The New Middle East: Israel’s Defeat Bankrupts the Logic of Force

Publisher: Adbusters
Date of Publication: August 14, 2006

'The most significant result of Israel's "two soldier war" in Lebanon is a change to the balance of fear in the region. For decades, Israel's massive military superiority has enjoyed a near mythic status throughout the Middle East. This unquestioned faith in Israel's military supremacy — financed by American taxpayers to the tune of $2 to $3-billion a year — has fueled the dangerous notion that force can perpetually substitute for diplomacy. Not only has it allowed Israel to avoid concessions, it created the assumption that invading Lebanon would be another step toward reshaping the Middle East in accordance with Israeli and American interests.

The war, long planned and encouraged in cooperation with the White House, has led many Israeli and foreign analysts to conclude that Israel has suffered the first defeat in its history, deeply wounding the new Israeli administration and tarnishing Israel's aura of invincibility. Taking much of the world by surprise, a small group of highly-trained and disciplined irregulars — around 2,000 to 4,000 Hezbollah fighters — managed to hold off one of the most powerful armies in the world, proving, if nothing else, the bankruptcy of the logic of force.

The high level of civilian deaths — a thousand Lebanese compared to several dozen Israeli civilians — has also cost Israel dearly in terms of international goodwill. To even the most sympathetic observers, concerned for Israel's long-term well-being, it is hard to understand why the capture of two soldiers would merit the destruction of an entire country, particularly a fragile democracy with a delicate sectarian balance that only recently emerged from the ashes of a long civil war in which Israel was one of the key players. The narrative ofDavid and Goliath has, this time around, cast Israel as the fallible giant. Continue reading here>>


JNI Deconstruction

This article classically portrays Israel as a rabid aggressor, devoid of its own rights, on all fronts and all counts. The article begins by touting Israel’s supposed military superiority in the region, neither supporting the claim nor addressing facts to the contrary (such as the fact that Saudi Arabia’s defense budget doubles that of Israel).

By using rhetoric such as ‘the logic of force’ the writer, in one careless stroke, whitewashes out the democratic processes and norms which govern Israel and substitutes in the idea that force, and force alone, govern actions and decisions within Israel.

Having established Israel as a perpetual, non-rational and immoral aggressor, the writer then goes on to cast a virulent terror network, Hezbollah, as ‘small group’ of  hapless ‘militants’ who achieved a heroic feat of holding off the Israeli army. The writer fails to mention two important points: first, that  not a single Israeli division entered Lebanon and, second,  the small group of  “irregulars” are a highly organized network that is supplied and financed by Iran.

The ‘two soldier war’ (a previously unheard-of term), then, is used by the writer as yet the latest example of the larger paradigm of wanton Israeli aggression—the ‘fallible giant’, Israel, doing its best to destroy the tiny, slingshot-armed victims of the entire Muslim and Arab world.  By casting the war in terms of merely two missing soldiers—and not in terms of Hezbollah’s act of war, breach of Israeli sovereignty, targeting of Israeli civilians (and Lebanon’s sheltering of the organization)—the writer can quickly arrive at the conclusion that Israel’s attack was based on pretense, not on right.

This is a false case used to support the equally false  paradigm which robs Israel of  sovereign right to respond when attacked (while awarding this right to Hezbollah) in order to arrive at the fallacy of Israel’s perpetual and baseless aggression.