Isolating Terrorists Doesn’t Bring Peace, So Try the Opposite

"Britain to Resume Talking With Hezbollah"
A10, Friday, 3/6/09,
By Robert F. Worth

Worth frames the British move to resume talks with Hezbollah as part of a larger response to the Bush administration’s policy of isolating regimes or entities hostile to Israel. Yet before Bush, how much engagement was there with Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran?

According to the warped logic of unnamed “Middle East experts,” the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace has been “impeded” by isolating the aforementioned parties, which have been unambiguous in rejecting peace with Israel [Syria’s ambiguous rejection the exception].

Unmentioned is the possibility that this is engagement for engagement's sake; that this is part of a political exercise – however ill-conceived it may seem – of taking a diplomatic high road in engaging Iran, which may itself just be a diplomatic formality.

Paul Salem, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, thinks “it’s an interesting and positive development”. Two reps from the British Foreign Office are cited, one of whom, Rammell, states that Britain reconsidered contact with Hezbollah “in light of more positive recent political developments in Lebanon.”

Yet Worth skips a paragraph before stating that “Hezbollah militiamen took control of large parts of Beirut last year by force, gaining an effective veto power over government decisions.” This fact, if placed right after Rammell’s line, might’ve thus exposed its ludicrousness. Furthermore, readers may be unsure that the Hezbollah takeover, breezily reported by Worth, is what Rammell referred to.

While Britain’s Foreign Office is quoted three times, Israel’s Foreign Ministry is not quoted, or cited, at all. It wasn’t for a lack of material. In response to Britain’s move, the ministry’s Yigal Palmor said that Hezbollah “uses violence as a means to foist itself and the interest of the country that pulls its strings [Iran] onto Lebanon. All its activities are designed to undercut peace and stability in the Middle East." Palmor continues that "anyone looking to promote compromise, understanding and peace in the Middle East will not find a partner in Hizbollah."

A higher level Israeli official, Zalman Shoval, took issue with Britain’s stated logic of “positive recent political development”. The British “say they are doing this because of the growing role of Hizbollah in Lebanese politics," Shoval said. "But is that growing role a good or a bad thing? Why do they want to encourage it?" This is a relevant question that was left out.

In a positive ending, Hezbollah is seen as the unreasonable organization it is when it, through a statement, condemned the ICC’s arrest warrant against Sudan’s president al-Bashir and insisted that arrest warrants should be issued for U.S. and Israeli officials for “filling the graves of Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Pakistan with hundreds of thousands of deaths.”

This goofy anti-Western rhetoric aside, this article fails to convey, at least in part, the inflexible militarily anti-Western agenda of Hezbollah.