In Just War Theory, we talk about the question of proportionality. Usually this refers to the severity by which an aggressive act is countered, and the moral requirement not to respond out of proportionality to the aggressive act. The Iraq War, for instance, is all out of whack in regard to proportionality and thus the political need to exaggerate the severity of the initial threat.

it’s hard for me to see hezbollah’s recent capture of two israeli soldiers as anything other than a provocation. they watched the capture of a soldier outside gaza trigger a full-scale invasion of the territory. what better way to prove they need to stay armed than to provoke their own strike against lebanon?

[. . . ] israel’s bombing of beirut international airport and its blockage of their ports, will hit lebanon’s western-oriented professional class the hardest. and they were the very people who were calling for hezbollah to disarm. these were the people who were on the streets protesting the syrian occupation in february 2005. lebanese nationalism among this group is quite strong. even though they are dominated by lebanese christians and otherwise would not be hezbollah’s friends, they could rally to hezbollah’s cause of defending lebanon from foreign invasion.

and if the blockade of lebanon continues for an extended period of time, lebanon would become dependent on syria for any goods from the outside world. another things that israel probably doesn’t want.

the potential for blowback against the israelis for taking this action is huge.

Rejectionists on both sides are to blame. The Oslo Peace Process could have forestalled all this violence, as Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin understood. But on the Israeli side, the then Likud Party of Bibi Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert derailed it. On the Palestinian side, Hamas rejected it. Had there been a peace process, prisoners would have been released in return for a cessation of hostilities, and there would have been no motivation to capture Israeli soldiers.

The lesson is that if you refuse to negotiate a peace, then you are likely to have to go on fighting a war.

None of this leads to a two state solution. None of it does anything but embroil Israel in a guerilla war and occupation of not only Palestine by with a good chunk of southern Lebanon, and by proxy, in a conflict with Syria and Iran.

And in such a war, and in a situation where the Israeli Jews are being outbred in their own country, failure to either create a lasting victory (ie. one where Palestine and Hizbollah and other interested parties can’t attack Israel) or a lasting peace (one where they don’t want to attack Israel), Israel’s enemies will, inevitably win.

I have a very, very bad feeling about what’s happening in Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon. I am less interested in assigning blame than in figuring out what’s actually happening. But to get the blame part out of the way: it’s almost never the case, in Israeli/Arab confrontations, that one side is wholly to blame, but in the case of the kidnapping of the two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah, it is. This was Hezbollah’s fault, pure and simple. That said, I think that the Israeli response has been disproportionate and in some respects unwise. And that’s all I have to say about the blame game, which, in this part of the world, I find a tiresome and pointless exercise.

But it is clear to me that the Israelis, through their own actions (plus some help from their clueless allies in the Cheney administration) have put themselves in trap they can’t escape. They’ve reached a strategic dead end, one that doesn’t even leave them enough maneuvering room to turn and go back. A return to the pre-Oslo status quo – full military reoccupation of the territories – is out of the question. The peace process (a pointless squirrel wheel, but one that at least kept the squirrels, both Palestinian and Israeli, busy going through their paces) is dead. The Palestinian Authority is shattered; Fatah’s legitimacy and President Abbas’s credibility flushed down the toilet. And Hamas – the only viable alternative – has been officially defined as Public Enemy Number One by the Israelis, the Americans and the Europeans.

In an earlier era, pre-9/11, pre-Iraq invasion, widening the war to Lebanon might have provided some breathing room, or at least a temporary distraction. But now it’s only added another horn to the dilemma, and created risks that no one – the Israelis least of all – can fully foresee.

A Lebanon with no Syrian troops and Hizbullah in the government was inherently unstable. All the other parties but Hizbullah had disarmed, so it alone had its own paramilitary. With Syria gone, Hizbullah filled a security vacuum and also was less restrained in its policies. While in the country, Syria supported the party, but also curbed its adventurism.

So this was Bush’s big success in the Levant. It was as though a chef baked a lopsided wedding cake with a ticking bomb embedded in it, and declared it a culinary breakthrough. Now the bomb has gone off.