Surrender of Sovereignty or Ceasefire? Legitimizing Occupation through the UN by Muhammed Asadi
Selves and Others Tuesday 8 August 2006
The UN resolutions, aimed at “ending” the conflict in Lebanon (after all calls for a ceasefire were rejected by the US) is a simple case of the US using everything at its disposal, force and institutional domination, to get what it wants in that region.
The provocation for war, as pretext, came from Israel in Lebanon and not the Hizballah as the mainstream media is deceptively presenting. Israel was expecting that response from them after it subcontracted to assassinate Hizballah members (June 18th, 2006 reported by Reuters) and later flew planes over the Syrian presidential palace, expecting a Hizballah response (June 29, 2006, reported by AFP). After seeing the Israeli belligerence in Gaza, the Hizballah took the bait. They merely reacted to those provocations based upon their “Pavlovian” response. By that I mean that their collective memory of dealing with Israel successfully in the past is based on just such reactions and Israel knowing that well, was waiting for them to act, and when they did, it acted in an amnesiac fashion forgetting the context it had laid for the abduction of the two soldiers, and presented that as a fresh unprovoked occurrence to the world.
Similarly, the escalation of the conflict based on those events came from Israel as well: The Hizballah only started firing rockets after Israel attacked Lebanon in a most barbarous fashion. The question then, regarding belligerence and ending the conflict should not be the disarming of the Hizballah but rather the disarming of the IDF
What US/Israel are doing at the UN is drafting a “surrender of sovereignty” document (paraded as a “ceasefire agreement”) to get what they have failed to achieve militarily. After inhumanely sitting by and letting Israel destroy an entire country, much like they sat by at the height of the Bosnian war, the Rwandan massacre and presided over the withering away of Iraq under sanctions before attacking it in a most barbarous fashion, they have achieved little and lost much in the global arena of public perception.
Israel makes a big deal of the rhetoric of groups that want its destruction, yet it thinks nothing of the fact that it has destroyed countries as fact. Who gets convicted for murder, the one who threatens someone or the one who has actually killed? It is one thing to “shout” things at your enemies who have destroyed your nation, quite another to actually do that as fact as Israel has done to the Palestinians and multiple times to Lebanon. Yet the media is presenting such selective rhetoric of those it desires to demonize, as legitimating tool for such a barbaric invasion by Israel. Further, the official charter of the Palestinian Authority has recognized the existence of Israel much beyond what the UN partition plan gave them, but that has made no difference to Israeli belligerence, which tells us that the selective use of such rhetoric about their destruction by the Israelis is a mere deception on their part.
The Lebanese should accept nothing in the short-term, short of
1. An unconditional ceasefire and a total withdrawal of all Israeli forces from Lebanon including Shebaa Farms.
2. Compensation by Israel of the destroyed Infrastructure of Lebanon and every single civilian killed in the attacks.
3. Total disarmament of the IDF’s weapons of mass destruction under threat of sanctions, with inspections to start immediately.
4. An international peace keeping force on the Israeli side of the border, with UN observers on the Lebanese side (and those observers have observed that Israel violated the blue line by air incursions, almost on a daily basis, deep into Lebanese territory, ever since its withdrawal in 2000).
5. Full implementation of all pending UN resolutions by Israel before any other UN resolutions are even mentioned about the region.
Will Israel accept these conditions? Of course not. Therefore, no just peace is possible at this juncture in the conflict.
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