In Lebanon, the Islamist Hizbullah party also proved its appeal to voters for its politics of resistance against Israel and the United States. The strength of Hizbullah came as a surprise to the Bush administration, which upheld Lebanon as an example of citizens who had succeeded in preserving their democratic rights—in this case from Syrian oppression. Lebanon’s democracy movement, which came to be known in the West as the Cedar Revolution, was provoked by the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri on February 14, 2005. Hariri?s son Saad led the nation in mourning, and made clear his belief that Syria was responsible for his father?s violent death. The assassination set off waves of mass demonstrations that brought politics in Lebanon to a standstill. On March 14, one million Lebanese descended on downtown Beirut to demand Syria?s complete withdrawal from Lebanon. The movement met with full support from the United States, which accused Syria of sponsoring terrorism. Under intense international pressure, the Syrian government agreed to withdraw its soldiers and intelligence forces from Lebanon. The last Syrian troops crossed out of Lebanon on April 26. In May and June 2005, the Lebanese public voted to elect a new parliament. The anti-Syrian coalition, headed by Saad Hariri, son of the assassinated premier, won 72 of the 128 seats in the parliament. However, the political wing of the Shiite militia Hizbullah won a solid bloc of fourteen parliamentary seats and, combined with a group of pro-Syrian parties, retained sufficient power within the Lebanese political system to resist any attempt by the central government to force the Hizbullah militia to disarm, in lines with the 1990 Taif Agreement. Even in Lebanon, parties explicitly hostile to the United States fared well at the polls.

For Islamist parties, resistance against Israel paid political dividends. Indeed, so long as they persisted in making bold strikes against the Jewish state, Hamas in Palestine and Hizbullah in Lebanon could count on broad-based political support. They also believed in what they were doing: that fighting against Israel to liberate Muslim lands was a religious duty. In the summer of 2006, both parties escalated their attacks on Israel—with disastrous consequences for both the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. On June 25, 2006, a group of Hamas activists crossed from Gaza to Israel through a tunnel near the Egyptian frontier and attacked an Israeli army post. They killed two soldiers and wounded four others before escaping back to Gaza with a young conscript named Gilad Shalit as their prisoner. On June 28 the Israeli army entered Gaza, and the next day they arrested sixty-four Hamas officials, including eight members of the Palestinian cabinet and twenty members of the Legislative Council. Hamas responded by firing homemade rockets into Israel, and the Israelis in turn deployed their air force to bomb Palestinian targets. Eleven Israelis and more than 400 Palestinians died before a cease-fire was struck in November 2006. Hizbullah’s war with Israel provoked a massively disproportionate response against Lebanon. On July 12, 2006, a group of Hizbullah fighters crossed into Israel and attacked two jeeps patrolling the border with Lebanon. They killed three soldiers, wounded two, and took two others prisoner. This unprovoked attack set off a thirty-four-day conflict in which Israeli ground forces invaded South Lebanon. The Israeli air force bombed key infrastructure and leveled whole neighborhoods in the Shiite southern suburbs of Beirut, displacing an estimated one million civilians. Hizbullah fighters fought fierce battles with Israeli troops in the hills of South Lebanon and kept up a constant barrage of missiles firing into Israel, forcing thousands of Israelis to evacuate the conflict zone. The Lebanese government turned to the United States for assistance. After all, the Bush administration had touted democratic Lebanon as an example to the Middle East and had given its full support to Lebanese demands for Syria to withdraw in 2005. Yet America was unwilling to intervene with the Israelis even to call for a cease-fire in 2006. Because Israel was fighting against Hizbullah, which the United States had branded a terrorist organization, the Bush administration refused to restrain its Israeli ally. In fact, the U.S. government resupplied the Israelis with laser-guided weapons and cluster bombs as the Israeli arsenal was depleted by its intensive bombing campaign against Lebanon. By the end of the conflict, over 1,100 Lebanese and 43 Israeli civilians had died under the aerial bombardment. Among combatants, the UN estimated 500 Hizbullah militiamen killed and the Israeli army reported 117 of their soldiers dead. Israel’s two-front war against Gaza and Lebanon in the summer of 2006 proved to the Arab world—if further proof were needed—that America would back Israel no matter what it did. The Arabs were more convinced than ever that the war on terror was an American-Israeli partnership to impose their full control over the Middle East. Television viewers alternated between images of violence in Iraq, Gaza, and Lebanon and concluded that there would be no peace for the Arab world so long as America pursued its war on terror.

The Middle East remained in turmoil at the end of the Bush presidency. There was some good news in Iraq. The Iraqi people had elected a national government in free elections with high voter turnout. A reinforcement of American troops in Iraq in 2007, known as the “surge,” led to a significant reduction in violence and a return to normal life for many Iraqis. By the end of 2008, the Americans began to reduce troop numbers in Iraq. There were still acts of terrible violence that threatened to overturn that country’s fragile gains. But the end of the American occupation was in sight. The situation for the Palestinians only deteriorated during Bush’s last weeks in office. In March 2007, the Fatah movement and Hamas formed a national unity cabinet with the aim of ending Palestinian isolation and the resumption of much-needed external aid. The unity government proved short lived and broke down in June 2007 when fighting erupted in Gaza between Fatah and Hamas. The dispute between the two parties ended with Hamas in full occupation of the Gaza Strip, and a Fatah-led emergency cabinet ruling the West Bank. The Quartet played upon Palestinian divisions and resumed support of the “moderate” Fatah government in the West Bank, while embargoing assistance to the Gaza Strip, now under Hamas rule. The standard of living in Gaza, cut off from all outside assistance, deteriorated into a humanitarian crisis. The final conflict of the Bush years took place in the Gaza Strip in December 2008 and January 2009. After Hamas had observed a six-month cease-fire with no relaxation of Israeli controls over Gaza’s frontiers, Palestinian militiamen began to fire missiles into Israel. On December 27, Israel’s government responded with dozens of air raids that left nearly 200 Palestinians dead; Israel claimed it was targeting “terrorist infrastructure” in Gaza. The Bush administration urged the Israelis to avoid civilians—this in one of the most densely populated spots on earth—but endorsed the Israeli attack in time-honored war-on-terror fashion. “Hamas must end its terrorist activities if it wishes to play a role in the future of the Palestinian people,” a White House spokesman claimed.⁶ After eight days of heavy aerial bombardment, the Israeli army sent tanks into the Gaza Strip. Over the next two weeks, the Israelis targeted UN agencies, hospitals, schools, and residential neighborhoods, inflicting physical damage estimated at $1.4 billion on the impoverished Gaza Strip. The bombardment continued until the eve of the inauguration of the new U.S. president, Barack Obama. By the time a cease-fire between the Israelis and Hamas was agreed to, on January 18, over 1,300 Palestinians had been killed and 5,100 wounded. By comparison, only thirteen Israelis died; eight more were wounded.