Jonathan Chait's heart breaks -- but don't worry, he doesn't use it anyway

Jonathan Chait’s column in the Guardian begins like this:

“Let's face it, Israel's counter offensive in Lebanon doesn't seem to be going very well. Liberals are saying it. Conservatives are saying it. Plenty of Israelis are saying it. But here is the odd thing: nobody is paying very careful attention to the alternative. The criticism of Israel's ground campaign - however sound much of it may be - takes place against an assumption that peace could be at hand if only Israel stopped fighting.”

Of course, we know that Chait, being a clever American, will tell us that peace isn’t the absence of fighting. In this way, a garden variety word, peace, suddenly starts doing summersaults.

“Let's examine that idea. The United Nations types argue that Israel should withdraw from Lebanon and cease its airstrikes and that an international force should patrol southern Lebanon. But every country that could contribute to such a force has insisted they don't want to fight Hizbullah. Kofi Annan has said that a "cardinal principle" of any peacekeeping force would be obtaining Lebanon's consent. And neither Hizbullah nor the Lebanese government has evinced any willingness to remove Hizbullah's forces from southern Lebanon.”

Hmm. So, peace, it turns out, and Israel’s victory are one and the same thing. If Lebanon itself doesn’t have any willingness to remove Hizbullah’s force from Southern Lebanon – an unwillingness reinforced, in the last two weeks, by the evidence that other than having that force there, Israel will invade and batter the country any time it feels like it –well, according to the impeccable logic of Chait, Israel just has to keep fighting. They are fighting, you see, for peace. Such peaceful bombing of children was never seen before. A regular miracle.

In Chait’s view though, the problem is that Israel is threatened. Lebanon, which Israel has invaded now three times in the last twenty years, is, by contrast, unthreatened. Funny, that. To be really unthreatened, you have to have an air force making hundreds of bombing sortees over your cities every day. It makes things more and more peaceful. It is almost like they are dropping apple pie, except the bombs are not sugared, and they rip your guts out and your arms off. But otherwise, it is just like a picnic.

“But the death toll doesn't quite capture the damage wrought by Hizbullah. The purpose of the missile attacks is to force Israelis to live under a constant threat - missile attacks or cross-border raids that, while sporadic, can occur at any time. No nation would consider that condition acceptable. And even if Israel learns to take periodic attacks from Hizbullah with good cheer, there's no guarantee that the attacks won't get worse. After all, Hizbullah is acquiring newer, more powerful rockets from Iran.”
So, we are to consider Israel as doing what any nation would do. There are things that are acceptable for all nations, according to Chait. An interesting concession. Similarly, no nation would allow its neighbor to occupy its land. No nation would allow its neighbor to repeatedly violate its air space. No nation should remain uncompensated for damage wrought over eighteen years of occupation. No nation would tolerate its neighbor calmly planning and carrying out assassinations of its political leaders.
In actuality, just as Chait’s idea of peace is simply war, Chait’s appeal to the universal acceptable behavior of nations is not meant to be taken seriously. One nation, Lebanon, according to Chait, should happily swallow anything that Israel wants to do to it. In return, Israel has the right to reply in any way it feels fit to aggression. But of course, if another nation, say Syria, occupied Lebanon, why that would be a serious crime against humanity.

Chait’s logic is about an equivalence that is simply bogus. That equivalence is between Israel and the more powerful nations. He is simply appealing to the behavior sanctioned by the special group of nations of which he wants to make Israel part – the great powers, the former and present empires, who have given themselves the right to bomb and invade at will.

This overlooks the fact that Israel simply isn’t part of that group, and never will be.

Chait is correct to sum up the pluses and minuses of the Israeli military operation against Hezbollah, but somehow he misses the alternative that would emerge if Israel’s ruling class hadn’t made military supremacy and the settlement of the West Bank Israel’s supreme goals for the last forty years. The inability to triumph militarily in Lebanon is a sign that this ruling clique has lead Israel into a trap. The trap is disguised by Israel’s current idea that it will take unilateral action – which really means endless violence, resting on endless efforts to achieve military supremacy, financed by the United States. That, it seems to me, is the path that Israel is taking in Southern Lebanon. As with many an American proxy, though, Israel is going to find out the limits of existing as a free rider on American benevolence. Squandering its moral stature and its wealth against a militia party that is unlikely to be dislodged at all in Southern Lebanon is not a good deal at all – although no doubt the red meat boys at the New Republic, where Chait writes, think that it is neat. The same thinkers thought invading Iraq was neat.

Unilateralism is dead. Military action has obviously reached its limit. Oh oh, that means the dreaded and wimpy negotiation thing – even, perhaps, giving up the Golan heights, and giving up the settler’s welfare state on the West Bank. If Israel heeds the call of its “friends” such as Chait, however, it will be giving up much more, in the not too distant future.

“The doves are right that any solution that involves attacking innocent civilians is a terrible one. It's heartbreaking to see houses flattened and children killed. But when you have a nation populated in part by murderous religious fanatics who delight in killing enemy civilians and see the deaths of their own civilians as a strategic boon, any option is going to be terrible.
Israel is hoping to change the equation, to force Lebanon to take control of its border or accept an outside force that would do so. The tactic of striking Hizbullah has some chance of bringing that about. Stopping the attack and hoping for the best has no chance at all.”

Heartbreaking, is it? I think those are the mass manufactiured, Hallmark kind of hearts he is alluding to. Any breaks they may suffer are easily healed. It isn't the likes of Chait who will refer, again, to the Children's Massacre in Quana.

However, the more Israel heeds the words of hawks like Chait, the more it is going to confront no choice at all. As Iraq showed, an insurgent force can stop an occupier. And certainly as Israel huffs and puffs about bombing Teheran if Tel Aviv is bombed, they are moving blindly in a direction that has been mapped out by group that has never yet been right in the middle east – the neo cons.