Word: hizballah
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...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...
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...
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...
...Hizballah and Hamas in this case have a more practical payoff in mind. Israeli governments have proved willing to make big concessions to get back one or two or three of their own captives, even dead ones. (In 2004, Israel swapped 429 prisoners in exchange for an Israeli businessman and the remains of three Israeli soldiers.) The Palestinians now have a tremendous interest in prisoner swaps since the Israelis have achieved the relative quiet of the past few years in part by arresting huge numbers of suspected terrorists and packing jails with more than 9,000 detainees. Securing the release...
...Hizballah too hopes to profit from aggression. Israel holds only three Lebanese prisoners, but the group's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, grandly noted that he also was making the release of Palestinian detainees a condition for freeing his Israeli captives, which would bring him and his group glory, both in the Arab world and Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps. And following the abduction with a rain of rockets on Israeli towns and villages may have bolstered the group's ability to intimidate Lebanon's government and force it to ignore the U.N. Security Council's demands that Hizballah's fighters...