Israel rightly defends its line in the sand

From Israel comes a plaintive cry: "We removed our troops from southern Lebanon in 2000, and last year pulled the settlers out of Gaza, but we're still being attacked from Lebanon and from Gaza. What good did it do us?"

The answer is, quite a lot. It's much easier to defend a military response to a cross-border attack when you know where your border is — and most of the world agrees with the line drawn. That's one reason the international reaction to the Israeli military strikes into Lebanon — and Gaza — is so different from that in previous conflicts. Israel has gotten right with the world on these two boundaries.

The reward is a more sympathetic response to its incursions into Gaza and Lebanon. And although Israel and her supporters have long scoffed at "world opinion," the international censure did hurt when there was truth to it.

Given the history, Israelis must have found the G-8 statement calling on Hezbollah to return their two captured soldiers and stop attacking them a nice surprise. It was reported as a victory for President Bush, who staunchly defended Israel's reaction. Actually, it was a vindication for Israel's decisions to leave its neighbors' territories. Because of those withdrawals, the leaders of the industrialized world felt confident that the border Hezbollah had crossed into Israel was not a fuzzy one.

Before Israel ended those two occupations, its complaints of "Look what they're doing to us" could always be countered by "Look what you're doing to them." True, Israel still controls Gaza's airspace and coastline (for security reasons), and it occupies much of the West Bank. These remain sources of friction. But "world opinion" no longer doubted that when Hamas militants crossed into southern Israel and Hezbollah operatives invaded the north, Israel was the victim.

Of course, a lot of other things have happened in the six years since Israel left southern Lebanon. The Islamic terrorist outrages in Madrid, London, Bali, Bombay, New York and Washington changed perceptions — as did the orchestrated riots over the Danish cartoons. These attacks cracked the widely held belief that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lay at the root of all Islamist discontent.

That notion had comforted European elites terrified of the growing militancy in their Islamic populations. If the source of Muslim anger was Israel and not them, then European governments could more easily appease it. The scary truth became clear in the wake of bombings, assassinations and riots in Europe. They were seen as strikes on European culture itself, as well as intra-Islamic rivalries for which Europeans had become mere pawns.

The extraordinary blame-Hezbollah statement coming from an Arab League summit acknowledges that these rivalries sparked the new violence — that Iran's clients had provoked Israel, not to defend Palestinians, but to impress the Muslim world. The growing threat of Shiite Iran had so alarmed Saudi Arabia, Egypt and several Persian Gulf countries that they dared to accuse Israel's attackers of causing the trouble, despite the exhaustive televising of the bloodshed in Lebanon.

But had Israel still been cutting down olive trees in Gaza and moving settlers onto Arab land, these countries could not have openly accused Hezbollah of "unexpected, inappropriate and irresponsible acts." Had Israel's military still been occupying the southern part of Lebanon, the Arab leaders would not have framed the Hezbollah operation as anything less than an effort to liberate Arab land.

Many dream of an uninterrupted beachfront civilization starting from Rafah in Gaza, passing Tel Aviv and Haifa in Israel, and Beirut in Lebanon, and ending in that country's north. It's becoming harder all the time to blame Israel for the lack of one, because in 2000, then in 2005, Israel took steps to honor world opinion of where its beaches begin and end. These moves clearly have not protected Israel against outside attacks, but they sure help her make a case for a forceful response.

Providence Journal columnist Froma Harrop's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is fharrop@projo.com