Necessary and Unreachable : The paradox is that to keep Mideast negotiations alive, Israeli leaders are fighting a mini-war in Lebanon.

It’s been quite a year for Israel. The prime minister assassinated; suicide bombers striking everywhere, and now another war in Lebanon. This is how we pursue peace in the Middle East. The assassinated prime minister famously said, “We shall negotiate as if there were no terror, and we shall fight terror as if there were no negotiations.” In fact, the opposite is true: Israel is negotiating because there was and is terror; and is fighting terror in order to retain the political clout to pursue negotiations. In a place with as tangled a web of history as this, no one action, no one pronouncement, stands alone. Everything is contextual. Everything is connected.

And the context today is the Israeli elections. Elections are the key to understanding the code. Hezbollah’s Katyusha rocket attacks have been growing more bold, it is true, but the recent shelling of Kiryat Shemona in northern Israel, which provoked the current exacerbated conflict, was not the first. Hezbollah missiles have, during the past month or so, fallen beyond the borders of the so-called security zone--the legal battlefield for the continuing mini-war between Israel and Hezbollah--and received only perfunctory responses.

This shelling is part of a strategy among Islamic fundamentalists and, perhaps, Syrian President Hafez Assad to undermine the Labor Party government and thereby destroy the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Labor Party leaders, now fighting for the right to continue governing and to continue the peace talks, have gradually come to believe that Hezbollah’s provocation is such that Labor cannot win the election unless it shows Israelis it is strong and willing to fight for Israel’s security. (Besides, every electorate on Earth loves a war--as long as its side is winning.)

Given this tough and painful election, it seemed particularly useful for Prime Minister Shimon Peres to fight--though the bloody accident that killed more than 75 civilians at a U.N. compound on Thursday has called even that logic into question. But Peres had decided to wage this war; though he has spent a large part of his 50-year public career in Israel’s defense ministry, he is seen as weak by many Israelis. He is not Yitzhak Rabin. His opponent, Benjamin Netanyahu, sensing a potentially popular war led by Peres, immediately began praising the oddly named “Operation Grapes of Wrath,” while setting forth unlikely goals it must achieve--for example, the annihilation of Hezbollah and a promise by Syria not to revive the group. Like any smart politician, while feigning support for Peres’ war, Netanyahu was laying the groundwork for labeling any outcome a failure. He is lying in wait like a lazy cat, licking his chops publicly and waiting for the Labor government to make a fatal mistake. Meanwhile, he is never subtle. “We support the government’s use of force, finally,” he said early last week.

Indeed, in Israel, negotiating is tantamount to weakness, and use of force equals strength--though Israel arrived at the negotiating table with its muscles flexed, and has been negotiating with the Palestinians from a position of strength. One reason those talks have gone as far as they have is because Israel is clearly the stronger negotiating partner. In negotiating, as in bargaining, a fast deal that both parties will accept means the two do not have shared standards for the transaction. What the seller perceives as a lot of money for his product (or the most he can get), the buyer perceives as a steal. When the parties share a vocabulary, the deal is likely to please each less and take longer to make--because the seller perceives what he is getting as too little, while the buyer thinks the cost is too high.

Talks between Israelis and Syrians are not moving along as well because each side is strong and feels it can strike a hard bargain. These two powers share the same language of force. No compelling reason has been presented why either should bend. The result: stalemate, and an ugly situation in Lebanon that has been allowed to fester.

On Wednesday morning in Jerusalem, air-raid sirens sounded over the usual honking of horns. Was it Katyushas coming? But that was ridiculous, since they can’t even reach over the entire Galilee, much less to Jerusalem.

In seconds, the reason for the alarm became clear. The loud warning was followed by something the Israelis call the “silence”--observed all over Israel to commemorate the victims of Germany’s extermination of the Jews of Europe. Across the country, in a dramatic show of respect for those who died in the Holocaust, all movement came to a halt. Cars stopped at the intersection; motorists got out and stood at attention; conversations ended in mid-phrase; pedestrians stopped in their tracks, as if frozen in time; work on the construction project a few blocks away ceased. An old man wearing a formal hat bowed his head. The jackhammer and the drill fell silent. Only the traffic lights, flickering from green to red and back to green again, gave a sign that life’s automatic ways would soon resume. A quarter of a million survivors of the German atrocities live in Israel.

It’s certainly not a new idea, but it bears keeping in mind that the ways Israel chooses to assert its right to exist are colored by the history of the Jews--especially by recent history. It is easy for a weakling to become a bully, given the right set of schoolyard circumstances, and not even notice the change. It is easy for an army that sees itself as perpetually under siege to take the risk of shelling a Hezbollah site only 300 meters from a refugee shelter filled with civilians.

It’s not impossible, either, for Israelis to accept unblinkingly the destruction of a Lebanese ambulance and almost all its innocent passengers as a not unacceptable (though perhaps unfortunate) result of Israel’s reaction to the injuries and shock that the rain of Katyushas has inflicted on the population of Kiryat Shemona. It’s only a little bit harder for them to accept what happened at the Qana U.N. installation on Thursday. Accidentally killing more than 75 innocents is just a few degrees worse than accidentally killing a family. This is war, the Israelis like to remind you, not unreasonably.

Israelis are caught between believing that their brilliant, smart weapons can make warfare a clean battle, only touching the concerned armies, and believing that any civilian near the forces of evil cannot expect to be completely safe. The latter argument, of course, makes it a little easier to contend that, from the point of view of Israel’s enemies, the people on the No. 18 bus in Jerusalem are also human shields, whose lives may not always be spared.

People here believe the enemy must be bulldozed if Israel is to have a chance. Israelis still see themselves, metaphorically and geographically, as the little guy--though they are the region’s over-dog. There is unquestionably a connection between the two minutes of silence observed on Holocaust day and the brash way the Israeli flag is displayed (two at the windshield of at least a quarter of the cars) in advance of Independence Day a week later. Coming so soon after the weeklong Passover celebrations, these two new--and very different--political holidays seem a part of one long, seamless celebration: the celebration of Israel’s survival in the face of terrible adversity.

The question, finally, is about the value of retaliation. Most Israelis believe retaliation is the sina qua non of survival--that even the strong must retaliate. Failure to respond is an indication of weakness. This is surely why the Israelis assassinated the Palestinian militant, Yehiya Ayyash, “the Engineer” who masterminded several terrorist attacks inside Israel. They had him in their gun sights, and he had to go--no matter how high the price. Some suggest the price was the spree of bus bombings that ensued once the Muslim period of mourning for Ayyash ended. And then, there must be a response to the bus bombings: closures, checkpoints and the roundup of everyone even faintly involved in Hamas. Now Hamas will respond.

With each pair of violent actions, some kind of peace appears both more unreachable and more necessary. As the possibility for peace seems to move farther and farther away, it begins to have, even for the warmongering Israelis, a greater and more compelling attraction. Peace for the Israelis is like an object of desire. The closer they get to it, the less appealing it becomes; but put it out of reach, and they want it. Give them a war, and after the initial euphoria and strident patriotism, they want peace. With the war in Lebanon, peace now seems almost beyond their ability to recall. This may, in the end, keep Peres in power--because he could be the wizard who can make peace reappear.*