What
You're Missing in Our Subscriber-only CounterPunch Newsletter
Special Investigation: Why Did the
World Trade Towers Fall?
A scientific explanation
at last, from a physicist and mechanical engineer. P. Sainath recalls
Gandhi's 9/11, one hundred years ago; Chris Sands reports from Afghanistan on the rise
of the Taliban.What you just missed, but can still get, in our
last newsletter: Paul Craig Roberts on the Collapse of America. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers
each month! But
remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the
print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription
to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find
anywhere else, or by making a donation towards the cost of this
online edition.
Remember contributions are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now!
The destructive and lethal forces unleashed
this past summer by the United States and Israel upon Lebanon
are not surprising in light of their historical roots in at least
four patterns of conflict:
First, the unwillingness of Israel and its
American patrons to resolve the question of the Palestinian refugees
and provide for a viable Palestinian state, but rather the exploitation
of this conflict to intimidate other Arab states in the region,
especially Lebanon.
Second, Israel's territorial ambitions in
southern Lebanon, especially regarding water, as well as the
economic challenge posed to Israel by a peaceful and thriving
Lebanon as a center of finance and tourism.
Third, Israel's doctrine of massive and
illegal retaliation against civilian populations in response
to Arab terrorism and resistance, as a means of asserting unquestioned
military superiority in the region and preventing the establishment
of a deterrent force that would necessitate good faith negotiation.
Fourth, Israel's military alliance with the
U.S., and its willingness to serve American interests in the
latter's efforts to dominate the region's energy resources, as
defined more recently by both neoconservative and neoliberal
doctrines that have engendered the destruction of not only Lebanon
but Afghanistan, Iraq, and Gaza; and have also justified the
increased concentration of wealth and economic inequality in
both Israel and the U.S.
The Palestinian
Question:
Palestinian refugees have resided
in Lebanon since the 1948 war. After the 1967 war, Israel continued
bombing refugee camps in southern Lebanon. Ron David (Arabs and Israel for Beginners)
quotes London Guardian correspondent Irene Beeson (writing
in 1978) that "150 or more towns and villages in South Lebanon
. . . have been repeatedly savaged by the Israeli armed forces
since 1968." In 1970, PLO leadership was driven from Jordan
to Lebanon. After the 1973 war, Yasser Arafat began to signal
that he would accept a two-state solution to the Palestinian
problem, building on an interpretation of UN resolution 242 that
called for the formation of a Palestinian state comprising the
West Bank and Gaza.
"The issue reached the
UN Security Council in January 1976, with a resolution incorporating
the language of UN 242 but abandoning its rejectionism, now calling
for a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The resolution was
supported by virtually the entire world, including the major
Arab states, the PLO, Europe, the nonaligned countries, and the
Soviet Union, which was in the mainstream of international diplomacy
throughout.
"Israel refused to attend
the UN session. Instead, it bombed Lebanon once again, killing
more than 50 villagers in what it called a 'preventive' strike,
presumably retaliation against U.N. diplomacy . . . The United
States vetoed the resolution, as it did again in 1980."
Chomsky (The
Fateful Triangle) documents that Israel's invasion of
Lebanon in 1982, long-planned and killing 20,000 Lebanese, mostly
civilians, grew out of fears of a peaceful resolution: "The
PLO was gaining respectability thanks to its preference for negotiations
over terror. The Israeli government's hope, therefore, was to
compel 'the stricken PLO' to 'return to its earlier terrorism,'
thus 'undercutting the danger' of negotiations." As such,
this was a "war for the (illegal) settlements."
The background for the recent
American-Israeli destruction of Lebanon was, of course, Israel's
relentless starving and bombing of Gaza (with American weapons),
beginning in its current intensified form after the election
of Hamas early this year, with an escalation well before Israel's
kidnapping of two Palestinian civilians on June 24th, followed
the next day by the capture of an Israeli soldier which "precipitated"
full-scale Israeli bombardment. While Hezbollah's capture and
killing of Israeli soldiers two weeks later must also be seen
in the context of six years of border violations since Israeli
withdrawal from South Lebanon in 2000 (with a ratio of 10 to
one in favor of Israeli violations), it was arguably also a
response in solidarity with Israel's assault on Gaza. Both Hamas
and Hezbollah have legitimacy as religious, populist, and nationalist
resistance movements in a Middle East dominated by American-approved
authoritarian regimes. As such, they threaten American/Israeli
hegemony if they become viable democratic actors and legitimate
negotiating partners.
Israeli
Ambitions in and Competition with Lebanon
Israel's long-term territorial
ambitions are discussed in the diaries of the second Israeli
Prime Minister, Moshe Sharett (1954-56), in accounts of conflicts
with his predecessor David Ben-Gurion. These diaries form the
basis for Livia Rokach's Israel's
Sacred Terrorism.
Rokach writes:
"The 1982 'operation,"
as well as its predecessor, the 'Litani Operation" of 1978,
were part of the long-standing Zionist strategy for Lebanon and
Palestine. That strategy, formulated and applied during the 1950s,
had been envisaged at least four decades earlier, and attempts
to implement it are still being carried out three decades later.
On November 6, 1918, a committee of British mandate officials
and Zionist leaders put forth a suggested northern boundary for
a Jewish Palestine 'from the North Litani River up to Banias.'
(A 1919) proposal emphasized the 'vital importance of controlling
all water resources up to their sources.'"
In the 1960s, as Ron David
reminds us, Beirut was the "Paris of the East," a financial
center with a tourist boom. In December 1968, Israel bombed the
Beirut airport, destroying 13 civilian airliners in a "retaliatory
raid" in response to an attack by two terrorists belonging
to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine at the Athens
airport that killed one Israeli. The UN Security Council condemned
the attack, but as David suggests, "Lebanese tourism nosedived;
Israel's tourism went up, and up." The Lebanese economy
was devastated by civil war (1975-90) and Israeli invasions (1978,
1982).
In this context, it's worth
noting the comments of two Lebanese businessmen interviewed on
Democracy Now.
Georges Hanna, manager of a
factory for prefab housing: "They hit everything: 25,000
square meter coverage area, factories, all of them damaged. We
think it's about -- they have also some factories that made the
same products like us, and they made this attack to eliminate
us from the market."
And Michel Waked, manager of
a larger dairy factory: "You know, this is the third time
our factory get destroyed. In '82, the same thing happened. It's
not the first time. So how can you consider Israeli as a friend,
or whatever? You always consider Israel the enemy. And the only
dairy who can compete with them is us."
Among other things, the destruction
of Lebanon can be seen as a kind of state-sponsored neoliberal
gangsterism.
Massive
and Disproportionate Retaliation Against Civilians
The first notorious example
of Israel's doctrine of massive retaliation against civilians
was at the Jordanian village of Qibya in 1953, reviewed by Walid
Khalidi in an article also based upon Sharett's diary.
Ariel Sharon's Unit 101, under
orders from Moshe Dayan, responded to the murder of an Israeli
mother and her two children by infiltrators into Israel by blowing
up 45 houses and killing 69 civilians, two-thirds of them women
and children.
Israel's implementation of
this policy based on a racist "language of force"
(directed at Arabs who stand accused of understanding no other)
does not necessarily require a clear provocation, as in 1982,
when the assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London by
the Abu Nidal group (sworn enemies of the PLO) provided the pretext
for a long-planned invasion into Lebanon, literally a "war
against peace" to drive out the PLO, which had scrupulously
observed a truce for nearly one year. Nor does the initial action
have to victimize Israeli civilians for Israel to "retaliate"
primarily against Arab civilians, as recent events in both Gaza
and Lebanon demonstrate.
In The Fateful Triangle,
Chomsky quotes remarks by General Mordechai Gur regarding the
1982 invasion of Lebanon, as summarized by military analyst Ze'ev
Schiff: "In South Lebanon we struck the civilian population
consciously, because they deserved it . . . the Army has never
distinguished civilian (from military) targets . . . but purposely
attacked civilian targets even when Israeli settlements had not
been struck."
U.S.-Israel
Military Alliance
The U.S.-Israel military alliance
can be traced to the early 1960s, and has been global in nature,
especially regarding the support for terrorism in Latin America
in the 1970s and 80s. With the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979,
Israel became even more important as a protector of American
interests in the Middle East. This alliance has intensified during
recent years with the neoconservative Project for a New American
Century, 9/11, and the re-declaration of the 1980s "war
on terror" by the Bush administration. The promotion of
military solutions and of fear in the general population in both
countries directly relates to transfers of wealth to military-industrial
sectors. Both countries are thus beset by a vicious cycle of
fear, war, and widespread economic desperation, for which invaded
and occupied peoples have paid the highest price.
Regarding the specifics of
U.S. support for Israel's invasion of Lebanon, Stephen Zunes
writes:
"There is increasing evidence
that Israel instigated a disastrous war on Lebanon largely at
the behest of the United States. The Bush administration was
set on crippling Hezbollah, the radical Shiite political movement
that maintains a sizable block of seats in the Lebanese parliament.
Taking advantage of the country's democratic opening after the
forced departure of Syrian troops last year, Hezbollah defied
U.S. efforts to democratize the region on American terms. The
populist party's unwillingness to disarm its militia as required
by UN resolution-and the inability of the pro-Western Lebanese
government to force them to do so-led the Bush administration
to push Israel to take military action."
Rhetoric
and Reality in the "War on Terror"
As American and Israeli efforts
to control events in the Middle East become increasingly problematic,
there are increased efforts to re-cast the conflict in terms
of a "clash of civilizations" between "Judeo-Christians"
and "Islamo-fascists." Such propaganda is obviously
intended to invoke both Nazi Germany and the Cold War, reframing
power-driven conflicts over land and resources as an essentialized
global conflict of culture and religion.
But the ironies inherent in
this propaganda may portend changes in violent historical patterns.
The Bush and Olmert administrations have proved to be corrupt
and deceitful; the relation between their rhetoric and reality
evokes none other than fascist propagandists and Pravda. Hezbollah
and Hamas have proved to be incorruptible popular movements,
unrelated to al-Qaeda, that rightly stand in opposition to the
Palestinian Authority, the government of Lebanon, and Israel.
Meanwhile, the religious subplot in the secular Jewish State
evokes Jacob Talmon's 1965 assertion (quoted by Chomsky in Middle
East Illusions) that "the Rabbinate (in Israel) is rapidly
developing into a firmly institutionalized church imposing an
exacting discipline on its members. The State . . . has given
birth to an established Church." But the religious Jew stays
at home or in the illegal settlements while the secular Jew is
conscripted to fight in an American/Israeli war for oil and hegemony
that targets civilians and infrastructure, and now invites serious
retaliation against his community. One possibility to be hoped
for is that the secular Jewish-Israeli conscript and impoverished
American "volunteer" will come to see no future in
all of this, and realize that their respective states are also
(and just as fundamentally) at war against their own citizens.
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
