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What Will Happen Next?

[Ha'aretz] Yossi Melman - According to Lebanon expert Professor Martin Kramer, a research fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, "Hizballah's hubris has created an opportunity for Israel." "Since Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon, Hizballah has basked in the illusion that it defeated Israel - that it somehow discovered a path to victory that had eluded Arab governments and the Palestinian movement....Nasrallah allowed a personality cult to develop around himself, and Hizballah marketed him as the only strategic genius in the Arab world." "It is in the interests of Israel and the United States to deal with the Hizballah threat now, and not later in the midst of a far more dangerous crisis over Iran's nuclear plans. So a war now to degrade Hizballah is a shared Israel-U.S. interest." "Israel has no choice. Islamism has come to fill the space that used to be occupied by Arab nationalism in Nasser's time: an ideology of rejection, resistance, and false promise of a Middle East without Israel. Israel's withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza, whatever their merits, have only fed this Islamism with lore of sacrifice and victory. The Islamists have a narrative, and they think the world conforms to it. The narrative is based on a very partial reading of reality. It has to be defeated, just as Nasser's narrative had to be defeated (in the 1967 war)." "Hizballah is no longer the darling of Lebanese nationalism, and its recent conduct has made it increasingly look like something foreign. This is certainly the message that is being sent by leaders of most other factions in the country: that Hizballah has usurped the power of decision-making on war and peace from the legitimately constituted government, and that it is acting outside the Lebanese national interest. The more Israel intensifies its attacks, the more that criticism is likely to spread - even among Shiites."
2006-07-21 01:00:00
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