Roots of Crisis: Why the Arabs and Israelis Fight

To understand why the Arab militants of Hamas and Hizballah are picking a fight with Israel now, you might start with an election. In January, Hamas, which is sworn to Israel's destruction, won the Palestinian general vote. The Hamas political leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniya, who fashions himself a relative moderate, became Prime Minister, and set about trying to prove Hamas could govern. Boycotted financially and politically by the U.S. and the E.U., Haniya in late June hammered out an agreement with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on a unified platform that would implicitly recognize Israel if it would withdraw to its 1967 borders. Recognizing Israel, though, is anathema to Hamas' hard-liners, who believe that God gave all the lands of the Middle East to Muslims and that the Jewish state therefore is accursed. For those hard-liners, any moves toward accommodation threaten the reason Hamas came into being in the first place. Deterred from attacking by arrests and assassinations, Hamas militants kept a cease-fire from March 2005 until last June, when they began firing rockets again and then, on June 25, decided to try another, daring tactic: they emerged from a tunnel dug under the Gaza fence to kill two Israeli soldiers and nab Corporal Gilad Shalit. Instead of talking about a peace deal, the Palestinian Authority found itself dealing with a rain of Israeli bombardments and border incursions.

Meanwhile, Hizballah, which was created in 1982 to resist Israel's invasion of southern Lebanon, has internal political incentives to act against Israel. In the new Lebanon, genuine independence is trying to take root after popular unrest forced the Syrians to lift their yoke on the country last spring. As a result, whether Hizballah should be allowed to remain armed six years after the Israelis left Lebanon is the most divisive political issue in the country today. Critics argue that only government forces should bear arms. Hizballah counters that given the weakness of the Lebanese Army, a disciplined guerrilla force is needed to deter Israeli aggression. And what better way to remind the country of that aggression than to provoke some by capturing a soldier or two?

Many analysts believe that Hizballah must have carried out the raid with at least the encouragement of the group's main benefactors, Syria and especially Iran. "He who pays the money is the boss," says a Lebanese official, arguing that Tehran engineered the crisis in hopes of deflecting the Bush Administration's drive to impose U.N. sanctions for Iran's suspected nuclear-weapons program. But whatever encouragement they may have had, neither Hamas nor Hizballah ever needs a specific justification for striking Israel. Attacking Israel is, for each, its raison d'être. And the groups' tacticians do not need to think that a particular strike will achieve a particular result. They take a long view, common among Islamists: over timedecades or even centuries, if necessaryIsrael will crumble. Israelis will lose their fortitude under the pressure of attacks, give up and go back to Europe or Russia or, if their roots are in the Middle East, agree to live within an Islamic state. Regardless, the fighters' reward is not here on earth in this lifetime, but in heaven.