Eight years after speaking at Boston University’s Hillel House about hopes for peace in the Middle East, Israeli diplomat Eynat Shlein-Michael returned yesterday afternoon to discuss this summer’s conflict between Israel and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, defending Israel and refusing to call the conflict a war.
The audience of 50, who attended the luncheon at the International Relations Center, included faculty, staff and students from BU and other schools.
“The events of the last several months in the Middle East have alarmed many people,” International Relations Center Director Husain Haqqani said. “This is a special opportunity for us to hear an Israeli diplomatic perspective on what the recent events mean for us.”
An adviser at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., Shlein-Michael has worked for the Israeli foreign ministry since 1992. She has been a consul at the Consulate General of Israel to New England and Boston and previously worked at the Israeli embassy in Jordan.
“This summer will be seen in a historic perspective as a milestone,” Shlein-Michael said. “It accelerated the ripening of processes that were emerging in the Middle East in recent years. Moderate Arab regimes saw what kind of damage terror organizations wrought on a sister nation, and they finally realized terror is really terror and nothing else.”
The luncheon was a part of a series of lectures the international relations department hosts.
IR Special Events Coordinator James Johnson said the event supplements regular course material, especially for students majoring in IR.
“We think the IR students will benefit from this lecture,” he said in an email. “First, as a supplement to their traditional classroom education on this particular subject matter, and second, as a way to gain insight on how government officials from other countries conduct business.”
Shlein-Michael said the Israel-Hezbollah conflict does not suggest future violence.
“The growth and support of Islamic radicalism may be increasing,” she said, “but support of violence is dwindling. People want to distance themselves from violence.”
Reaction against events in Morocco, Egypt and Iraq are responsible for the new opposition, she said. She spoke in detail about the events leading to the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, defending Israel’s actions as retaliation against a specific militant group.
“I will not call it a war,” she said. “A war is between two countries. This crisis took place between a state and a non-state actor. Israel took an executive decision to attack Hezbollah. They did not attack Lebanon.”
According to Shlein-Michael, Israel’s actions were better received than popular opinion suggests.
“Saudi Arabia, the heart of the conservative Sunni cleric circles, was split right in the middle about whether to support Hezbollah or not,” she said. “Many people in the U.S. and even in Arab countries, when they’re not next to a [microphone], would tell us we were not forceful enough, that we should have used more force in order to get to a decisive knockout.”
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student Abram Trosky said he was unimpressed by the claims of support.
“There was an all-around denouncement of Israel’s actions by the United Nations,” he said during a question-and-answer session following the diplomat’s lecture. “There was massive destruction of infrastructure, a lot of civilian casualties, including a basement of children in the hospital, farm worker, 24 United Nations peacekeepers . . . Are you sure you’re pleasing the right sort of people?”
Shlein-Michael said she was aware of the damage Lebanon suffered.
“Yes, the Lebanese economy was damaged,” Shlein-Michael said. “Yes, there was collateral damage. I will not shy away from that. We were trying to achieve a very complicated goal, to fight this terror organization. We did try and avoid damaging Lebanon’s infrastructure and its people.”