Dibattito su Palestina e Libano al Festival di Rifondazione, a Torino.

A perilous excursion into the distant past, starting
seven whole weeks ago

Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel: Everything You Need To
Know

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

As the tv networks give unlimited airtime to
Israel’s apologists, the message rolls out that no
nation, least of all Israel, can permit bombardment or
armed incursion across its borders without
retaliation.

The guiding rule in this tsunami of drivel is that the
viewers should be denied the slightest access to any
historical context, or indeed to anything that
happened prior to June 28, which was when the capture
of an Israeli soldier and the killing of two others by
Hamas hit the headlines, followed soon thereafter by
an attack by a unit of Hezbollah’s fighters.

Memory is supposed to stop in its tracks at June 28,
2006.

Let’s go on a brief excursion into pre-history. I’m
talking about June 20, 2006, when Israeli aircraft
fired at least one missile at a car in an attempted
extrajudicial assassination attempt on a road between
Jabalya and Gaza City. The missile missed the car.
Instead it killed three Palestinian children and
wounded 15.

Back we go again to June 13, 2006. Israeli aircraft
fired missiles at a van in another attempted
extrajudicial assassination. The successive barrages
killed nine innocent Palestinians.

Now we’re really in the dark ages, reaching far, far
back to June 9, 2006, when Israel shelled a beach in
Beit Lahiya killing 8 civilians and injuring 32.

That’s just a brief trip down Memory Lane, and we trip
over the bodies of twenty dead and forty-seven
wounded, all of them Palestinians, most of them women
and children.

Israel regrets… But no! Israel doesn’t regret in the
least. Most of the time it doesn’t even bother to
pretend to regret. It says, “We reserve the right to
slaughter Palestinians whenever we want. We reserve
the right to assassinate their leaders, crush their
homes, steal their water, tear out their olive groves,
and when they try to resist we call them terrorists
intent on wrecking the ‘peace process’”.

Now Israel says it wants to wipe out Hezbollah. It
wishes no harm to the people of Lebanon, just so long
as they’re not supporters of Hezbollah, or standing
anywhere in the neighborhood of a person or a house or
a car or a truck or a road or a bus or a field, or a
power station or a port that might, in the mind of an
Israeli commander or pilot, have something to do with
Hezbollah. In any of those eventualities all bets are
off. You or your wife or your mother or your baby get
fried.

Israel regrets… But no! As noted above, it doesn’t
regret in the least. Neither does George Bush, nor
Condoleezza Rice nor John Bolton who is the moral
savage who brings shame on his country each day that
he sits as America’s ambassador (unconfirmed) at the
UN and who has just told the world that a dead Israel
civilian is worth a whole more in terms of moral
outrage than a Lebanese one.

None of them regrets. They say Hezbollah is a cancer
in the body of Lebanon. Sometimes, to kill the cancer,
you end up killing the body. Or bodies. Bodies of
babies. Lots of them. Go to the website
fromisraeltolebanon.info and take a look. Then sign
the petition on the site calling on the governments of
the world to stop this barbarity.

You can say that Israel brought Hezbollah into the
world. You can prove it too, though this too involves
another frightening excursion into history.

This time we have to go far, almost unimaginably far,
back into history. Back to 1982, before the dinosaurs,
before CNN, before Fox TV, before O’Reilly and
Limbaugh. But not before the neo-cons who at that time
had already crawled from the primal slime and were
doing exactly what they are doing now: advising an
American president to give Israel the green light to
“solve its security problems” by destroying Lebanon.

In 1982 Israel had a problem. Yasir Arafat,
headquartered in Beirut, was making ready to announce
that the PLO was prepared to sit down with Israel and
embark on peaceful, good faith negotiations towards a
two-state solution.

Israel didn’t want a two-state solution, which meant
— if UN resolutions were to be taken seriously — a
Palestinian state right next door, with water, and
contiguous territory. So Israel decided chase the PLO
right out of Lebanon. It announced that the
Palestinian fighters had broken the year-long
cease-fire by lobbing some shells into northern
Israel.

Palestinians had done nothing of the sort. I remember
this very well, because Brian Urquhart, at that time
assistant secretary general of the United Nations, in
charge of UN observers on Israel’s northern border,
invited me to his office on the 38th floor of the UN
hq in mid-Manhattan and showed me all the current
reports from the zone. For over a year there’d been no
shelling from north of the border. Israel was lying.

With or without a pretext Israel wanted to invade
Lebanon. So it did, and rolled up to Beirut. It
shelled Lebanese towns and villages and bombed them
from the air. Sharon’s forces killed maybe 20,000
people, and let Lebanese Christians slaughter hundreds
of Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and
Chatilla.

The killing got so bad that even Ronald Reagan awoke
from his slumbers and called Tel Aviv to tell Israel
to stop. Sharon gave the White House the finger by
bombing Beirut at the precise times — 2.42 and 3.38
— of two UN resolutions calling for a peaceful
settlement on the matter of Palestine.

When the dust settled over the rubble, Israel bunkered
down several miles inside Lebanese sovereign
territory, which it illegally occupied, in defiance of
all UN resolutions, for years, supervising a brutal
local militia and running its own version of Abu
Graibh, the torture center at the prison of Al-Khiam.

Occupy a country, torture its citizens and in the end
you face resistance. In Israel’s case it was
Hezbollah, and in the end Hezbollah ran Israel out of
Lebanon, which is why a lot of Lebanese regard
Hezbollah not as terrorists but as courageous
liberators.

The years roll by and Israel does its successful best
to destroy all possibility of a viable two-state
solution. It builds illegal settlements. It chops up
Palestine with Jews-only roads. It collars all the
water. It cordons off Jerusalem. It steals even more
land by bisecting Palestinian territory with its
“fence”. Anyone trying to organize resistance gets
jailed, tortured, or blown up.

Sick of their terrible trials, Palestinians elect
Hamas, whose leaders make it perfectly clear that they
are ready to deal on the basis of the old two-state
solution, which of course is the one thing Israel
cannot endure. Israel doesn’t want any “peaceful
solution” that gives the Palestinians anything more
than a few trashed out acres surrounded with barbed
wire and tanks, between the Israeli settlements whose
goons can murder them pretty much at will.

So here we are, 24 years after Sharon did his best to
destroy Lebanon in 1982, and his heirs are doing it
all over again. Since they can’t endure the idea of
any just settlement for Palestinians, it’s the only
thing they know how to do. Call Lebanon a terror-haven
and bomb it back to the stone age. Call Gaza a
terror-haven and bomb its power plant, first stop on
the journey back to the stone age. Bomb Damascus. Bomb
Teheran.

Of course they won’t destroy Hezbollah. Every time
they kill another Lebanese family, they multiply
hatred of Israel and support for Hezbollah. They’ve
even unified the parliament in Baghdad, which just
voted unanimously — Sunnis and Shi’ites and Kurds
alike — to deplore Israel’s conduct and to call for
a ceasefire.

I hope you’ve enjoyed these little excursions into
history, even though history is dangerous, which is
why the US press gives it a wide birth. But even
without the benefit of historical instruction, a
majority of Americans in CNN’s instant poll –- about
55 per cent out of 800,000 as of midday, July 19 —
don’t like what Israel is up to.

Dislike is one thing, but at least in the short term
it doesn’t help much. Israel’s 1982 attack on Lebanon
grew unpopular in the US, after the first few days.
But forcing the US to pressure Israel to settle the
basic problem takes political courage, and virtually
no US politician is prepared to buck the Israel lobby,
however many families in Lebanon and Gaza may be
sacrificed on the altar of such cowardice.

Dozens missing in South Lebanon

Although as many as 500,000 people have left the
border area, thousands remain in an area which has
seen the worst of the Israeli bombing.

In the village of Sreefa near Naqoura at least 21
people have been confirmed killed and 60 missing after
Israeli rockets hit 13 homes yesterday.

Nayla Mouawad, the Lebanese social affairs minister,
said: `Sreefa has suffered a real massacre but we
don`t have enough details.`

Although the current death toll in Lebanon is above
300, it is likely to be higher, especially in the
southern areas where bodies have not been recovered,
doctors say.

Doctors and emergency services working in south
Lebanon say it is extremely difficult to access the
wounded as Israel has targeted Red Cross vehicles and
civilian traffic.

Maha Mrouweh, a financial administrator at the Jabal
Amal hospital in Tyre, told Aljazeera.net: `They are
targeting the civilian cars. They are preventing the
food from arriving in the south. They are preventing
the Red Cross from arriving to the destroyed
buildings. They are shooting the Red Cross.`

Civilians

Mrouweh said that none of the casualties being treated
in the hospital were Hezbollah fighters.

`No one is in Hezbollah. I assure you. All of them are
civilians. Hezbollah soldiers are not being sent to
the hospital. We don`t see them. These are very secret
people. The Israelis are just killing civilian
people.`

Ahmad Mrouweh, a doctor at the Jabal Amal hospital,
said that he had received 20 bodies since the conflict
had begun but many bodies remained in the rubble of
bombed houses or in burnt-out cars.

`There are bodies still lying in cars. It`s a
disaster. Nobody can reach the hospital because all
the roads are cut.`

Food supplies

Villages in the south are also running low on food
supplies and medicines as supply trucks cannot find a
way through.

Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights
Watch, said: `Movement in southern Lebanon is
extremely restricted even for international
humanitarian organisations. The Israelis have refused
to give guarantees that vehicles carrying supplies and
wounded will not be targeted.

`I have worked in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo and I
have never seen a situation where humanitarian
organisations have faced such access risks.`

Mouawad said the southern areas had been worst hit,
but central and northern areas of Lebanon were also
struggling to cope with at least 100,000 refugees who
have fled the south.

`We are living a humanitarian disaster … They are in a
desperate situation. There is no milk, bread and
medicine.`

According to the Lebanese government 21 key
infrastructure sites, 55 road bridges, two milk
factories and two hospitals have been attacked in
Israel`s military offensive on Lebanon.

Israel denies

Mouawad said the Lebanese government was desperate for
aid and asked for international assurances that relief
supplies would get through to the affected areas.

`We are asking for a humanitarian corridor to the
south and east of Lebanon.

`If the international community do not react to help
Lebanon then the Lebanese people will lose faith in
them. The people of Lebanon deserve to live in peace
and dignity.`

Israel denies it has been hitting civilians and says
the official death toll is exaggerated.