BEIRUT — A combination of vindication, disdain, and renewed concerns about Israeli militarism are the dominant reactions in the Arab world to the preliminary report of the Winograd Commission released on 30 April in Israel. The commission harshly rebuked three senior Israeli political and military leaders for their conduct during last summer’s 34-day war with Lebanon’s Hizbullah Party, leaving Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister and Labor Party leader Amir Peretz in dismal shape before Israeli public opinion. The former Army chief of staff, Dan Halutz, had already resigned in disgrace after the war.
The Arab sense of vindication stems from the feeling that Israel had performed poorly in the war, and had not achieved its primary strategic objectives: smashing Hizbullah, removing the armed Lebanese resistance movement from the south of Lebanon, returning the two kidnapped Israeli soldiers in Hizbullah’s hands, reaffirming Israel’s deterrence posture with the entire Arab world and Iran, and ensuring that all wars with the Arabs are fought in Arab lands, not in Israel. Arab analysts were quick to recall Monday that Israel had also been forced to accept a UN-mandated cease-fire in August, after failing to win on the battlefield.
Disdain permeates many Arab reactions to the Winograd report, for two reasons. The first is the long history of such internal Israeli commissions of enquiry that create much political noise and dust, and censure top officials, but without altering Israel’s consistent strategy of militarization and colonization in dealing with Arabs.
Most galling for Arabs are the bitter memories of deeply flawed and inconsequential enquiry commissions that examined Israeli army and policy behavior against Palestinian citizens of Israel within the state’s 1967 borders. The latest followed demonstrations inside Israel in 2000, where Israeli police killed and wounded dozens of Palestinian citizens of Israel. The message of such enquiries — into Israel’s use of arms in Lebanon, the occupied West Bank and Gaza, or in majority Palestinian areas inside Israel itself — seems to be that rule of law punctilio for Israelis will be observed, but Arabs can only expect to remain at the receiving end of the combined Israeli military machine and legacy of political discrimination.
The second reason for widespread Arab disdain is that the prospect of the Winograd Report bringing down the Israeli government and leading to a change in leadership holds out no particular promise of anything positive. While Israelis get themselves deeply entangled in the minutia of Israeli party politics and the entertaining personalities of their leaders, Arabs at the receiving end of Israeli foreign policy tend to see little or no significant difference between the Labor and Likud parties that have dominated Israeli life since the 1960s. The hybrid Kadima Party that Ariel Sharon formed in 2005 to claim a new “center” of Israeli politics is about to disintegrate. Removing Olmert and replacing him with Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, former Labor leader and Prime Minister Ehud Barak or Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni may spur a satisfying sense of cleansing and renewal in Israeli politics, but would be seen as only another massive show of smoke and mirrors in the Arab world.
Arabs see Kadima as an apt symbol of the combined approaches of Labor and Likud, both of which have pursued virtually identical policies towards the Arabs: colonizing and expropriating Arab lands, using massive military overkill in a failed attempt to resolve the political differences with the Palestinians, jailing or killing thousands of Palestinians, injuring tens of thousands of others, institutionalizing Apartheid-like segregation between Jewish Israeli occupiers and native Palestinian Arabs, strengthening the movement to Judaize Jerusalem and diminish its Christian and Moslem character, and refusing to seriously consider any negotiated compromise on the core Palestinian refugee issue which forms the heart of the conflict in Arab eyes.
After 60 years of hard experience with the Jewish state, most Arabs conclude that Israeli national policy is defined by a combination of Zionist ideological zealotry and state military overkill vis-à-vis Palestinians and other Arabs. Political leaders who come and go — Olmert, Barak, Rabin, Begin, Sharon and others — tend to be technical managers of a core, consistent policy, rather than strategic managers who can truly change policy for the same of the well-being of Israel and its Arab neighbors.
Another prevalent Arab attitude to the Winograd Report is renewed concern that an admonished Israeli military and political elite will resort to military adventurism or other extremist moves to reassert its deterrent capability in Arab eyes. The bedrock of Israel’s national strategic policy has always been a fearsome military that can quickly defeat, and therefore preemptively deter, any combination of hostile neighbors — Arab or Iranian. Restoring that shattered image of invincibility is likely to be seen as a priority by any Israeli political and military leadership that takes over from Olmert’s discredited and crippled coalition.
Winograd may make Israelis feel good, but in Arab eyes it portends only more of the same Israeli military overkill policies, or even worse, in the months and years ahead.
Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.
Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 02 May 2007
Word Count: 829
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