Lebanon's election results as seen from Jerusalem

No joy for Lebanon


Dancing in the streets, chanting "ya'ala Hariri" and discharging weapons into Beirut's night sky, the Sunni-led (nominally) pro-Western "March 14 Coalition" celebrated its victory Sunday over the pro-Hizbullah, pro-Syria and pro-Iran "March 8 Coalition."

Sa'ad Hariri's Sunni-led alliance captured 71 of parliament's 128 seats, versus 57 for the Hizbullah-led grouping. Voter participation was high at 55 percent. Both sides spent huge sums to purchase support and fly in expatriates to bolster their numbers.

It is good that Hizbullah did not achieve a better outcome. Yet Israelis would be deluding themselves if they viewed the results as a substantive defeat for the Islamists.

The harsh reality, the latest election results notwithstanding, is that Lebanon's radicalized Shi'ites are growing stronger and will need to be accommodated by the "victorious" forces of relative moderation.

No official census has been taken in Lebanon for decades. But the working assumption is that Shi'ites comprises 50% of the population; Sunnis 18%; Christians 15%; and Druse 17%. Nevertheless, elections in Lebanon are a set piece - a guaranteed 50:50 split between Christians and Muslims. This adheres to the 1943 National Pact, modified by the 1989 Taif Accord. Christians and Muslims then further divide the electoral results along confessional sub-groupings.

Election districts are gerrymandered. A given ward might be authorized to send, say, two Druse and one Sunni representative to the legislature. Everyone, regardless of religious affiliation, has the right to select from among the competing Druse and Sunni candidates. In other words, a Sunni running for a "Sunni seat" could still be aligned with Hizbullah.

Both sides understand that regardless of the results, Lebanon is in for more of the same. After his electoral achievement became clear, Hariri declared: "There are no winners or losers in these elections; the only winner is democracy in Lebanon."

Hizbullah's Hassan Fadlallah readily agreed about no winners or losers, saying: "Whoever wants political stability, the preservation of national unity and the resurrection of Lebanon will find no choice but to accept the principle of consensus." He meant: Hizbullah's consent.

Walid Jumblatt, the Druse leader ostensibly aligned with Hariri, said Hizbullah should be included in the next government. Before the results were in, he told a meeting of Druse elders: "The Shi'ite reality has imposed itself" via demography, money, ties with Iran, and the support of the wealthy Lebanese Shi'ite diaspora in Africa. Lebanon's future, Jumblatt was saying, is Shi'ite; the Druse struggling to survive will have to adjust accordingly.

That said, the Hariri forces will still have the most influence over the composition of the next government. Prior to the election, Hariri said he was not disposed to form a government with Hizbullah. Whatever the case, as a price for its support, Hizbullah will demand that Lebanon stop cooperating with the international tribunal investigating (already fingering, some reports say) Hizbullah's role in the assassination of Hariri's father, Rafik.

For this reason, Sa'ad Hariri may opt not to become premier, citing "national unity."

IT GOES without saying that Shi'ite leaders will not honor their pledge to view the election as a referendum on continued "resistance" against Israel.

Indeed, one may deduce that Hassan Nasrallah's fingerprints are all over yesterday's infiltration attempt from the northern Gaza Strip into Israel. The Hizbullah chief instigates attacks that are not easily traceable back to him, so as not to complicate the delicate political situation inside Lebanon.

On the other hand, in the unlikely event that Nasrallah should lash out openly against Israel out of frustration over his electoral setback, Lebanese factions should know that the Land of the Cedars will be held responsible for any aggression emanating from its territory.

So long as the West continues to kowtow to Iran, its Hizbullah proxy will continue to hold sway over events in Lebanon. Hizbullah will continue to field the country's strongest army and smuggle in weapons from Iran and Syria. It will bide its time; buy up more land; engage in more narco-terrorism; counterfeit more currency, and wait for demographics to determine Lebanon's fate.

Can Lebanon's fate yet be salvaged? Only if the West is prepared to do the heavy lifting required to block Teheran's drive for regional hegemony, and enforce UN Security Council resolutions 1559 and 1701 to stem weapons smuggling into Lebanon.

Don't know much about history...

Why Obama is wrong on Israel & the Shoah

On Friday, President Barack Obama placed a single white flower at the Buchenwald memorial for the estimated 43,000 people - among them 11,000 Jews - murdered at the concentration camp. In subdued tones, he said that the passage of time had not made the crematoria lose their horror. He spoke of his great uncle, who under Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had been among the camp's liberators. He recounted how Eisenhower had toured the camp so he could personally challenge anyone who might claim that the Allies had exaggerated the Nazi horrors for propaganda purposes.

This gave Obama another opportunity to declare that Holocaust denial is "baseless," "ignorant" and "hateful."

In his Cairo address the day before to the Muslim and Arab worlds, the president had justified Israel's right to exist on the basis of the Holocaust: "The aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted," he said, "in a tragic history" that culminated in the Shoah.

At Buchenwald, he said: "The nation of Israel [arose] out of the destruction of the Holocaust."

That rationale, standing alone, set the stage for Obama to assert: "On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinians… have suffered in pursuit of a homeland."

BARACK OBAMA has been terribly misinformed if he thinks Israel's legitimacy hinges on the Shoah. Of course, had the Jews achieved a national homeland in Palestine before the outbreak of WWII - as Britain promised in the 1917 Balfour Declaration and as the League of Nations affirmed in 1920 - the doors to this country would not have been barred to Jewish refugees seeking to escape from the Nazi killing machine. History would have turned out very differently indeed.

What the Holocaust proved is that the world is too dangerous a place for Jews to be stateless and defenseless. But we Zionists were making that argument long before Hitler came to power.

Granted, modern political Zionism developed in the late 1800s and early 1900s. But the president needs to better appreciate that Israel's legitimacy is not dependent on the consequences of the war waged against the Jews between 1933 and 1945. It is, first and foremost, rooted in the historic connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.

The Zionist movement rejected Uganda as a safe haven in 1903, the need to save Jews from violent anti-Semitism notwithstanding, because Uganda did not belong to the Jews.

However one chooses to understand Jewish civilization - as sacred history, or through the modern lenses of secular history and archeology - the ancient bond between the Jews and their land is indisputable.

By 1000 BCE, the Twelve Tribes had formed a united monarchy. Then, when in 586 BCE the Jews were defeated and exiled, "By the rivers of Babylon... we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion." We returned and rebuilt our commonwealth - only to be defeated and exiled again, in 70 CE. As early as the 9th century, Jews had reestablished communities in Tiberias; and, in the 11th century, in Gaza.

SO YOU see, Mr. President, long before Christianity and Islam appeared on the world stage, the covenant between the people of Israel and the Land of Israel was entrenched and unwavering. Every day we prayed in our ancient tongue for our return to Zion. Every day, Mr. President. For 2,000 years.

At every Jewish wedding down through the centuries, the bridegroom has crushed a glass beneath his foot while declaring: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem…"

Perhaps it's because Palestine was never sovereign under the Arabs that even moderate Palestinians cannot find it in their hearts to acknowledge the depth of the Jews' connection to Zion. Instead, they insist we are interlopers.

When Obama implies that Jewish rights are essentially predicated on the Holocaust - not once asserting they are far, far deeper and more ancient - he is dooming the prospects for peace.

For why should the Arabs reconcile themselves to the presence of a Jewish state, organic to the region, when the US president keeps insinuating that Israel was established to atone for Europe's crimes?

Obama's Cairo Speech as Seen from Jerusalem

Great expectations

It was with mixed feelings that we watched President Barack Obama deliver his extraordinary speech to the Muslim and Arab worlds in Cairo yesterday.

Critics will see the speech as incredibly naive. Yet it was also the most meaningful and coherent attempt by an American leader since 9/11 to dissociate the world's 1.5 billion Muslims from demagogic elites preaching worldwide jihad and hatred of non-believers.

It is not insignificant that Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden took the president's power to persuade seriously enough to try to preempt him by issuing fresh rants. It must have galled them to see hard-line imams and Muslim Brothers listening attentively in the audience. A Gallup Poll, taken before the speech, showed 25 percent of Egyptians approving of the US under Obama, compared to 6% under George W. Bush.

IN A city where Holocaust denial is part of the popular culture, it was good to hear Obama telling Muslims: "Six million Jews were killed," and saying otherwise is "ignorant, and hateful."

To no applause, he proclaimed: America's ties with Israel are "unbreakable."

However, elsewhere, Obama's moral equivalency was disconcerting. Undeniably, Palestinians have endured dislocation - but it would have been courageous of the president to say that much of this pain has been self-inflicted, thanks to 60 years of intransigence.

He was right to remind the Arab states that their peace initiative was only "an important beginning." And we were gratified when he insisted Hamas end its violence, recognize past agreements, and accept Israel's right to exist.

But we cringed when he associated the Palestinian struggle with the US civil rights movement and with the campaign for majority rule in South Africa - even if the punch-line of this false analogy was: Terrorism is always unjustifiable.

We were braced for his reiteration of long-standing US policy against the settlement enterprise. But he missed a crucial opportunity to prepare the Arabs for territorial compromise. No Israeli government is going to pull back to the hard-to-defend 1949 Armistice Lines.

Obama didn't really need to tell Israelis to acknowledge "Palestine's" right to exist since every government since Yitzhak Rabin's has been explicit that the Jewish state does not want to rule over another people. The real question is whether a violently fragmented Palestinian polity is capable of making the necessary compromises required to close a deal.

BUT THIS speech was not largely about the Arab-Israel conflict. It was an effort to pursue public diplomacy and suasion - trying to decouple the susceptible Muslim masses from the demagogic extremists who now hold such sway. That is why the president was wise to travel first to Saudi Arabia, "where Islam began," and, just before his speech, to be seen deferentially touring a mosque in Cairo - the city from where the theology of worldwide jihad first spread its vicious tentacles.

The speech was brilliantly proleptic: first acknowledging Muslim grievances, then stating the American case. To the Israeli ear, the president sounded fawning, prefacing each mention of the Koran with "holy." But it was just the right tack given the task at hand. Similarly, as the president highlighted the epochs during which Islam was a force for enlightenment, we could not help but recall that even in that "Golden Age," Jews were still treated as a dhimmi people.

And yet, the president's harking back to periods of relative tolerance bolstered his call on today's Muslims to behave temperately. We also appreciated his defense of the region's Christian minority.

We swallowed hard as the president intoned that "Islam is not part of the problem" of worldwide terrorism. At the same time, we reminded ourselves that his goal was to convince ordinary Muslims to make this dubious statement reality.

On democracy, employing a lighter touch than his predecessor, Obama advocated for the right of all citizens everywhere to express themselves freely and to live under regimes that respect the rule of law.

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei didn't wait long to digest the Obama speech before proclaiming that America remained "deeply hated" in the region, something that wasn't going to change because of "beautiful and sweet" words.

Who will be the first Muslim leader to tell the ayatollah he is wrong?
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Shabbat shalom to all.

Obama & Israel .....

Cool it!


To illustrate the nadir to which America-Israel relations have sunk, one Hebrew-language tabloid revealed that when IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi travelled to Washington several weeks back to meet with US decision-makers about the worrisome speed with which Iran is moving toward a nuclear bomb, neither Secretary of Defense Robert Gates nor Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would make time to see him.

The trip, said the paper, ended in failure.

Shocking story - but not true. Ashkenazi's visit didn't take place weeks ago, but months ago. The general chose to cut his visit short to participate in urgent cabinet deliberations about Gilad Schalit. And he wasn't in the US on official business, but to attend a Friends of the IDF fund-raiser.

Then there was The New York Times report about Washington toying with letting Israel fend for itself against the UN's built-in Muslim and Arab majority, to pressure for a settlement freeze. On Tuesday, administration sources denied the story.

There are those in America and Israel who, albeit for differing reasons, think talking-up tension in the US-Israel relationship is a good idea.

For those who want to create a political environment conducive to forcing Israeli concessions, it makes sense to spotlight differences over settlements; which is also a convenient way to dissociate the pro-Israel community in America from Israeli government policies, since support for the settlement enterprise is hardly widespread.

That's why Monday's loutish behavior by the "hilltop youth" in Samaria who attacked Palestinians, torched fields and burned tires was a godsend to proponents of a settlement freeze. Such images strengthen the myth that all settlers are wild-eyed religious fanatics to whom violence is second nature.

Meanwhile, dovish American Jews, hankering for Obama to impose "peace," are promoting a story that has White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel purportedly telling an unnamed Jewish leader that no matter what, a Palestinian state will emerge in the next four years; and that if Israel wants action on Iran, it will have to withdraw from West Bank territory.

This account portrays the savvy Emanuel as not only petulant, but naive - as if the Palestinians have no role to play, and Israel alone will bear the consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Playing up tensions with the Obama administration also serves the interests of Netanyahu's domestic opponents. One pundit wrote Tuesday that the US and Israel aren't heading for a collision - they've already crashed. Implication: All would be well if Tzipi Livni was premier.

Paradoxically, commentators on the Right are saying exactly the same thing: that Washington has launched an all-out diplomatic and media assault against Israel that's "worse than a crisis."

We ask them: What useful purpose does it serve to demonize so popular a president, or claim his policies are motivated by animus, when it's hard to discern where they differ substantively from those of his predecessors?

GOING into his Thursday reconciliation speech in Cairo addressed to the Arab and Muslim world, Obama has been signaling that he expects gestures from them to encourage Israeli reciprocity. To interviewers reveling in the perceived chasm between Israel and Washington, the president is saying that unlike the 24/7 news cycle, which feeds on crises, diplomacy requires patience. And as The New York Times reported yesterday, he wants to play down differences over settlements.

Obama is reportedly planning a major Washington policy address next month detailing his approach to Arab-Israel peacemaking. Those who want to manipulate the environment to Israel's detriment will continue to foster an ambiance of crisis. But those who want what's best for Israel should be working in the opposite direction.

Our government can create a better atmosphere by permanently dismantling unauthorized outposts; reiterating Israel's "no new settlements" policy, and rethinking the wisdom of refusing to endorse previous Israeli governments' policy on the two-state solution.

Can we ask Obama to honor understandings about settlement blocs reached by Israel with his predecessor when we are not honoring agreements his predecessor reached with us?

Once we have taken these steps, we can feel more comfortable about disagreeing with other Obama policies without seeming to be disagreeable.

War Siren at 11 a.m.

Welcome to our reality

Say you live in any one of these cities: Oslo, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, London, Stockholm or Washington, and at 11 a.m. today the war siren goes off. You've been told it's just a drill - your city isn't being attacked by ballistic missiles or long-range rockets. Your country neither plans to attack anyone, nor is there intelligence indicating it is the target of imminent attack.

Still, the wailing siren - a curiously anachronistic instrument for the 21st century - is upsetting. You do as you're told and seek out a nearby bomb shelter, or enter the reinforced-concrete room common in homes built since the 1990s.

At work, there is some gallows humor as colleagues file into the bomb shelter. At school, your children will head into the shelters with their teachers. It may strike you that the authorities were imprudent in collecting for refurbishment those cardboard boxes with their plastic shoulder-straps containing gas masks and a chemical-warfare antidote.

Of course, if you do live in any of the above-mentioned capitals, this scenario is beyond far-fetched. There are no shelters. No safe rooms. No gas masks.

No one is threatening to wipe Sweden, Germany or Scotland - or any of the others - off the map. There are no Sajil II ballistic missiles aimed your way. Your country didn't absorb 5,000 rocket hits in the course of a single summer. It doesn't share a border with a country that deploys Scud D missiles. And the notion that missiles laden with WMDs could explode over your head is simply beyond imagination.

Though Muslim extremists struck in Spain, Britain and the United States, the sense that any further danger looms is not widespread. That's why no one undergoes a security check to enter a supermarket, department store or cinema. And why armed guards are not posted outside schools.

WE ISRAELIS live in a very different reality.

That truth was brought home in remarks Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made at Sunday's cabinet meeting regarding Turning Point 3 - the week-long nationwide emergency drill.

The exercise is "routine," something the country does annually, he said, adding that it "reflects the special way in which we lead our lives - which, upon reflection, is not all that routine."

Want to understand the Israeli psyche? Consider that when our country was born, those with whom we sought to share this land rejected our right to exist. Though we have created a technologically advanced, Western-oriented country, and made peace with Egypt and Jordan, our "normality" still demands that a high-school graduate head not to university or for a gap year, but to basic training.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s (when there were no settlements and no "occupation") our homeland was under attack anyway. A single example: On March 17, 1954, gunmen ambushed an Eilat-Tel Aviv commuter bus. First they murdered the driver, then they proceeded to shoot the passengers, one by one.

In the 1970s, we fought off a surprise attack on our most solemn holy day - after having withstood a war of attrition. In the 1980s, we fought bitter wars in Lebanon to fend off attacks against our northern border.

In the 1990s, we signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestinian leadership. And since then? More Israelis have been murdered by terrorists than ever before.

Efforts to reach an accommodation with a violently fragmented Palestinian polity have thus far proven fruitless. The "moderates" appear no less unyielding than the fanatics.

We caught the Syrians, to our north, building a clandestine nuclear facility under North Korean tutelage. They make no secret about hosting Hamas's politburo, pressuring it to resist even a tactical timeout in its anti-Israel belligerency.

Hizbullah dominates Lebanese affairs and provides Iran with shock-troops along our border.

Then there is Iran, which may have enriched enough uranium to manufacture a nuclear bomb by year's end. Even as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens our obliteration, he insists that the Nazis did not systematically destroy European Jewry. Yet he is feted at UN forums, while Europeans shamelessly subsidize trade with his country.

That is our reality. It's the one many of us will be contemplating at 11 a.m. today, when the siren sounds.