Re: hezbollah, hamas etc etc, big talk but no balls?
Desolation won't bring any peace
By Julie Flint
Commentary by
Monday, July 24, 2006
Let's call a spade a spade. This is a turkey shoot in Lebanon, every bit as much as a war on Hizbullah "terror." Unable to see its enemy clearly, the Israeli armed forces are flattening, quite literally, a wide swathe of South Lebanon. But this is not 1982, and Hizbullah is not the PLO. Hizbullah's fighters are not firing rockets from the houses Israel is destroying. Israel is targeting non-combatants.
This is a war Israel cannot win. Have the Israelis forgotten the lesson of 1982 - that force resolves nothing? Yes, the Palestine Liberation Organization sailed out in the end. But Hizbullah rode in and is still fighting the Israelis 20 years later, more determined and more organized than Yasser Arafat's men ever were. The war crimes of 1982, climaxing in the Sabra and Shatila massacres, will forever sully Israel and its army. Already today, in only the second week of this new war, the central debate here is no longer about whether Hizbullah's provocative attack across the Blue Line on July 12 was a calculation or a miscalculation, an initiative ordered from Tehran or Haret Hreik. Israel is committing a new round of war crimes for which it must be called to account, and for which a whole new generation of Lebanese will hate it. Marwaheen, Tyre, Rmeile, Srifa.
Twenty-four years ago, the Israelis invaded Lebanon at the start of "Operation Peace in Galilee," ending a year of relative calm in which the PLO did not fire a single rocket across Lebanon's southern border. This is not the bias of one who has lived in Lebanon since 1981 and who has no love, no love at all, for the state of Israel. In a cuttings box, I have an editorial clipped from The Jerusalem Post and making just this point: In June 1982, the cease-fire negotiated by US envoy Philip Habib was holding. But Arafat had been received in the Vatican by the Pope. The PLO had to be bombed back into the Stone Age.
Suddenly memories are rushing back - and they are all filled with Palestinian fighters. Hurtling into Sidon in June 1982 as the first Israeli tank rolled into the town center - empty but for an old man running across the road with a child in his arms and three Palestinians armed only with AK-47s, sitting on a low wall waiting to die. Leaving a dinner party in Raouche during the siege of West Beirut and finding my colleague's car ripped apart by fedayeen who thought it was a car bomb. Encountering a young Palestinian with a yellow toothbrush, and not much else, retreating to Beirut as the Israelis moved north - and then knocking at the door a week or so later, holding the toothbrush and asking if you have water, please.
Palestinians, Palestinians everywhere (and not a drop to drink).
But where, in 2006, is Hizbullah? Not in any of the television pictures from the wasteland that is South Lebanon. Not in the Marwaheen pick-ups. Not under the rubble of those parts of the southern suburbs that were flattened - and I use the word in its most precise sense - in the five-hour bombardment that began at midnight one week ago. It will not be acceptable to many to say it, but parts of the southern suburbs now look like Ground Zero, New York, writ large. Large numbers of non-combatants lived in the area singled out - not all of them members or even supporters of Hizbullah. **That they did not all die was not because of any care taken by Israel, but because Hizbullah went from door to door evacuating families in anticipation of the coming storm. Israel has Hizbullah to thank for the fact that its air force did not kill hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent men, woman and children in the pre-dawn hours of Monday July 17.
**Presuming, of course, that Israel did not want them killed. In the eyes of the Israelis - and the generalization must stand until some refuse the killing of 2006, as they did in 1982 - all inhabitants of the southern suburbs are "terrorists." And if not "terrorists," then "human shields" for terrorists and so deserving of death.
In West Beirut - in the parlance of 1982 - the worm is already turning. Taking the pulse of a nation, or even a part of a nation, is always fraught with risk. But the mood of most of those I talk to - in streets, in shops, in hospitals - is changing from one of anger against Hizbullah for its flagrant violation of the rules of the game in the South to rage against Israel for its collective crime against an entire nation - and for then telling that nation: "You know that what we are doing is good for you."
What Israel is doing, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, is weakening a government that was struggling, valiantly, to diminish Syrian influence in Lebanon. You are making Syria quite literally, the gateway to a better life. You are giving Iran a chance to deepen its penetration of Lebanon when it finances tomorrow the reconstruction of what you are deconstructing today. You can weaken Hizbullah, but like the proverbial phoenix it will rise again. Bombs cannot destroy an ideology; stomach-churning hypocrisy about what is good for us will not win our hearts and minds.
You have already lost that battle - just as you lost the battle to decapitate the Hizbullah leadership on July 17, just as you will lose the battle to decimate its rank-and-file. I for one am praying that you fail to find Hassan Nasrallah. It is he who is holding the most radical elements of Hizbullah in check. If he dies, the petrochemical complexes of Haifa will quite possibly be hit and Lebanon will cease to exist. (I may be excused a degree of exaggeration, I think. These are difficult times.) In the end, there will have to be a negotiated deal. It would be so much better for you, as well as for us, to try that now, instead of flattening Lebanon to rediscover the futility of force. Twenty centuries ago, the Roman historian Tacitus, in his "Agricola," a biography of his father-in-law, described what Israel is doing in Lebanon today. "They create a desolation and call it peace." But Tacitus also said: "A desire to resist oppression is implanted in the nature of man." Bear that in mind, Mr. Olmert, as you kill us for our own good.
