Israel’s Mission: Change the Rules of Engagement in Lebanon

Israel’s reprisal attacks on Hezbollah headquarters in Beirut and throughout Lebanon have been intended as impressive surgical strikes and may well have done serious damage to the Iranian-backed guerrillas.

But Israel never expected the military operation to end the decade-long war against Hezbollah, a militia drawn from Lebanon’s Shiite Muslims. That end, Israel believes, can come only through negotiations with Syria, the de facto ruler of Lebanon and overseer of Hezbollah.

The Israeli fighter-bombers, helicopter gunships and heavy artillery that have attacked Hezbollah bases throughout Lebanon for two days are instead meant to bury the old rules of engagement under which a war of attrition has been waged for more than a decade and to open the way for negotiations on a new set of rules--if not peace.

Until there is such an understanding, however, Israelis living in the northern town of Kiryat Shemona, Lebanese villagers and even some Beirut residents will be forced to run for cover.

“The point is very simple: Hezbollah doesn’t fire, neither do we,” said Maj. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, the Israeli army’s intelligence chief. “They are firing, however, and so are we, to the best of our capability and according to our own rules.”

In 1993, after a massive Israeli attack on southern Lebanese villages called “Operation Accountability,” the two sides reached a U.S.-brokered understanding to protect Israeli and Lebanese civilians from the fighting. The agreement effectively restricted combat to Israel’s self-declared “security zone” in southern Lebanon, although there have been violations by both sides.

Israel blames Hezbollah for breaking this understanding with repeated Katyusha rocket attacks on northern Israeli communities in recent months.

Fed up and under mounting domestic criticism for inaction, Prime Minister Shimon Peres ordered Israel’s first air attacks on Beirut in 14 years--against a suspected Hezbollah headquarters in the city’s southern suburbs--and other strikes in the Bekaa Valley, within 700 yards of Syrian troops stationed there.

These raids, in turn, provoked further Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel on Friday and Israeli counterattacks on Beirut and on Lebanese villages.

Trying to minimize civilian casualties, Israel warned the residents of more than 40 Lebanese villages just north of the security zone that it was about to bomb, sending thousands of men, women and children fleeing north toward Beirut.

The sudden flood of refugees created an immediate crisis for the Lebanese government, which a day earlier had tried to dismiss the conflict as a problem between Israel and Hezbollah.

The bombing of Beirut also provoked, as Israel clearly intended, panic among the city’s residents and revived frightening memories of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war.

Israeli Foreign Minister Ehud Barak said that Israel wanted to “clarify to the Lebanese government . . . that sovereignty above all means responsibility. . . . They will have to find a solution: Either disarm the Hezbollah of their weapons or find another way to silence them.”

Although Lebanon is an independent country and has its own army, Prime Minister Rafik Hariri can do little more than beseech Syria, his powerful neighbor, to resolve the situation. To act against Hezbollah itself would risk both renewed civil war and Syrian retaliation. Hariri plans to travel to the Syrian capital of Damascus today to discuss the situation with Syrian President Hafez Assad.

Syria not only maintains an estimated 40,000 troops in the country but effectively controls the Lebanese government. It also manages the supply routes through which Hezbollah receives money and weapons from the Islamic government in Iran.

Syria’s interest in Hezbollah, however, is as a bargaining chip for negotiations with Israel and, to a certain degree, in its relations with the United States. Syria wants the return of the captured Golan Heights in exchange for ending its state of war with Israel. But Israel wants a deal with Syria to bring about regional peace, especially an end to the fighting with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

Assad’s response to the increased fighting in Lebanon is not yet known. So far he has maintained a discreet silence, although Syrian radio accused Peres of escalating the conflict to improve his image before the May 29 Israeli election.

Assad may have wanted to wait to make any move until Israel is ready to return to negotiations after the election. But the Israeli attack Friday on a Syrian antiaircraft position outside Beirut, killing one Syrian soldier and wounding 11 others, may force his hand.

“There is a link between military action and negotiations which is always part of the equation in the Middle East,” said Gerald Steinberg, a political scientist at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv’s Bar Ilan University. “Peres expects that if Syria’s ally is weakened in military attacks, after [Israeli] elections Syria will come back to the negotiating table more ready to reach compromise, including an agreement on Lebanon.”

The other player in the equation is Iran, Hezbollah’s main source of materiel and ideological support.

Iran uses Hezbollah in its efforts to block peace negotiations between Syria and its enemy Israel and to build Islamic governments in the Arab world.

Peres blames Iran for Hezbollah’s recent escalation of attacks, saying that Tehran wants his defeat in the upcoming election in order to kill the prospect of a broad Middle East peace.

Because no negotiations are possible with Iran, Israel attacks Hezbollah. And until Syria and Israel return to the bargaining table, Israel’s only option is to try to set new rules of war. The United States can be expected to step in soon to mediate another “understanding,” as it did after 1993’s Operation Accountability.