The savaging of Lebanon

by Dayan Jayatilleka

Certainly, every state has a right to defend itself. Israel has a right to retaliate for the seizure of its soldiers by Hamas and Hezbollah, and to defend itself against rocket attacks. This however does not translate itself into the right to wittingly kill civilians and shatter civilian infrastructure, and kidnap elected members of parliament, which is what Israel has done in Lebanon and Gaza.

The right way for Israel to have responded would have been to target the military leaders and units of Hezbollah and Hamas, be it in air-sea strikes, deep penetration commando raids or individual assassinations, of which Israel was master in past decades. Instead, Israel has resorted to massive criminality.

While Tony Blair has discredited himself by being caught on an open microphone at the G8 summit in St. Petersburg seemingly canvassing permission from George Bush for a visit to the Middle East and not being accorded it, a British junior minister has condemned Israel's conduct.

On a visit to Lebanon, Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells said: "The destruction of the infrastructure and the deaths of so many children and so many people - these have not been surgical strikes. If you are chasing Hezbollah, well, go for Hezbollah.

You don't target the entire Lebanese nation and that's the difference. This (Hezbollah) is not a legitimate organisation, this is a terrorist organisation. But by destroying infrastructure they (the Israelis) are driving moderate Muslims into the arms of Hezbollah." (The Australian, Monday July 24, 2006). Jan Egeland, UN Commissioner on Humanitarian Affairs went a step further, saying that Israel's bombing of civilian infrastructure could be a violation of international humanitarian law.

Root Cause

The diagnosis is deeply flawed on both sides of the divide. The Bush Administration is in error when it asserts that the 'root cause' of the problem is Hezbollah, and the support extended to it by Iran and Syria.

Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran are also wrong when they claim that the root cause of the problem is the very founding and existence of the state of Israel - and refuse to recognise its right to exist. Israel does exist and is not going away, nor can it be destroyed. Refusal to recognise this reality helps no one's cause.

Israel was established in 1948 by a decision of the United Nations, and as the clock struck and the moment had arrived, the first person to cross the floor of the Security Council and congratulate the representative of the new-born state was Molotov, Stalin's Foreign Minister and close associate. The UN however, did not intend Israel to be born with the borders that it wound up enjoying.

The Resolution was for two states, one Jewish, the other Palestinian. It was the Arabs who, with an imprudence that was to be characteristic, rejected that solution and whose armies invaded Israel.

This gave the new born state the opportunity to advance far beyond the UN envisaged borders, in its counteroffensive. In that initial war for survival, the bulk of Israel's weapons came from Czechoslovakia and had been sent by Stalin's USSR.

The root cause of the problem is not Israel's existence but Israeli aggression, annexation, occupation and colonisation of land that does not belong to it, land that belongs to others, who are then turned into second class human beings in what was their homeland.

Israel and the USA claim that the present crisis is due to the fact that Hezbollah and Lebanon ignore UN Security Council Resolution 1559 on the deployment of the Lebanese army in that country's south, which is the northern border of Israel. What then of a much longer standing resolution, UN resolution 242, which calls for Israeli withdrawal from lands occupied in 1967; a withdrawal that not only has not taken place, but in some places has been rendered permanent by Israeli settlements?

The causes of the current crisis reside in Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982. That invasion was launched to dislodge Palestinian guerrillas from Lebanon - guerrillas who shifted there after the brutal crackdown in Jordan in 1970; guerrillas who did not exist before and would not have existed if not for Israel's unjust and continued occupation of land seized after the justifiable pre-emptive war it waged so brilliantly in six days in June 1967.

Even if a cross border offensive by Israel in 1982 was warranted, its prolonged occupation was not. Some parts of Lebanon were occupied for 22 years, others for 18.

Hezbollah & Hamas

What, after all was Hezbollah, but an Islamic army of resistance to Israel occupation; one that arose after that occupation and the dispersal of the secular Palestinian resistance? With the defeat of established Arab states in 1948, 1956, 1967, and the effective Israeli counterpunch after the initial Egyptian success of 1973, the hopes of the Arab and Muslim peoples had shifted to the Palestinian guerrillas.

With the dispersal of the latter (Arafat was exiled to Tunisia), the hopes of the masses shifted in a new direction, towards the Iranian Revolution of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The Shiites in Lebanon already had a resistance movement, the *Amal*, supported by Syria. The Syrians had lost the Golan Heights to the Israelis and had moved into part of Lebanon to establish a buffer zone so as to prevent an Israeli invasion.

In 1982, a thousand volunteers of the Pasdaran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards forged after the Iranian Revolution, crossed over to the Bekaa valley in Lebanon and with the cooperation of Syria, trained the Lebanese Shiite force that became, in 1985, the Hezbollah (dislodging the fairly ineffectual *Amal*).

That fighting force became the finest irregular army in the world, forcing the withdrawal of US marines (operating under the UN flag) in 1983 and the Israelis in 2000 (in a campaign that was at its most intense from 1996). Thus it is infinitely superior to the LTTE, founded in 1976, which has been unable for three decades to wrest the Northeast from the Sri Lankan army or to retain or regain Jaffna in the past decade. Currently Hezbollah has only 3,000 fulltime fighters, built around a hard core of 600, unlike the 10,000 strong LTTE.

Contrary to Israeli propaganda and US perception, Hezbollah cannot be lumped with Al Qaeda. Its chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah has strongly and repeatedly condemned Osama Bin Laden, the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban, the decapitation of US journalist Nichols Bergh and the violent protests at the Danish publication of the cartoons of Prophet Mohammed. It is no LTTE either.

Unlike Prabhakaran's cosseted, foreign educated kids, Sheikh Nasrallah's oldest son Hadi died fighting the Israelis in 1997. 46 year old Nasrallah has also turned Hezbollah into a successful political machine with many seats in the country's democratically elected parliament and strong alliances with two countries (Iran and Syria).

Hezbollah is however in grave error, morally, strategically and tactically, to target Israel's cities with its rockets. That is an act of terrorism and provides Israel with a credible excuse for its aggression, and I would think that tactically the Hezbollah's arsenal of 12,000 rockets would have been far more effective had they been raining on the Israeli forces massed on the Lebanese border.

Hamas too was an indirect creation of Israel, in that the secular Palestinians were weakened by Israel's intransigence and their own inflexibility. Just as the USA created Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda by stimulating militant Islam against Communism, Israel had permitted, even promoted Islamic social organisations in the occupied territories, in order to undermine the Palestinian Left (which was mostly Christian-led: Dr.

George Habash of the PFLP and Nayef Hawatmeh of the DFLP) and Al Fatah, both of which were secular. Hamas arose in the wake of those Israeli policies while Israel's entrenched occupation opened the space for the Intifada.

While Fatah was a major player in the First Intifada, Israel's ignoring of the Oslo Accords and its use of the mailed fist against stone throwing Palestinian youth - a policy which resulted in many civilian fatalities including those of children - led to the Second Intifada being fought by suicide bombers not slingshot wielders, and under the banner of Hamas, not Fatah.

The weakening of Arafat and Fatah by Israel and the USA resulted in a huge electoral victory for Hamas, which is now the democratically chosen government of the Palestinian people.

Prospects

The Israeli Right, of which Binyamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon were the main (if competing) figures, and Palestinian 'rejectionism' worked almost in concert to bury the Oslo peace accords. Had Hamas not undermined Shimon Peres' campaign and suicide-bombed Likud's Netanyahu into power in the election following Yitzhak Rabin's murder by a Jewish fanatic; had Yasser Arafat accepted the offer made by President Bill Clinton and acceded to by Israel's Ehud Barak at Camp David in 2000; had Ariel Sharon not intentionally triggered the Second Intifada by his provocative visit to the Temple Mount (also during an election campaign); had Sharon and Bush not undermined President Arafat and the Palestinian Authority; had the newly elected Hamas administration swiftly accepted the bold new project - including the recognition of the right of Israel to exist- outlined by prestigious Palestinian political prisoners (most notably Marwaan Barghouti) of both Fatah and Hamas; the unarmed civilians of Lebanon, Gaza and Haifa would not be dying today.

Israel's new assault on Lebanon is both immoral and unwise. It will not succeed in its stated goals or implicit wider aims. The bombing has not damaged Hezbollah significantly according to Western press reports, though over three hundred innocent Lebanese civilians have been killed.

Unlike the Palestinian resistance which was evicted from Jordan in 1970 and Lebanon in 1982, the Hezbollah cannot be thrown out: the Palestinians were refugees and the PLO guests; the Hezbollah is indigenous. If the Israelis invade the South they will be drawn in, fiercely resisted and bogged down by Hezbollah, which is dug into the Shouf Mountains and which enjoys a wide socio-political support network throughout the country. It cannot be ruled out that the Lebanese army will join the resistance to an Israeli invasion, and such has been signalled by the Lebanese Minister of Defence.

Whether or not that transpires, Israel's aggression has not damaged Hezbollah socio-politically. On the contrary the resistance has increased its popularity among the Lebanese. It cannot be ruled out as fanciful therefore, that Hezbollah will be able to dominate, by democratic means, a future government in Beirut!

While Israel's aggression will serve to create a new generation of Islamic militants, including suicide bombers, the outrageous partisanship towards Israel that the Bush administration has unwisely displayed throughout this crisis will only serve to reconfirm the US as an enemy and target of such militancy and terrorism for decades to come.