THE ISRAEL-LEBANON BORDER
Yellow Hezbollah FLAGS fly over the rubble of the Tourmus agricultural station on the Israel-Lebanon border. Following Israel's May 2000 withdrawal from southern Lebanon, Hezbollah guerrillas dynamited the cattle pens and vaccination clinics where Lebanese farmers once brought their livestock for immunization. "It's a shame. Disease doesn't know the border, and everyone will suffer because of this," one local farmer said. Hezbollah does not care. Emboldened by the Israeli withdrawal and United Nations moral equivalency, Hezbollah is determined to further the conflict. Sadly, Israel's muddled anti-terrorism policy, like that of the Bush administration, encourages such terror.

More than two years after Israel's unilateral withdrawal, peace is increasingly distant. Syria and Iran saw Israel's retreat not as a gesture of peace, but as a sign of weakness. Rather than enjoy peace, Israeli border towns prepare for renewed terror. Residents of Manara, for example, live behind high fences, barbed wire, and watchtowers. The UNIFIL post ten meters away across the border in Lebanon provides little comfort, especially after the October 2000 incident in which UNIFIL troops concealed evidence of a Hezbollah kidnapping across the U.N.-certified border.

Hezbollah does not operate in isolation. "Syria is the brains and Iran is the heart," one counterterrorism expert explained. Twice a week, Iran Air cargo planes touch down at the Damascus airport, supplying increasingly sophisticated arms to terrorist camps across the border in Syrian-occupied Lebanon. In recent weeks, Hezbollah has deployed thousands of missiles capable of striking targets as deep inside Israel as Haifa. Intelligence reports indicate that Iranian Revolutionary Guard brigadier general Ali Reza Tamizr has begun training Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Hamas, and Arafat's Fatah on missiles capable of downing civilian aircraft.

The lessons of Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon are clear. Adversaries who do not desire peace will further conflict. The day after the completion of Israel's withdrawal, Hezbollah secretary general Hasan Nasrallah declared, "The road to Palestine and freedom is the road of the resistance and intifada! It should be neither the intifada that is framed by Oslo, nor that which is negotiated by the compromising negotiator in Stockholm. All you need is to follow the way of the martyred people of the past who shook and frightened the entity of this raping Zionist community."

Palestinian chairman Yasser Arafat concurred. Two months after Israel's pullback, Arafat turned down Israel's offer of a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem, on 97 percent of the West Bank and Gaza and 3 percent of Israel proper. Instead, Arafat launched a war designed to strike not only in disputed territories, but also in Israel.

The second Palestinian intifada is not a grass-roots uprising, but rather a terror campaign perpetrated largely by Arafat's overlapping Fatah, Tanzim, Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, and Force 17, with overt Syrian, Iranian, Saudi, and Iraqi assistance. With the State Department floating trial balloons of new peace plans predicated upon further Israeli concessions, and self-righteous European Union and U.N. officials demanding a cessation of Israeli self-defense, state sponsors of terrorism smell blood and sense victory.
Val:Y