MB Civic

Stop That Shit!”

By URI AVNERY

A WOMAN, an immigrant from Russia, throws herself on the ground in total
despair in front of her home that has been hit by a missile, crying in
broken Hebrew: “My son! My son!” believing him dead. In fact he was only
wounded and sent to the hospital.

Lebanese children, covered with wounds, in Beirut hospitals. The funeral
of the victims of a missile in Haifa. The ruins of a whole devastated
quarter in Beirut. Inhabitants of the north of Israel fleeing south from
the Katyushas. Inhabitants of the south of Lebanon fleeing north from the
Israeli Air Force.

Death, destruction. Unimaginable human suffering.

And the most disgusting sight: George Bush in a playful mood sitting on
his chair in St. Petersburg, with his loyal servant Tony Blair leaning
over him, and solving the problem: “See? What they need to do is get Syria
to get Hizbullah to stop doing that shit, and it’s over.” Thus spake the
leader of the world, and the seven dwarfs – “the great of the world” – say
Amen.

SYRIA? But only a few months ago it was Bush – yes, the same Bush – who
induced the Lebanese to drive the Syrians out of their country. Now he
wants them to intervene in Lebanon and impose order?

31 years ago, when the Lebanese civil war was at its height, the Syrians
sent their army into Lebanon (invited, of all people, by the Christians).
At the time, the then Minister of Defense Shimon Peres and his associates
created hysteria in Israel. They demanded that Israel deliver an ultimatum
to the Syrians, to prevent them from reaching the Israeli border. Yitzhak
Rabin, the Prime Minister, told me then that that was sheer nonsense,
because the best that could happen to Israel was for the Syrian army to
spread out along the border. Only thus could calm be assured, the same
calm that reigned along our border with Syria.

However, Rabin gave in to the hysteria of the media and stopped the
Syrians far from the border. The vacuum created was filled by the PLO. In
1982, Ariel Sharon pushed the PLO out, and the vacuum was filled by
Hizbullah.

All that has happened there since then would not have happened if we had
allowed the Syrians to occupy the border from the beginning. The Syrians
are cautious, they do not act recklessly.

What was Hassan Nasrallah thinking of, when he decided to cross the
border and carry out the guerilla action that started the current Witches’
Sabbath? Why did he do it? And why at this time?

Everybody agrees that Nasrallah is a clever person. He is also prudent.
For years he has been assembling a huge stockpile of missiles of all kinds
to establish a balance of terror. He knew that the Israeli army was only
waiting for an opportunity to destroy them. In spite of that, he carried
out a provocation that provided the Israeli government with a perfect
pretext to attack Lebanon with the full approval of the world. Why?

Possibly he was asked by Iran and Syria, who had supplied him with the
missiles, to do something to divert American pressure from them. And
indeed, the sudden crisis has shifted attention away the Iranian nuclear
effort, and it seems that Bush’s attitude towards Syria has also changed.

But Nasrallah is far from being a marionette of Iran or Syria. He heads an
authentic Lebanese movement, and calculates his own balance sheet of pros
and cons. If he had been asked by Iran and/or Syria to do something – for
which there is no proof – and he saw that it was contrary to the aims of
his movement, he would not have done it.

Perhaps he acted because of domestic Lebanese concerns. The Lebanese
political system was becoming more stable and it was becoming more
difficult to justify the military wing of Hizbullah. A new armed incident
could have helped. (Such considerations are not alien to us either,
especially before budget debates.)

But all this does not explain the timing. After all, Nasrallah could have
acted a month before or a month later, a year before or a year later.
There must have been a much stronger reason to convince him to enter upon
such an adventure at precisely this time.

And indeed there was: Palestine.Two weeks before, the Israeli army had
started a war against the population of the Gaza Strip. There, too, the
pretext was provided by a guerrilla action, in which an Israeli soldier
was captured. The Israeli government used the opportunity to carry out a
plan prepared long before: to break the Palestinians’ will to resist and
to destroy the newly elected Palestinian government, dominated by Hamas.
And, of course, to stop the Qassams.

The operation in Gaza is an especially brutal one, and that is how it
looks on the world’s TV screens. Terrible pictures from Gaza appear daily
and hourly in the Arab media. Dead people, wounded people, devastation.
Lack of water and medicaments for the wounded and sick. Whole families
killed. Children screaming in agony. Mothers weeping. Buildings
collapsing.The Arab regimes, which are all dependent on America, did
nothing to help. Since they are also threatened by Islamic opposition
movements, they looked at what was happening to Hamas with some
Schadenfreude. But tens of millions of Arabs, from the Atlantic Ocean to
the Persian Gulf, saw, got excited and angry with their government, crying
out for a leader who would bring succor to their besieged, heroic
brothers.

Fifty years ago, Gamal Abd-el-Nasser, the new Egyptian leader, wrote that
there was a role waiting for a hero. He decided to be that hero himself.
For several years, he was the idol of the Arab world, symbol of Arab
unity. But Israel used an opportunity that presented itself and broke him
in the Six-day war. After that, the star of Saddam Hussein rose in the
firmament. He dared to stand up to mighty America and to launch missiles
at Israel, and became the hero of the Arab masses. But he was routed in a
humiliating manner by the Americans, spurred on by Israel.A week ago,
Nasrallah faced the same temptation. The Arab world was crying out for a
hero, and he said: Here am I! He challenged Israel, and indirectly the
United States and the entire West. He started the attack without allies,
knowing that neither Iran nor Syria could risk helping him.

Perhaps he got carried away, like Abd-el-Nasser and Saddam before him.
Perhaps he misjudged the force of the counter-attack he could expect.
Perhaps he really believed that under the weight of his rockets the
Israeli rear would collapse. (As the Israeli army believed that the
Israeli onslaught would break the Palestinian people in Gaza and the
Shiites in Lebanon.)One thing is clear: Nasrallah would not have started
this vicious circle of violence, if the Palestinians had not called for
help. Either from cool calculation, or from true moral outrage, or from
both – Nasrallah rushed to the rescue of beleaguered Palestine.

The Israeli reaction could have been expected. For years, the army
commanders had yearned for an opportunity to eliminate the missile arsenal
of Hizbullah and destroy that organization, or at least disarm it and push
it far, far from the border. They are trying to do this the only way they
know: by causing so much devastation, that the Lebanese population will
stand up and compel its government to fulfill Israel’s demands.

Will these aims be achieved?

Hizbullah is the authentic representative of the Shiite community, which
makes up 40% of the Lebanese population. Together with the other Muslims,
they are the majority in the country. The idea that the weakling Lebanese
government – which in any case includes Hizbullah – would be able to
liquidate the organization is ludicrous.

The Israeli government demands that the Lebanese army be deployed along
the border. This has by now become a mantra. It reveals total ignorance.
The Shiites occupy important positions in the Lebanese army, and there is
no chance at all that it would start a fratricidal war against them.

Abroad, another idea is taking shape: that an international force should
be deployed on the border. The Israeli government objects to this
strenuously. A real international force – unlike the hapless UNIFIL which
has been there for decades – would hinder the Israeli army from doing
whatever it wants. Moreover, if it were deployed there without the
agreement of Hizbullah, a new guerilla war would start against it. Would
such a force, without real motivation, succeed where the mighty Israeli
army was routed? At most, this war, with its hundreds of dead and waves of
destruction, will lead to another delicate armistice. The Israeli
government will claim victory and argue that it has “changed the rules of
the game”. Nasrallah (or his successors) will claim that their small
organization has stood up to one of the mightiest military machines in the
world and written another shining chapter of heroism in the annals of Arab
and Muslim history.

No real solution will be achieved, because there is no treatment of the
root of the matter: the Palestinian problem.

Many years ago, I was listening on the radio to one of the speeches of
Abd-el-Nasser before a huge crowd in Egypt. He was holding forth on the
achievements of the Egyptian revolution, when shouts arose from the crowd:
“Filastine, ya Gamal!” (“Palestine, oh Gamal!”) Whereupon Nasser forgot
what he was talking about and started on Palestine, getting more and more
carried away.Since then, not much has changed. When the Palestinian cause
is mentioned, it casts its shadow over everything else. That’s what has
happened now, too.

Whoever longs for a solution must know: there is no solution without
settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And there is no solution to the
Palestinian problem without negotiations with their elected leadership,
the government headed by Hamas.

If one wants to finish, once and for all, with this shit – as Bush so
delicately put it – that is the only way.

***

Number Of Iraqi Civilians Slaughtered In America’s War? As Many As 250,000
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11674.htm

Number of U.S. Military Personnel Sacrificed (Officially acknowledged) In
Bush’s War 2565

http://icasualties.org/oif/

The War in Iraq Costs
$298,388,378,355
See the cost in your community
http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=182

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“Our German forbearers in the 1930s sat around, blamed their rulers, said ‘maybe everything’s going to be alright.’ That is something we cannot do. I do not want my grandchildren asking me years from now, ‘why didn’t you do something to stop all this?” –Ray McGovern,  former CIA analyst of 27 years, referring to the actions and crimes of the Bush Administration