Same rules, same Katyushas

By Zvi Bar'el,Haaretz, 7.5.00


The Katyusha attack on Israel on Friday and Saturday still belongs to the pre-withdrawal rules of the game. After the Israel Defense Forces attacked targets in Lebanese territory last week, Hezbollah slammed into South Lebanon Army positions and fired intensively on the Livneh outpost on the northern border. Afterward, it took over an SLA outpost at Aramta and killed four SLA members.The SLA, the IDF's independent representative in Lebanon, responded without prior approval with cannon fire, killing an 80-year-old woman and her 40-year-old daughter. To top it off, a fatal error by an Israeli pilot who dropped a bomb on a village caused injuries to a few dozen civilians.

Hezbollah reacted by the book, firing Katyushas that killed one Israeli soldier and injured close to 20 inhabitants of Kiryat Shmona. The IDF's bombing of civilian targets in Lebanon, as well, did not exceed the bounds of the established reflex. "No state will agree to its citizens being attacked by Katyushas," Prime Minister Ehud Barak said while surveying the damage Friday evening. No state would agree to having its citizens attacked by aircraft, either, the Lebanese president could have responded from his palace in Baabda. Hezbollah responded for him. After all, both Israel and Lebanon have their proxy armies, imposing on their respective governments responsibilities that do not always serve a government's interests.

The war in Lebanon is not over. It will not be over in July, either. If an agreement is not signed with Syria and Lebanon, the state of war between Israel and Lebanon will continue even after July 7, the official withdrawal date. The rules will be new, however - without the Grapes of Wrath understanding, without limitations on targets and with the ability to directly threaten Syrian targets if needed. In the face of the Israeli threat, the Katyushas will continue even after the withdrawal to be used as a strategic weapon whose deterrent power is equal to the bombing of a power station in Beirut. But these will then be the "normal" rules of war that exist between two hostile states.

If so, the IDF is redeploying along the international border not as part of a peace process, but rather in order to change the method of war after the security zone became a burden. The same battlefield that Israel believed could be a clearly delineated, agreed-upon killing field turned into a centrifuge whose contents fly beyond its boundaries. It is still a daily source of friction with Hezbollah. This friction leads to a desire for vengeance and retaliatory action, which in turn produce an escalation that ends in Katyusha attacks and the bombing of a power station.

The goal of the withdrawal is to remove this friction so that the war will be between states and not between a state and an organization, so that the IDF will not be forced to fight a guerrilla war that it will lose.

That is a tactical and not a political goal, since the attempt to hitch a political ride on it has so far not succeeded, and it would be best to be content with this limited goal.

But it seems that the Israeli ambition to create a new Lebanon has not dimmed since the 1982 Lebanon War. Like that war, whose tactical goal was to remove the Palestinian threat, but which developed into a strategic vision of a new order in Lebanon, the same is true now.

That is the pretext for delaying the withdrawal from Lebanon until July, a delay that is intended to accelerate the return of Syrian President Hafez Assad to the bargaining table.

As is becoming clear now, if not for this, the IDF could have withdrawn within two months had the correct political decision been made. Now the IDF has no choice.

Its schedule is dictated by the travel speed of the bulldozers and the contractors erecting the new border fence and the new line of outposts; the rate of firing on the border is increasingly dependent on the decisions of the SLA commanders, who can already smell their freedom of action in the air, while the decisions of the cabinet are increasingly affected by the kibitzers who are calling for blood from the sidelines, Cabinet ministers and Knesset members who seek to take advantage of the "last opportunity" to strike hard at Lebanon, to show that country what we are capable of, to drive home the "deterrence awareness" before the Lebanese circus folds up its tent.