Aftermath of the war

PAT JOHNSON

Israel's ambassador to Canada rejects the idea that Israel lost the war with Hezbollah. After the ceasefire Sunday, recriminations began over the execution of Israel's war effort. But Alan Baker, speaking during a B'nai Brith Canada conference call Tuesday with media, Jewish community leaders and others, said Israel had to weigh continued fighting with a satisfactory compromise.

Baker said that scenes of Hezbollah supporters celebrating victory are misrepresentative and he blamed media coverage for purveying the idea of a Hezbollah victory.

"I don't accept that this is a success for Hezbollah," said the ambassador. "They're trying to show this as a success for their own reasons."

Though Israel did not succeed in its ultimate goal – eliminating Hezbollah – it reached a satisfactory result, Baker suggested.

"You can have various opinions on whether Israel should have continued fighting, whether we should have simply taken another two or three weeks and completed the job with the growing number of casualties this would have involved," he said, "or whether the international action taken by the international community in the [United Nations] Security Council gave us some type of better assurance or guarantee that the international community and the state of Lebanon would take concerted action to deal with the problem of Hezbollah. And I think here there are several achievements that we cannot underestimate."

The UN has recognized Hezbollah as the cause of this conflict, Baker said, and has put in place a framework for preventing the transfer of weapons from Iran, Syria and Russia to Hezbollah.

In a separate interview with the Independent, Dr. Michael Elterman, chair of the Pacific region of the Canada-Israel Committee, expressed a mixed reaction to the outcome of the conflict.

"If Hezbollah is not disarmed and they have this mandate, which is to destroy Israel on any pretext, a ceasefire is not going to get them to drop arms and take up farming," said Elterman. "Unless something is done to address the patrons, which are Iran and Syria, I'm not that optimistic that we've seen the end of it."

In terms of media imagery over the month of fighting, Elterman believes Hezbollah won the visual battle, but Israel was treated fairly by media who generally sought to explain the complexities of the regional conflict, including the role of Iran, Syria and global jihad.

"It's true to say that we lost the battle on images, but we won the battle on text," Elterman explained. "By and large, newspapers have been favorable and explanatory, but the images of civilians killed have been very difficult to stomach.... The other side in these conflicts has no compunction showing dead and wounded, where Israel won't do that."

The worst-case scenario coming out of the conflict, Elterman warned, may be that Hamas will learn from the tactics of Hezbollah.

"Why do they need to send in suicide bombers, why do they need to try to infiltrate the [security] fence when all they need is to get some of the short-range rockets that Hezbollah got from Iran and Syria?" asked Elterman. "The fence doesn't matter at that point."

Pat Johnson is editor of MVOX Multicultural Digest, www.mvox.ca.

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