Just recently, the Israeli cabinet voted to expand the ground war in southern Lebanon in its continued effort to uproot Hezbollah's terror infrastructure, which has been assailing the Israeli civilian population. As the casualties on both sides continue to mount, various world leaders have been struggling to get the two sides to agree on some sort of ceasefire agreement. They should save their breath. The Israeli-Lebanese-Hezbollah conflict is well beyond the point where calling off hostilities is a possibility. This conflict is but a proxy for a larger and for more bitter rift between Israel and its Arab neighbors that can be traced as far back as 1948 -- if not further.
The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 constituted a moment of severe cultural crisis for the Arab nations. It was a catastrophe of the first magnitude from which Arab society, as it existed then, could never hope to recover. When the Arab landlords who sold the Jewish settlers the land that would become much of the State of Israel, they did so with the sardonic, self-assured demeanor that there was no way these crazy Jews could pull it off. That a modern western state arose from the barren deserts and malarial swamps which the Jews purchased was inconceivable to the Arabs. Israel provided a brutal and glaring comparison to the inadequacies and failings of the backwards Arab nations that surrounded it. Everything that Arab civilization at large had believed in and stood for up until that point was jeopardized.
The situation was akin to the one that faced the German people in the wake of their seemingly inexplicable defeat in the First World War. It was unfathomable to the Germans that their mighty army with its long-standing Prussian military tradition could be defeated in the field of battle. Everything that German civilization had stood for had been completely destroyed when the generals signed the armistice. How were the Germans to cope? They did so in the same way that the Arabs attempted to deal with the Jewish state in their midst -- an equally appalling calamity. The Arabs sought to challenge the existence of Israel by adopting the very values that its enemy's society was built upon. This strategy manifested itself in the pan-Arab nationalism, spearheaded by Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser, which spread across the Middle East from 1948 until 1967.
The June 1967 war between Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Israel hammered the nail in the coffin of pan-Arab nationalism. In only six short days, the Israeli army dealt a horrendously humiliating defeat to all three of the Arab co-belligerents. Egypt, Syria and Jordan lost a lot of land, but more importantly, they lost face on the Arab "street." Arab nationalism with all of its pretensions to Western civilization was dead and buried. Once again, a comparison to inter-war Germany proves relevant. When the stock market crash of 1929 destroyed the democratic Weimer Republic, the German people turned to a political extreme to bandage their severely wounded society: Nazism. Similarly, in the wake of the defeat of 1967, the Arabs turned to their own form of extremism: radical Islam.
The radical Islamic regimes and groups that provide the central opposition to Israel today are merely the next link in the chain of the war to destroy Israel. There can be no effective ceasefire or premature end to the current hostilities because the fighting is exactly what Iran and Hezbollah and all those like them yearn for. Since 1967 the Arabs have been strengthening and intensifying their program of radical Islam; they have been stewing in their own juices, waiting for the moment to test their reinvigorated culture in battle against their sworn enemy. A ceasefire would be a return to the prewar status quo. From the Arab point of view it would be moving backwards, totally countermanding their efforts to open a new Islamic war against Israel. From the Israeli standpoint, a ceasefire and a return to the situation of four weeks ago would be counterproductive: the Arabs could never be expected to honor the terms.
A ceasefire is impossible simply because the Arabs have sworn themselves resolutely and determinedly to the destruction of Israel at whatever cost, no matter how great the price. The Israeli goal of peacefully coexisting with its neighbors is not a mutual aim. The continued existence of the Jewish state is such an anathema to the Arabs that the possibility of a negotiated and peaceful solution to the current war is unthinkable. You cannot talk someone down who believes as doggedly and as fanatically as the Arabs believe in their goal of Israel's destruction. All you can do is fight.
