Scott Lucas on Al Jazeera: Israel's Military Drills

On Sunday's Inside Story on Al Jazeera English, I was in a spirited discussion on Israel's military exercises and their significance for Middle Eastern politics. The other panelists were Mark Heller of Israel's Institute for National Security Studies and retired General Hisham Jaber of the Lebanese Army.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNFnlH0yr9w[/youtube]

Comments

[UJ]

Excellent discussion! Except I think General Jaber blew it there at the end with his answer to the Gaza/West Bank question. Lebanon is like the last country that can lecture others about internal instability and being "destroyed from within." There could be riots in the streets of Tel Aviv and it would still be preferable to the militant polarization of Lebanon. And let's not forget that Israel isn't the only one who doesn't give Palestinians a vote. There's millions of disenfranchised refugees left to rot in Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and...oh yeah, LEBANON!

What would your answer have been to the final question, Scott? How do you see Israel's strategically separating the Gaza Strip and West Bank as threatening and non threatening respectively?

To me it looks like a Catch 22. If Israel presumed the West Bank to be a threat, it could humiliate the wobbling Fatah dictatorship and empower Hamas ("See? Abu Mazen can't protect you!") but conversely, with Israel portraying the West Bank as non-threatening, it still undermines the PLO as compliant puppets of Israel. I don't really see any good options, except maybe to not hold the exercises in the first place.

[Scott Lucas]

UJ,

In general, I see the Israeli exercises as a diversion --- deliberate or by an accident of timing --- from the significant political questions, including the talks or, at this stage, non-talks)with the Palestinian Authority. Beyond that, there is the quite unsubtle (if somewhat contradictory, given Israel's balking at any substantive negotiations with Abbas) strategy of propping up the PA and not only keeping Hamas in the cold but trying to break it down.

In that respect, I would argue that far more significant than the posture of Israel's military exercises was the very real shoot-out in Qalqilya in the West Bank over the weekend, with US-trained PA forces killing two leaders of Hamas' military wing.

S.