What links these conflicts, beyond Israeli fear-mongering and
Hizballah's use of Palestine as a chess piece, is the future of
limited withdrawals -- what Prime Minister Ehud Olmert calls
"convergence" or "realignment" -- as an Israeli strategy for managing
its conflict with the Palestinians. By this plan, advanced by Olmert's
Kadima Party in the March election campaign, Israel would move its
soldiers and settlers from much of the West Bank behind a unilaterally
fixed “eastern border” for the Jewish state -- the walls and fences
that Israel is building through the West Bank, including East
Jerusalem. Though the idea of convergence was initially popular, more
and more Israelis, even some within Kadima, are growing skeptical.
Public support for withdrawals in the West Bank had plummeted to just
over 30 percent even before the present conflagration, and Kadima
luminaries Livni, Shimon Peres and Meir Sheetrit all have expressed
reservations recently. As the one-year anniversary of Gaza
“disengagement” approaches, even the left-leaning Israeli press has
begun to ask, as has Ha'aretz, “Was it a mistake?” The Israeli
government, whose multi-partisan raison d'être is limited withdrawal,
is under pressure to demonstrate the fruits of its approach. With its
two-front war, the Israeli government has set out to prove
emphatically that disengagement was not a mistake.
Converging Upon War
Robert Blecher
July 18, 2006
(Robert Blecher is a fellow at the Center for Human Rights at the
University of Iowa and an editor of Middle East Report. He contributed
this article from Jerusalem.)
“WAR,” proclaimed the three-inch headline in Ma‘ariv, Israel's leading
daily, the day after Hizballah launched its cross-border attack on an
Israeli army convoy on July 12. With the onset of Israel's massive
bombing campaign in Lebanon that evening, its aerial and ground
incursions into Gaza were transformed into the southern front of a
two-front conflict. But are the two fronts, in Lebanon and Gaza, part of
a single war? Speaking in such terms risks misidentifying what really
links Israeli actions on its northern and southern borders.
.http://www.merip.org/mero071806.htm
