‘Act with fairness, responsibility, honesty and courage or leave us alone’ By Hasan Abu Nimah
The Jordan Times
26 July 2006
The latest Israeli adventure in Lebanon, like many other things in our region, runs against the simplest principles of logic.
Usually in dealing with disputes, diplomacy is tried first and only when it fails, resorting to the use of force becomes the last option. Here, and in line with the usual demented Israeli reasoning, military force, murder and mayhem are supposed to set the stage for diplomatic arrangements.
Israel started a total war on all Lebanon two weeks ago. The excuse was a Hizbollah attack on Israel’s border fortifications in which two Israeli soldiers were taken prisoner and several others killed in subsequent fighting.
It would be very naive, however, to believe that the Israeli wars on Gaza and Lebanon are being waged to liberate few soldiers “kidnapped” by resistance groups.
Nor can the war on Lebanon be justified by the excuse that Israel wants to protect its citizens from rocket fire: Hizbollah did not start firing rockets at Israeli cities until after Israel began its massive and indiscriminate bombardment of Lebanese villages and cities, including the capital Beirut.
Israel, in its arrogant manner, wants to inflict collective punishment and total pain on all Palestinians and Lebanese because a few of them dared challenge Israeli immunity to the consequences of its mounting crimes against the people of the region, and threatened the supposed “invincibility” and “deterrence” of the Israeli army.
In fact, and as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle on July 21, Israel had laid the elaborate plans it is now carrying out for the destruction of Lebanon more than a year ago, and simply used its captured soldiers as an excuse for a pre-planned war of aggression.
Israel’s goals are wider than just restoring the pride of its thuggish military. Its broader aims are the destruction of the democratically elected Hamas authority in the occupied Palestinian territories — something which the Western and official Arab siege has so far failed to do – and ending the military existence of Hizbollah which, along with Hamas, poses the only serious, if compared with Israel’s might, tiny military threat to total Israeli colonial hegemony. Again, this is a goal that UN Security Council Resolution 1559, and all the pressure brought on Syria and Iran from the so-called international community (the US, Israel and the spineless EU) failed to do.
The silence with which the “international community” has greeted the destruction by Israel of the country which just a year ago was claimed as a great friend of the United States, after the “Cedar Revolution”, underscores that Israel and the United States are engaged in a joint enterprise to rearrange the region so that any form of resistance to Zionist domination is totally delegitimised and destroyed.
The US-led war on Iraq was meant to start the process of rearranging the political map of the Middle East by creating in Iraq a model to be emulated in Syria and Iran.
By now Iraq was supposed to be a docile entity, open to US capital and on friendly terms with Israel. Once it become
clear this would fail, the international community started exerting pressure by other means: on Iran via its nuclear
programme, and on Syria via its presence in Lebanon.
In 2005, Syria was forced to remove its troops from Lebanon, supposedly to fulfill the terms of Resolution 1559 which called for the removal of all foreign troops, the eventual disarming of non-state militias and extension of Lebanese sovereignty up to the border with Israel. The accusations that Syria was directly responsible for the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri were part of this campaign, although that front has faltered as the supposed evidence has largely fallen apart. Yet none of this has stemmed the rise of Hizbollah as a political, military and even regional force.
Some parties in the Arab world have acquiesced to the simplistic and convenient theory that these developments are not primarily a local reaction to Israel’s colonial practices but an evil conspiracy masterminded entirely in Tehran as part of a grand design to establish Irania Shiite hegemony in the region and, therefore, confronting this design, even if spearheaded by Israel, is not undesirable. This minority view is being trumpeted by Israel as “evidence” that it is engaged in the US-declared war on terrorism, and that its atrocities enjoy support in the Arab world.
Israeli propaganda and lies aside, Israel’s problem is that after two weeks, it has been unable to achieve any of its political goals and it has signalled that it would “accept” a “disarmed” Hizbollah. In 1982, when Israel wanted to dislodge the PLO by force and settle the conflict with Lebanon on its own terms, one of the many unintended consequences was the rise of Hizbollah. This time, again, a war which is causing unspeakable atrocities has enhanced the standing of Hizbollah throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds, as it has exposed Israeli towns and settlements to unprecedented attacks.
Having failed to dent Hizbollah, despite killing hundreds of innocent people, Israel is once again turning to its friends to try to achieve by “diplomacy” what it failed to realise by force. All signs indicate that if there were a ceasefire it would be conditional upon the realisation of the Israeli demands: disarming Hizbollah and creating a buffer zone in the south manned either by a UN or a NATO force, or by the Lebanese army. It would also put restrictions on Syria and guarantee no rocket attacks across the Israeli border. That alone would again be partial and counterproductive. It will be the exact opposite of what Condoleezza Rice has been saying, “a permanent peace, not a temporary ceasefire”.
After all, if it is important to remove foreign troops, disarm militias and extend state sovereignty up to the border, is it not equally important to remove all Israeli troops from Syria’s Golan Heights, occupied since 1967, disarm and remove its tens of thousands of settlers, and allow the Syrian army to return to its international border and expand Syrian sovereignty over its occupied Golan Heights?
The “good” thing about wars, if there is any, is that they often stir stagnant political waters and expose festering
evil underneath. This war is no exception in stirring the rot and in exposing the entrenched deception in Middle Eastern politics. The fear is that this last and very costly lesson — for which Lebanon pays the price — will again be ignored. The lesson is simple. The Middle East sits on a volcano where the pressure is constantly building up. What we have been experiencing are minor eruptions to release mounting pressure. The choice is either to continue to sit on shaky ground and deal with the symptoms of the deeper source of instability as they occur, or go deeper to the roots and put all the
components of the problem on the table.
For peace to permanently prevail in the Middle East, there is need to end the Arab-Israeli conflict by ending the occupation of Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian lands, including East Jerusalem. There is need to dismantle the system of apartheid that Israel has built against the Palestinian colonial subjects, as part of a comprehensive and genuine process of democratisation of the region where people are free to choose their own governments even if the “international community” does not like them. And that “international community” must also choose to either act with fairness, responsibility, honesty and courage or leave us alone. Their hypocrisy, meddling and double standards have been slowly destroying all of us, Israel included, and destroying not only our peace, but world peace as well.
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