"Hezbollah must know," Lebanese prime minister Fouad Siniora said in a speech this weekend, "that the power of weapons will not terrorize us."

Unfortunately his words were directly contradicted when the Lebanese army almost simultaneously announced that it was freezing the two measures by Siniora's government that had kicked off the crisis--the removal from his post of the Hezbollah-affiliated security chief at Beirut airport and the declaration of Hezbollah's telecommunications network as illegal. It didn't take much longer for the government to follow through and rescind those two steps.

It was Hezbollah's seizure of West Beirut in a naked show of force, in reaction to those measures, that clearly showed the terror organization holds the real power in Lebanon and allows what's left of Siniora's hamstrung government to keep functioning on sufferance. Even though, by early this week, Lebanese army forces had taken up position in West Beirut and the Hezbollah gunmen had cleared out, barricades to the airport put up by Hezbollah remained and the airport was still shut down.

And the scattered fighting in Lebanon, while fierce and taking dozens of lives, showed that the progovernment forces are ragtag and disorganized, consisting of groups of Sunni and Druze fighters with no central structure or clear overarching purpose. Indeed, most telling is the role of the Lebanese army, which in some cases has fulfilled a peacekeeping task of separating the various combatants and bringing calm.

Well and good--except that an army that plays, at best, a neutral role between a foreign-directed terror organization and progovernment forces is actually abetting foreign-directed terror by letting it keep its power position. Nor is any of this surprising in a country whose population is now close to half-Shiite and much of whose army, reflecting that balance, is sympathetic to Shiite Hezbollah and the Iranian and Syrian-powered axis it represents.

With 150,000 predominantly Christian and Sunni Lebanese having left the country since the February 2005 assassination by that axis of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, the recent flare-up--even if it eventually subsides--is only a further sign that Lebanon's takeover by totalitarian jihadists is proceeding in the face of Western abandonment of the more moderate, pluralist camp.

So far Teheran can also look with satisfaction at parallel events in these same days on its Gazan front. There its Hamas proxy has been similarly demonstrating its violent hegemony over southwestern Israel unhindered by an impotent Israeli government.

On Friday a mortar attack on a kibbutz killed a 48-year-old man and the bombardment continued with over 20 mortar shells and rockets fired at various Israeli communities over the weekend, including a rocket that almost hit a schoolbus and several cases of shrapnel or shock victims.

It kept up Monday morning as a rocket landed near a school in the coastal city of Ashkelon and another hit a park there. On Monday evening there was another loser in the Russian roulette game when a 70-year-old woman was killed by a rocket in a small Gaza-belt community.

Israel, though an incomparably more cohesive and powerful country than Lebanon, seemed no better able to cope with the terrorist aggression. But whereas Lebanon used the pretext of a peacekeeping army not really aligned with the state, Israel resorted to that irresistible temptation of democracies--talks on a ceasefire.

Also on Monday Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman was in Israel with proposals concocted along with Hamas for a lull in the fighting, meeting first with Defense Minister Ehud Barak and then with both Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. Both Barak and Olmert reportedly told Suleiman there was no deal without the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier kidnapped two years ago by Hamas, and a commitment to end all smuggling of weapons into Gaza.

As Olmert's spokesman Mark Regev put it, "We see our relationship with Egypt as one of the central foundations of regional stability, and a pillar of our foreign policy, and we are always eager to engage with the Egyptian government." It was a horrifically obtuse statement given that Egypt has steadily facilitated the deadly smuggling into Gaza in the face of all agreements, lulls, understandings, and arrangements and only a willfully blind or catastrophically weak Israeli government could pretend otherwise.

Barak is reported to have told Suleiman that "Israel will have to take broader action in the Gaza Strip if the firing of Qassam rockets and mortar bombs does not stop."

With the firing from the Strip having gone on for seven years and no possibility that Hamas would stop it except as a transparent ruse to gain time to fortify itself for an even more lethal assault, Olmert and Barak's "conditions" amounted to abject demands that Egypt cease to be Egypt and Hamas cease to be Hamas, and that reality cease to be difficult and unpleasant and instead magically become easy and serene.

Although the concern for Shalit is clearly a legitimate one that unites Israelis, Likud Member of Knesset Yuval Steinitz stated that "Shalit's release must not be a fig leaf [to cover] the shameful and dangerous surrender agreement that is being signed with Hamas. Capitulating to Hamas violence and extortion in removing the siege of Gaza will lead to Hamas becoming stronger [and will result in] additional kidnappings in the future."

But with an Iranian-made Katyusha rocket hitting a shopping mall in a further escalation, it wasn't certain whether the agreement would materialize and whether Israel under Olmert would go as far as Lebanon in bowing to Damascus and Teheran-sponsored terror.

By P. David Hornik
FrontPageMagazine.com