Orthodoxy

[UPDATED, because I hit the "post" button before finishing]

It's pretty well assumed that ethnic groups living in the United States tend to be more bellicose in their demands to defend the home country than those who, um, do the actual defending. And it is a given of American politics that a failure to provide unquestioned support for Israel is one of the third rails of American politics. So with the rise of the population of Orthodox Jews as a percentage of the Jewish population (who are also more culturally conservative than other Jews), all of that is going to be the driving force of our middle east policies for years to come -- policies that may not be in the best interest of either Israel or the United States.

Democrats agree Republicans under President Bush are making inroads among Orthodox Jews. "Absolutely it is problematic," said Ira Foreman, of the National Democratic Jewish Council. "But I would much rather be where we are." Foreman and others said Republican efforts to shake overall Jewish allegiance to Democrats have largely failed because of domestic issues such as abortion rights and concerns about the blending of religious and government activities.

"If you [as a candidate] are not a very strong supporter of Israel, you are disqualified" from getting much, if any, of the Jewish vote, said Steve Rabinowitz, a Democratic strategist. "Once you reach that threshold, for the vast majority of the Jewish community, it switches to domestic issues on which Republicans routinely get killed."

Bush has made small gains among Jews since his first election, but short of what some GOP strategists had envisioned. A staunch supporter of Israel who won the backing of a few prominent Democratic Jews such as former New York City mayor Ed Koch, Bush captured between 22 and 26 percent of the Jewish vote in 2004, based on various exit polling surveys. In 2000, he won 19 percent.

Because there are only about a half-million Orthodox Jews, it is virtually impossible for pollsters to collect a large enough sample to determine their precise voting patterns. But several who have studied the issue estimate that Bush won a strong majority of Orthodox Jewish votes in 2004, a reversal from 2000 when Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), an Orthodox Jew, was running on the national Democratic ticket.

There is not a single voice in Washington questioning Israel's current strategy, which seems to have adopted all of the worst aspects of our invasion of Iraq. Questioning, not so much on moral grounds, which are ambiguous to say the least, but on tactical grounds, which seem less so.

Israel also wants to send a message to the Palestinians, and to Hezbollah and its sponsors, Syria and Iran, that attacks on Israel will be met with overwhelming force, and that the cost is not worth the effort. How soon that message is perceived will play a central role in its decision to stop the war.

As with all wars, however, any victory must be consolidated in political and diplomatic arrangements, which remain uncertain, like the insertion of a multinational force along the border.

For Hezbollah, victory means simply avoiding defeat. It will be perceived by many Muslims to have won by keeping the capacity to fire even short-range rockets into Israel.

Gidi Grinstein, a former Israeli negotiator and director of the Reut Institute, a research group, calls it the “90-10 paradox.” Israel can eliminate 90 percent of Hezbollah’s fighting capacity, but Hezbollah can still declare victory and claim that it fought the mighty Israeli Army to a draw.

“At the end of the war, they’ll have a narrative, and so will we,” he said. “It’s all about perception.”

Hezbollah will argue that it withstood three to five weeks of fighting with the region’s most powerful army, supported and equipped by the world’s most powerful army, that of the United States. In that sense, a long war is better for Hezbollah.

Hezbollah and its leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, will be hailed by many in the Arab and Muslim worlds as heroes and new Saladins, whose religious faith was transmuted into astounding bravery rarely shown by the huge Arab armies of the secular Arab states that fought Israel in the 1967 and 1973 wars.

Shlomo Avineri, a former Foreign Ministry official and professor of political science at Hebrew University, said Israel could never prevail in an Arab narrative. “If Israel had won in the first week, Hezbollah would say that it was a victory of the United States, which provided Israel the time, weapons and money.”

Israel’s problem is much more complicated, Mr. Avineri said, because “everything is likely to end in grays.” What will help define the real results, he said, is the mandate of any multinational force and whether it calls for disarming Hezbollah.

An Israeli cabinet minister, who spoke anonymously because of the delicacy of the topic, said, “The narrative at the end is part of the problem.” He added: “That’s why we’re making up this balance sheet of accomplishments. Olmert said it very well in the cabinet: ‘Ask Nasrallah and his colleagues if they would like to return to the situation of three weeks ago, and they will say yes.”

But the end will be a far cry from Israel’s original intent, which Mr. Olmert stated as the destruction or dismantling of Hezbollah.

“Israel is trying to frame its narrative now around the most minimal achievement, which is a major setback to the fighting capacity of Hezbollah,” Mr. Grinstein said. “But the question and the challenge is to frame a narrative of victory around more ambitious objectives.”

To “win,” Israel must be able to alter Hezbollah’s decision-making and remove the aura of the invincible fighters who drove the Americans and French out of Beirut in 1983 and the Israelis out of Lebanon in 2000. Israel must also create enough distance between Lebanese and Hezbollah interests to ensure that the Lebanese also press the militia group not to provoke Israel to another round of costly warfare.

“Hezbollah serves two masters: Lebanon, where it lives, and Iran and Syria and the camp of permanent resistance to Israel,” Mr. Grinstein said. “Most Lebanese don’t like the second master, but if the two overlap, as they did before July 12, Hezbollah is comfortable.”

Israel is trying to underline the contradictions. Mr. Nasrallah is widely considered to have miscalculated when he authorized the raid into Israel on July 12, when two soldiers were captured. He said he thought Israel would respond as in the past, with token tank fire.

“Israel’s most significant accomplishment from this war will be if it can severely compromise Hezbollah’s ability to fight Israel from inside Lebanon,” Mr. Grinstein said.

Giora Eiland, Israel’s national security adviser under former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, predicts a solution in the next week or so “that is far from Israel’s original intent.”

I wonder if Nasrallah himself feels he miscalculated. After all, he seems to be following the playbook terrorists have used for decades, most notably by bin Laden -- keep upping the atrocities ante until the imperial power decides it must respond with full force; the result being getting sucked into an asymetrical war the imperial forces can't ultimately, entirely defeat.

With Bush talking tough and no U.S. politician willing to contradict him we have abandoned our traditional balancing role as chief supporter of democratic Israel and honest broker in the middle east. We have done so at exactly the moment that urban Islamic terrorist organizations are willing to have unleashed on civilian populations the full power of their enemies' revenge. The repurcussions of this could make the attacks on The World Trade Center and the Pentagon seem puny indeed in retrospect.

Because, remember, those attacks' "root cause" as preznit likes to say these days, were the rather vague and intellectual demands that the Infidels leave the land of Mecca and Medina. The destruction of Beirut by a U.S.-supported Israel could have a much more visceral reaction among a much wider group of people.

Lebanese prime minister Fuad Siniora said the death toll in his country has risen above 900 in the three weeks since hostilities broke out after a Hezbollah raid into Israel. More than 3,000 have been wounded, Siniora told a gathering of Islamic leaders in a videotaped statement. He said a third of the total casualties have been children under 12.

Hezbollah sprayed a record 230 rockets into Israel on Wednesday, setting buildings and forests ablaze, wounding at least 33 civilians and killing an Israeli man as he rode his bicycle in front of his home.

Another 100 missiles had been launched by 5 p.m. Thursday (10 a.m. EDT), an Israeli police spokesman said, killing two people in Acre and three in Ma'alot. That brings the Israeli death toll to 38 soldiers and 24 civilians. Information about Hezbollah deaths remains sketchy, with Israeli military officials saying 300 fighters have been killed, and the militant Shiite group saying the total is 46.

Also Thursday, the Israeli military announced it had completed an inquiry into the airstrike Sunday on the Lebanese town of Qana that killed dozens of civilians--most of them children-- huddled in a three-story building.

In a statement, the military expressed regret for the incident but blamed Hezbollah for using civilian areas to facilitate attacks, including in Qana. The statement said the building was targeted in accordance with military guidelines, but that authorities mistakenly believed no civilians were inside and would not have authorized the attack had their information been accurate.

Although the Lebanese government said 57 people died in the airstrike, a Human Rights Watch report published Wednesday said the confirmed death toll thus far was 28 people, 16 of them children. Thirteen people are still missing, the report said.

How this is helping our or Israel's interests or mending those "root causes" remains beyond my comprehension.