Tonight featured three amazing performers - two of them Palestinians from the Galilee playing together with their good friend of over twenty years, veteran Israeli guitarist and newly religious Jew, Ehud Banai. They played to a mixed audience of Arabs, and both secular and religious Jews.

The concert started with George Sam'an on the Oud and Salem Darwish on the Darabuka singing some traditional Arabic Galilean folk songs. Then George Sam'an spoke a few very moving words about friendship and brotherhood before calling out his close friend for the past 20 years, popular Israeli folk singer Ehud Banai who because of his newly religious observance was wearing a yarmulke (skullcap) and tzizit. From then on Ehud Banai and George and Salem would switch off in a fusion of Hebrew, Arabic, modern, pop, and folk. Ehud Banai would sing a Jewish Sabbath liturgical piece while George would intersperse it with Arabic. When George and Salem started singing village love songs in Arabic, Ehud would jump in to the tune with his own Hebrew interpretation. The evening was beautiful and moving and probably only something that would occur in Israel (contrary to the impression you might get from certain media reports).

Haaretz has a wonderful interview with Ehud Banai here discussing his views on the expropriation of religion in the name of causes he objects to.

On Thursday the Oud Festival will feature Amal Murkus singing a tribute to Fairuz. Amal Murkus is an Israeli-Palestinian who lives in the Galilee and is a self proclaimed communist. She has been championed by famous Israeli singers such as David Broza and has insisted on having her first album (titled Amal-hope in Arabic) produced in Israel by an Israeli recording studio instead of abroad.

I was born in Israel, I live in Israel, I am a citizen of Israel, and I think this is within my rights to make my own CD in my own country, as other Israeli singers make their own CD's. So I started to be stubborn. I intended to make my CD just in Israel."

She is the first Arab to record on an Israeli label (wikipedia).

The woman who she will be singing a tribute for is the famous Lebanese singer Fairuz who also sang Arab nationalist songs about Jerusalem and Palestine. Whatever one may think of certain practices of the government of Israel, the fact that the Israeli municipality of Jerusalem would actually fund this type of show demonstrates, to Israel's credit, a very independent, liberal, and self-reflective streak in Israeli society which would definitely not occur in any of the surrounding authoritarian countries let alone certain other Western democracies.

Paradise Now at the Jerusalem Cinematheque

Paradise Now is the name of the popular film by Palestinian-Israeli film maker Hany Abu-Assad about 2 young Palestinians from Nablus, played by Kais Nashef and Ali Suliman, recruited to carry out a suicide bombing inside of Israel. The film itself is surprisingly apolitical and focuses more on the stories of the individual characters rather than the geo-political causes and strategies behind terrorism.

One of the would be bomber's father was killed for being a collaborator with the Israeli army. We get the sense that his recruitment was a way of taking advantage of the feeling of shame that was heaped upon his family by Palestinian society for his father's deeds. After an argument with his attractive Palestinian girlfriend (played by Lubna Azabel) who heads a human rights organization he escapes to his father's grave and starts crying. She pleads with him, "Violence is not the way. What is killing more innocent people going to accomplish? We must turn this struggle into a moral one. You must also think of those that you leave behind and hurt when you commit such an act."

The film's ambiguous message with regard to the situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories was further emphasized at the film's showing at the Jerusalem Cinematheque where the director and actors were present to take questions from the mixed audience of Palestinians and Israelis. The director spoke eloquent Hebrew -"Erev Tov Gvirotay ve Rabotay (Good evening ladies and Gentlemen)." Both actors Kais Nashef and Ali Suliman, who like the director have Israeli citizenship, also spoke in flawless Hebrew which was quite a sight considering how effectively they had played two Palestinian terrorists from Nablus. Both of them spoke about how they did not get involved in politics and treated their roles in the movie strictly as characters with a background story. One of them spoke about how he lived in Tel Aviv and attends a Jewish acting school there.

The director also showed a familiarity with the Israeli psyche that matched his familiarity with the Israeli linguistic mannerisms and sayings that would only be apparent to a native Hebrew speaker. "The Jews have been one of the most persecuted people in the history of the world. They came to this land as a refuge perhaps thinking that this land was a land without a people. However there was a people here and as a result of having their land stolen, they have now taken over the narrative of the suffering Jew."

A young Israeli raised his hand and spoke in Arabic that he had picked up from his travels in Egypt and the Palestinian territories to the actor who lived in Tel Aviv about how they both lived on the same street and should learn to look at each other as equals and neighbors. The director Abu-Assad immediately chimed in and reminded him that while he and his Arab neighbor in Tel Aviv may learn to live as equals and neighbors without a problem, there were still Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank who are being denied their basic human rights. The fact that this point was expressed in eloquent Hebrew in an Israeli Cinematheque in Jerusalem (on the seam between Jewish and Arab neighborhoods no less) by a self-defined Palestinian who holds Israeli citizenship only served to emphasize the complexity and ambiguity of identity and politics in Israel and Palestine.

An Israeli Political Revolution

An Israeli political revolution occurred 2 weeks ago with the election of Amir Peretz as head of the Israeli Labor Party. To understand just how large of a revolution this development is, one must first understand the ethnic and political dynamics which govern Israeli society.

The Labor party was the party of the founding fathers of Israel and Zionism. By and large all of these founding fathers such as Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, and Shimon Peres were all European (Ashkenazic), hostile to religion, and socialist minded. In the 1950's and 1960's, scores of Jews from Arab countries such as Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, and Syria started arriving in Israel. Most of them were religiously and culturally worlds apart from the socialist Labor party leaders and they felt that their heritage was dismissed and that they were looked down upon as uneducated and that their culture was not authentically "Israeli".

It was due to this dynamic that the first Israeli political "revolution" occurred in 1977. Menachem Begin, under the banner of the rightist Likud party, tapped into the grievances felt by the Mizrachim (Jews from Arab countries). In this Polish Jew they saw someone who wouldn't look down on them because they were more traditional or think less of them because they did not fit the mold of the sophisticated European socialist. It is largely due to the Mizrachi vote that Begin was elected the first non-Labor leader in Israel's history. The Mizrachim stayed in the Likud by and large until today. Even though under Benjamin Netanyahu as finance minister the Likud instituted privatization measures that hurt the poor, the Mizrachim (who along with the Arabs and ultra-orthodox make up a disproportionate amount of the poor in Israel) continued to support Likud and never forgave the Labor party for the humiliation that it inflicted upon their grandparents (Much like American Southerners who for most of the 20th century refused to vote Republican as it was "the party of Lincoln"). To this day there has never been a Mizrachi prime minister of Israel despite the fact that they make up almost 50% of the Israeli electorate.

Now finally you have someone like Amir Peretz elected to become head of the Labor Party. Amir Peretz's story is the story of the Mizrachi immigrants. Born in Morocco in the town of Boujad, Peretz immigrated to Israel with his family in 1956 and was settled in the euphemistically titled "development town" of Sderot in the south (To this day Sderot is a symbol of economic depression and unemployment in Israel). In 1983 Peretz answered a call made by friends, and ran for the office of mayor of the town of Sderot, as candidate of the Israel Labour Party. At only thirty years of age he won a victory which ended a long period of dominance of the town's politics by the right-wing Likud party and the national-religious Mafdal party. Later in his life he went on to become leader of Israel's powerful labor union, Histadrut.

Many Likudniks, realizing the deep wounds that Netanyahu's right wing economic policies have inflicted on Israel's working poor are worried that a populist campaign by Peretz will cut into their Mizrachi base, almost considered a backbone of the party. Also, Peretz's background and life story has given him a profound sense of respect among Mizrachim, even those who vote for the Likud or the religious Shas party. These two facts may portend political realignment to rival that of 1977 and may finally mean that Israel's labor party will have new life breathed into it, much like Tony Blair did to his own Labor party. The fact that Peretz is considered a dove on peace issues also has many in Israel's peace camp excited about the increased prospect of a final peace deal with the Palestinians. His campaign strategists have already told him to focus on economic issues and not emphasize his dovish views vis-a-vis the Palestinians. Yet the fact that Israelis would be willing to vote for someone who does not emphasize hawkish views may serve to show how much the past year of relative quiet and the successful implementation of the disengagement from Gaza might have moderated the political landscape and given rise to new support for renewed diplomatic initiatives.