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Israel vows to keep fighting

Amid world outrage at attack on civilians, Israelis temporarily stop aerial bombs but assert war will go on

BY MATTHEW McALLESTER | Newsday Middle East Correspondent

July 31, 2006

NAHARIYA, Israel - Israel's apologetic but defiant reaction to yesterday's events in the Lebanese town of Qana underscores the difference between this war and most Arab-Israeli conflicts waged during the past three decades: In the minds of many Israelis, their country's very existence is now at stake.

With nearly every government and leader in the world raining condemnation down on Israel yesterday for the bombing, which killed at least 56 civilians, Israel said it was sorry. It announced a 48-hour pause in its aerial bombing campaign.

But it did not end its campaign against Hezbollah.

"I have no plan to ask the government to change the war's objectives and reduce the activity of security forces, all this in a bid to stop the firing of rockets on northern Israel," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said yesterday, speaking before the announcement of the 48-hour pause in air attacks on Lebanon.

"This is about national survival," said Gerald Steinberg, the director of the program in conflict management at Israel's Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv. "There's no domestic pressure to get this over with."

A painful national narrative of survival underpins the conflict on the Israeli side. It is so omnipresent, such a given to most Israelis that it is largely unspoken. They all know this is a country born out of the trauma of the Holocaust, a country that has survived several attempts by Arab nations bent on its destruction. That menace has returned for the first time in decades, many Israelis feel.

Hezbollah itself might not seem much of a threat to the militarily mighty Israel, but what worries Israelis is that they see the Lebanese Shia militia as a vanguard for the Shia Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran provides ideological, financial and material support to Hezbollah.

Within the past year Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has said that Israel should be "wiped off the map." He has questioned whether the Holocaust happened. At the same time, Iran has been involved in a standoff with much of the international community over its nuclear program. Israel is convinced Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons, with Israel as Iran's prime potential target.

Israel has not faced such a threat to its existence, many Israelis feel, since Arab nations tried to invade and destroy it in the wars of 1967 and 1973.

Those battles for survival tapped into a deep and widely held determination among Israelis and Jews elsewhere in the world to never again - after the Russian pogroms of the 19th century and the Nazi Holocaust of the 20th - be passive victims.

Perhaps not since the Syrian and Egyptian attack of 1973 has Israel felt, rightly or wrongly, realistically or paranoically, that the survival of a Jewish state in the most Muslim region of the world is in doubt.

And so, Qana bombing or no Qana bombing, it appears determined to fight until it feels it has enabled its northern residents to return home and its 6 million other residents to feel that all of Israel is safe.

When asked how long Israel can withstand such widespread international condemnation, the Israeli Foreign Ministry's chief spokesman, Gideon Meir, told Newsday: "As long as it needs to bring security to our people. On [the] one hand we want to do it with international legitimacy and the support of the international community. On [the] other hand we are a sovereign government and we have to protect our people."

Israel clearly does not have the support of the international community. Apart from the United States and Britain, it is virtually without allies.

Yesterday there were even wobbles in Britain. "We have repeatedly urged Israel to act proportionately," Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said. Other British ministers are beginning to dissent from Prime Minister Tony Blair's line.

Israel's isolation grew further yesterday as moderate Arab leaders such as King Abdullah of Jordan condemned the attack, calling it "an ugly crime." At the start of the war, countries including Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia were hedgingly critical of Hezbollah for initiating the fighting by kidnapping two Israeli soldiers from inside Israel. That equivocation seems to be over.

Israel is unlikely to be too bothered by that shift or by its increasingly friendless standing in the world. Its priority, it says, is self-defense.

Yesterday, Hezbollah fired more missiles into Israel - more than 140 throughout the day - than on any previous day.

YESTERDAY'S EVENTS

An Israeli air strike kills at least 56 Lebanese, mostly women and children, seeking shelter in a building in Qana, Lebanon. Israel apologizes and agrees to a 48-hour suspension of aerial activity over southern Lebanon to allow civilian evacuations.

Lebanon says it will no longer negotiate a U.S. peace package without an unconditional cease-fire.

The United Nations Security Council approves a statement expressing "extreme shock and distress" over the Qana bombing but does not condemn it.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice cuts short a trip to the region after Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora tells her not to visit Beirut to continue work on a peace package.

About 5,000 protesters gather in downtown Beirut, attacking a UN building and burning American and Israeli flags.

Israel launches its second significant ground incursion into southern Lebanon, where its troops clashed with Hezbollah guerrillas, as far as 2.5 miles inside Lebanon.

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Amid world outrage at attack on civilians, Israelis temporarily stop aerial bombs but assert war will go on

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