Here is an interesting piece on Hezbollah in Tablet, by Nicholas Noe, that essentially warns Jews that the Jewish state is finished unless you can reach a deal soon. Because the threat picture is only getting bigger, and you can’t deal with it with an iron wall anymore. No, you must come to terms with your neighbors. Assuming they are not all radicalized by now. As I say myself, those who hope to redeem the Jewish state politically must act fast and act now, sincerely. The piece’s realpolitik conclusion:
In a late April 2010 speech to AIPAC, Clinton warned:
"We must recognize that the ever-evolving technology of war is making it harder to guarantee Israel’s security. For six decades, Israelis have guarded their borders vigilantly. But advances in rocket technology mean that Israeli families are now at risk far from those borders….Only by choosing a new path can Israel make the progress it deserves to ensure that their children are able to see a future of peace, and only by having a partner willing to participate with them will the Palestinians be able to see the same future."
Perhaps not surprisingly, shortly after her remarks were delivered, news reports citing unnamed U.S. officials surfaced charging that Hezbollah had acquired the infamous SCUD missile via Syria. Whether true or not, the SCUD magnified the underlying point implied by Clinton and wholly endorsed by Nasrallah: Hezbollah is growing militarily stronger by the day, and Israel is inexorably losing its qualitative military advantage over its enemies.
///It is time, Clinton and Nasrallah are both saying—though from diametrically opposed ends—for Israel to change the “hardware” and “software” of its negotiating positions.
For if Israel does not—if the change is not decisive enough vis-à-vis the underlying grievances to put the Resistance Axis, especially Hezbollah, definitively outside the vital realm of reason (and therefore on a path to isolation and implosion should it continue to violently resist)—the war that the Party of God has said it “does not want” but that it nevertheless “craves” will draw ever closer until, by miscalculation or one small decision by one party, great or small, war is upon us.
In his speech late last month to mark the 10-year anniversary of the liberation of South Lebanon, Nasrallah went so far as to quote Clinton’s AIPAC speech at length, exhorting, “This is Mrs. Clinton, and this is the U.S. State Department, and this is the evaluation of the U.S. stand. This is not the evaluation of President Ahmadinejad or anyone in Palestine or in Lebanon.”
“Now,” he continued, “the Americans are telling the Jews, openly and frankly: If you do not help us; if you do help Obama to reach a settlement, then there will be no purely Jewish state. This state is threatened. Everything in it will be threatened. Now you might find someone to reach a settlement with you but you will not find anyone in the future. This means that you are heading toward the abyss, to ruination.”
Of course, the winner of this contest is anything but certain—despite those who still believe in the unchallenged military hegemony of Israel and the United States and those, on the opposite side, like Nasrallah, who believe the State of Israel is facing immediate ruination.
Two things, however, are certain: First, that in the absence of a credible settlement process, Nasrallah’s dialectic, which should be radically unstable, is only growing in strength—gaining the party allies who no longer see any other option and who no longer view Hezbollah as the only “insane” party in the Middle East.
