Israel's monstrous legacy brings tumult a step closer

[bemildred]

Overnight Lebanon has been plunged into a role it endured for 25 years - that of a hapless arena for other people's wars

David Hirst
Friday July 14, 2006
The Guardian

The Lebanese people, habitues as few people are of the lethal, violent and unexpected, yesterday awoke to the kind of news they thought they had put behind them. Their brand-new airport, the pride of their postwar reconstruction, had been bombarded by Israeli war planes along with a host of other infrastructure projects, bringing death and devastation on a more than Gazan scale.

For some it inevitably brought to mind a bleak winter day in 1968 when, out of the blue, helicopter-borne Israeli commandos landed on the old airport and blew up 13 passenger jets, almost the entire fleet of the national carrier. The pretext: of two Palestinians who killed an Israeli at Athens airport, one came from a refugee camp in Lebanon, then an entirely peaceable country. The significance of this most spectacularly disproportionate reprisal was something the Lebanese could hardly even have guessed at then. But it was a very early portent of the long nightmare to come: military conflict with Israel, eventually to be compounded with an atrocious civil war that it did much to engender.

There is something ominously similar, in possible consequences, about yesterday's repeat Israeli performance. Ever since the Israelis ended their occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000, this weak and diminutive country has enjoyed an almost unmarred respite from the turbulence of the region to which it so easily and habitually falls victim. But overnight it has been plunged back into the role it endured for a quarter century and more - that of hapless arena for other people's wars, as well as pawn in the ambitions and machinations of regional players far more powerful than itself.

It is only the players who change. After 1968 it was to be the Palestinian resistance movement, with Lebanon as its principal power base, that was Israel's antagonist in Lebanon. Now it is Hizbullah. To be sure, Hizbullah is Lebanese in everything that defines nationality, and it has cabinet ministers and members of parliament. That is why Israel could so plausibly blame the Lebanese government for the seizure of its two soldiers. Yet blaming Lebanon was as about as futile as blaming President Mahmoud Abbas for the earlier capture of an Israeli solder in Gaza. If Islamists act on their own in Palestine, Hizbullah does so even more blatantly in Lebanon. It is a virtual state within a state, with a militia more powerful than the Lebanese army. Of course, in its Lebanese self Hizbullah places that army in the defence of Lebanon. But it has another self - another identity, mission, agenda - that it always tries to reconcile with its Lebanese one, but in the final analysis cannot: that of universal jihad and all that now implies in terms of non-Lebanese regional ambitions, allegiances, obligations and constraints. Palestine now looms largest in that. Hizbullah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, openly asserts it: Hizbullah's task is not merely to liberate the last pocket of Lebanese soil, the Sebaa farms, it is to help shape the outcome of the Arab-Israeli struggle.

Guardian

[Kutjara]

1. I wonder if anyone's booked the Plains of Megiddo for...

...a really big party yet. Should be quite a show.

[Igel]

2. Allah's Party wouldn't be anything other than

a really big show. Lots of fireworks, and a fair number of human sacrifices ...

[wagthedogwar]

3. and then comes the Parousia

if you really want to wind up the religious wackos

[DELUSIONAL]

4. Thanks for posting this -- I am interested in the historical perspective

of this region.

I remember that Lebanon was once a beautiful and peaceful place.

Sailors on Med cruises looked forward to their port of call in Lebanon. My dad was there in the early 1950s and it was probably his favorite port.

Because of his stories about Lebanon I wanted to visit one day -- but Israel destabilized this country long before I could get there.

[pelsar]

5. your right your need a historical perspective...

but Israel destabilized this country long before I could get there.

first you admit you know little, then you blame israel...quite an interesting "historical perspective"...admiting you know little, then making a claim based on no knowledge.

[Matilda]

6. In truth, the Lebanese did a pretty good job of destabilizing themselves.

The civil strife that began in the 1970s was really between Lebansese Christians and Muslims.
Inevitably, the Israelis, the PLO and the Syrians all butted in and made a bad situation worse,
but it was really an internal problem.

[bemildred]

8. My pleasure. I like to see different points of view aired.

As long as they are put in decent prose.
Sarajevo used to be a great place too.
The list of great places trashed by hate is pretty long.

[Englander]

7. Guardian leader;

'Disproportionate, dangerous, destructive

Leader
Friday July 14, 2006
The Guardian

Israel's massive onslaught on Lebanon has already killed scores of people, most if not all unconnected to the Hizbullah guerrillas who attacked across the international border early on Wednesday morning, killing eight soldiers and capturing two others. By the time this article is published, there will likely have been more fatalities, each lost life feeding the hatred that fuels the conflicts of the Middle East. Hardly surprisingly, rockets were quickly fired back from Lebanon, hitting towns and villages inside Israel, maintaining the cycle of retaliation, and hurting civilians there. The outrageous bombing of Beirut airport and the imposition of a blockade on the entire country constitute a grave crisis that is now a war in all but name.

The attack on the airport, the blockade and the warning to evacuate the densely populated southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital take the region and the world back to the dark days of Israel's invasion and occupation in 1982. All go far beyond the legitimate right of any country to defend itself. Israel's escalation is disproportionate, highly dangerous and illegal.

None of this excuses Hizbullah. Its raid, intended to detonate an explosion, was an act of aggression, none the less so for being carried out by a non-state actor. Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000. Hizbullah's motive was to take prisoners to use as a bargaining chip to secure the freedom of its own people held in Israel. It calculated too that with the Israelis besieging the Gaza Strip and punishing and killing Palestinians there to try to free another captured soldier, their operation would be hailed as an act of Arab and Muslim solidarity with Hamas. That would suit Hizbullah's backers in Syria and Iran and cheer suffering Gazans, if not the many ordinary Lebanese who will pay the price in ruined lives and lost revenues.

The dangers in any such calculation have quickly become depressingly clear. Israel's overwhelming military superiority means it can bomb the Beqa'a Valley or Damascus or send tanks into Tyre and Sidon. The untried Ehud Olmert, striving to show he is as resolute as Ariel Sharon, seems to feel he can act with impunity. He should think again. Wreaking devastation on Lebanon is unlikely to secure Israel's goals. The Beirut government, which insists it did not condone Wednesday's attack, has a duty to implement UN resolutions, disarm Hizbullah and extend its authority to the international border. This is hardly the way to achieve that. Like Hamas or Sinn Féin, Hizbullah is a political organisation with a tough and experienced military wing. It is almost certainly more powerful than the Lebanese army.

Israel should have learned some lessons from the Lebanese quagmire it created and endured for years after the disastrous 1982 invasion - notoriously a "war of choice" designed by Mr Sharon, then defence minister, to crush the PLO. That conflict, which was hugely divisive in Israel too, marked a nadir in the country's international reputation. Its first stage culminated in the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians by Israel's Christian allies. It took another 18 years before the Israelis withdrew, having created a determined new enemy among the southern Shia. Inspired and helped by Iran, they fought under the banner of the Islamic Resistance Movement, later to become today's Hizbullah - the "party of god".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,,1820106,00.html