Middle East
“Major change” is an apt summary of 2006 in the Middle East/Mediterranean basin. In January, Israel’s Ariel Sharon suffered a massive stroke, leaving Ehud Olmert to run the new political party in the March elections. Meanwhile, Palestinians gave a parliamentary majority to the U.S.-designated “terror” group Hamas, triggering Israeli and U.S. punitive measures aimed at overturning the choice of the Palestinians. In June, Palestinian militants seized an Israeli soldier during a deadly raid on an Israeli guard post. After a three-day delay, Israeli troops poured into the Gaza strip, methodically moving from one village to the next, one refugee camp to the next. The Israeli action undercut Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas who had been working to get the various Palestinian factions to end their daily barrage of short-range Qassam rockets from Gaza into Israel. After five months of Israeli incursions into Gaza and the West Bank, the Israelis suddenly changed course. On November 25, Olmert unexpectedly accepted a comprehensive cease-fire arrangement, engineered by Abbas, that covered all militant Palestinian organizations. Olmert pledged that at 6:00 AM November 26, all offensive Israeli activities in Gaza and the West Bank would cease, and Israeli military forces would immediately begin to leave all Palestinian territory. As the ceasefire went into effect, at least 403 had died as a direct result of clashes – 400 Palestinians and 3 Israeli soldiers. The kidnapped soldier is still missing.
Far more devastating carnage began July 12 when an Israeli commando patrol was ambushed by the “radical” Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Eight Israelis were killed and two captured. This seemed at first to be just one more clash – albeit with more fatalities than usual – after which Hezbollah and Israel would swap prisoners. But this time, within a few short hours, Israel’s air force launched what became a punishing assault on southern Lebanon, Beirut, and part of northern Lebanon and the upper Beka Valley.
But just as Hezbollah miscalculated the Israeli reaction, so too did Israel miscalculate the extensive preparations Hezbollah had made over the previous five years. When Israeli troops precipitously withdrew from southern Lebanon in May 2000, Hezbollah, not the Lebanese government, became the dominant social, economic, security, and local political power in the area from the Litani River south to the Lebanon-Israeli border. Supported by Syria and Iran, Hezbollah built an intricate array of military redoubts linked by covered tunnels and a complex of camouflaged rocket firing positions that could be remotely controlled. The extent and the intricacy of Hezbollah’s preparations surprised Israeli intelligence professionals. For the first time in decades, the Israeli Defense Forces faced an opponent that knew the terrain better, who believed more strongly in its cause, and who refused to collapse even under Israel’s superior firepower. After 33 days of meager military success, with Hezbollah still able to launch Katyusha rocket barrages into northern Israel, Olmert was ready to agree to a truce on the condition that the Lebanese Army deploy troops into the Litani basin and that the long-standing UN peacekeeping mission, UNIFIL, be sharply increased to 15,000 with troops from European nations. Fatalities from the 33 days of fighting came to at least 636 civilians, but the massive use of cluster munitions, primarily by Israel, continues to take a toll.
Later in the year, the assassination of the Lebanese Christian (Phalange) Minister of Industry Pierre Gemayel on November 21 plunged the already shaky government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora into a deep crisis. Since pro-Syrian Hezbollah cabinet ministers and their allies had already resigned from the government, Gemayel’s death left the anti-Syrian Siniora with no options under Lebanon’s constitution but to dissolve the government should even one more minister leave the cabinet for any reason. At year’s end, Siniora was still hanging on to power but reliant on the UN peacekeeping force to stabilize the border with Israel.
