Roots of Crisis: Why the Arabs and Israelis Fight

By LISA BEYER/JERUSALEM

In normal times, the hills of northern Galilee fill with tourists, some of them pilgrims seeking out the places where Jesus walked 2,000 years ago. Today those hills are burning. It is in Galilee that the rockets fired by Hizballah militants in Lebanon typically fall, occasionally scoring a direct hit on someone vulnerable, more often forcing inhabitants to move into bomb shelters. In the escarpment hamlet of Shomera, Israelis like Gabriel Peretz, the owner of a bed-and-breakfast, can do little more than brace for the next attack. "The situation is very bad," he says, his sentences punctuated by the sound of Israeli artillery fire, a crack-boom followed by a lingering zing of the outgoing shell, as loudspeakers in the village instruct residents to take cover in hardened shelters. "We've had six years of peace," he says, "but everything has come back to us."

Around the world, people could be excused for feeling that they too are witnessing something numbingly familiar in the Middle East, like a recurring nightmare that many would rather keep stored in the recesses of memory. But the conflagration involving Israel and its neighbors has erupted once more--and no one knows how bad and destabilizing it may get. Israel's ferocious response to Hizballah's kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, which came a little more than two weeks after Palestinian militants from Hamas seized an Israeli corporal and smuggled him into the Gaza Strip, has produced the worst Arab-Israeli cross-border conflict since Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The great bulk of the pain last week was felt in Lebanon, as Israel bombarded the country, including sites in Beirut, killing more than 100 Lebanese by Saturday evening, almost all civilians. Hizballah, an Islamist Shi'ite group that operates freely in southern Lebanon, killed eight Israeli soldiers in its initial raid July 12 and has since flung hundreds of rockets into Israel, killing four civilians.

For all the mayhem and destruction, the crisis hasn't yet escalated into the kind of full-scale, multicountry war that rocked the Middle East in 1948 or 1956 or 1967 or 1973. But that's not exactly cause for comfort. The lethal exchange of firepower between Israel and Hizballah will likely not let up until someone--the U.N., nervous Arab countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia or possibly the U.S.--intervenes and persuades one or both sides to stop. A British official told TIME that Prime Minister Tony Blair is personally pressing President George W. Bush to send Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the region to engage in Henry Kissinger-style shuttle diplomacy. But it's not clear that anyone has the ability to get the belligerents to calm down. And the longer Israel and Hizballah keep up their skirmish, the greater the chances it will spread out of control.

Hizballah is the wild card. There is always the possibility it could try to order up terrorist attacks against Israeli and Western targets around the world. If pushed to stop fighting, the group could lash out against its critics in Lebanon, unleashing the forces of civil war that ravaged the highly sectarian country for 15 years until 1990, and creating a new field of instability even as the U.S. struggles with crises in places like Iraq and Iran. Israel's strikes against Lebanon have provoked Shi'ite radicals in Iraq, who are threatening to attack U.S. troops in retaliation. The most chilling scenario is that the Israeli-Lebanese dispute could grow into a wider war, if Hizballah's backers in Iran or Syria decide or are provoked to join the fray--a possibility that grew when Israeli intelligence claimed on Saturday that Iranian forces helped Hizballah fighters hit an Israeli ship off the coast of Beirut, killing one sailor. (Iran denies the charge.) "It will never completely cool down," says Edward Luttwak, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "When the Israelis have hit enough targets, they'll be inclined to slow down. [But] these things don't get resolved."

That dim view of prospects for peace in the Middle East is widely shared by people on all sides of the conflict. What's driving the violence, and why does it seem so difficult to tamp down? Although the current battles may have been set off by age-old hatreds between Israel and its Arab enemies, what we're seeing today is not simply a replay of hackneyed set pieces in the Middle East. With new governments in place in the three key nodes of the crisis--Israel, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority--and fighters within the radical Islamist groups--Hamas and Hizballah--eager to assert their agendas, the region is going through a period of dramatic and in some ways radical change. The volatility has added new fuel to the motivations and ambitions that have defined why they fight. And that poses a challenge for the international community--not least a U.S. Administration already waging two wars in the Islamic world. Once the fire is started, can anything be done to put it out?

o WHY THE ARABS FIGHT

To understand why the Arab militants of Hamas and Hizballah are picking a fight with Israel now, you might start with an election. In January, Hamas, which is sworn to Israel's destruction, won the Palestinian general vote. The Hamas political leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniya, who fashions himself a relative moderate, became Prime Minister, and set about trying to prove Hamas could govern. Boycotted financially and politically by the U.S. and the E.U., Haniya in late June hammered out an agreement with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on a unified platform that would implicitly recognize Israel if it would withdraw to its 1967 borders. Recognizing Israel, though, is anathema to Hamas' hard-liners, who believe that God gave all the lands of the Middle East to Muslims and that the Jewish state therefore is accursed. For those hard-liners, any moves toward accommodation threaten the reason Hamas came into being in the first place. Deterred from attacking by arrests and assassinations, Hamas militants kept a cease-fire from March 2005 until last June, when they began firing rockets again and then, on June 25, decided to try another, daring tactic: they emerged from a tunnel dug under the Gaza fence to kill two Israeli soldiers and nab Corporal Gilad Shalit. Instead of talking about a peace deal, the Palestinian Authority found itself dealing with a rain of Israeli bombardments and border incursions.

Meanwhile, Hizballah, which was created in 1982 to resist Israel's invasion of southern Lebanon, has internal political incentives to act against Israel. In the new Lebanon, genuine independence is trying to take root after popular unrest forced the Syrians to lift their yoke on the country last spring. As a result, whether Hizballah should be allowed to remain armed six years after the Israelis left Lebanon is the most divisive political issue in the country today. Critics argue that only government forces should bear arms. Hizballah counters that given the weakness of the Lebanese Army, a disciplined guerrilla force is needed to deter Israeli aggression. And what better way to remind the country of that aggression than to provoke some by capturing a soldier or two?

Many analysts believe that Hizballah must have carried out the raid with at least the encouragement of the group's main benefactors, Syria and especially Iran. "He who pays the money is the boss," says a Lebanese official, arguing that Tehran engineered the crisis in hopes of deflecting the Bush Administration's drive to impose U.N. sanctions for Iran's suspected nuclear-weapons program. But whatever encouragement they may have had, neither Hamas nor Hizballah ever needs a specific justification for striking Israel. Attacking Israel is, for each, its raison d'etre. And the groups' tacticians do not need to think that a particular strike will achieve a particular result. They take a long view, common among Islamists: over timedecades or even centuries, if necessaryIsrael will crumble. Israelis will lose their fortitude under the pressure of attacks, give up and go back to Europe or Russia or, if their roots are in the Middle East, agree to live within an Islamic state. Regardless, the fighters' reward is not here on earth in this lifetime, but in heaven.

But Hizballah and Hamas in this case have a more practical payoff in mind. Israeli governments have proved willing to make big concessions to get back one or two or three of their own captives, even dead ones. (In 2004, Israel swapped 429 prisoners in exchange for an Israeli businessman and the remains of three Israeli soldiers.) The Palestinians now have a tremendous interest in prisoner swaps since the Israelis have achieved the relative quiet of the past few years in part by arresting huge numbers of suspected terrorists and packing jails with more than 9,000 detainees. Securing the release of many of them, by negotiating the return of the Israeli corporal, would make heroes of Hamas. And it would do so at a time when ordinary Palestinians have been grumbling that they may have erred in electing the radical group since the government--bankrupt because of international boycotts--has gone five months without paying salaries to its 160,000 employees.

Hizballah too hopes to profit from aggression. Israel holds only three Lebanese prisoners, but the group's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, grandly noted that he also was making the release of Palestinian detainees a condition for freeing his Israeli captives, which would bring him and his group glory, both in the Arab world and Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps. And following the abduction with a rain of rockets on Israeli towns and villages may have bolstered the group's ability to intimidate Lebanon's government and force it to ignore the U.N. Security Council's demands that Hizballah's fighters be disarmed. Compared with Hizballah, Lebanon's national army is impotent.

o WHY ISRAEL FIGHTS

The Israelis are determined to show their adversaries that they aren't cowed. That has become clear in Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's announcements that Israel will not negotiate for the return of its soldiers. Israeli officials have long talked of "changing the rules of the game," and Olmert unleashed the military to do just that, setting the price for aggression against Israel so high that its enemies would be deterred from acting up in the future.

Olmert may have been influenced by President Bush, both in his stance of "no negotiations with terrorists" and in his decision to retaliate harshly for the Hamas and Hizballah actions. The post-9/11 era has marked a new high in Israeli-U.S. relations, with Washington abandoning its past practice of criticizing Israel when it acts severely toward the Palestinians or other Arab parties. Starting with former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israeli officials have taken to adopting Bush's war-on-terrorism rhetoric. Justice Minister Haim Ramon last week said Israel would treat Nasrallah as the U.S. treats Osama bin Laden.

In that context, the abduction of the soldiers was particularly combustible. As it is, such acts strike deep into Israel's soul. It is practically a sacred notion in the Israeli military that nobody is left behind. And because the nation has a citizen's army and Israel's population is so small, hostage taking is felt intimately; if it's not your son or your neighbor's son, it could be.

But provoked by the hostage taking, Olmert's government is also trying to settle other scores. Palestinian militants have been regularly firing homemade Qassam rockets, a Hamas specialty, into Israel from Gaza--some 200 in June and 100 so far in July. Hizballah has occasionally also lobbed rockets across the border since the Israeli pullout. And Israel has watched in dismay as Hizballah has built border fortifications, sometimes 30 feet from Israeli outposts and stockpiled with what Israel estimates to be 13,000 rockets, including upgraded ones that can reach at least as far as the cities of Haifa and Tiberias.

Facing those threats, Israel isn't prepared to show mercy. In the case of Hizballah, especially, the Israelis are going well beyond retribution, taking an opportunity to degrade the organization's capabilities and, perhaps, cripple the group permanently. Said Defense Minister Amir Peretz: "The goal is for this to end with Hizballah so badly beaten that not a man in it does not regret having launched this incident." Most Israelis know the offensive has come at a heavy price--to civilians on both sides, to Lebanon's infrastructure and to Israel's reputation abroad. But from the government's point of view, it is necessary and it is working. Israel claims to have hit many stores of Hizballah's rockets, often within houses. What Israel wants is for the Lebanese to disarm Hizballah, but Israeli realists don't expect the Lebanese to go that far. A demilitarized zone in the south might suffice. The Israelis were heartened to hear that some Arab states and a number of Lebanese politicians were complaining that Hizballah had taken not just the Israeli soldiers but also all of Lebanon hostage.

The assault on Lebanon is intended to send a broader message too, at a time when Israel has largely given up on trying to negotiate for peace and security and instead is trying to establish them on its own. The strongest argument made by domestic critics of Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip last year was that the country's enemies would think it was weak and frightened and thus would be encouraged to strike out. Olmert's dual counterblasts are aimed at changing that impression--among those who believe it--to make the idea of attacking Israel prohibitively scary to the other side or, as the Israelis put it, to re-establish deterrence.

So where might this lead? Is anything remotely approaching quiet, if not quite peace, possible in a place where all the actors see gain in continuing to fight?

As bleak as it now looks, it's not entirely out of the question. The chances are greater in Lebanon, where there are actors with a clear interest in taming Hizballah. As in past flare-ups on the border, coming to terms will almost surely require a third-party interlocutor. "It could be the Red Cross or the Germans, the French, maybe a special adviser to Kofi Annan," says an Israeli intelligence official.

Dealing with Hamas won't be as easy. In Gaza, the main force that has tended to moderate the behavior of the militants has been public opinion, which has sometimes swung against the radicals when their actions prompted Israeli reprisals that punished the population. Now, though, Gazans place the blame for scores of deaths and deteriorating conditions squarely on Israel. Their anger and the prospect of an eventual prisoner exchange are strengthening the militants, which will make it harder for Palestinian Prime Minister Haniya to defend his agreement with Abbas if the current siege ends.

What should the U.S. do? Blair and other allies would like Rice to take a more active role in bringing first calm and then a return to peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians. Bush has showed no interest in engaging in the region in that way, and Washington is handicapped by its unwillingness to negotiate with four of the key players--Hamas and Hizballah, Syria and Iran--whose interests would have to be addressed. But crises can sometimes provide opportunities, especially since the U.S. can't afford to have another Middle East mess on its hands. At this point, U.S. intervention can't undo the reasons Israel and its enemies fight. But doing nothing is an even bigger risk. And summers in the Middle East can still get a lot hotter.

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With reporting by Christopher Allbritton, Nicholas Blanford/ Beirut, Aaron J. Klein, Phil Zabriskie/ Jerusalem, Scott Macleod/ Cairo, J.F.O. McAllister/ London, Elaine Shannon, Douglas Waller/ Washington, Unmesh Kher/ New York