A Costly Trap for Israel

The great debate in Israel these days is not whether peace with the Palestinians is still possible but whether the cost of Israel’s 15-year-long occupation of southern Lebanon is any longer supportable.

The nine-mile-deep so-called security zone held by about 1,000 Israeli troops and a 2,500-man Lebanese militia financed by Jerusalem was supposed to keep northern Israel safe from attack. In fact rockets fired by Iran-backed Lebanese forces fall periodically on Israeli towns and settlements, causing damage but few casualties. Far heavier have been Israeli troop losses in the zone and in other operations associated with Lebanon. Yossi Beilin, an opposition Labor Party politician, puts the number of Israelis who have died since the ill-conceived 1982 invasion of Lebanon at more than 1,200. About half died in that war, the rest in subsequent fighting and accidents. The toll this year alone exceeds 100.

Successive Israeli governments have linked a withdrawal from Lebanon to a peace agreement with Syria, which keeps 35,000 troops in eastern Lebanon to assure that the Beirut government does its bidding. But as Israeli casualties have inexorably increased, the wisdom of that policy has been increasingly questioned. At little risk to itself, Syria has been able to impose a steadily growing burden on Israel, which has struggled vainly to suppress the forces opposing it, at a high cost to Lebanese civilians as well as its own troops. As in virtually all such long-term struggles, the guerrillas win simply by not being defeated.

The Israeli debate over Lebanon does not divide along party or ideological lines. Among those arguing for a policy reassessment now is Ariel Sharon, one of the most militant members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and, as defense minister in 1982, the architect of the Lebanon invasion. The invasion in time led to the expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organization from its bases in Lebanon. But by energizing Hezbollah and other fundamentalist groups, it also unintendedly brought the virulently anti-Israel Iranian revolution to Israel’s very doorstep.

A unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon by Israel for a long time seemed inconceivable. But circumstances change, public attitudes shift. What once appeared to be a sound defensive strategy is now increasingly seen as a costly trap. Israel’s enemies are not going to help it out of that trap. Only the policymakers in Jerusalem can point the way to an exit.