Of course, everybody has lost sight of why this war started in the first place. The three Israeli soldiers are still languishing somewhere and even if the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) stumbles upon some intelligence on their whereabouts, they aren't in a hurry to retrieve them.
That's because time is running out on the Israeli offensive, with US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice promising a ceasefire within days, not weeks. Commentators speculate that the US cannot afford
to pay the high moral price of letting the war go on for too long. Just last week, the US State Department described as "outrageous" a claim by Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon that Israel had received permission to keep bombing Lebanon.
Obviously, the photographs of children being pulled out of bombed-out ruins does
not sit well with policymakers who had played an active part in resisting the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's call for an immediate ceasefire to be imposed in the initial stages of the conflict.
Hezbollah's tenacity was totally unexpected and its arsenal of missiles is far from being depleted. Israel's objective in all this
is hardly set in stone and has oscillated from rescuing her captured soldiers to eradicating Hezbollah
completely to merely unseating Hezbollah's hold over Southern Lebanon. Shifting
priorities in the heat of battle is not a sign of weakness as some people
allege, but the mark of a frighteningly efficient and adaptive war machine.
One thing is clear, though, the facts on the ground must change. So confident
are the Israelis over this goal that even the normally dovish Shimon Peres vehemently disagrees with Rice that the ceasefire should come sooner rather than later. The fear is that Hezbollah escapes unscathed. However, it is hard to fathom Israel's strategy. Does it think that mimicking Hezbollah's crime of targeting civilian populations would reap results? Isn't Israel's own outrage and subsequent retaliation a good barometer of what it would provoke not only in the Lebanese side, but also in the whole Middle East?
Central to all this is Israel not being used to facing an effective opponent. The David and Goliath myths attached to Israel's confrontation with four Arab armies in the Six Day War has solidified how Israel views itself. To be hurt, even by pinpricks caused by a ragtag guerilla group like Hezbollah, is an offense of epic proportions. More, Israel believes that if it does not respond in the most overwhelming manner, her Arab opponents might nurture plans to revisit the Six Day War. This time, it will not be just four poorly-organized armies, but a project that would be enthusiastically joined by Iran itself.
Bloodying Hezbollah's nose is thus tantamount to bloodying Iran's nose. Israel fears that Iran might tip the region's balance of power by acquiring the same nuclear deterrence that it holds over the heads of her Arab neighbors. Hezbollah's
annihilation would serve as a useful warning to Iran.
But Israel is not alone it her goal to paralyze Hezbollah. Help arrives from the unexpected quarter of a certain brand of Islam. In a curt fatwa labeled 4174, Shaykh Abdullah bin Abdul Rahman bin Jibrin totally overturns the notion that Hezbollah should be assisted or even praised in any way.
Q. Is it permissible to support the Rafidi Hizbullah?
A. It is not permissible to support this Rafidi party and it is not permissible to join under its leadership, and it is not permissible to wish them (from God) victory and empowerment. And our advise to the people of Sunnah is to distance themselves from them, and to denounce those who join them, and to show their hostility to Islam and Muslims, and their harm, in the past and in modern times. The Rafidah always harbored hostility to Sunnis, and how they always try to show faults in Sunnis, and to betray them and undermine them.
The term, Rafidi, of course, is a pejorative word used to refer to Shia Muslims in general. It's a term liberally used by the websites listed
here, and also by individuals like
Musab al-Zarqawi (recently killed) whose zeal in slaughtering Shia Muslims earned even
a rebuke from al-Qaida.
Which puts the fatwa in a whole new perspective. It's rather obvious, for example, that the questioner is either the same person who answered, or that both the questioner and the replier adhere to the same particular stream of Islam. I say 'particular stream' because the doctrine that ALL Shia Muslims are Rafidi does not in reality find an echo in Sunni Islam, whose position is more accurately reflected
here.
In the essay entitled
Islam: Religion or Ideology?, Imam Zaid Shakir rightly articulates a worry,
...we should never lose sight of the fact that the Jewish people have also paid heavily for that triumph. The growing number of Jewish victims of the deepening cycles of violence plaguing the region, evidenced most recently in the indiscriminant Hizbollah rocket attacks on northern Israeli cities, is part of that price. However, in my opinion, the greater price lies in how the triumph of Zionism threatens to transform mainstream Judaism from a religion characterized by the loftiest of moral codes, to one that is willing to sacrifice its morality on the altar of political expediency.
On other fronts, a recent
interview by Jon Stewart of Dr Alon Ben-Meir, a Middle East expert, threw up an interesting
mis-fact. Both men
erroneously conclude that since Syria predominantly consists of Sunni Muslims, her relationship with Hezbollah is thus purely one of political convenience. The
mis-fact might not have been so important if they had not extended it by claiming that the Lebanese conflict signals a convergence of both Sunni and Shia militancy.
The trouble is, Syria's government is not Sunni, but Alawite, a branch that broke away from the Shia sect in the ninth century. The relationship is hence not purely political, but also theological. All claims that Sunni and Shia militancy is entering a new phase of intimacy is rather alarmist, considering that the ideology that continues to motivate the bulk of extremists is
unflinchingly opposed to Shi'ism in its entirety.
Israel is safe from that prospect for the moment, and indeed, might find the idea of colluding with ideological Islam not completely unpalatable, especially when it shares with the latter a visceral mistrust of Iran's
Ayatollahs.
