Jeff Shear: The 40 Years War
[Jeff Shear is the author of Keys to the Kingdom, an investigation into a weapons deal with Japan, published by Doubleday in 1994. His writing and reporting have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone. He was staff correspondent for the National Journal, regularly reporting from the White House and Congress, and co-authored The Buying of the Congress, by Avon Books.]
Now that a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel is in effect, contrasting it with the 1967 Arab-Israel war suggests volatile new threats to the pursuit of peace in the region, and beyond.
Nearly 40 years ago, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt's ruler and military dictator, instigated a war against Israel in alliance with Syria and Jordan. Nassar sought to unite the Arab World. His cause was political, but most of all it was secular.
The 1967 war and Israel's quick and decisive victory set terms of the current conflict, to the degree that they established the current borders of the Middle East. The important difference between the 1967 war and the bloodshed with Hezbollah has been the alarming switch from pan-Arabism to Islamism. Where Nasser wanted to unite a world defined by language, Islamists want to recreate a world in the image of the Koran. Significantly, Islamism brings more international players to its"alliance" than Nasser's pan-Arabism: adding Pakistan, Turkey, Afghanistan, Indonesia and Iran. Islamism arguably had its origins in Iran - with the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Thus, we are no longer talking about a crisis in the Middle East; Islamism claims two billion adherents stretched across Europe, Africa and deep into Asia. A regional conflict now has the elements of an international conflagration.
This is the significance of Lebanon, a nation unilaterally carved out by the French government in 1943 - the Vichy French government -- from Greater Syria, which once claimed Beirut as its Capital. In effect, the map of the Middle East was completely redrawn in the post World War Two era. In this, the similarities between pan-Arabism and Islamism reflect on each other. Both would have the maps of the region redrawn to their own scale, even those written into law by the United Nations, which arguably has become Islamism's court of appeal.
That's why the bloodshed between Israel and Hezbollah suggests a new and greater threat to peace than 1967 war. The post-war map that created Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel happens to bridge both eras, while contrasting them at the same time. Where the regional map led to a war among nations in 1967, that same map has given rise to an angry mass of wild-card factions, such as Hezbollah, based in the Muslim crescent.
The most recent bloodshed over the existence of Israel was not a fight between nations; instead, it was a militia using one nation to attack another. A state of war between Israel and Lebanon never existed. Lebanon never approved of Hezbollah's actions from within its borders. What is more, Hezbollah was supported and encouraged not by Lebanon but by Syria and Iran.
This is why Islamism is problematic to the West. Nations directly supporting Islamist elements dodge political responsibility through surrogates: militias, such as Hezbollah. The deeper problem is one of tactics and terms. Islamism appears to militate against accommodation, let alone negotiation. How, for instance, can there be a political solution between a nation and a militia; between religious parties and political entities?
The war in 1967 between Egypt and Israel finally was resolved in 1978 with President Carter's Camp David peace accord. A secular agreement was struck. In 1994, former combatants Israel and Jordan signed accords. President Clinton nearly brought about an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. But Islamism disavows these efforts and agreements, raising the question if it is even possible to reconcile religious factions to the rule of nations? Can there be an agreement such as Camp David between a religious-military leader loyal ultimately to his God and not the terms of diplomacy, the bonds of treaties? This is a large question, now that the wider Moslem world has involved itself in determining the answer to regional strife, unlike the secular aims of pan-Arabists, like Nasser.