Saving Israel from itself

WASHINGTON - Stephanie Guttman's book "The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy" came out last September, but its sales soared this week due to the sudden interest from U.S. Defense Department officials.

Guttman analyzes the failure of Israel to attain unequivocal superiority in its struggle against Palestinian terror: It simply does not excel in such struggles. Neither do media organizations emerge unscathed in her book. Superficiality, amateurishness and vociferousness all serve the interests of a sly charlatan. Only yesterday a senior Pentagon official told Haaretz, "Hezbollah is smart. Every day they make sure there's a picture of a smoking building or a weeping woman from Lebanon in the paper."

Thus Israel went from the victim to the perpetrator, from just to justifying. The impending cease-fire will be the beginning of the real battle - determining who will be remembered as the victor.

Some on the right flank of the Bush administration feel Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was too hasty in aligning with French demands for a cease-fire. They say the turning point was Rice's trip to see the president at Crawford. With the vice president absent and the deputy head of the National Security Council, Eliott Abrams, on vacation, Rice had the president's ear. And Rice wanted a cease-fire. She has had it with criticism of her failure to stop the war by diplomacy. The U.S. ambassador to the UN, John Bolton - so they say in Washington - was not happy with the result, but understood the die had been cast.

Rice, like others in the administration, simply saw no other way out of the war, and the principal blame falls on Israel. "Even we are asking ourselves how Israel defines success in this war," a senior administration official said yesterday in a private conversation. There were also harsher statements: "Do you understand what they want, where they're going? Because we don't." And with Israel having difficulty defining its goals, Rice decided there was no other way but to close a deal, for better or for worse, as far as the details go. Her people said she did Israel a favor, as it sought a way to stop the bloodshed without seeming to surrender. She saved Israel from itself.

Rice will get points for firmness, Israel will have a way out of the war, and Lebanon will get aid.

Unfortunately, Hezbollah has nothing to complain about either. It can recoup its losses, and it will always say it won.

An Israeli official who knows the details of the American-French plan proposed not looking "at every detail separately," but rather at the whole picture - the strategy and the new situation that will prevail after the resolution is passed. The war will be over, as a senior Pentagon official told Haaretz Wednesday, and the result will be "ambiguous," open to interpretation. The title of Guttman's next book can already be imagined: "The Other War: Israel, Hezbollah and the Struggle for Media Supremacy."