Fallout in Israel

Haifa

The day after the cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah went into effect, I paid a visit to Yana Knopova, coordinator of the Coalition of Women for Peace. Knopova lives in Haifa, where some of the rockets fired by Hezbollah during the fighting fell, and was among the tiny minority of Israelis who opposed the war from the start, arguing that it would achieve nothing save to make Israel more hated throughout the region and would cost many innocent lives. By the time we met, Israelis across the political spectrum were criticizing the war, the two soldiers whose kidnapping had sparked the conflict were still in Hezbollah's custody and columnists on the left and right were calling for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to step down. Knopova felt vindicated. "I feel in this war we have succeeded," she said. "The things we were saying at the beginning, now everybody is saying them."

But the sense of vindication may prove short-lived. Although it remains to be seen whether the cease-fire will last and what its long-term consequences will be, it looks increasingly as though the war's political beneficiaries in Israel will be on the right, among the people least willing to accept one of the central lessons it has underscored: that there are limits to military power. The bombing campaign that some in Washington evidently hoped would serve as a model for an eventual US attack on Iran, as Seymour Hersh recently reported in The New Yorker, instead brought to mind America's experience in Iraq, with Israeli troops suffering unexpectedly heavy losses and getting bogged down in a quagmire that could have lasted months.

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