MB Civic

By Richard Cohen | Tuesday, August 1, 2006; A17 | The Washington Post

The world is having a Mel Gibson moment. If it does not quite hold Jews “responsible for all the wars in the world,” then certainly it is ready to blame Israel alone for the carnage in Lebanon and, in the addled formulations of some, the war in Iraq as well. Gibson offered his inebriated analysis to a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, but drunk and a skunk though he may be, he put his finger to the anti-Israel zeitgeist and uttered its prevailing sentiment: Enough.

The war in Lebanon has thus far proved to be a debacle for both Israel and the United States. It has flipped George Bush into a state of babbling inanity about how this was “a moment of opportunity” — as Britain’s Tony Blair, his steadfast enabler, stood by and watched. This is similar to the opportunity presented by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which offered Bush et al. the chance to rearrange the china of the Middle East by smashing a good deal of it. That, as we all know, has not worked quite as splendidly as promised.

Before Gibson there was Kofi Annan. I do not accuse the United Nations secretary general of anti-Semitism — a slam-dunk in Gibson’s case — but here again there is a rush to judgment, an impatience, an anger and a general vexation that, at best, is worrisome. When an Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon killed four U.N. observers last week, Annan was quick to say Israel had done so deliberately. Why Israel would do such a thing — what’s the benefit to it? — went unexplained or even, it seemed, unconsidered. Annan, who later said he would await an Israeli report on the incident, was having a mini-Mel Gibson moment.

This is all regrettable, not to mention troubling. War is a nasty thing, and in this war Israel has most of the firepower. Having most of the firepower means that it can do most of the damage. The consequences can be horrendous and almost unbearable to see on television. What’s more, Israel has an almost mythical reputation for military prowess, a supposedly magical ability for battlefield precision, so it’s all the harder to accept the fact that it, too, can make awful mistakes. The United States, after all, has done similar things in Iraq and Afghanistan. As for Hezbollah, it cannot make such mistakes. It doesn’t give a damn where its rockets land.

It is the nature of contemporary war that its causes are soon forgotten. Hezbollah’s kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers and its cross-border missile attacks are a distant memory. More pressing, more urgent — more compelling by far — are the horrible images of dead and wounded children. The urge is to change the channel, alter the programming: End the war. The kidnapped soldiers have no on-screen presence. Their plight, their fate, cannot compare to what happened in the Lebanese village of Qana. It is also useless to point out that the 2,500 or so rockets fired into Israel have mostly been directed at civilian targets. Haifa, after all, is not a military base.

A constant state of war makes a country mad. It unnerves it, unhinges it — which is what happened here after Sept. 11. You only have to read the Israeli press to get a sense of the fury, the anger, the hurt of a people who see their enemy lurking among civilians, their weapons placed in and among children — and feel the wrath of the world for hitting back. The strike into Lebanon has almost universal support in Israel, the most contentious of all societies, because of a deep and justifiable sense of grievance. What more can it do? What else will be asked of it? Who picked this fight, anyway?

The world has a responsibility here. If it can no longer put up with Israeli excess, with its (understandable) policy to strike back disproportionately, then it has to put an end to the slow bleeding of that country. The world — the United Nations — created Israel. It ought to safeguard it. It is the only way.

Israel pulled out of Lebanon in 2000. It pulled out of Gaza last year. It was making plans to pull out of most of the West Bank. Still, the suicide bombings continue, the rockets keep coming down and soldiers get kidnapped, maybe never to be returned. Yet the world, appalled at what it can see on television and untroubled by what it cannot, has had it with Israel. Mel Gibson would understand.