The End?

Finally it was on the 33^rd day that the war was to end – ironic perhaps. Of course many still do not believe it ended – myself included – however one thing is over and it is the daily menu of air raids all over Lebanon. 8am was the hour zero and some hours before the last massacre was to be committed just to remind those who thought they can forget the savagery of the Israeli air force. Before 9am many refugees had packed their few belongings, their hopes, themselves and their loved ones and were heading back to their villages where they might find some trace of their homes. Many had no gas to be able to get there, so – like myself – they lingered behind watching the long trails of cars going south. It was frustrating not to be able to go. The traffic was exceptional since the highway was destroyed; people had to take side roads which sometimes are found to be blocked by some earlier air strike. The journey towards Tyr would take something like 5 hours (it usually takes no more than 1 hour and a half).

The main danger was in the form of cluster bombs left behind by the Israeli army; until now 2 people died and 7 were wounded because of incidents of the sort. And another danger is the potential Uranium pollution in the Suburbs of Beirut since yesterday’s bombing (the most violent during the war) was attributed to a potential enriched Uranium weapon, tests are however still to be carried away to confirm or not.

It was somewhat surreal to see the morale of those who were heading south – hands out of the car drawing the victory sign, and the everlasting cheer to the resistance and its Siyyid. Those who found their homes in rubble did not cry, they would say ‘all for the sake of the resistance, we can rebuild stone but we cannot rebuild dignity”. It was an overwhelming atmosphere of pride that one can witness in the streets of Beirut and more so on the way south. At night we went out like always to the Barometre, this leftist pub in a small alley in Hamra street. It was crowded like expected and we had to sit on the table outside like many others. Every now and then a convoy of cars horning and cheering for the Hezbollah would pass on the street nearby and the drinkers sitting outside like ourselves would run towards the street and raise their glasses and voices to those passing in their cars – the V sign was to unite them.

The whole night convoys like these kept passing all over Beirut. Today I woke up early and went to the Suburbs with my camera and a friend. We stopped the car somewhere close and carried on foot. The spectacle was breathtaking. The moment you cross to the Suburbs you can look for a building that still has traces of glass but you will find none. That was the entrance; we were far away from the real disaster. Moments later here it was: a square that used to be composed of some 7 10 floor residential buildings was now nothing but a huge whole. Books, toys, pieces of cloths were scattered all around the dusty ground. Those who used to live here were searching for remainders of there belongings amongst the rubble. They were not devastated, they were joking, saying that this is where I used to live and I gave it for the resistance – ‘all for the sake of the resistance’. A sentence I heard so much these last days. In his speech yesterday the Siyyid promised those whose houses were destroyed that they will get enough money to rent an apartment for 1 year and to buy furniture for it, until their houses are rebuilt. Those who had their houses partly destroyed will have a visit from the party’s engineering department to start the restoration process starting today. Indeed teams of Hezbollah volunteers were found everywhere in the Suburbs working on taking out the rubble and cleaning the damage that struck our own little Hiroshima.

We latter went to check our friend’s house which was supposedly destroyed; she was now in France. We arrived to the crossing, and the smell which filled the whole region until the edges of Beirut was so heavy that one could see the damage before one’s eyes would. Her street was no longer there; it was turned into a pile of rubble, maybe 5 or 6 buildings were completely liquidated around it we could not even know were the building was. Smoke was still going out from under the broken concrete.

As I was walking in yet another of those highly hit areas, I looked at the floor and found a magazine that survived the blast of the building nearby, it was open on a page where the title ‘the history of the Arab Israeli conflict’ appeared. I looked at the burnt edges of the page and then at the grounded building in front and saw the perfect illustration of this conflict.

It is perhaps impossible to describe with words or images the destruction that is found around the Suburbs, however it is even more impossible to describe the sentiments that one can grasp while walking among these people who are the ‘supporters of terrorism’, all of them working together, celebrating a victory that did not come without a price of blood and fire. ‘All for the sake of the resistance’ today I understood that this slogan is not only about words.

Some of my photos from the Suburbs:

Photos from the Suburbs

Photos from the Suburbs

Photos from the suburbs

'Jihad against the Hezbollah' by Stephen Zunes

Published on Saturday, August 5, 2006 by Foreign Policy In Focus
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3412


The Bush administration and an overwhelming bipartisan majority of Congress have gone on record defending Israel's assault on Lebanon's civilian infrastructure as a means of attacking Hezbollah “terrorists.” Unlike the major Palestinian Islamist groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah forces haven't killed any Israeli civilians for more than a decade. Indeed, a 2002 Congressional Research Service report noted, in its analysis of Hezbollah, that “no major terrorist attacks have been attributed to it since 1994.” The most recent State Department report on international terrorism also fails to note any acts of terrorism by Hezbollah since that time except for unsubstantiated claims that a Hezbollah member was a participant in a June 1996 attack on the U.S. Air Force dormitory at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.

While Hezbollah's ongoing rocket attacks on civilian targets in Israel are indeed illegitimate and can certainly be considered acts of terrorism, it is important to note that such attacks were launched only after the U.S.-backed Israeli assault on civilian targets in Israel began July 12. Similarly, Hezbollah has pledged to cease such attacks once Israel stops its attacks against Lebanon and withdraws its troops from Lebanese territory occupied since the onset of the latest round of hostilities. (The Hezbollah attack on the Israeli border post that prompted the Israeli assaults, while clearly illegitimate and provocative, can not legally be considered a terrorist attack since the targets were military rather than civilian.)

Indeed, the evolution of this Lebanese Shiite movement from a terrorist group to a legal political party had been one of the more interesting and hopeful developments in the Middle East in recent years. Like many radical Islamist parties elsewhere, Hezbollah (meaning “Party of God”) combines populist rhetoric, important social service networks for the needy, and a decidedly reactionary and chauvinistic interpretation of Islam in its approach to contemporary social and political issues. In Lebanese parliamentary elections earlier last year, Hezbollah ended up with fourteen seats outright in the 128-member national assembly, and a slate shared with the more moderate Shiite party Amal gained an additional twenty-three seats. Hezbollah controls one ministry in the 24-member cabinet. While failing to disarm as required under UN Security Council resolution 1559, Hezbollah was negotiating with the Lebanese government and other interested Lebanese parties, leading to hopes that the party's military wing would be disbanded within a few months. Prior to calling up reserves following the Israeli assault, Hezbollah could probably count on no more than a thousand active-duty militiamen.

In other words, whatever one might think of Hezbollah's reactionary ideology and its sordid history, the group did not constitute such a serious threat to Israel's security as to legitimate a pre-emptive war.

Having ousted Syrian forces from Lebanon in an impressive nonviolent uprising last year, the Lebanese had re-established what may perhaps be the most democratic state in the Arab world. Because they allowed the anti-Israel and anti-American Hezbollah to participate in the elections, however, the Israeli government and the Bush administration—with strong bipartisan support on Capitol Hill—apparently decided that Lebanon as a whole must be punished in the name of “the war on terror.”

Inverse Reaction to Threat
Just as Washington's concerns about the threat from Iraq grew in inverse correlation to its military capability—culminating in the 2003 invasion long after that country had disarmed and dismantled its chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs—the U.S. focus on Hezbollah has grown as that party had largely put its terrorist past behind it. In recent years, the administration and Congress—in apparent anticipation of the long-planned Israeli assault—began to become more and more obsessed with Hezbollah. For example, not a single Congressional resolution mentioned Hezbollah during the 1980s when they were kidnapping and murdering American citizens and engaging in other terrorist activities. In fact, no Congressional resolution mentioned Hezbollah by name until 1998, years after the group's last act of terrorism noted by the State Department. During the last session of Congress, there were more than two dozen resolutions condemning Hezbollah.

In March of last year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution by an overwhelming 380-3 margin condemning “the continuous terrorist attacks perpetrated by Hezbollah.” Despite contacting scores of Congressional offices asking them to cite any examples of terrorist attacks by Hezbollah at any time during the past decade, no one on Capitol Hill with whom I have communicated has been able to cite any.

Adding to the hyperbole is the assertion that Hezbollah threatens not just Israel but the United States, despite never having attacked or threatened to attack U.S. interests outside of Lebanon. Cited as evidence in the nearly unanimous March 2005 House resolution is testimony from former CIA director George Tenet (who also insisted that the case for Iraq having offensive weapons of mass destruction was a “slam dunk”), in which he made the bizarre accusations that Hezbollah is “an organization with the capability and worldwide presence [equal to] al-Qaida, equal if not far more [of a] capable organization … [t]hey're a notch above in many respects … which puts them in a state sponsored category with a potential for lethality that's quite great.”

In reality, other than a number of assassinations of political opponents in Europe during the 1980s and 1990s, it is highly debatable whether Hezbollah has ever launched a terrorist attack outside of Lebanon. The United States alleges as one of its stronger cases that Hezbollah was involved in two major bombings of Jewish targets in Argentina: the Israeli embassy in 1993 and a Jewish community center in 1994, both resulting in scores of fatalities. Despite longstanding investigations by Argentine officials, including testimony by hundreds of eyewitnesses and two lengthy trials, no convincing evidence emerged that implicated Hezbollah. The more likely suspects are extreme right-wing elements of the Argentine military, which has a notorious history of anti-Semitism.

Not every country has failed to recognize Hezbollah's evolution from its notorious earlier years. The European Union, for example, does not include Hezbollah among its list of terrorist groups. As a result, in yet another effort to push the U.S. foreign policy agenda on other nations, last year's House resolution also “urges the European Union to classify Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.” This may be the first and only time the U.S. Congress has sought to directly challenge EU policy on a non-trade issue.

The Europeans have had far more experience with terrorism, are much closer geographically to the Middle East, and historically have had stronger commercial, political, and other ties to Lebanon than the United States and are therefore at least as capable as the U.S. Congress of assessing the orientation of Hezbollah. Furthermore, the European Union has had no problem labeling al-Qaida, Islamic Jihad, or Hamas as terrorist organizations, which suggests that it would have extended the same designation to Hezbollah if the facts warranted it. Both Republican and Democratic House members, however, most of whom have little knowledge of the complexities of contemporary Lebanese politics and apparently fearing European criticism of a U.S.-backed Israeli attack on Lebanon, arrogantly insisted they knew better and that they had the right to tell the European Union what to do.

The Rise of Hezbollah
Hezbollah did not exist until four years after Israel first invaded and occupied southern Lebanon in 1978. The movement grew dramatically following Israel's more extensive U.S.-backed invasion and occupation of the central part of the country in 1982 and the subsequent intervention by U.S. Marines to prop up a weak Israeli-installed government. In forcing the departure of the armed forces of the Palestine Liberation Organization and destroying the broad, left-leaning, secular Lebanese National Movement, the U.S. and Israeli interventions created a vacuum in which sectarian groups like Hezbollah could grow.

During the early 1990s, following the end of the Lebanese civil war, a revived central Lebanese government and its Syrian backers disarmed most of the other militias that had once carved up much of the country. By contrast, as the Israeli attacks continued, Hezbollah not only remained intact, it grew. Years of heavy Israeli bombardment led hundreds of thousands of Lebanese Shiites to flee north, filling vast slums in the southern outskirts of Beirut. From these refugees and others who suffered as a result of these U.S.-supported Israeli assaults Hezbollah received the core of its support. The Hezbollah militia became heroes to many Lebanese, particularly as the U.S.-led peace process stalled.

The Hezbollah also periodically fired shells into Israel proper, some of which killed and injured civilians. Virtually all these attacks, however, were in direct retaliation for large-scale Israeli attacks against Lebanese civilians. The United States condemned Hezbollah not just for occasional attacks inside Israel but also for its armed resistance against Israeli soldiers within Lebanon, despite the fact that international law specifically recognizes the right of armed resistance against foreign occupation forces. The United States was apparently hoping that enough Israeli pressure against Lebanon would force the Lebanese to sign a separate peace treaty with Israel and thereby isolate the Syrians. U.S. officials greatly exaggerated the role of Syria in its control and support for Hezbollah, seemingly ignoring the fact that Syria had historically backed Amal, a rival Shiite militia. By contrast, while the radical Iranian Revolutionary Guards did play a significant role in the initial formation of Hezbollah in 1982, most direct Iranian support diminished substantially in subsequent years. The emphasis by the United States in subsequent years on Hezbollah's ties to Iran has largely been to discredit a movement that had widespread popular support across Lebanon's diverse confessional and ideological communities.

By the mid-1990s, greater casualties among Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in occupied southern Lebanon led to increased dissent within Israel. In response to public opinion polls showing that the vast majority of Israelis wanted the IDF to withdraw unilaterally, Martin Indyk—President Clinton's ambassador to Israel who had also served as his assistant secretary of state for the Middle East—publicly encouraged Israel to keep its occupation forces in Lebanon. In other words, the United States, while defending its sanctions and bombing against Iraq on the grounds of upholding UN Security Council resolutions, was encouraging Israel—against the better judgment of the majority of its citizens—to defy longstanding UN Security Council resolutions demanding Israel's unconditional withdrawal. In an interesting display of double standards, the wording of the 1978 resolution demanding Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon was virtually identical to the resolution passed twelve years later demanding Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait, for which the United States went to war.

The Hezbollah militia finally drove the Israelis and their proxy force out of Lebanon in a hasty retreat in May 2000. In the wake of the failure of those advocating a more moderate ideology and a diplomatic solution, the military victory by Hezbollah greatly enhanced its status.

For more than a dozen years, the Hezbollah militia had restricted its armed activities to fighting Israeli occupation forces, initially in southern Lebanon and—following Israel's withdrawal in 2000—in a disputed border region with Syria still under Israeli military occupation. Both the Bush administration and Congress, however, have sought to blur the distinction between armed resistance against foreign occupation forces, which is generally recognized under international law as legitimate self-defense, and terrorism, which—regardless of the political circumstances—is always illegal, since it targets innocent civilians. (Few Americans, for example, would have labeled the sporadic attacks by Kuwaiti resistance fighters against Iraqi occupation forces during the six months Saddam's army occupied their country in 1990-91 as acts of terrorism. By contrast, had the Kuwaiti resistance planted bombs on buses or in cafes in Baghdad or Basra, the terrorist label would have been quite deserved, however illegitimate Iraq's invasion and occupation of Kuwait may have been. The same holds true for apologists for Palestinian terrorism who attempt to justify the murders of innocent Israeli civilians on the grounds that it is part of the armed struggle against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.)

Despite some unconfirmed reports linking individual Hezbollah operatives with Palestinian terrorist groups, it appears that the movement as a whole had become another one of the scores of former terrorist groups and political movements with terrorist components that have evolved into legitimate political parties in recent decades. These include the current ruling parties or ruling coalition partners of the governments of Israel, Algeria, Uruguay, Zimbabwe, and Afghanistan. Indeed, some prominent leaders of the U.S.-backed Islamic coalition in Iraq were once part of organizations labeled terrorist by the U.S. State Department and a few have even maintained longstanding ties with Hezbollah.

Rather than welcoming Hezbollah's important shift away from the use of terrorism to advance its political agenda, however, the Bush administration and Congress—in apparent anticipation of a U.S.-Israeli assault against the group and its supporters—instead became increasingly alarmist about the supposed threat posed by this Lebanese political party. And, given the refusal by the Lebanese government to ban the political party and their inability to disband the militia, the United States has given Israel the green light to attack not just Hezbollah militia, but the civilian infrastructure of Lebanon as well.

Why Hezbollah?
Given the number of dangerous movements in the Middle East and elsewhere that really have been involved in ongoing terrorist activities in recent years, why this obsession over a minority Lebanese party that had, prior to last month's assault by Israel, largely left terrorism behind?

A key component of the Bush Doctrine holds that states supporting groups that the U.S. government designates as “terrorist” are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and are therefore legitimate targets for the United States to attack in the name of self-defense.

This doctrine applies not just to Lebanon, but to Syria and Iran as well, the two countries that the neoconservative architects of the U.S. invasion of Iraq have proposed as the next targets for attack. Though outside support for Hezbollah has declined dramatically from previous years, Syria and Iran have traditionally been Hezbollah's primary backers. By formally designating Hezbollah as a “terrorist organization” and exaggerating the degree of Syrian and Iranian support, the Bush administration and Congress are paving the way for possible U.S. military action against one or both countries some time in the future. Just as Soviet and Cuban control over leftist movements and governments in Central America and Africa during the 1980s was grossly exaggerated in order to advance the Reagan administration's global agenda, a similar, bipartisan effort is afoot to exaggerate Syrian and Iranian control over Hezbollah.

During the Cold War, nationalist movements that coalesced under a Marxist-Leninist framework, such as the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam, were depicted not as the manifestation of a longstanding national liberation struggle against foreign domination, but part of the global expansionist agenda of international communism. As such, sending more than a half a million American troops into South Vietnam and engaging in the heaviest bombing campaign in world history was depicted as an act of self-defense for “if we do not fight them over there, we will have to fight them here.” Once American forces withdrew, however, Vietnamese stopped killing Americans. Similarly, Hezbollah stopped attacking French and American interests when they withdrew from Lebanon in 1984. As noted above, they largely stopped attacking Israelis when they withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 (with the exception of the Shebaa Farms, which they claim is part of Lebanon).

Therefore, a second reason for the U.S. government's disproportionate hostility toward Hezbollah may be to convince Americans that radical Islamist groups with a nationalist base will not stop attacking even after troop withdrawal. The Bush administration has insisted that the United States must destroy the terrorists in Iraq or they will attack the United States. But the rise of Islamic extremist groups and terrorist attacks in Iraq came only after the United States invaded that country in 2003. And if Americans recognized that attacks against Americans by Iraqis would stop if U.S. forces withdrew, it would be harder to justify the ongoing U.S. war. Similarly, if Americans recognized that terrorist attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad would likely cease if Israel fully withdrew its occupation forces from the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza Strip and allowed for the emergence of a viable independent Palestinian state, they would no longer be able to defend their financial, military, and diplomatic support for the ongoing occupation, repression, and colonization of those occupied Palestinian territories by the right-wing Israeli government. (As with Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad did not come into existence until after years of Israeli occupation and the failure of both secular nationalist groups and international diplomacy to end the occupation.)

This, of course, is not what the Bush administration or Congressional leaders want people to think, however, since it would make it far more difficult to defend the wars in Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon. Therefore, it is politically important to convince Americans that Hezbollah is a terrorist group engaged in “continuous terrorist attacks” that constitute an ongoing threat to the national security interests of the United States and its allies.

The tragedy is how easily the mainstream media and the American public are willing to believe these simplistic misinterpretations of the complex Lebanese political situation, and how easily the war on terrorism can be manipulated to justify a U.S.-backed offensive against a small democratic country's civilian infrastructure.

Stephen Zunes is Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy In Focus Project. He is a professor of Politics and the author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Courage Press, 2003).


© 2006 Foreign Policy in Focus

The beginning of the end?

Today Beirut was not the same. The news of the UN resolution, as bad as it might be, was greeted with great enthusiasm and greater doubt. However, it was clear that people believed that the war was indeed in its final phase. Everyone was of course expecting a final Israeli massacre that will announce the end of the current hostilities – it is some kind of ritual that we got used to every time Israel launches a war on Lebanon (which is basically after every election – any new prime minister has to prove himself somehow by attacking Lebanon). It was Saturday night – which in usual days is the day of celebration – and every pub we visited was full. Finally after the second try we managed to get a table at our usual pub, the ‘Barometre’. Arak and Arabic music were on the menu not to mention the more than vivid atmosphere.

It was not a celebration of the end of the war as much as a celebration of having witnessed and therefore survived a historical event. The war was not over on the front, people were dying like they do everyday now. But you could feel the celebration of life all around the smoke filled room. The soft sound of Fairuz filled the room and soon enough the music passed to a more enthusiastic one as the Arak was flowing. The small glasses were apparently broken so if you want to drink Arak you had to drink a big glass (which is not the usual way to do it). Political discussions soon left the table and only left behind were words of common usage. War humor however is not so easily broken and drinking to the health of the Siyyid is now a daily ritual.

Minutes and hours passed by and the music went down for a minute for the owner of the pub to announce the destruction of an Israeli helicopter – cheers and the sound of glasses greeted the news and the music soon occupied again the audible space. They say that the Shiites are now the most educated community in Lebanon, because they sleep and wake up in schools (the refugees are mostly sleeping in schools since the beginning of the hostilities – it is one of the many jokes you will hear on the street).

One thing that caught my attention today was an announcement that I read in the newspaper: the patriotic front (a resistance movement that was created during the Israeli invasion of 1982 by leftist Lebanese parties to fight the occupying Israeli forces) which is now mainly composed of the Lebanese communist party and the Syrian Nationalist party (it is not a Syrian party but a Lebanese one – the party was founded in the 30s by a Lebanese Orthodox and calls for the unification of the natural Syria which comprises what is now Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Iraq in a secular state) are fighting along side the Hezbollah and took part in the battle of Marjeyoun 2 days ago. This news was greeted with great satisfaction by all the leftists; the resistance is back to what it was.

Earlier today the Siyyid made another speech to comment on the latest developments notably the UN resolution 1701 (a new number to be added to the now so many numbers we have to know). The electricity was down when the speech started so we had to listen to it on the radio. It was not a surprising one and in short he said what he was expected to say: even though we think this resolution is not fair, we will respect it and will respect any seize fire as long as the Israelis do; as he had said and done before, any action by the Israelis will be met by a reaction, but the resistance will not launch any missile as long as the Israelis do not launch any assault. However, as long as there is one Israeli soldier on Lebanese soil the resistance will keep the right to attack him.

What got my attention today more than anything else was the absurd and insultingly illogical paradox that the Israeli government announced: we accept the UN resolution that calls for the end of the hostilities while at the same time gratifying another governmental decision to enlarge the land attack on Lebanon. How can one government do both things? Nonetheless they are welcome to invade by land; after all it gives the resistance a chance to destroy some more tanks instead of counting the missiles that are falling from the unattainable sky.

You are terrorists, we are virtuous by Yitzhak Laor

Published in the London Review of Books
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n16/laor01_.html

As soon as the facts of the Bint Jbeil ambush, which ended with relatively high Israeli casualties (eight soldiers died there), became public, the press and television in Israel began marginalising any opinion that was critical of the war. The media also fell back on the kitsch to which Israelis grow accustomed from childhood: the most menacing army in the region is described here as if it is David against an Arab Goliath. Yet the Jewish Goliath has sent Lebanon back 20 years, and Israelis themselves even further: we now appear to be a lynch-mob culture, glued to our televisions, incited by a premier whose ‘leadership’ is being launched and legitimised with rivers of fire and destruction on both sides of the border. Mass psychology works best when you can pinpoint an institution or a phenomenon with which large numbers of people identify. Israelis identify with the IDF, and even after the deaths of many Lebanese children in Qana, they think that stopping the war without scoring a definitive victory would amount to defeat. This logic reveals our national psychosis, and it derives from our over-identification with Israeli military thinking.

In the melodramatic barrage fired off by the press, the army is assigned the dual role of hero and victim. And the enemy? In Hebrew broadcasts the formulations are always the same: on the one hand ‘we’, ‘ours’, ‘us’; on the other, Nasrallah and Hizbullah. There aren’t, it seems, any Lebanese in this war. So who is dying under Israeli fire? Hizbullah. And if we ask about the Lebanese? The answer is always that Israel has no quarrel with Lebanon. It’s yet another illustration of our unilateralism, the thundering Israeli battle-cry for years: no matter what happens around us, we have the power and therefore we can enforce the logic. If only Israelis could see the damage that’s been done by all these years of unilateral thinking. But we cannot, because the army – which has always been the core of the state – determines the shape of our lives and the nature of our memories, and wars like this one erase everything we thought we knew, creating a new version of history with which we can only concur. If the army wins, its success becomes part of ‘our heritage’. Israelis have assimilated the logic and the language of the IDF – and in the process, they have lost their memories. Is there a better way to understand why we have never learned from history? We have never been a match for the army, whose memory – the official Israeli memory – is hammered into place at the centre of our culture by an intelligentsia in the service of the IDF and the state.

The IDF is the most powerful institution in Israeli society, and one which we are discouraged from criticising. Few have studied the dominant role it plays in the Israeli economy. Even while they are still serving, our generals become friendly with the US companies that sell arms to Israel; they then retire, loaded with money, and become corporate executives. The IDF is the biggest customer for everything and anything in Israel. In addition, our high-tech industries are staffed by a mixture of military and ex-military who work closely with the Western military complex. The current war is the first to become a branding opportunity for one of our largest mobile phone companies, which is using it to run a huge promotional campaign. Israel’s second biggest bank, Bank Leumi, used inserts in the three largest newspapers to distribute bumper stickers saying: ‘Israel is powerful.’ The military and the universities are intimately linked too, with joint research projects and an array of army scholarships.

There is no institution in Israel that can approach the army’s ability to disseminate images and news or to shape a national political class and an academic elite or to produce memory, history, value, wealth, desire. This is the way identification becomes entrenched: not through dictatorship or draconian legislation, but by virtue of the fact that the country’s most powerful institution gets its hands on every citizen at the age of 18. The majority of Israelis identify with the army and the army reciprocates by consolidating our identity, especially when it is – or we are – waging war.

The IDF didn’t play any role in either of the Gulf wars and may not play a part in Bush’s pending war in Iran, but it is on permanent alert for the real war that is always just round the corner. Meanwhile, it harasses Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, to very destructive effect. (In July it killed 176 Palestinians, most of them from the same area in Gaza, in a ‘policing’ operation that included the destruction of houses and infrastructure.) They shoot. They abduct. They use F-16s against refugee camps, tanks against shacks and huts. For years they have operated in this way against gangs and groups of armed youths and children, and they call it a war, a ‘just war’, vital for our existence. The power of the army to produce meanings, values, desire is perfectly illustrated by its handling of the Palestinians, but it would not be possible without the support of the left in Israel.

The mainstream left has never seriously tried to oppose the military. The notion that we had no alternative but to attack Lebanon and that we cannot stop until we have finished the job: these are army-sponsored truths, decided by the military and articulated by state intellectuals and commentators. So are most other descriptions of the war, such as the Tel Aviv academic Yossef Gorni’s statement in Haaretz, that ‘this is our second war of independence.’ The same sort of nonsense was written by the same kind of people when the 2000 intifada began. That was also a war about our right to exist, our ‘second 1948’. These descriptions would not have stood a chance if Zionist left intellectuals – solemn purveyors of the ‘morality of war’ – hadn’t endorsed them.

Military thinking has become our only thinking. The wish for superiority has become the need to have the upper hand in every aspect of relations with our neighbours. The Arabs must be crippled, socially and economically, and smashed militarily, and of course they must then appear to us in the degraded state to which we’ve reduced them. Our usual way of looking at them is borrowed from our intelligence corps, who ‘translate’ them and interpret them, but cannot recognise them as human beings. Israelis long ago ceased to be distressed by images of sobbing women in white scarves, searching for the remains of their homes in the rubble left by our soldiers. We think of them much as we think of chickens or cats. We turn away without much trouble and consider the real issue: the enemy. The Katyusha missiles that have been hitting the north of the country are launched without ‘discrimination’, and in this sense Hizbullah is guilty of a war crime, but the recent volleys of Katyushas were a response to the frenzied assault on Lebanon. To the large majority of Israelis, however, all the Katyushas prove is what a good and necessary thing we have done by destroying our neighbours again: the enemy is indeed dangerous, it’s just as well we went to war. The thinking becomes circular and the prophecies self-fulfilling. Israelis are fond of saying: ‘The Middle East is a jungle, where only might speaks.’ See Qana, and Gaza, or Beirut.

Defenders of Israel and its leaders can always argue that the US and Britain behave similarly in Iraq. (It is true that Olmert and his colleagues would not have acted so shamelessly if the US had not been behind them. Had Bush told them to hold their fire, they wouldn’t have dared to move a single tank.) But there is a major difference. The US and Britain went to war in Iraq without public opinion behind them. Israel went to war in Lebanon, after a border incident which it exploited in order to destroy a country, with the overwhelming support of Israelis, including the members of what the European press calls the ‘peace camp’.

Amos Oz, on 20 July, when the destruction of Lebanon was already well underway, wrote in the Evening Standard: ‘This time, Israel is not invading Lebanon. It is defending itself from a daily harassment and bombardment of dozens of our towns and villages by attempting to smash Hizbullah wherever it lurks.’ Nothing here is distinguishable from Israeli state pronouncements. David Grossman wrote in the Guardian, again on 20 July, as if he were unaware of any bombardment in Lebanon: ‘There is no justification for the large-scale violence that Hizbullah unleashed this week, from Lebanese territory, on dozens of peaceful Israeli villages, towns and cities. No country in the world could remain silent and abandon its citizens when its neighbour strikes without any provocation.’ We can bomb, but if they respond they are responsible for both their suffering and ours. And it’s important to remember that ‘our suffering’ is that of poor people in the north who cannot leave their homes easily or quickly. ‘Our suffering’ is not that of the decision-makers or their friends in the media. Oz also wrote that ‘there can be no moral equation between Hizbullah and Israel. Hizbullah is targeting Israeli civilians wherever they are, while Israel is targeting mostly Hizbullah.’ At that time more than 300 Lebanese had been killed and 600 had been injured. Oz went on: ‘The Israeli peace movement should support Israel’s attempt at self-defence, pure and simple, as long as this operation targets mostly Hizbullah and spares, as much as possible, the lives of Lebanese civilians (this is not always an easy task, as Hizbullah missile-launchers often use Lebanese civilians as human sandbags).’

The truth behind this is that Israel must always be allowed to do as it likes even if this involves scorching its supremacy into Arab bodies. This supremacy is beyond discussion and it is simple to the point of madness. We have the right to abduct. You don’t. We have the right to arrest. You don’t. You are terrorists. We are virtuous. We have sovereignty. You don’t. We can ruin you. You cannot ruin us, even when you retaliate, because we are tied to the most powerful nation on earth. We are angels of death.

The Lebanese will not remember everything about this war. How many atrocities can a person keep in mind, how much helplessness can he or she admit, how many massacres can people tell their children about, how many terrorised escapes from burning houses, without becoming a slave to memory? Should a child keep a leaflet written by the IDF in Arabic, in which he is told to leave his home before it’s bombed? I cannot urge my Lebanese friends to remember the crimes my state and its army have committed in Lebanon.

Israelis, however, have no right to forget. Too many people here supported the war. It wasn’t just the nationalist religious settlers. It’s always easy to blame the usual suspects for our misdemeanours: the scapegoating of religious fanatics has allowed us to ignore the role of the army and its advocates within the Zionist left. This time we have seen just how strongly the ‘moderates’ are wedded to immoderation, even though they knew, before it even started, that this would be a war against suburbs and crowded areas of cities, small towns and defenceless villages. The model was our army’s recent actions in Gaza: Israeli moderates found these perfectly acceptable.

It was a mistake for those of us who are unhappy with our country’s policies to breathe a sigh of relief after the army withdrew from Lebanon in 2000. We thought that the names of Sabra and Shatila would do all the memorial work that needed to be done and that they would stand, metonymically, for the crimes committed in Lebanon by Israel. But, with the withdrawal from Gaza, many Israelis who should be opposing this war started to think of Ariel Sharon, the genius of Sabra and Shatila, as a champion of peace. The logic of unilateralism – of which Sharon was the embodiment – had at last prevailed: Israelis are the only people who count in the Middle East; we are the only ones who deserve to live here.

This time we must try harder to remember. We must remember the crimes of Olmert, and of our minister of justice, Haim Ramon, who championed the destruction of Lebanese villages after the ambush at Bint Jbeil, and of the army chief of staff, Dan Halutz. Their names should be submitted to The Hague so they can be held accountable.

Elections are a wholly inadequate form of accountability in Israel: the people we kill and maim and ruin cannot vote here. If we let our memories slacken now, the machine-memory will reassert control and write history for us. It will glide into the vacuum created by our negligence, with the civilised voice of Amos Oz easing its path, and insert its own version. And suddenly we will not be able to explain what we know, even to our own children.

In Israel there is still no proper history of our acts in Lebanon. Israelis in the peace camp used to carry posters with the figure ‘680’ on them – the number of Israelis who died during the 1982 invasion. Six hundred and eighty Israeli soldiers. How many members of that once sizeable peace camp protested about the tens of thousands of Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian casualties? Isn’t the failure of the peace camp a result of its inability to speak about the cheapness of Arab blood? General Udi Adam, one of the architects of the current war, has told Israelis that we shouldn’t count the dead. He meant this very seriously and Israelis should take him seriously. We should make it our business to count the dead in Lebanon and in Israel and, to the best of our abilities, to find out their names, all of them.

Learning from Its Mistakes by Charles Glass

published in the London Review of Books
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n16/glas01_.html

In his memoir, Not So Wild a Dream, the famous CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid recalled watching the execution of six Nazi collaborators in the newly liberated city of Grenoble in 1944.

When the police van arrived and the six who were to die stepped out, a tremendous and awful cry arose from the crowd. The six young men walked firmly to the iron posts, and as their hands were tied behind the shafts they held their bare heads upright, one or two with closed eyes, the others staring over the line of the buildings and the crowd into the lowering clouds . . . There was the jarring, metallic noise of rifle bolts and then the sharp report. The six young men slid slowly to their knees, their heads falling to one side. An officer ran with frantic haste from one to the other, giving the coup de grâce with a revolver, and one of the victims was seen to work his mouth as though trying to say something to the executioner. As the last shot was fired, the terrible, savage cry rose again from the crowd. Mothers with babies rushed forward to look on the bodies at close range, and small boys ran from one to the other spitting upon the bodies. The crowd dispersed, men and women laughing and shouting at one another. Barbarous?

Such events were part of what the French described as the épuration – the purification or purging of France after four years of German occupation. The number of French men and women killed by the Resistance or kangaroo courts is usually put at ten thousand. Camus called this ‘human justice with all its defects’. The American forces that liberated France tolerated local vengeance against those who had worked for a brutal occupier. Thousands of French people, encouraged by a government in Vichy that they believed to be legitimate, had collaborated. Many, like the Milices, fascist gangs armed by Vichy, went further and killed Frenchmen. When Vichy’s foreign sponsors withdrew and its government fell, the killing began. Accounts were settled with similar violence in other provinces of the former Third Reich – countries which, along with Britain and the United States, we now think of as the civilised world.

From 1978 to 2000 Israel occupied slices of Lebanon from their common border right up to Beirut and back again. To reduce the burden on its own forces, the Israelis created a species of Milice in the form of the locally recruited South Lebanon Army – first under Major Saad Haddad, who had broken from the Lebanese army in 1976 with a few hundred men, and later under General Antoine Lahad. Both were Christians, and their troops – armed, trained, fed and clothed by Israel – were mainly Shia Muslims from the south. About a third of the force, which grew to almost 10,000, were Christians. Some joined because they resented the Palestinians’ armed presence in south Lebanon. Others enlisted because they needed the money: the region has always been Lebanon’s poorest. The SLA had a reputation for cruelty, confirmed when its torture chambers at Khiam were opened after the Israeli withdrawal in 2000, and for a high rate of desertions.

As Israel pulled back from Beirut, the high-water mark reached during its 1982 invasion, its share of Lebanon contracted further and further. Having seized 3560 square kilometres, about a third of the country, containing around 800 towns and villages, Israel found itself in 1985 with only 500 square kilometres and 61 villages, mostly deserted. Hizbullah, which led the resistance that had forced the Israelis to abandon most of their conquest, demanded the unconditional return of all Lebanese territory. Its attacks intensified, resulting in a loss of IDF soldiers that became unpalatable to most Israelis. The Israeli army placed the SLA between itself and Hizbullah so that it could pay the price that Israel had decided it could not afford. Hizbullah kidnapped SLA men, and the SLA and Israelis kidnapped Shias. The two sides killed each other, as well as many civilians, and blood feuds were born. On 17 May 1999, Israelis elected Ehud Barak on the strength of his promise to reverse Ariel Sharon’s Lebanon adventure, which had by then cost around a thousand Israeli lives.

Barak announced that Israel would pull out in an orderly fashion in July 2000, provided that Lebanon agreed to certain conditions. The Lebanese government, urged by Hizbullah, rejected these conditions and demanded full Israeli withdrawal in accordance with UN Resolutions 425 and 426 of 1978. Barak abandoned Lebanon two months ahead of schedule, suddenly and without advance warning, on 23 May 2000. His SLA clients and other Lebanese who had worked for the occupation over the previous 22 years were caught off guard. A few escaped into Israel, but most remained. UN personnel made urgent appeals for help to avert a massacre by Hizbullah. Hizbullah went in, but nothing happened.

The deputy secretary-general and co-founder of Hizbullah, Sheikh Naim Qassem, wrote a fascinating if partisan account of the creation and rise of Hizbullah. His version of the events in 2000 is, however, borne out by eyewitnesses from other Lebanese sects – including some who stood to lose their lives – and the UN. ‘It is no secret that some young combatants, as well as some of the region’s citizens, had a desire for vengeance – especially those who were aware of what collaborators and their families had inflicted on the mujahedin and their next of kin across the occupied villages,’ Qassem wrote in Hizbullah: The Story from Within. ‘Resistance leadership issued a strict warning forbidding any such action and vowing to discipline those who took it whatever the justifications.’ Hizbullah captured Israeli weapons, which it is now using against Israel, and turned over SLA militiamen to the government without murdering any of them. Barbarous?

Naim Qassem called the liberation of south Lebanon ‘the grandest and most important victory over Israel since it commenced its occupation [of Palestine] fifty years before – a liberation that was achieved at the hands of the weakest of nations, of a resistance operating through the most modest of means, not at the hands of armies with powerful military arsenals.’ But what impressed most Lebanese as much as Hizbullah’s victory over Israel was its refusal to murder collaborators – a triumph over the tribalism that has plagued and divided Lebanese society since its founding. Christians I knew in the Lebanese army admitted that their own side would have committed atrocities. Hizbullah may have been playing politics in Lebanon, but it refused to play Lebanese politics. What it sought in south Lebanon was not revenge, but votes. In the interval between its founding in 1982 and the victory of 2000, Hizbullah had become – as well as an armed force – a sophisticated and successful political party. It jettisoned its early rhetoric about making Lebanon an Islamic republic, and spoke of Christians, Muslims and Druze living in harmony. When it put up candidates for parliament, some of those on its electoral list were Christians. It won 14 seats.

Like Israel’s previous enemies, Hizbullah relies on the weapons of the weak: car bombs, ambushes, occasional flurries of small rockets and suicide bombers. The difference is that it uses them intelligently, in conjunction with an uncompromising political programme. Against Israel’s thousand dead on the Lebanese field, Hizbullah gave up 1276 ‘martyrs’. That is the closest any Arab group has ever come to parity in casualties with Israel. The PLO usually lost hundreds of dead commandos to Israel’s tens, and Hamas has seen most of its leaders assassinated and thousands of its cadres captured with little to show for it. Hizbullah’s achievement, perhaps ironically for a religious party headed by men in turbans, is that it belongs to the modern age. It videotaped its ambushes of Israeli convoys for broadcast the same evening. It captured Israeli soldiers and made Israel give up hundreds of prisoners to get them back. It used stage-set cardboard boulders that blew up when Israeli patrols passed. It flew drones over Israel to take reconnaissance photographs – just as the Israelis did in Lebanon. It had a website that was short on traditional Arab bombast and long on facts. If Israelis had faced an enemy like Hizbullah in 1948, the outcome of its War of Independence might have been different. Israel, whose military respect Hizbullah, is well aware of this.

That is why, having failed to eliminate Hizbullah while it occupied Lebanon, Israel is trying to destroy it now. Hizbullah’s unpardonable sin in Israel’s view is its military success. Israel may portray Hizbullah as the cat’s-paw of Syria and Iran, but its support base is Lebanese. Moreover, it does one thing that Syria and Iran do not: it fights for the Palestinians. On 12 July Hizbullah attacked an Israeli army unit, capturing two soldiers. It said it would negotiate indirectly to exchange them for Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners in Israel, as it has done in the past. It made clear that its attack was in support of the Palestinians under siege in Gaza after the capture of another Israeli soldier a week earlier. The whole Arab world had remained silent when Israel reoccupied the Gaza settlements and bombed the territory. Hizbullah’s response humiliated the Arab regimes, most of which condemned its actions, as much as it humiliated Israel. No one need have been surprised. Hizbullah has a long history of supporting the Palestinians. Many of its original fighters were trained by the PLO in the 1970s when the Shias had no militias of their own. Hizbullah risked the anger of Syria in 1986 when it sided against another Shia group which was attacking Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut. Hizbullah has never abandoned the Palestinian cause. Its capture last month of the two Israeli soldiers sent a message to Israel that it could not attack Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank without expecting a reaction.

On this occasion Israel, which regards its treatment of Palestinians under occupation as an internal affair in which neither the UN nor the Arab countries have any right to interfere, calibrated its response in such a way that it could not win. Instead of doing a quiet deal with Hizbullah to free its soldiers, it launched an all-out assault on Lebanon. Reports indicate that Israel has already dropped a greater tonnage of bombs on the country than it did during Sharon’s invasion in 1982. The stated purpose was to force a significant portion of the Lebanese to demand that the government disarm Hizbullah once and for all. That failed to happen. Israel’s massive destruction of Lebanon has had the effect of improving Hizbullah’s standing in the country. Its popularity had been low since last year, when it alone refused to demand the evacuation of the Syrian army after the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. Hizbullah sensed that Washington was orchestrating the anti-Syrian campaign for its own – rather than Lebanon’s – benefit.

Syria had, after all, helped found Hizbullah after Israel’s invasion – and encouraged it to face down and defeat the occupation, as well as to drive the Americans from Lebanon. Syria in turn allowed Iran, whose religious leaders gave direction to Hizbullah and whose Revolutionary Guards provided valuable tactical instruction, to send weapons through its territory to Lebanon. Hizbullah’s leaders nevertheless have sufficiently strong support to assert their independence of both sponsors whenever their interests or philosophies clash. (I have first-hand, if minor, experience of this. When Hizbullah kidnapped me in full view of a Syrian army checkpoint in 1987, Syria insisted that I be released to show that Syrian control of Lebanon could not be flouted. Hizbullah, unfortunately, ignored the request.) Despite occasional Syrian pressure, Hizbullah has refused to go into combat against any other Lebanese militia. It remained aloof from the civil war and concentrated on defeating Israel and its SLA surrogates.

Hizbullah’s unspectacular showing in the first post-Syrian parliamentary elections was largely due to changes in electoral law but may also be traced in part to its perceived pro-Syrian stance. Now, Israel has rescued Hizbullah and made its secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, not only the most popular man in Lebanon – but in the whole Arab world. An opinion poll commissioned by the Beirut Centre for Research and Information found that 80 per cent of Lebanese Christians supported Hizbullah; the figure for other communities was even higher. It was not insignificant that, when false reports came in that Hizbullah had sunk a second Israeli warship, the area that fired the loudest celebratory shots in the air was Ashrafieh, the heart of Christian East Beirut. Unlike in 1982, when it could rely on some of the Christian militias, Israel now has no friends in Lebanon.

Israel misjudged Lebanon’s response to its assaults, just as Hizbullah misjudged Israeli opinion. Firing its rockets into Israel did not, as it may have planned, divide Israelis and make them call for an end to the war. Israelis, like the Lebanese, rallied to their fighters in a contest that is taking on life and death proportions for both countries. Unlike Israel, which has repeatedly played out the same failed scenario in Lebanon since its first attack on Beirut in 1968, Hizbullah has a history of learning from its mistakes. Seeing the Israeli response to his rocket bombardment of Haifa and Netanya in the north, Nasrallah has not carried out his threat to send rockets as far as Tel Aviv. He now says he will do this only if Israel targets the centre of Beirut.

If the UN had any power, or the United States exercised its power responsibly, there would have been an unconditional ceasefire weeks ago and an exchange of prisoners. The Middle East could then have awaited the next crisis. Crises will inevitably recur until the Palestine problem is solved. But Lebanon would not have been demolished, hundreds of people would not have died and the hatred between Lebanese and Israelis would not have become so bitter.

On 31 July, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said: ‘This is a unique opportunity to change the rules in Lebanon.’ Yet Israel itself is playing by the same old unsuccessful rules. It is ordering Lebanon to disarm Hizbullah or face destruction, just as in 1975 it demanded the dismantling of the PLO. Then, many Lebanese fought the PLO and destroyed the country from within. Now, they reason, better war than another civil war: better that the Israelis kill us than that we kill ourselves. What else can Israel do to them? It has bombed comprehensively, destroyed the country’s expensively restored infrastructure, laid siege to it and sent its troops back in. Israel still insists that it will destroy Hizbullah in a few weeks, although it did not manage to do so between 1982 and 2000 when it had thousands of troops on the ground and a local proxy force to help it. What is its secret weapon this time?

3 August

‘God's chosen people’ by Jostein Gaarder

Jostein Gaarder is author of the global literary phenomenon Sophie's World (printed in 26m copies in 53 languages), in Aftenposten, Norway's paper of record.

The form of Gaarder's condemnation is inspired by Amos, the first Judaic prophet whose message is preserved in scroll (ca. 750 B.C.).

Aftenposten 05.08.06

There is no turning back. It is time to learn a new lesson: We do no longer recognize the state of Israel. We could not recognize the South African apartheid regime, nor did we recognize the Afghan Taliban regime. Then there were many who did not recognize Saddam Hussein's Iraq or the Serbs' ethnic cleansing. We must now get used to the idea: The state of Israel in its current form is history.

We do not believe in the notion of God's chosen people. We laugh at this people's fancies and weep over its misdeeds. To act as God's chosen people is not only stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. We call it racism.

Limits to tolerance

There are limits to our patience, and there are limits to our tolerance. We do not believe in divine promises as justification for occupation and apartheid. We have left the Middle Ages behind. We laugh uneasily at those who still believe that the God of flora, fauna, and galaxies has selected one people in particular as his favorite and given it funny stone tablets, burning bushes, and a license to kill.

We call child murderers 'child murderers' and will never accept that such have a divine or historic mandate excusing their outrages. We say but this: Shame on all apartheid, shame on ethnic cleansing, shame on every terrorist strike against civilians, be it carried out by Hamas, Hizballah, or the state of Israel!

Unscrupulous art of war

We acknowledge and pay heed to Europe's deep responsibility for the plight of the Jews, for the disgraceful harassment, the pogroms, and the Holocaust. It was historically and morally necessary for Jews to get their own home. However, the state of Israel, with its unscrupulous art of war and its disgusting weapons, has massacred its own legitimacy. It has systematically flaunted International Law, international conventions, and countless UN resolutions, and it can no longer expect protection from same. It has carpet bombed the recognition of the world. But fear not! The time of trouble shall soon be over. The state of Israel has seen its Soweto.

We are now at the watershed. There is no turning back. The state of Israel has raped the recognition of the world and shall have no peace until it lays down its arms.

Without defense, without skin

May spirit and word sweep away the apartheid walls of Israel. The state of Israel does not exist. It is now without defense, without skin. May the world therefore have mercy on the civilian population. For it is not civilian individuals at whom our doomsaying is directed.

We wish the people of Israel well, nothing but well, but we reserve the right not to eat Jaffa oranges as long as they taste foul and are poisonous. It was endurable to live some years without the blue grapes of apartheid.

They celebrate their triumphs

We do not believe that Israel mourns forty killed Lebanese children more than it for over three thousand years has lamented forty years in the desert. We note that many Israelis celebrate such triumphs like they once cheered the scourges of the Lord as "fitting punishment" for the people of Egypt. (In that tale, the Lord, God of Israel, appears as an insatiable sadist.) We query whether most Israelis think that one Israeli life is worth more than forty Palestinian or Lebanese lives.

For we have seen pictures of little Israeli girls writing hateful greetings on the bombs to be dropped on the civilian population of Lebanon and Palestine. Little Israeli girls are not cute when they strut with glee at death and torment across the fronts.

The retribution of blood vengeance

We do not recognize the rhetoric of the state of Israel. We do not recognize the spiral of retribution of the blood vengeance with "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." We do not recognize the principle of one or a thousand Arab eyes for one Israeli eye. We do not recognize collective punishment or population-wide diets as political weapons. Two thousand years have passed since a Jewish rabbi criticized the ancient doctrine of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."

He said: "Do to others as you would have them do to you." We do not recognize a state founded on antihumanistic principles and on the ruins of an archaic national and war religion. Or as Albert Schweitzer expressed it: "Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose."

Compassion and forgiveness

We do not recognize the old Kingdom of David as a model for the 21st century map of the Middle East. The Jewish rabbi claimed two thousand years ago that the Kingdom of God is not a martial restoration of the Kingdom of David, but that the Kingdom of God is within us and among us. The Kingdom of God is compassion and forgiveness.

Two thousand years have passed since the Jewish rabbi disarmed and humanized the old rhetoric of war. Even in his time, the first Zionist terrorists were operating.

Israel does not listen

For two thousand years, we have rehearsed the syllabus of humanism, but Israel does not listen. It was not the Pharisee that helped the man who lay by the wayside, having fallen prey to robbers. It was a Samaritan; today we would say, a Palestinian. For we are human first of all -- then Christian, Muslim, or Jewish. Or as the Jewish rabbi said: "And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others?" We do not accept the abduction of soldiers. But nor do we accept the deportation of whole populations or the abduction of legally elected parliamentarians and government ministers.

We recognize the state of Israel of 1948, but not the one of 1967. It is the state of Israel that fails to recognize, respect, or defer to the internationally lawful Israeli state of 1948. Israel wants more; more water and more villages. To obtain this, there are those who want, with God's assistance, a final solution to the Palestinian problem. The Palestinians have so many other countries, certain Israeli politicians have argued; we have only one.

The USA or the world?

Or as the highest protector of the state of Israel puts it: "May God continue to bless America." A little child took note of that. She turned to her mother, saying: "Why does the President always end his speeches with 'God bless America'? Why not, 'God bless the world'?"

Then there was a Norwegian poet who let out this childlike sigh of the heart: "Why doth Humanity so slowly progress?" It was he that wrote so beautifully of the Jew and the Jewess. But he rejected the notion of God's chosen people. He personally liked to call himself a Muhammedan.

Calm and mercy

We do not recognize the state of Israel. Not today, not as of this writing, not in the hour of grief and wrath. If the entire Israeli nation should fall to its own devices and parts of the population have to flee the occupied areas into another diaspora, then we say: May the surroundings stay calm and show them mercy. It is forever a crime without mitigation to lay hand on refugees and stateless people.

Peace and free passage for the evacuating civilian population no longer protected by a state. Fire not at the fugitives! Take not aim at them! They are vulnerable now like snails without shells, vulnerable like slow caravans of Palestinian and Lebanese refugees, defenseless like women and children and the old in Qana, Gaza, Sabra, and Chatilla. Give the Israeli refugees shelter, give them milk and honey!

Let not one Israeli child be deprived of life. Far too many children and civilians have already been murdered.

Time and space

The night of Beirut is bathing in black. The fuel crisis has finally caught up with the daily life of the city. Long trails of cars, all waiting for rations of fuel, are spread out all around the city. The ‘service’ is now the only way to move around the city – but not for long. Soon we will be back to the era that precedes the discovery of the black gold – this same material that has cursed the Middle East with global power struggles. The power stations no longer have enough fuel to generate light and other forms of electric appliances. Today we had 4 hours of electricity.

As it seems clear the war is now heading towards a new phase, one that will take too long a time for me to linger in this land. I find myself faced with a dilemma for which I know the answer; nonetheless I am still looking – naively – for another one. After all I will forsake my country and my dear ones. Life has to go on as we always repeat. But how can I go on when my heart and mind are trapped in a war that seems endless and soon to become far away?

I fear the distance. I fear the silence and tranquility to which I am going. Will I be able to survive without the sound of falling bombs? As we say, the bomb you do not hear is the one that will hit you. How will I sleep without hearing those explosions I got addicted to? How will I sleep knowing that someone I know is hearing them and even worse might not be hearing them?

Today i went to a travel agency to book a ticket out of the war; it will be perhaps the first time in my life that I see the war from far away – a scarier perspective than seeing it from a close distance. The destruction becomes abstract, the violence becomes linguistic and emotions are lost between physical intimacy and long distance preoccupation.

Am I running away? Is it a form of surrendering to the dark reality of life? Or is it simply what I am bound to do?

I sometimes think that the closer we are to danger the safer we feel – it is this physical relation that gives you an esthetic sense of safety, a direct knowledge of death and therefore life. The moment this physical relation is broken the sense of safety becomes bound to a mediated state that you cannot grasp.

Since yesterday a wave of pessimism has drowned the Lebanese state of mind. Everyone felt suddenly or not that this war is only in its beginning. The direct political reason for these speculations is clearly the UN stance. Again and again the ‘international community’ will inflict another war on us. It has become a ritual that the Lebanese people have gotten used to.

The absurdity and the flagrance of the situation are always translated by the common character specificity that distinguishes us: sarcasm. I cannot help myself thinking about what would have happened if we had kidnapped the Israeli chief of parliament or a couple of deputies from the Knesset or even some ministers. It is in a way ironic to see a country claiming self defense for the kidnapping of two of its soldiers while at the same time itself kidnapping elected deputies, a chief of parliament and some ministers from another country (the kidnapped chief of parliament of the Palestinian authority was taken to a hospital for what appears to be a ‘mistreatment’ by his captives) not to mention 5 Lebanese civilians. But of course how can one criticize Israel without being called terrorist, anti-Semitic or biased?

Tonight as it seems a larger land operation has been initiated by the Israeli army for the purpose of invading southern Lebanon until the Litany river (the same initial operation that got the Israeli army led by Sharon to Beirut in 1982) in order to ‘clean’ the region from Hezbollah presence (in 1982 it was to clean it from the PLO presence – both of course baptized as terrorists). How hygienic one should say. Buy many Lebanese would rather say: Let them come down from their safe murderous skies.

Day 28

I wonder how it feels to be trapped under a building; pieces of stone and metal piercing through my body and suffocating the blood in my veins and the air in my lungs: To be unable to move and still able to think; a spiritual freedom perhaps but not a physical one. I wonder how it is to die slowly in the dark, with the idea in mind that tomorrow I will become a statistic, that this building has reduced me to a number. Perhaps if I am lucky some newspaper or a TV channel will even make a report about my life and the tragedy of my death, or a profile of a victim with interviews with my loved ones and other touching moments. I wonder if I would care about justice, injustice, politics, terrorism, or the international community. I wonder whom I will be thinking of and whom I will forget.

The number of victims in the Shiyyeh bombing has reached a record of 56 killed and a similar number of wounded until now, many are still missing under the rubble. I wonder why this massacre did not make as much echo in the ears of the world as the massacre of Qana (part 2) even though the number of victims is more or less the same. Was it a problem of production, marketing or material? Was it a bad timing for releasing a massacre story? Or has it become commonplace to have ‘50 people killed in Israeli air strike on Beirut witnesses say’ – it is no longer a headline story it has retreated back to Middle East news or even World news.

Yesterday in Ghazyyeh, a village in the south not far from Saida the villagers were performing the common ritual of walking the dead to the graveyard. 15 people had died the day before in Israeli air raids, needless to say these were civilians trapped under their house. During the ceremony a twisted sense of humor perhaps or just a killing frenzy inspired the Israeli air force to bomb those who were burying their dead. Another 14 people died. It is some kind of special offer that gives you one more dead for every person to be buried.

A landscape or a portrait in Shiyyeh

Causalities or Casual sonorities

It was around 7 30 pm when the glass windows of the cafe shook. I was sitting with 3 friends, Lamia, Karim and Youssef drinking rosé wine (the white wine is very bad in this specific café, and red wine was too warm for the weather, even though perfect for the situation) and ironically talking about the early morning bombs and if anyone of us woke up because of the sound. Yesterday night I got too drunk and I slept too deeply to notice anything, even though the sound was apparently very loud. This time it was different we knew it was too loud to be the Suburbs. There was music and the noise of the crowd in the cafe and still we heard the explosion very clearly. There was no TV in the room. The only solution was of course to wait for someone to call and notify us, or wait until the news gets to the room by so diverse channels of people.

Rumors began to circulate as usual: ‘they hit the Cola Bridge (it is a bridge in the southern part of Beirut and it has been the fixation of people in Beirut ever since the Israelis started bombing bridges – everyone was waiting for them to bomb this bridge). I thought that it would be good if they hit it and finish with it, this way people will feel relieved that now it is done with and we don’t need to worry about it anymore. I expressed the thought. It couldn’t be the bridge, it was too easy.

Some moments passed and with them some comments then we forgot about it and carried on with the conversation.

We went out of the café at around 8pm and head to dinner. Karim went home and I was sitting on the ‘Domtex stairs’ with Youssef waiting for Lamia to get back (she had to go get her cellular phone). It was at that moment that I received a phone call. ‘Where are you?’

‘In Hamra, what happened, where was it? ‘

‘They hit Shiyyeh, a building near the Beirut Mall’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes we saw it’

It was enough to know that it was bad. Shiyyeh is part of the Southern Suburbs of Beirut but it is the closest district to the city and it is not a Hezbollah area. In fact many of those who escaped the Southern Suburbs found refuge in this region which is a strictly residential and very highly populated area. Bombing Shiyyeh means killing a lot of people, and I am not talking about Hezbollah fighters. A residential building was hit with two missiles; another building close-by was also hit. The buildings were full. Until now more than 15 bodies have been evacuated and many injuries. No exact body count is yet available.

Is it a statement? Bombing Shiyyeh is like bombing Beirut only not in official terms. Is it to provoke the Hezbollah into launching their rockets on Tel Aviv and then bear the responsibility of a future escalation? Or is it to scare the government or the Arab leaders (they don’t need scaring) who took a minimum of a stand against the proposed resolution that is to be voted tomorrow in the UN? Whatever it is, and whatever it might be, it made the inhabitants of Shiyyeh know that they too should become refugees, they are not safe either.

I went back home at around 10 30pm and on my way I noticed a massive traffic. They were coming to seek refuge in the Sanayeh Park which has become since the beginning of the war a transit station for those who left their homes before they get transferred (if they want, or if there is room) to some school where they will live until they get back home if they are of those lucky enough to have their houses still standing. Will Shiyyeh too be turned into rubble like the rest of the Suburbs? (in total the southern suburbs are populated by nearly half a million people, it is the most densely populated area in Lebanon, most of them are Shiites, the new ‘inferior race’).

I went back home with one thought in mind: The war will not end soon.

Another article by Robert Fisk

A terrible thought occurs to me - that there will be another 9/11

08/05/06 "The Independent" -- -- The room shook. Not since the 1983 earthquake has my apartment rocked from side to side. That was the force of the Israeli explosions in the southern suburbs of Beirut - three miles from my home - and the air pressure changed in the house yesterday morning and outside in the street the palm trees moved. Is it to be like this every day? How many civilians can you make homeless before you start a revolution? And what is next? Are the Israelis to bomb the centre of Beirut? The Corniche? Is this why all the foreign warships came and took their citizens away, to make Beirut safe to destroy?Yesterday, needless to say, was another day of massacres, great and small. The largest appeared to be 40 farm workers in northern Lebanon, some of them Kurds - a people who do not even have a country. An Israeli missile was reported to have exploded among them as they loaded vegetables on to a refrigerated truck near Al-Qaa, a small village east of Hermel in the far north. The wounded were taken to hospital in Syria because the roads of Lebanon have now all been cratered by Israeli bomb-bursts. Later we learnt that an air strike on a house in the village of Taibeh in the south had killed seven civilians and wounded 10 seeking shelter from attack.In Israel two civilians were killed by Hizbollah missiles but, as usual, Lebanon bore the brunt of the day's attacks which centred - incredibly - on the Christian heartland that has traditionally shown great sympathy towards Israel. It was the Christian Maronite community whose Phalangist militiamen were Israel's closest allies in its 1982 invasion of Lebanon yet Israel's air force yesterday attacked three highway bridges north of Beirut and - again as usual - it was the little people who died.One of them was Joseph Bassil, 65, a Christian man who had gone out on his daily jogging exercise with four friends north of Jounieh. "His friends packed up after four rounds of the bridge because it was hot," a member of his family told us later. "Joseph decided to do one more jog on the bridge. That was what killed him." The Israelis gave no reason for the attacks - no Hizbollah fighters would ever enter this Christian Maronite stronghold and the only hindrance was caused to humanitarian convoys - and there were growing fears in Lebanon that the latest air raids were a sign of Israel's frustration rather any serious military planning.
Indeed, as the Lebanon war continues to destroy innocent lives - most of them Lebanese - the conflict seems to be increasingly aimless. The Israeli air force has succeeded in killing perhaps 50 Hizbollah members and 600 civilians and has destroyed bridges, milk factories, gas stations, fuel storage depots, airport runways and thousands of homes. But to what purpose?Does the United States any longer believe Israel's claims that it will destroy Hizbollah when its army clearly cannot do anything of the kind? Does Washington not realise that when Israel grows tired of this war, it will plead for a ceasefire - which only Washington can deliver by doing what it most loathes to do: by taking the road to Damascus and asking for help from President Bashar al-Assad of Syria?What in the meanwhile is happening to Lebanon? Bridges and buildings can be reconstructed - with European Union loans, no doubt - but many Lebanese are now questioning the institutions of the democracy for which the US was itself so full of praise last year. What is the point of a democratically elected Lebanese government which cannot protect its people? What is the point of a 75,000-member Lebanese army which cannot protect its nation, which cannot be sent to the border, which does not fire on Lebanon's enemies and which cannot disarm Hizbollah? Indeed, for many Lebanese Shias, Hizbollah is now the Lebanese army.So fierce has been Hizbollah's resistance - and so determined its attacks on Israeli ground troops in Lebanon - that many people here no longer recall that it was Hizbollah which provoked this latest war by crossing the border on 12 July, killing three Israeli soldiers and capturing two others. Israel's threats of enlarging the conflict even further are now met with amusement rather than horror by a Lebanese population which has been listening to Israel's warnings for 30 years with ever greater weariness. And yet they fear for their lives. If Tel Aviv is hit, will Beirut be spared. Or if central Beirut is hit, will Tel Aviv be spared? Hizbollah now uses Israel's language of an eye for an eye. Every Israeli taunt is met by a Hizbollah taunt.And do the Israelis realise that they are legitimising Hizbollah, that a rag-tag army of guerrillas is winning its spurs against an Israeli army and air force whose targets - if intended - prove them to be war criminals and if unintended suggest that they are a rif-raff little better than the Arab armies they have been fighting, on and off, for more than half a century? Extraordinary precedents are being set in this Lebanon war.In fact, one of the most profound changes in the region these past three decades has been the growing unwillingness of Arabs to be afraid. Their leaders - our "moderate" pro-Western Arab leaders such as King Abdullah of Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt - may be afraid. But their peoples are not. And once a people have lost their terror, they cannot be re-injected with fear. Thus Israel's consistent policy of smashing Arabs into submission no longer works. It is a policy whose bankruptcy the Americans are now discovering in Iraq.And all across the Muslim world, "we" - the West, America, Israel - are fighting not nationalists but Islamists. And watching the martyrdom of Lebanon this week - its slaughtered children in Qana packed into plastic bags until the bags ran out and their corpses had to be wrapped in carpets - a terrible and daunting thought occurs to me, day by day. That there will be another 9/11.
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