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WEEKDAY PRESS PICKS FROM
THE ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
ELECTRONIC LEBANON
AND ELECTRONIC IRAQ

http://electronicIntifada.net
http://electronicIraq.net
http://electronicLebanon.net

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News Items For 22 August 2006

NEWS:
1) Young Palestinian drowns trying to save Israeli teenagers (AFP)
2) Israel hijacking all Beirut-bound planes to Amman (JT)
3) Hezbollah minister: Lebanon might challenge Israeli blockade (AP)
4) "Truce holds" as Israel kills three Lebanese resistance fighters (DS)
5) UN: Lebanon's development "annihilated" by Israel (AFP)
6) Use of "IDF" for colonial repression hurt fighting ability (Ha)
7) Apartheid state gives Jews more money than Arabs for war damage (Ha)
8) One quarter of Palestinian MPs are held hostage by occupier (Guardian)
9) Power station bombed by occupier, Gaza swelters (Ha)
10) Reservists in Israel Protest Conduct of Lebanon War (NYT)

ANALYSIS & VIEWS:
11) You are terrorists, we are virtuous (Yitzhak Laor/LRB)
12) Learning from Its Mistakes (Charles Glass/LRB)
13) Official defeatism leaves last word to those we call extremists (Gresh)
14) A Proportionate Response (Kathy Kelly/eLeb)
15) What Does Israel Want? (Justin Raimondo/Antiwar)
16) Israeli stoners against Hizbullah (Daphna Baram/Guardian)

Ali Abunimah

**********************************************************

(1) Palestinian drowns trying to save Israeli teenagers

Agence France Presse
21 August 2006

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060821/wl_mideast_afp/
mideastisrael

JERUSALEM (AFP) - A 24-year-old Palestinian man died over
the weekend trying to save four Israeli teenagers from
drowning in waters just off a beach south of Tel Aviv, an
Israeli newspaper has reported.

Ahed Tamimi, from Israeli-occupied east Jerusalem, was on
the Rishon Le Tzion beach with his relatives when he heard
four teenagers in the water cry for help,the Maariv daily
reported Monday.

"He heard our cries for help and he dove into the water
without hesitation," of the teenagers, Denis Mihayev, 15,
told the newspaper.

"He swam towards me, grabbed my hand and pulled me
forcefully back to shore," he said.

Tamimi then returned to the water to try and help the
three others, but was caught up in a strong current and
disappeared from view.

"He dove in to help my friends. I saw him battle against
the current and in a few minutes, he disappeared," he
said.

The three other teenagers managed to safely get back to
shore.

"He didn't think twice about it, even though he wasn't a
good swimmer." Ashraf Tamimi, Ahed's uncle, told the
newspaper. "He came to their help and he paid for it with
his life."

**********************************************************

(2) All flights to and from Lebanon must pass through Jordan --
aviation officials

By Stephanie Tournear

The Jordan Times
22 August 2006

http://jordantimes.com/tue/homenews/homenews2.htm

AMMAN -- All flights in and out of Beirut's Rafiq Hariri
International Airport are required to first stop in Jordan
for security checks, aviation sources here confirmed on
Monday.

This measure follows Lebanon's national carrier Middle
East Airlines' (MEA) announcement on Monday that it has
resumed flights to all international destinations.

Royal Jordanian and MEA are currently the only carriers
flying to Beirut.

Director of the Jordan Civil Aviation Authority Captain
Suleiman Obeidat told The Jordan Times the secondary
inspection is conducted by an airport security unit and is
in line with the international security inspection codes
followed by airports worldwide.

According to Reuters, the carrier said it would be routed
through Amman where passengers would stay on board for a
transit time "not exceeding 50 minutes."

Obeidat told the Jordan News Agency, Petra, on Monday the
decision of MEA to operate flights to all destinations
from Queen Alia International Airport (QAIA) came in line
with preparations for partially reopening Beirut's
airport.

No reason has been given for the secondary inspection but
a senior industry source told Reuters the enforced stop in
Amman was a condition set by Israel, which is determined
to stop Hizbollah guerrillas from rearming after a
UN-backed truce took effect a week ago.

"They say it's for security checks. It's not an acceptable
reason. It's part of the pressure that is being put on
Lebanon by Israel," the source told Reuters, who asked not
to be named.

"It's absurd. I don't think Hizbollah is going to smuggle
weapons or hostages or part of their leadership on a
commercial flight," the source added.

**********************************************************

(3) Hezbollah minister: Lebanon might challenge Israeli
blockade

Associated Press
22 August 2006

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/753550.html

BEIRUT - A Hezbollah Cabinet minister on Tuesday said the
government may attempt to break the Israeli naval and air
blockade of Lebanon by calling on ships and aircraft to
travel to Lebanese ports without prior Israeli approval.

The government has condemned the blockade, saying it
violates the UN cease-fire resolution, and the foreign
minister Tuesday called on the international community to
force Israel to end the blockade. The Cabinet met late
Monday but did not publicly challenge to the blockade,
although it called the siege one of Israel's "terrorist
practices."

"Entry to Lebanon by sea and from air is a matter of
sovereignty," Tarrad Hamadeh, minister of Labor said on
Hezbollah television. Hamadeh, one of two Hezbollah
Cabinet ministers, said the Lebanese "must be free to
enter their country at will. We cannot accept the siege
and blackmail."

Israel imposed a sea, land and air blockade of Lebanon
early on in the July 12-August 14 war with Hezbollah.

The Hezbollah minister said it was Lebanon's right to end
the blockade, and that the Cabinet could ask Middle East
Airlines and Arab shipping to come to Lebanon. "If Israel
wants to attack, let them attack Arab ships and planes and
let them shoulder the responsibility before the
international community."

The Israelis want to turn the blockade into a "de facto
(arrangement) in which we have to ask their permission to
cross into our country. We cannot submit to siege and
blackmail and abandon our sovereignty," Hamadeh said.

Lebanese Foreign Minister Fawzi Salloukh also called on
Tuesday for the United Nations to act "decisively" against
Israeli violations of the cease-fire agreement.

"The continuation of offensive operations on Lebanese
territory and its continued air and naval blockade on
Lebanon are a flagrant and unacceptable violation" of the
UN Security Council resolution," Salloukh told reporters
after a meeting with Dutch Foreign Minister Ben Bot.

"Israel is challenging the will of the international
community and the Security Council. These are actions that
go against Lebanon's wishes and that of the international
community for a peaceful and secure implementation of the
resolution. It has become clear who wants peace and
stability and who wants to resume hostilities," he said.

Salloukh said the Netherlands, which has ruled out
providing troops to a UN peacekeeping force in southern
Lebanon, will donate $8.7 million to help Lebanon rebuild.

After Monday's Cabinet meeting, Information Minister Ghazi
Aridi stressed Lebanon's determination to stand up for its
rights. "Israel is attempting to be a guardian of Lebanon
... . The Lebanese government rejects that."

Jets have struck major highways and Lebanon's land routes
to Syria. The Beirut airport runways were hit.

Since the cease-fire took hold Aug. 14, the only land
routes in and out of the country - to Syria - have
reopened after temporary repairs. Commercial flights to
Beirut airport have been allowed only to and from Amman,
Jordan, an Arab state with a peace treaty with Israel.

The Israelis have said the blockade continued as a weapon
against Hezbollah rearmament.

Lebanon's government has promised to take measures to
improve security screening at the international airport in
Beirut and has deployed troops on the border with Syria.

Hamadeh said that when Lebanon completes those measures
Cabinet is tilting toward "taking a decision on its own to
open its areas and rid itself of the siege."

Lebanon's demands for an end to the siege has found
support.

During the first visit by a head of state to Lebanon since
fighting began, Qatari ruler Sheik Sheik Hamad Bin Khalifa
Al-Thani urged Israel to lift its blockade in line with
the requirements of the cease-fire resolution, disclosing
that even his flight had to be cleared by Israel before
landing in Beirut.

Sheik Hamad, whose moderate government has contacts with
Israel but no diplomatic relations, rejected the Israeli
contention that the blockade was designed to prevent
Hezbollah from rearming, saying Lebanon has the same
rights to self-defense as Israel.

"We are for any country defending its territory and
establishing its own state," he said.

France also has called on Israel to lift its siege.

UN envoy Terje Roed-Larsen, during a weekend visit to
Beirut, said the Israeli blockade was "totally unhelpful"
to the Lebanese economy, but added the Lebanese government
must control its borders to prevent weapons from reaching
Hezbollah.


**********************************************************

(4) Truce takes another hit as Israelis kill 3 resistance
fighters

The Daily Star
22 August 2006

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&
categ_id=2&article_id=74932

Israeli troops in South Lebanon shot and killed three
Hizbullah fighters Monday evening, as UN special envoy
Terje Roed-Larsen said he was optimistic that a fragile
truce ending 34 days of warfare would hold. Troops spotted
a group of armed fighters who looked threatening and
opened fire on them, an Israeli Army spokesman said.

Israel's privately run Channel 10 television said three
Hizbullah fighters were killed in the incident. Four
Israeli soldiers were wounded. The reports could not be
independently confirmed.

But in Jerusalem, Roed-Larsen told reporters after meeting
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni in Jerusalem: "We discussed
all matters of Resolution 1701," referring to the text
which laid the ground for a cessation of hostilities that
took effect on August 14.

There is "optimism that there will now be full respect of
the cease-fire and full support of the parties for its
implementation," he said.

He said he hoped that Israel would "in the near future
lift this blockade, with Lebanon taking full
responsibility of its borders." Israel imposed an air, sea
and road blockade on Lebanon when it launched its
offensive against Hizbullah on July 12.

Roed-Larsen said that while in Beirut he called for the
unconditional release of two Israeli soldiers, whose
capture by Hizbullah on July 12 sparked the Israeli
offensive, "to the appropriate and proper government of
Lebanon under the auspices of the International Red
Cross."

The UN envoy was due to meet Defense Minister Amir Peretz
later Monday.

According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, the UN delegation
- comprised of Roed-Larsen and special envoy Vijay Nambiar
- would discuss a possible prisoner exchange between
Israel and Hizbullah at length.

Earlier in the day, five men who were captured in an
Israeli commando raid deep inside Lebanon nearly three
weeks ago were freed on Monday, military sources said.

The Israeli military handed over the five to Lebanese
government troops through the United Nations Interim Force
in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in the border town of Naqoura, the
sources said.

The truce has been barely holding as the Lebanese Army
deploys to the South for the first time in decades and the
international peacekeeping force awaits orders to deploy.

Representatives of countries considering contributing to
the international force in Lebanon met at the UN Monday.

One of the meeting's main goals was to encourage European
Union countries to increase their participation levels.

Following the meeting, US Ambassador John Bolton said the
US is planning to introduce a new UN resolution on
disarming Hizbullah in Southern Lebanon but added this
should not hold up the quick deployment of UN
peacekeepers.

"I think the initial force can be deployed now," Bolton
told reporters. "We want the disar-ming of Hizbullah to be
accomp-lished rapidly so that the democ-ratically elected
government of Lebanon can establish full control over its
territory."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday described the
situation in Lebanon as "very fragile."

Speaking in Berlin, Merkel said it was vital to get United
Nations peacekeeping troops to the area quickly to prevent
a rekindling of the conflict, in which nearly 1,200 people
in Lebanon and 157 Israelis died.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb


Merkel and French President Jacques Chirac will meet in
Paris Friday for talks on efforts to put a lasting end to
the conflict in Lebanon, her spokesman said.

Deputy government spokes-man Thomas Steg said the foreign
ministers of the two countries, Frank-Walter Steinmeier
and Philippe Douste-Blazy, would also take part.

Germany has said it would limit its commitment to the
force to a naval unit and ruled out sending combat troops
or police.

Italy has emerged as the potential leader of such troops,
following telephone talks between Italian Premier Romano
Prodi and his counterparts in Beirut and Jerusalem.

Israeli Premier Ehud Olmert spoke to Prodi late on Sunday
and said he would be happy to see the Italians in charge.

"Italy should lead the international force and send troops
to also oversee the Lebanon-Syria border crossings," a
statement from Olmert's office said.

A senior Lebanese political source said some 2,500 Italian
soldiers would take part in the UN contingent.

One general with peacekeeping experience said Italy's good
relations in the Middle East made it diplomatically
suitable.

Carlo Cabigiosu, a retired general who led a multinational
force in Kosovo, told La Repubblica: "We have a good card
to play with Hizbullah: our good relations with Iran."

Some nations have complained that the rules of engagement
under which their soldiers would operate are ill-defined.

Vijay Nambiar said he hoped those rules would be set "in
the next few days."

The UN envoys said they would also discuss Saturday's dawn
raid by Israeli commandos on a Hizbullah stronghold in the
Lebanese Bekaa Valley.

The UN said the operation was a violation of Resolution
1701, while Israel said it was defensive and designed to
disrupt weapons supplies to Hizbullah.

Meanwhile, Dutch Foreign Minister Ben Bot said from Israel
Monday that the EU wants to see a stable cease-fire on the
ground in Lebanon before contributing troops to a UN
international force there.

"We are waiting for signals from all parties that they're
serious in implementing [UN Resolution] 1701 before we
send our boys in the field," Bot said after meeting with
Israel's Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

He rejected criticism in Israel that the 15,000-strong UN
force was slow getting off the ground, with some countries
contributing fewer troops than expected and others holding
off on making commitments.

"I don't understand the disappointment," Bot said.

"It could always be better, it can always be quicker, but
also in the European Union we have to come to terms, we
have to agree among ourselves, we have to see what kind of
mandate we want to see, whether the cease-fire is holding
and how it is holding," he said. - Agencies

**********************************************************

(5) Lebanon's development 'annihilated': UN

Agence France Presse
22 August 2006

GENEVA, Aug 22 2006-- Lebanon's 15-year economic and
social recovery from civil war was wiped out in the recent
Israeli offensive against Hezbollah, the UN development
agency said Tuesday.

"The damage is such that the last 15 years of work on
reconstruction and rehabilitation, following the previous
problems that Lebanon experienced, are now annihilated,"
said Jean Fabre, a spokesman for the UN Development
Programme (UNDP).

Lebanon's relatively healthy progress towards the United
Nations' Millennium Development Goals, which cover a range
of social and economic targets, "have been brought back to
zero," he told journalists.

"Fifteen years of work have been wiped out in a month."

Fabre estimated that overall economic losses for Lebanon
from the month-long conflict between Israel and Hezbollah
totalled "at least 15 billion dollars, if not more".

Lebanese authorities estimated last week that direct
structural damage inflicted by the offensive reached 3.6
billion dollars, including 15,000 housing units, 80
bridges and 94 roads destroyed or damaged.

About 35,000 homes and businesses were destroyed in the
conflict, while a quarter of the country's road bridges or
flyovers were shattered, according to the UNDP's initial
estimate

UN agencies said it would take weeks to assess the full
extent of the damage in south Lebanon and southern Beirut.

The need for clean water and sanitation, to make safe
unexploded munitions and to build shelters are the most
urgent issues, aid agencies said Tuesday.

**********************************************************

(6) ANALYSIS: Policing in Gaza has blunted IDF fighting
abilities

By Ze'ev Schiff

Haaretz
22 August 2006

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/753186.html

One of the main conclusions of the war against Hezbollah
will be the fact that the fighting abilities of the ground
forces deployed by the Israel Defense Forces in Lebanon
have been blunted by years of police action in the
territories.

Most units, in their training and operations, followed
fighting doctrines of police forces and not of standing
armies. Hezbollah trains, fights and is equiped as an
army, utilizing some of the most advanced anti-tank
missiles and other weapons.

The character of the IDF - known for its blitzkrieg
methods, encircling movements deep inside enemy territory,
and the ability to bring about a quick and decisive
conclusion to the fighting - has been spoiled by years of
involvement in operations that tied it down, emotionally
and politically.

This included missions to stop terrorist cells, dealing
with suicide bombings, the use of light weapons for the
most part, and closures and sieges imposed on large
population centers. Many of the IDF's reservists operate
alongside the Shin Bet security service personnel to carry
out arrests of wanted Palestinians. Battalions of
reservists stood guard over Palestinians in detention
centers.

In many ways, the IDF became the standing army of the Shin
Bet. This is not the army that Israel knew in the Yom
Kippur War of 1973 or the 1982 Lebanon War, which were
both followed by a public commission of inquiry. Many of
the advantages and operational qualities of the IDF have
been lost over the years because the army has been
fighting the wrong war from a military point of view.

It would have been better, for example, had the war
against the Palestinians been handled by the Border
Police, allowing the regular army and its reservists to
train for a different type of warfare.

It turns out that many of the commanders in Lebanon
learned their trade in the fighting in the territories,
and they thought in terms of fighting the Palestinians.
The "Palestinian model" guided the way IDF units fought
the bloody battles at Maroun al-Ras and Bint Jbail. The
units entered the battle and withdrew, similar to the way
they operate in the Gaza Strip.

The IDF was also surprised in Lebanon by the amount of
anti-tank missiles fired by Hezbollah. The immediate
reaction in the territories is to take cover in the
closest home. In Lebanon, many soldiers were killed when
anti-tank missiles penetrated walls behind which IDF
troops had taken cover. Two weeks into the fighting, a
specific order went out on how and where to take cover.

In Lebanon, soldiers fought in bunkers just like the
Americans in Vietnam. A Hezbollah prisoner, who was part
of an anti-tank missile team, said that during their
training, they were allowed to fire as many as 15
anti-tank missiles. These are very costly, and the IDF
doesn't even dream of such training, even though the
experience is invaluable.

Another example is the deployment of the Golani Brigade
from the Gaza Strip to Lebanon. It turns out that this
excellent fighting force lacked officer expertise in
coordinating with artillery batteries, something that they
don't have to do very often in their policing duties.


**********************************************************

(7) Second-class compensation

By Aryeh Dayan

Haaretz
22 August 2006

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/752768.html

Is a shop owner in Nahariya, who was forced to close his
business during the war, entitled to more compensation
than the owner of a similar store in Acre or the Haifa bay
area, who had to close shop? Are lawyers and accountants
who were forced to close their offices in Kiryat Shmona or
Ma'alot eligible for higher compensation than that which
will be given to their colleagues in Rosh Pina or Safed?

According to the decisions taken by officials in the
Finance Ministry during the war, which were approved by
the Knesset's Finance committee, the answer to both
questions is yes. Since the government refrained from
declaring a state of war, a strange and unusual legal
situation has emerged, in which differences have arisen in
the amount of compensation paid to various owners of
businesses that were affected in a similar way.

The gap between the amount of compensation that was
granted - stemming from whether the persons in question
were designated as belonging to "confrontation line"
communities - is well known and has already prompted three
petitions to the High Court of Justice on the part of
owners of small and medium businesses, who have requested
that the situation be rectified. A fourth petition,
submitted by attorney Samuel Dahwar from the Arab village
of Fassouta in Galilee, reveals the fact that no Arab
communities are included on the full-compensation list
even though Arab towns and villages were in the range of
the Katyushas and were hit by them.

One of the plaintiffs, Raik Matar of Fassouta, is a
practical engineer and graduate of the Technion - Israel
Institute of Technology in Haifa. He provides planning
services and carries out construction work and repairs.
During the war, he was unable to continue with his job
both because the government offices he works with were
closed, and because the incessant shelling on the part of
the Israel Defense Forces' artillery batteries, stationed
at the outskirts of his village, made life unbearable. The
construction work that he had begun on the eve of the war
- in Hurfeish, Kfar Vradim and Arab al-Aramshe - had to be
stopped, on the instruction of the Home Front Command,
because the residents of these places, like those of
Fassouta itself, were not allowed out of the protected
areas.

Matar estimates his losses during the month of the war to
be some NIS 19,000: He should have earned NIS 15,000, and
the remainder would have been ongoing expenses that are
automatically deducted from his account (various insurance
plans, regular office expenses, etc.). Had his office been
situated at Moshav Alkosh rather than Fassouta, attorney
Dahwar says, "the state would have remitted the entire sum
to him."

Alkosh is no closer to the confrontation line - it lies
five kilometers south of Fassouta - but nevertheless the
owner of a similar office there would have received the
entire sum he had lost, while Matar can expect be left,
after paying salaries to his workers, with only NIS 6,500.

Another petitioner, Suleiman Halek, owns a pizzeria in
Fassouta and he also lost tens of thousands of shekels
during the war. This is a flourishing pizzeria that was
opened in 1997 and has since become a central place of
entertainment for the youth of the village. "I estimate
that before the war, at least half of the youth and
children living in the village would come in here every
day," he says. Halek's delivery service reached almost
every house in the village and the neighboring villages.

During the war, Halek closed the pizzeria, according to
Home Front Command instructions, which did not exempt him
from paying his ongoing expenses, amounting to some NIS
5,000 per month. His turnover last year amounted to about
NIS 35,000 per month. Had he employed workers, his
situation would have been even worse than that of Matar.
Since the pizzeria is a family business, however, his
compensation will be estimated on the basis of his income
last year. He will not be recompensed for his ongoing
expenses or for damages such as spoiled food products. Had
his pizzeria been in Ma'alot, he would have received full
compensation from the state, both for the lack of income
and for the expenses and damages.

Rational explanations

The root of this problem is the fact that an official
declaration of a state of war was never made, which left
in place laws and regulations that create two categories
of victims, receiving compensation according to different
rules and of differing sums. One group, whose existence
was recognized by arrangements existing long before this
war broke out, are those who have businesses in
communities described as being on the so-called
confrontation or front line. According to law, the state
must compensate these businessmen fully during a time of
hostilities, including for loss of income and regular
expenses that they incur even when their business is not
open. The list of front-line businesses, which is
determined and updated by the finance minister, consists
mainly of communities that are situated close to the
border with Lebanon and as far away as 10 kilometers from
it: in other words, the area that was already exposed in
the 1970s to the short-range Katyusha rockets.

The second group, which is much larger than the first,
consists of all those persons whose businesses are
situated in what was defined during the war as "areas of
limitation" - that is, places south of the confrontation
line, which were exposed for the first time to the
Katyushas. The vast majority of the 90,000 business owners
in the North fall into this category and they will be
recompensed according to new criteria that were drawn up
in an agreement signed after the war started between the
treasury, the Histadrut labor federation and the
employers.

According to these regulations, the state will pay the
full salaries of workers employed by these businesses and
the remaining compensation will be fixed according to the
expenditures for wages - not according to the permanent
expenses they have to bear, the damages that were caused
or the loss of income. The government will give them 132.5
percent of the wages they pay to their workers and since
the business owners are obliged to pay the salaries in
full, the sum left in their hands will be 23.5 percent.
Businesses that do not have a lot of salaried workers -
and many of the enterprises in the Arab sector are in that
category - will receive a symbolic sum.

One may have thought the list of front-line businesses was
out of date, but from the documents attached to the
petition, it transpires that Finance Minister Abraham
Hirchson took the trouble of updating it during the war,
when the range of the new Katyusha rockets was known. Left
off the list were at least four Arab communities that were
hit by them. A missile that fell in Arab al-Aramshe took
the lives of two people, one that fell in Fassouta
destroyed a house and injured one of its occupants, and
others that fell in Ma'ilia and Jish (Gush Halav) caused
damage to property. Leaving these four communities off the
list did not keep Hirchson from adding five Jewish
communities, during the war, to the list: Eliad, Degania
Bet, Har Odem, Kabri and Safsufa - all located south of
the Arab communities that were left off the list.

The matter in question is one of "blatant discrimination
on a national basis," Dahwar wrote in his petition, in
which he requests that the High Court order inclusion of
Arab communities in the list of confrontation-line
settlements. "Businesses in the Arab villages close to the
border with Lebanon will get less compensation simply
because they are Arab."

Dahwar examined the names on the list and found that the
only non-Jewish communities included are the largely Druze
Pek'in and Hurfeish, and Rehaniya, which is Circassian. He
also found that Ma'ilia was not included on the list even
though Kibbutz Yehiam and the moshavim Me'ona and Ein
Yaakov, located even further from the border, were
included and that Jish is not included even though Dalton
and Safsufa, also further from the border, are listed.

"Before I presented the petition," Dahwar says, "I tried
to find other reasons besides discrimination against Arabs
that could cause a rational being like the finance
minister to make such a miserable and irrational decision.
I could not find them. The instructions that the Home
Front Command gave in Fassouta and Ma'ilia were the exact
same instructions as they gave in Ma'alot or Alkosh. The
damages caused to businesses are the same damages. So what
explanation can there be other than racial
discrimination?"

On August 8, the attorney sent a letter asking that the
finance minister correct these distortions. He submitted
the petition only five days later, after he did not hear
from the ministry. Treasury officials this week refused to
explain to Haaretz why Hirchson had decided to leave the
Arab villages off the list that he had updated.

"A petition on the matter has been presented to the High
Court of Justice," the spokesman's office replied, "and
we'll explain our position to the justices."

Attorney Dahwar, who lives in Fassouta, is also an
accountant and he submitted the petition in his own name
and in that of four businessmen from Fassouta and Ma'ilia
whose accounts his office audits. Dahwar's office is
situated in the village of Tarshiha, which because it
belongs to the joint Ma'alot-Tarshiha municipality, is
actually included among the front-line communities. He
himself will be eligible for full compensation, but in the
petition Dahwar explains that he too will be affected
since the businesses of most of his clients are in Ma'ilia
and Fassouta and they will therefore receive much less
compensation.

This is not the first time that Dahwar is fighting to have
Fassouta, Ma'ilia, Jish and Arab al-Aramshe put on this
list. He raised the issue already in 1996, at the end of
the Grapes of Wrath campaign, during several radio
interviews. The then-finance minister, Abraham Shochat,
acted swiftly to remove the issue from the public agenda.

"The finance minister proposed to us then to receive
compensation as if we were on the list, but without being
included on the list and without this constituting a
precedent," Dahwar explains. "At that time, I agreed to
the arrangement because I wanted my clients to get the
compensation that was coming to them. I won't agree again
since it can't be that after every military operation, we
will have to fight again for our rights."

This time Dahwar hopes that the High Court of Justice will
put an end, once and for all, to what he sees as outright
discrimination.

**********************************************************

(8) 25% of Palestinian MPs detained by Israel

By Conal Urquhart in Tel Aviv

The Guardian
21 August 2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1855201,
00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=12

Israel has arrested almost one quarter of the members of
the Palestinian parliament as part of its campaign to free
an Israeli soldier captured on the Gaza border in June.
Mahmoud Ramahi became the 33rd member of the legislative
council (PLC) to be taken in by the Israelis during an
operation yesterday.

Amani Rahami, 36, said her husband had been avoiding home
for fear the Israelis would arrest him, but did not
realise he was important enough to warrant surveillance.

"They came to arrest him many times but he was not here.
This time they arrived minutes after he did. He is a
father, an educated man and they take him away like a
criminal. It is the Israelis who are criminals in this,"
she said.

Mr Ramahi is an anaesthetist at a Jerusalem hospital and
is considered a Hamas moderate who opposes violence. When
he arrived at his home in Ramallah yesterday, a squad of
Israeli soldiers in jeeps were waiting nearby. They
surrounded the house and summoned him by loudspeaker
before tying him up and taking him away.

Mr Ramahi is the second Hamas representative to be taken
into custody in Ramallah in as many days. On Saturday,
Israeli soldiers detained Nasser Shaer, the deputy prime
minister of the Palestinian Authority. Earlier this month,
they arrested the PLC speaker, Aziz Dweik, a prominent
political leader of Hamas in the West Bank.

After the capture of Corporal Gilad Shalit on June 12,
Israel launched a series of military operations which left
almost 200 Gaza residents dead and the territory besieged.
Despite the damage, the militants holding Corporal Shalit
continue to insist they would only release him in return
for the liberation of Palestinian prisoners.

Since June, Israel has arrested 49 senior Hamas officials,
including the 33 parliamentarians, as an extra bargaining
chip in the prisoner exchange negotiations, which are
being conducted by Egyptian mediators.

The officials are all from the West Bank and most have
been a strong moderating force within Hamas, urging
leaders in Gaza to recognise Israel and ensure the party
is acceptable to the international community.

The Israeli government has arrested the men because it
claims that technically they are members of "a terrorist
organisation" although they may not be involved in
terrorist acts themselves.

Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry
said: "The men who have been arrested are self-confessed
senior members of Hamas which, in Europe, in Britain, in
Japan, in Australia and in Israel is regarded as a
terrorist organisation. They have been picked up and will
be placed before a judge who will decide if there is
sufficient evidence to try them."

Mr Regev would not confirm that their arrest was directly
related to the detention of Corporal Shalit but added:
"You cannot act like a terrorist and expect to be treated
like a statesman. If Palestinian leaders act like
statesmen and in accordance with conventional practices,
they will earn the respect their position gives them."

Hamas has accused Israel of trying to destroy the
Palestinian Authority, but members of the parliament said
it is still managing to operate. PLC member Qais Abu Leila
said that the arrest of PLC members was a show of force
designed to demonstrate that Palestinians only have rights
that Israel is prepared to give them.

"They have arrested as many as they can but still the PLC
is working. It has more that 67 members out 132 which is a
quorum and the deputy-speaker is presiding over the
sessions. The PLC is not working at the same tempo as
previously but it is moving on although there is an
agreement that controversial subjects will not be voted
on," he said.

**********************************************************

(9) Gaza swelters through summer without power

By Gideon Levy
22 August 2006

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/753236.html

It's hot, very hot, in the Gaza Strip. But over the last
two months, ever since Israel bombed the new power station
in the center of the Strip, the heat has become
unbearable. The bombing has disrupted the supply of
electricity to some 1.5 million residents; food in
refrigerators goes bad, the patients in the hospitals
groan, industry and work are paralyzed, traffic is
gridlocked and there is a severe water shortage.

On the night of June 28, the Israel Air Force bombed the
power station as part of Operation Summer Rains,
destroying its six transformers. The assault was approved
by the security cabinet, and was intended to pressure the
Palestinians into releasing Gilad Shalit, the captured
soldier.

The modern power station, financed by Enron in partnership
with a Palestinian company, was completely paralyzed, and
the Gaza Strip lost some 60 percent of its supply of
electricity. Gaza buys the remaining 40 percent from the
Israel Electricity Corporation.

On Sunday this week, the burned out and destroyed
transformers were still lying near the power station's
fence. Two were made by Israeli company Elco Industries,
and four by the German ABB. The station, located between
Gaza and Dir al Balah, was inaugurated at the end of 2001.
It was to provide power not only to Gaza but to the West
Bank too, after being linked in the future to the Israeli
network.

Israel knew exactly what it was bombing, says station
manager Dr. Drar Abu-Sisi. It's impossible to operate the
station without the transformers. Replacing them would
take at least a year - either by ordering new transformers
or by hooking up to the Egyptian power network.

With a capacity of 140 megawatts, the power station was
the most advanced in the Arab world. Israel could have
paralyzed the station by simply stopping its fuel supply,
without putting it out of action for months.

"Had they told us on the phone to cut the power off, we'd
have done so right away," says Abu-Sisi, who is convinced
that the bombing was politically motivated.

"It was a foolish attack, which only sows more and more
hatred for Israel," he says.

Each transformer costs around $2 million, but the main
damage is indirect - the loss of income to the power
station, grave damage to all its systems that could rust,
and the huge blow to the Gaza Strip's miserable economy.

The Israel Defense Forces Spokesman's Office told Haaretz
Monday that "the bombing was intended to disrupt the
activity of the terror networks directly and indirectly
associated with Gilad Shalit's kidnapping."

Meanwhile, the station's 160 workers are out of work and
Gaza has electrical power for only a few hours a day.
Those who can afford it buy generators, and everyone goes
up on the rooftops at night to escape the burdensome heat
inside.

**********************************************************

(10) Reservists in Israel Protest Conduct of Lebanon War

By STEVEN ERLANGER

The New York TImes
22 August 2006

JERUSALEM, Aug. 21 -- A group of Israeli reservist soldiers
who served during the recent fighting in Lebanon, angry
about the conduct of the war, on Monday demanded the
resignations of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense
Minister Amir Peretz and the army chief of staff, Lt. Gen.
Dan Halutz.

The reservists, most of whom have gone back to civilian
life, say that their training was inadequate and that they
were sent into Lebanon with unclear missions, inadequate
supplies, outdated equipment and a lack of basics, like
drinking water. They called for a national inquiry into
how the war was waged.

During a protest march, one of the participants, Roni
Zwiegenboim of the Alexandroni Brigade, said, "Beyond the
whole issue of the ammunition, the food and the water that
wasn't, the issue was that there was no leadership." He
added with disgust, "In the end it was just a mess, and it
all starts at the top."

The protest march of about 100 people went from Castel,
the site of a 1948 battle, to Mr. Olmert's house. It
reflected considerable domestic angst about the uncertain
outcome of the war, the fragility of the cease-fire,
general skepticism about the ability of any United Nations
force to control Hezbollah and the failure to reach stated
goals, like the release of captured soldiers.

Protests by reservists, who are allowed to criticize the
army freely, unlike enlisted men and women, helped lead to
the fall of the Golda Meir government after the 1973 war,
when an Egyptian attack took Israel by surprise.

This war with Hezbollah is not considered that kind of
failure, though, and the growing criticism -- including
other recent protests -- has not yet gathered enough
momentum to shake the government.

Mr. Olmert and his new Kadima Party were just elected on
March 28, and there is little appetite here for another
round of voting. Kadima and the Labor Party are more
likely to pull together to preserve their coalition,
especially when the immediate beneficiaries of a breakup
are likely to be on the right. But Mr. Olmert and Mr.
Peretz have been badly weakened, and their main campaign
promise, of a sweeping new withdrawal of settlers from the
occupied West Bank, has been shelved for now.

Mr. Olmert told the cabinet on Sunday that the
government's priority should be to rebuild Israel's north.

But the call for an investigation is finding an echo in
Parliament. Mr. Olmert is trying to forestall such an
inquiry, which might have legal powers to question him and
other top officials.

During a visit on Monday to Kiryat Shmona, which was hit
by almost one-quarter of the nearly 4,000 rockets fired
into Israel by Hezbollah, Mr. Olmert said the point was to
concentrate on the future. "I won't be part of this game
of self-flagellation," he said. "I won't be part of this
game of slandering the army."

Speaking of the Israel Defense Forces, Mr. Olmert said:
"We have no other army. Who is the I.D.F.? It's our
children, it's our brother, it's our public, part of it in
the regular army, part of it in the reserves. What are we
going to do now? Stand them in a line and give them a slap
on the face? Try them? Put them in front of commissions of
inquiry each and every day, so they won't be able to
properly assess the next conflict because they will be
afraid we shall come complaining to them?"

Mr. Olmert has asked his attorney general to come up with
alternatives to a formal inquiry. A governmental
investigation authorized by the cabinet, for example,
could be better controlled by Mr. Olmert, even if
outsiders are involved, and the cabinet could decide what
is published.

Mr. Peretz, the defense minister, has been criticized for
opening an inquiry into the army's performance led by one
of his own advisers, former Chief of Staff Amnon
Lipkin-Shahak. The committee has begun to take testimony,
but is expected to grant the army's demand that such
testimony be kept confidential.

Meanwhile, hundreds of reserve soldiers from the
Alexandroni Brigade met Sunday with General Halutz, the
army chief of staff, and told him there was a crisis of
confidence in senior officers. He promised a thorough
investigation.

In another protest, reservists from the Spearhead
Paratroop Brigade complained in an open letter covered in
Israeli newspapers on Monday that soldiers were prevented
from winning the war because of poor leadership. They said
that the war was marked by indecision and complained that
their missions were repeatedly canceled. "This led to
prolonged stays in hostile territory without an
operational purpose," the letter said.

"To us, the indecisiveness expressed deep disrespect for
our willingness to join the ranks and fight and made us
feel as though we had been spat at," it said.

The letter, signed by several hundred reservists, also
called for an inquiry into how the war was carried out.

Another kind of protest came Sunday from Brig. Gen. Yossi
Hyman, who is leaving as commander of the Infantry Corps
and Paratroops. "We were guilty of the sin of arrogance,"
General Hyman said at his farewell ceremony. "Despite
heroic fighting by the soldiers and commanders, especially
at the company and battalion level, we all feel a certain
sense of failure and missed opportunity."

He said he took the blame for not preparing the infantry
better and for not preventing "burnout among professional
companies and platoons," adding, "I feel no relief
whatsoever in the face of the array of excuses."

Mr. Olmert has rejected a suggestion from his public
security minister, Avi Dichter, a former head of the
domestic security service, that Israel pursue peace talks
with Syria, a Hezbollah sponsor, even if it means giving
up the Golan Heights, which Israel conquered in 1967.

Mr. Olmert said he favored negotiations, but not while the
Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, continues to support
groups that Israel and the United States label as
terrorist organizations, like Hezbollah and Hamas.

"Before we negotiate with Syria, they should stop
financing terror; before we negotiate with Bashar Assad,
let him stop launching missiles by means of Hezbollah onto
the heads of innocent Israelis," Mr. Olmert said. "And
before we sit down to negotiate, let them stop funding
Hamas's murder, sabotage and terror. If they meet all
these tests we shall negotiate with them."

Still, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said last week that
she had picked Yaakov Dayan, formerly her chief of staff,
to explore the idea that secular Syria might be pulled out
of the orbit of Shiite Iran.


****************
ANALYSIS & VIEWS
****************

(11) You are terrorists, we are virtuous

By Yitzhak Laor

The London Review of Books
17 August 2006

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n16/print/laor01_.html

As soon as the facts of the Bint Jbeil ambush, which ended
with relatively high Israeli casualties (eight soldiers
died there), became public, the press and television in
Israel began marginalising any opinion that was critical
of the war. The media also fell back on the kitsch to
which Israelis grow accustomed from childhood: the most
menacing army in the region is described here as if it is
David against an Arab Goliath. Yet the Jewish Goliath has
sent Lebanon back 20 years, and Israelis themselves even
further: we now appear to be a lynch-mob culture, glued to
our televisions, incited by a premier whose 'leadership'
is being launched and legitimised with rivers of fire and
destruction on both sides of the border. Mass psychology
works best when you can pinpoint an institution or a
phenomenon with which large numbers of people identify.
Israelis identify with the IDF, and even after the deaths
of many Lebanese children in Qana, they think that
stopping the war without scoring a definitive victory
would amount to defeat. This logic reveals our national
psychosis, and it derives from our over-identification
with Israeli military thinking.

In the melodramatic barrage fired off by the press, the
army is assigned the dual role of hero and victim. And the
enemy? In Hebrew broadcasts the formulations are always
the same: on the one hand 'we', 'ours', 'us'; on the
other, Nasrallah and Hizbullah. There aren't, it seems,
any Lebanese in this war. So who is dying under Israeli
fire? Hizbullah. And if we ask about the Lebanese? The
answer is always that Israel has no quarrel with Lebanon.
It's yet another illustration of our unilateralism, the
thundering Israeli battle-cry for years: no matter what
happens around us, we have the power and therefore we can
enforce the logic. If only Israelis could see the damage
that's been done by all these years of unilateral
thinking. But we cannot, because the army - which has
always been the core of the state - determines the shape
of our lives and the nature of our memories, and wars like
this one erase everything we thought we knew, creating a
new version of history with which we can only concur. If
the army wins, its success becomes part of 'our heritage'.
Israelis have assimilated the logic and the language of
the IDF - and in the process, they have lost their
memories. Is there a better way to understand why we have
never learned from history? We have never been a match for
the army, whose memory - the official Israeli memory - is
hammered into place at the centre of our culture by an
intelligentsia in the service of the IDF and the state.

The IDF is the most powerful institution in Israeli
society, and one which we are discouraged from
criticising. Few have studied the dominant role it plays
in the Israeli economy. Even while they are still serving,
our generals become friendly with the US companies that
sell arms to Israel; they then retire, loaded with money,
and become corporate executives. The IDF is the biggest
customer for everything and anything in Israel. In
addition, our high-tech industries are staffed by a
mixture of military and ex-military who work closely with
the Western military complex. The current war is the first
to become a branding opportunity for one of our largest
mobile phone companies, which is using it to run a huge
promotional campaign. Israel's second biggest bank, Bank
Leumi, used inserts in the three largest newspapers to
distribute bumper stickers saying: 'Israel is powerful.'
The military and the universities are intimately linked
too, with joint research projects and an array of army
scholarships.

There is no institution in Israel that can approach the
army's ability to disseminate images and news or to shape
a national political class and an academic elite or to
produce memory, history, value, wealth, desire. This is
the way identification becomes entrenched: not through
dictatorship or draconian legislation, but by virtue of
the fact that the country's most powerful institution gets
its hands on every citizen at the age of 18. The majority
of Israelis identify with the army and the army
reciprocates by consolidating our identity, especially
when it is - or we are - waging war.

The IDF didn't play any role in either of the Gulf wars
and may not play a part in Bush's pending war in Iran, but
it is on permanent alert for the real war that is always
just round the corner. Meanwhile, it harasses Palestinians
in the West Bank and Gaza, to very destructive effect. (In
July it killed 176 Palestinians, most of them from the
same area in Gaza, in a 'policing' operation that included
the destruction of houses and infrastructure.) They shoot.
They abduct. They use F-16s against refugee camps, tanks
against shacks and huts. For years they have operated in
this way against gangs and groups of armed youths and
children, and they call it a war, a 'just war', vital for
our existence. The power of the army to produce meanings,
values, desire is perfectly illustrated by its handling of
the Palestinians, but it would not be possible without the
support of the left in Israel.

The mainstream left has never seriously tried to oppose
the military. The notion that we had no alternative but to
attack Lebanon and that we cannot stop until we have
finished the job: these are army-sponsored truths, decided
by the military and articulated by state intellectuals and
commentators. So are most other descriptions of the war,
such as the Tel Aviv academic Yossef Gorni's statement in
Haaretz, that 'this is our second war of independence.'
The same sort of nonsense was written by the same kind of
people when the 2000 intifada began. That was also a war
about our right to exist, our 'second 1948'. These
descriptions would not have stood a chance if Zionist left
intellectuals - solemn purveyors of the 'morality of war'
- hadn't endorsed them.

Military thinking has become our only thinking. The wish
for superiority has become the need to have the upper hand
in every aspect of relations with our neighbours. The
Arabs must be crippled, socially and economically, and
smashed militarily, and of course they must then appear to
us in the degraded state to which we've reduced them. Our
usual way of looking at them is borrowed from our
intelligence corps, who 'translate' them and interpret
them, but cannot recognise them as human beings. Israelis
long ago ceased to be distressed by images of sobbing
women in white scarves, searching for the remains of their
homes in the rubble left by our soldiers. We think of them
much as we think of chickens or cats. We turn away without
much trouble and consider the real issue: the enemy. The
Katyusha missiles that have been hitting the north of the
country are launched without 'discrimination', and in this
sense Hizbullah is guilty of a war crime, but the recent
volleys of Katyushas were a response to the frenzied
assault on Lebanon. To the large majority of Israelis,
however, all the Katyushas prove is what a good and
necessary thing we have done by destroying our neighbours
again: the enemy is indeed dangerous, it's just as well we
went to war. The thinking becomes circular and the
prophecies self-fulfilling. Israelis are fond of saying:
'The Middle East is a jungle, where only might speaks.'
See Qana, and Gaza, or Beirut.

Defenders of Israel and its leaders can always argue that
the US and Britain behave similarly in Iraq. (It is true
that Olmert and his colleagues would not have acted so
shamelessly if the US had not been behind them. Had Bush
told them to hold their fire, they wouldn't have dared to
move a single tank.) But there is a major difference. The
US and Britain went to war in Iraq without public opinion
behind them. Israel went to war in Lebanon, after a border
incident which it exploited in order to destroy a country,
with the overwhelming support of Israelis, including the
members of what the European press calls the 'peace camp'.

Amos Oz, on 20 July, when the destruction of Lebanon was
already well underway, wrote in the Evening Standard:
'This time, Israel is not invading Lebanon. It is
defending itself from a daily harassment and bombardment
of dozens of our towns and villages by attempting to smash
Hizbullah wherever it lurks.' Nothing here is
distinguishable from Israeli state pronouncements. David
Grossman wrote in the Guardian, again on 20 July, as if he
were unaware of any bombardment in Lebanon: 'There is no
justification for the large-scale violence that Hizbullah
unleashed this week, from Lebanese territory, on dozens of
peaceful Israeli villages, towns and cities. No country in
the world could remain silent and abandon its citizens
when its neighbour strikes without any provocation.' We
can bomb, but if they respond they are responsible for
both their suffering and ours. And it's important to
remember that 'our suffering' is that of poor people in
the north who cannot leave their homes easily or quickly.
'Our suffering' is not that of the decision-makers or
their friends in the media. Oz also wrote that 'there can
be no moral equation between Hizbullah and Israel.
Hizbullah is targeting Israeli civilians wherever they
are, while Israel is targeting mostly Hizbullah.' At that
time more than 300 Lebanese had been killed and 600 had
been injured. Oz went on: 'The Israeli peace movement
should support Israel's attempt at self-defence, pure and
simple, as long as this operation targets mostly Hizbullah
and spares, as much as possible, the lives of Lebanese
civilians (this is not always an easy task, as Hizbullah
missile-launchers often use Lebanese civilians as human
sandbags).'

The truth behind this is that Israel must always be
allowed to do as it likes even if this involves scorching
its supremacy into Arab bodies. This supremacy is beyond
discussion and it is simple to the point of madness. We
have the right to abduct. You don't. We have the right to
arrest. You don't. You are terrorists. We are virtuous. We
have sovereignty. You don't. We can ruin you. You cannot
ruin us, even when you retaliate, because we are tied to
the most powerful nation on earth. We are angels of death.

The Lebanese will not remember everything about this war.
How many atrocities can a person keep in mind, how much
helplessness can he or she admit, how many massacres can
people tell their children about, how many terrorised
escapes from burning houses, without becoming a slave to
memory? Should a child keep a leaflet written by the IDF
in Arabic, in which he is told to leave his home before
it's bombed? I cannot urge my Lebanese friends to remember
the crimes my state and its army have committed in
Lebanon.

Israelis, however, have no right to forget. Too many
people here supported the war. It wasn't just the
nationalist religious settlers. It's always easy to blame
the usual suspects for our misdemeanours: the scapegoating
of religious fanatics has allowed us to ignore the role of
the army and its advocates within the Zionist left. This
time we have seen just how strongly the 'moderates' are
wedded to immoderation, even though they knew, before it
even started, that this would be a war against suburbs and
crowded areas of cities, small towns and defenceless
villages. The model was our army's recent actions in Gaza:
Israeli moderates found these perfectly acceptable.

It was a mistake for those of us who are unhappy with our
country's policies to breathe a sigh of relief after the
army withdrew from Lebanon in 2000. We thought that the
names of Sabra and Shatila would do all the memorial work
that needed to be done and that they would stand,
metonymically, for the crimes committed in Lebanon by
Israel. But, with the withdrawal from Gaza, many Israelis
who should be opposing this war started to think of Ariel
Sharon, the genius of Sabra and Shatila, as a champion of
peace. The logic of unilateralism - of which Sharon was
the embodiment - had at last prevailed: Israelis are the
only people who count in the Middle East; we are the only
ones who deserve to live here.

This time we must try harder to remember. We must remember
the crimes of Olmert, and of our minister of justice, Haim
Ramon, who championed the destruction of Lebanese villages
after the ambush at Bint Jbeil, and of the army chief of
staff, Dan Halutz. Their names should be submitted to The
Hague so they can be held accountable.

Elections are a wholly inadequate form of accountability
in Israel: the people we kill and maim and ruin cannot
vote here. If we let our memories slacken now, the
machine-memory will reassert control and write history for
us. It will glide into the vacuum created by our
negligence, with the civilised voice of Amos Oz easing its
path, and insert its own version. And suddenly we will not
be able to explain what we know, even to our own children.

In Israel there is still no proper history of our acts in
Lebanon. Israelis in the peace camp used to carry posters
with the figure '680' on them - the number of Israelis who
died during the 1982 invasion. Six hundred and eighty
Israeli soldiers. How many members of that once sizeable
peace camp protested about the tens of thousands of
Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian casualties? Isn't the
failure of the peace camp a result of its inability to
speak about the cheapness of Arab blood? General Udi Adam,
one of the architects of the current war, has told
Israelis that we shouldn't count the dead. He meant this
very seriously and Israelis should take him seriously. We
should make it our business to count the dead in Lebanon
and in Israel and, to the best of our abilities, to find
out their names, all of them.

3 August

**********************************************************

(12) Learning from Its Mistakes

By Charles Glass

The London Review of Books
17 August 2006

http://lrb.co.uk/v28/n16/glas01_.html

In his memoir, Not So Wild a Dream, the famous CBS
correspondent Eric Sevareid recalled watching the
execution of six Nazi collaborators in the newly liberated
city of Grenoble in 1944.

When the police van arrived and the six who were to die
stepped out, a tremendous and awful cry arose from the
crowd. The six young men walked firmly to the iron posts,
and as their hands were tied behind the shafts they held
their bare heads upright, one or two with closed eyes, the
others staring over the line of the buildings and the
crowd into the lowering clouds . . . There was the
jarring, metallic noise of rifle bolts and then the sharp
report. The six young men slid slowly to their knees,
their heads falling to one side. An officer ran with
frantic haste from one to the other, giving the coup de
grace with a revolver, and one of the victims was seen to
work his mouth as though trying to say something to the
executioner. As the last shot was fired, the terrible,
savage cry rose again from the crowd. Mothers with babies
rushed forward to look on the bodies at close range, and
small boys ran from one to the other spitting upon the
bodies. The crowd dispersed, men and women laughing and
shouting at one another. Barbarous?

Such events were part of what the French described as the
epuration - the purification or purging of France after
four years of German occupation. The number of French men
and women killed by the Resistance or kangaroo courts is
usually put at ten thousand. Camus called this 'human
justice with all its defects'. The American forces that
liberated France tolerated local vengeance against those
who had worked for a brutal occupier. Thousands of French
people, encouraged by a government in Vichy that they
believed to be legitimate, had collaborated. Many, like
the Milices, fascist gangs armed by Vichy, went further
and killed Frenchmen. When Vichy's foreign sponsors
withdrew and its government fell, the killing began.
Accounts were settled with similar violence in other
provinces of the former Third Reich - countries which,
along with Britain and the United States, we now think of
as the civilised world.

From 1978 to 2000 Israel occupied slices of Lebanon from
their common border right up to Beirut and back again. To
reduce the burden on its own forces, the Israelis created
a species of Milice in the form of the locally recruited
South Lebanon Army - first under Major Saad Haddad, who
had broken from the Lebanese army in 1976 with a few
hundred men, and later under General Antoine Lahad. Both
were Christians, and their troops - armed, trained, fed
and clothed by Israel - were mainly Shia Muslims from the
south. About a third of the force, which grew to almost
10,000, were Christians. Some joined because they resented
the Palestinians' armed presence in south Lebanon. Others
enlisted because they needed the money: the region has
always been Lebanon's poorest. The SLA had a reputation
for cruelty, confirmed when its torture chambers at Khiam
were opened after the Israeli withdrawal in 2000, and for
a high rate of desertions.

As Israel pulled back from Beirut, the high-water mark
reached during its 1982 invasion, its share of Lebanon
contracted further and further. Having seized 3560 square
kilometres, about a third of the country, containing
around 800 towns and villages, Israel found itself in 1985
with only 500 square kilometres and 61 villages, mostly
deserted. Hizbullah, which led the resistance that had
forced the Israelis to abandon most of their conquest,
demanded the unconditional return of all Lebanese
territory. Its attacks intensified, resulting in a loss of
IDF soldiers that became unpalatable to most Israelis. The
Israeli army placed the SLA between itself and Hizbullah
so that it could pay the price that Israel had decided it
could not afford. Hizbullah kidnapped SLA men, and the SLA
and Israelis kidnapped Shias. The two sides killed each
other, as well as many civilians, and blood feuds were
born. On 17 May 1999, Israelis elected Ehud Barak on the
strength of his promise to reverse Ariel Sharon's Lebanon
adventure, which had by then cost around a thousand
Israeli lives.

Barak announced that Israel would pull out in an orderly
fashion in July 2000, provided that Lebanon agreed to
certain conditions. The Lebanese government, urged by
Hizbullah, rejected these conditions and demanded full
Israeli withdrawal in accordance with UN Resolutions 425
and 426 of 1978. Barak abandoned Lebanon two months ahead
of schedule, suddenly and without advance warning, on 23
May 2000. His SLA clients and other Lebanese who had
worked for the occupation over the previous 22 years were
caught off guard. A few escaped into Israel, but most
remained. UN personnel made urgent appeals for help to
avert a massacre by Hizbullah. Hizbullah went in, but
nothing happened.

The deputy secretary-general and co-founder of Hizbullah,
Sheikh Naim Qassem, wrote a fascinating if partisan
account of the creation and rise of Hizbullah. His version
of the events in 2000 is, however, borne out by
eyewitnesses from other Lebanese sects - including some
who stood to lose their lives - and the UN. 'It is no
secret that some young combatants, as well as some of the
region's citizens, had a desire for vengeance - especially
those who were aware of what collaborators and their
families had inflicted on the mujahedin and their next of
kin across the occupied villages,' Qassem wrote in
Hizbullah: The Story from Within. 'Resistance leadership
issued a strict warning forbidding any such action and
vowing to discipline those who took it whatever the
justifications.' Hizbullah captured Israeli weapons, which
it is now using against Israel, and turned over SLA
militiamen to the government without murdering any of
them. Barbarous?

Naim Qassem called the liberation of south Lebanon 'the
grandest and most important victory over Israel since it
commenced its occupation [of Palestine] fifty years before
- a liberation that was achieved at the hands of the
weakest of nations, of a resistance operating through the
most modest of means, not at the hands of armies with
powerful military arsenals.' But what impressed most
Lebanese as much as Hizbullah's victory over Israel was
its refusal to murder collaborators - a triumph over the
tribalism that has plagued and divided Lebanese society
since its founding. Christians I knew in the Lebanese army
admitted that their own side would have committed
atrocities. Hizbullah may have been playing politics in
Lebanon, but it refused to play Lebanese politics. What it
sought in south Lebanon was not revenge, but votes. In the
interval between its founding in 1982 and the victory of
2000, Hizbullah had become - as well as an armed force - a
sophisticated and successful political party. It
jettisoned its early rhetoric about making Lebanon an
Islamic republic, and spoke of Christians, Muslims and
Druze living in harmony. When it put up candidates for
parliament, some of those on its electoral list were
Christians. It won 14 seats.

Like Israel's previous enemies, Hizbullah relies on the
weapons of the weak: car bombs, ambushes, occasional
flurries of small rockets and suicide bombers. The
difference is that it uses them intelligently, in
conjunction with an uncompromising political programme.
Against Israel's thousand dead on the Lebanese field,
Hizbullah gave up 1276 'martyrs'. That is the closest any
Arab group has ever come to parity in casualties with
Israel. The PLO usually lost hundreds of dead commandos to
Israel's tens, and Hamas has seen most of its leaders
assassinated and thousands of its cadres captured with
little to show for it. Hizbullah's achievement, perhaps
ironically for a religious party headed by men in turbans,
is that it belongs to the modern age. It videotaped its
ambushes of Israeli convoys for broadcast the same
evening. It captured Israeli soldiers and made Israel give
up hundreds of prisoners to get them back. It used
stage-set cardboard boulders that blew up when Israeli
patrols passed. It flew drones over Israel to take
reconnaissance photographs - just as the Israelis did in
Lebanon. It had a website that was short on traditional
Arab bombast and long on facts. If Israelis had faced an
enemy like Hizbullah in 1948, the outcome of its War of
Independence might have been different. Israel, whose
military respect Hizbullah, is well aware of this.

That is why, having failed to eliminate Hizbullah while it
occupied Lebanon, Israel is trying to destroy it now.
Hizbullah's unpardonable sin in Israel's view is its
military success. Israel may portray Hizbullah as the
cat's-paw of Syria and Iran, but its support base is
Lebanese. Moreover, it does one thing that Syria and Iran
do not: it fights for the Palestinians. On 12 July
Hizbullah attacked an Israeli army unit, capturing two
soldiers. It said it would negotiate indirectly to
exchange them for Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners in
Israel, as it has done in the past. It made clear that its
attack was in support of the Palestinians under siege in
Gaza after the capture of another Israeli soldier a week
earlier. The whole Arab world had remained silent when
Israel reoccupied the Gaza settlements and bombed the
territory. Hizbullah's response humiliated the Arab
regimes, most of which condemned its actions, as much as
it humiliated Israel. No one need have been surprised.
Hizbullah has a long history of supporting the
Palestinians. Many of its original fighters were trained
by the PLO in the 1970s when the Shias had no militias of
their own. Hizbullah risked the anger of Syria in 1986
when it sided against another Shia group which was
attacking Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut. Hizbullah
has never abandoned the Palestinian cause. Its capture
last month of the two Israeli soldiers sent a message to
Israel that it could not attack Palestinians in Gaza and
the West Bank without expecting a reaction.

On this occasion Israel, which regards its treatment of
Palestinians under occupation as an internal affair in
which neither the UN nor the Arab countries have any right
to interfere, calibrated its response in such a way that
it could not win. Instead of doing a quiet deal with
Hizbullah to free its soldiers, it launched an all-out
assault on Lebanon. Reports indicate that Israel has
already dropped a greater tonnage of bombs on the country
than it did during Sharon's invasion in 1982. The stated
purpose was to force a significant portion of the Lebanese
to demand that the government disarm Hizbullah once and
for all. That failed to happen. Israel's massive
destruction of Lebanon has had the effect of improving
Hizbullah's standing in the country. Its popularity had
been low since last year, when it alone refused to demand
the evacuation of the Syrian army after the assassination
of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.
Hizbullah sensed that Washington was orchestrating the
anti-Syrian campaign for its own - rather than Lebanon's -
benefit.

Syria had, after all, helped found Hizbullah after
Israel's invasion - and encouraged it to face down and
defeat the occupation, as well as to drive the Americans
from Lebanon. Syria in turn allowed Iran, whose religious
leaders gave direction to Hizbullah and whose
Revolutionary Guards provided valuable tactical
instruction, to send weapons through its territory to
Lebanon. Hizbullah's leaders nevertheless have
sufficiently strong support to assert their independence
of both sponsors whenever their interests or philosophies
clash. (I have first-hand, if minor, experience of this.
When Hizbullah kidnapped me in full view of a Syrian army
checkpoint in 1987, Syria insisted that I be released to
show that Syrian control of Lebanon could not be flouted.
Hizbullah, unfortunately, ignored the request.) Despite
occasional Syrian pressure, Hizbullah has refused to go
into combat against any other Lebanese militia. It
remained aloof from the civil war and concentrated on
defeating Israel and its SLA surrogates.

Hizbullah's unspectacular showing in the first post-Syrian
parliamentary elections was largely due to changes in
electoral law but may also be traced in part to its
perceived pro-Syrian stance. Now, Israel has rescued
Hizbullah and made its secretary-general, Hassan
Nasrallah, not only the most popular man in Lebanon - but
in the whole Arab world. An opinion poll commissioned by
the Beirut Centre for Research and Information found that
80 per cent of Lebanese Christians supported Hizbullah;
the figure for other communities was even higher. It was
not insignificant that, when false reports came in that
Hizbullah had sunk a second Israeli warship, the area that
fired the loudest celebratory shots in the air was
Ashrafieh, the heart of Christian East Beirut. Unlike in
1982, when it could rely on some of the Christian
militias, Israel now has no friends in Lebanon.

Israel misjudged Lebanon's response to its assaults, just
as Hizbullah misjudged Israeli opinion. Firing its rockets
into Israel did not, as it may have planned, divide
Israelis and make them call for an end to the war.
Israelis, like the Lebanese, rallied to their fighters in
a contest that is taking on life and death proportions for
both countries. Unlike Israel, which has repeatedly played
out the same failed scenario in Lebanon since its first
attack on Beirut in 1968, Hizbullah has a history of
learning from its mistakes. Seeing the Israeli response to
his rocket bombardment of Haifa and Netanya in the north,
Nasrallah has not carried out his threat to send rockets
as far as Tel Aviv. He now says he will do this only if
Israel targets the centre of Beirut.

If the UN had any power, or the United States exercised
its power responsibly, there would have been an
unconditional ceasefire weeks ago and an exchange of
prisoners. The Middle East could then have awaited the
next crisis. Crises will inevitably recur until the
Palestine problem is solved. But Lebanon would not have
been demolished, hundreds of people would not have died
and the hatred between Lebanese and Israelis would not
have become so bitter.

On 31 July, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said:
'This is a unique opportunity to change the rules in
Lebanon.' Yet Israel itself is playing by the same old
unsuccessful rules. It is ordering Lebanon to disarm
Hizbullah or face destruction, just as in 1975 it demanded
the dismantling of the PLO. Then, many Lebanese fought the
PLO and destroyed the country from within. Now, they
reason, better war than another civil war: better that the
Israelis kill us than that we kill ourselves. What else
can Israel do to them? It has bombed comprehensively,
destroyed the country's expensively restored
infrastructure, laid siege to it and sent its troops back
in. Israel still insists that it will destroy Hizbullah in
a few weeks, although it did not manage to do so between
1982 and 2000 when it had thousands of troops on the
ground and a local proxy force to help it. What is its
secret weapon this time?

3 August

Charles Glass has recently published two books on the
Middle East, The Northern Front and The Tribes Triumphant,
and is writing a book set in France during the German
occupation.

**********************************************************

(13) The Arab world's silence has left the last word to those
we call extremists

While Israel receives unanimous western support, this
crisis is dragging the region ever faster into the abyss

By Alain Gresh

The Guardian
22 August 2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1855348,00.html

Killers slaughter dozens of civilians in Iraq every day
just because they are Sunni Muslims. Suicide attacks are
increasingly common in Afghanistan, where they used to be
unknown. On the Gaza Strip, 1.5 million Palestinians are
caught in a trap, hemmed in by the Israeli offensive and
the decision by the US and the EU to freeze all direct
aid. The sudden escalation of hostilities between Israel
and Lebanon may drag Syria and Iran into a regional
conflict. And the Iran nuclear crisis remains unresolved.

Not since 1967 has the Middle East suffered so many
simultaneous high-intensity crises. They are all linked by
many threads, making partial solutions more difficult and
dragging the region ever faster into the abyss.

For many western observers there is no doubt about the
culprit: Hizbullah, which aims to destroy Israel and
unsettle the western camp. The analysis, predominant among
politicians and the media, is close to that of the US
neoconservatives: a new world war has started.

One leading US neocon ideologue, William Kristol, proudly
proclaims that "it's our war," since he believes that in
the face of an across-the-board attempt to destabilise the
west, the Israeli government, led by Ehud Olmert, is
undoubtedly "on the right side". Even as Lebanon was being
bombed, the G8 issued a statement from its meeting in St
Petersburg, signed by France, proclaiming Israel's "right
to defend itself."

True, the initial Hizbullah attack on July 12 on an
Israeli patrol led to six deaths and the capture of two
soldiers. This was hardly an isolated incident .
Skirmishes are commonplace along the Israel-Lebanon
border. On May 26, Israel had a leader of the Islamic
Jihad assassinated. Lebanese militants are still held in
Israeli prisons.

Even if we accept that the Hizbullah incursion was
illegal, how do we regard the systematic destruction of
Lebanon? Under international law such action counts as a
war crime. Who could imagine that the stated objective, to
rescue two soldiers, justifies the death and destruction
caused by Israel's bombing? Is a Lebanese life is worth
less than an Israeli life?

The outcome of the Israeli offensive remains uncertain.
Hizbullah is Lebanon's largest political party, with 12
members of parliament. It is deeply rooted in the Shia
community, the country's largest, and enjoys enormous
prestige for having liberated the south of Lebanon in
2000. It is allied with major political forces, such as
General Michel Aoun's Free Patriotic Movement, the
Lebanese Communist party, and the Syrian Social
Nationalist party. To claim that Hizbullah is a pawn in
the hands of Iran or Syria is absurd.

The occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and
parts of the Golan Heights has lasted almost 40 years.
Despite many UN security council resolutions and
optimistic statements - the roadmap, approved by the US,
Russia, the EU and the UN claimed that the Palestinian
state would be set up before the end of 2005 - conditions
in Palestine are deteriorating.

No progress was made in 2005. The authorities in Tel Aviv
repeatedly explained to the world that Yasser Arafat was
an obstacle to peace, but his death and replacement by
Mahmoud Abbas did not force Ariel Sharon to give up his
unilateral policies.

The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, hailed by
political leaders and the media as a courageous act,
destroyed what remained of the Oslo accords: the principle
that peace would be achieved through bilateral
negotiation. For the Palestinian population of Gaza the
evacuation did nothing to improve their predicament; it
worsened their position. The pace of Israeli settlement of
the West Bank quickens and the "peace process" is no more
than an empty phrase used by the international community.
Under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that
Hamas should have won the general election in January. Yet
the west promptly punished the Palestinians for making the
wrong choice. With French backing, the EU deprived the
Palestinian Authority of its direct aid, worsening living
conditions and further hampering already enfeebled
administrative bodies.

On the subject of the rockets fired from Gaza into the
Israeli town of Sderot, Gideon Levy, an Israeli journalist
for Ha'aretz, asked: "What would have happened if the
Palestinians had not fired Qassams? Would Israel have
lifted the economic siege that it imposed on Gaza? Would
it open the border to Palestinian labourers? Free
prisoners? Meet with the elected leadership and conduct
negotiations? Encourage investment in Gaza? Nonsense. If
the Gazans were sitting quietly, as Israel expects them to
do, their case would disappear from the agenda here and
around the world. Nobody would have given any thought to
their fate if they did not behave violently."

After considerable tension, all the Palestinian
organisations except Islamic Jihad signed a text on June
27 calling for a political solution based on the creation
of a Palestinian state beside the state of Israel. It also
restricted armed resistance to the occupied territories.
This agreement opened the way for the formation of a
government of national unity that could open peace
negotiations. The next day the Israeli army invaded Gaza,
on the pretext that a soldier had been taken hostage, but
in fact to destroy Hamas.

This Israeli incursion, with its bombing of power stations
and ministry buildings, arrests of political leaders,
destruction of homes, and use of civilians as human
shields also qualifies as a war crime. The Swiss
government, the custodian of the Geneva conventions, said
on July 4 that there is "no doubt Israel has not taken the
precautions required of it in international law to protect
the civilian population and infrastructure".

The wars against the Palestinians and Lebanese are parts
of the same strategy, which seeks to impose a solution
that only satisfies Israeli interests. Yet never in the
past 40 years has Israeli policy received such unanimous
western support. We have heard only a few voices of
dissent, notably from the Vatican.

Again the Arab world has demonstrated its inability to
intervene - so far. Arab states allied with the US feel
unable to exert pressure on Washington. What they have
done is to condemn Hizbullah and Hamas, implicitly
justifying Israeli incursions. The Saudi foreign minister,
Saud al-Faisal, asked non-Arab parties to keep out of the
conflict, obviously not referring to the US, but to Iran.

Abd al-Wahab Badrakhan, an al-Hayat columnist, wrote: "All
the Arabs, from the Atlantic to the Gulf, know that the
peace process is well and truly dead. However, the Arabs
have never acknowledged that the peace process was dead,
out of obstinacy and because they do not know how to get
out of the swamp they have sunk into. Therefore, whether
we like it or not, the final word has been left to those
we call extremists or adventurers."

Hamas began in Gaza in 1987, after 20 years of Israeli
occupation, surfing on the tidal wave of the first
intifada. Hizbullah emerged from the fight against
occupation forces after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in
1982. What new extremist organisation will rise from the
fresh ruins of Lebanon?

. Alain Gresh is a specialist on the Middle East for Le
Monde Diplomatique. His most recent book is L'Islam, la
Republique et le Monde (Fayard)

**********************************************************

(14) A Proportionate Response

By Kathy Kelly

Electronic Lebanon
21 August 2006

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5606.shtml

Upon arrival in Beirut in early August, 2006, Michael
Birmingham met Abu Mustafa. Michael is an Irish citizen
who has worked with Voices campaigns for several years.
Abu Mustafa is a kindly Lebanese cab driver.

Having fled his home in the Dahiya neighborhood which was
being heavily bombed, Abu Mustafa was living in his car.
Abu Mustafa joked that he sometimes went back to his home
in the already evacuated area of the Dahiya, just to take
a shower or sometimes a proper nap. His family was living
with relatives in a safer area. Toward the end of the war,
Israeli bombs blasted buildings quite near his home. He
tore out of the suburb in his cab and made that his home
until we met him again on August 15th.

That day, he took us to the Dahiya where we saw hundreds
of people, including parents walking hand in hand with
toddlers, process silently along streets lined by
wreckage. Even the small children looked extremely sad and
grim.

Before the "Shock and Awe" bombing of Iraq in 2003, a
contingent of peace activists living in Baghdad hung huge
banners at various locales stating, "To bomb this place
would be a war crime."

On Dahiya's streets, we saw the sequel, banners that said
"Made in the U.S.A." in Arabic and English, detailing U.S.
complicity in manufacturing and shipping the weapons that
demolished homes, gas stations, shopping malls,
overpasses, clinics, the town square, a.block after block
of ruin.

On the fourth floor of a five-story apartment building, a
father and his daughters scooped up successive loads of
broken glass and pitched them onto the sidewalk below.
They called out a warning before each load came crashing
down. You have to start somewhere.

On August 17 and 18, two men, both named Mohammed and both
in their twenties, took Michael, Ramzi Kysia, Farah
Mokhtarazedei, and me to towns and villages south of the
Litani River. In each of the towns we visited, we saw
appalling wreckage. Nowhere could we see military targets.

In Sriefa, the town center was almost completely
destroyed. Residents told us that five or six F-16s bombed
the area on July 19th, destroying ten houses, many of them
three story buildings. We stared at the rubble, spotting
household items, - a child's high chair, a weaving loom, a
toy plastic television.

Neighbors had buried nine corpses in shallow graves when
it was too dangerous to be outside for any length of time.
On the outskirts of Sriefa, as a handful of women and
youngsters watched, workers exhumed the bodies and placed
them in plastic body bags which were then wrapped in green
shrouds and laid in wooden coffins. Workers sealed the
lids and then wrapped the coffins in flags. These slain
men were communists. The flags bore dual symbols for
Lebanon and the Lebanese communist party.

Later, we watched a long funeral procession pass, carrying
25 of the 40 people killed in Sriefa. Uniformed men,
marching, led the procession. Women followed, clutching
one another in grief, next boys bearing flags, and finally
the coffin-bearing vans, each with pictures of the
brothers, fathers, and sons that would be buried.

Abbas Najdi stopped to talk with us on a street in Sriefa
and then invited us to his home. During the bombing, his
wife and children left Sriefa, but Abu Abbas, age 78,
decided to stay. He wanted to watch over his home and the
family's sole source of income, the "tabac" which was
carefully stored in a shed below the second story where
they lived. Fortunately, he had decided to sleep on the
ground floor during the first night of bombing. The back
part of his home, their sleeping room, took a direct hit.
Debris from a collapsing building across the street
blocked the Najdi family's front door, trapping Abu Abbas
inside for two days. Neighbors eventually freed him. Abu
Abbas's left leg was injured by flying glass, but he felt
very lucky to have survived at all. Unluckily, his entire
tabac crop was burnt, the harvest of one year's labor.

Before we left the Najdi family, one of the daughters,
Zainab Najdi, a University student, stood to say goodbye
and then laughed. "My pants are falling down," she
explained, still graceful as she pulled them up. "I am
'daifah'" --the Arabic word for thin or weak. Her loose
clothes disguised how thin she is, but when we embraced, I
could nearly encircle her waist with my hands.

On the morning of the 18th, explosions awakened us. I
thought the cease fire had ended. Our hosts reassured us
that the Lebanese army was blowing up explosives. In the
garden outside the home where we stayed, the local
Hezbollah municipal leader spotted three unexploded
cluster bombs. We had nearly driven over two cluster bombs
lying on the road the previous day. The sound of each
blast destroying hideous bombs was oddly comforting. You
have to start somewhere.

Many people we talk to in Lebanon understand that the
majority of Israelis urged their government to fight this
war once it began. Did the proponents of war, in Israel,
understand that there is no sign of a military target in
the villages of southern Lebanon where homes, schools,
clinics, grocery stores and children's playgrounds have
been destroyed?

On August 18th, Anthony Cordesman published a working
draft of a report called "Preliminary Lessons of
Israeli-Hezbollah War." I read excerpts of it in
commentary written by Helena Cobban. Cordesman, a seasoned
military strategist, writing about the Israeli Air Force
bombardment of Lebanon, remarks that "the air campaign
continued to escalate against targets that often were
completely valid but that sometimes involved high levels
of collateral damage and very uncertain tactical and
military effect. The end result was to give the impression
Israel was not providing a proportionate response, an
impression compounded by ineffective (and often
unintelligible) efforts to explain IAF actions to the
media.

I honestly don't understand. Why is a target completely
valid if it involved high levels of collateral damage,
that is to say high levels of civilians who are maimed and
killed, of civilian infrastructure ruined, of families
rendered homeless, penniless, jobless and hungry?
Cordesman states that there was uncertain tactical and
military effect. Before completing the draft, I wish that
Mr. Cordesman could stand for just five minutes at one
intersection in the small city of Bint Jbail. He would see
certain usage of conventional military weapons used
against a civilian population. He would see certain
evidence of a war crime. Turn in one direction and you see
the remains of a school building, some desks and chairs
still aligned in careful rows, visible because a whole
side of the building is demolished. In another direction,
a damaged stadium. Next to it, a field where 30 rockets
killed a flock of sheep. One man managed a chuckle,
telling us that 2 million dollars was spent to kill these
sheep, that these must have been the most costly sheep in
all of Lebanon. On the 27th and 28th of July, 100 bombs
fell between two mosques in Bint Jbail within 11 minutes.
At one point, the Israelis bombed for 11 hours straight.
Then there was a break and they bombed for 21 hours until
most of the town was completely destroyed. It's estimated
that about 60,000 people lived in Bint Jbail.

Of what military value, as a target, is a school, an
entire block of residences, a town square, a favorite
swimming hole? Why is it strategically valuable to drop
many hundreds of cluster bombs that fall in gardens and
along roadsides between small farming villages?

The residents of Bint Jbail and other southern Lebanese
cities as well as those who lived in the Dahiya and in
Baalbeck had jobs, homes, and basic securities just a
little over a month ago. Now, billions of euros and other
currencies, along with ingenuity, resources, talents, will
be directed toward aid and recovery. Such aid might have
been helping relieve suffering elsewhere in the world had
this war not "escalated."

Both legally and rationally, you cannot say "everyone
living there is Hezbollah." You can't just walk away from
the appalling damage and say, they were warned. Or can
you? Can a state get away with it, backed up by other
world bodies?

If that's the case, then ordinary people bear a grave
responsibility to demand that leaders own up to war
crimes. Yes, finding a proportionate response to war
crimes when so much power is concentrated in the hands of
fewer and fewer people, many of them reckless and
dangerous leaders of the United States and Israel, is a
daunting task. But let's think of the people finding
courage to return and rebuild, let's think of those trying
to demine and clear out the cluster bombs, let's think of
the parents trying to help children orient themselves to a
vastly insecure world. With them, we might acknowledge,
you have to start somewhere.

Kathy Kelly, is a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative
Nonviolence. Her book, Other Lands Have Dreams, is
available at www.counterpunch.org. She may be reached at
kathy@vcnv.org. On August 17 and 18, she traveled in
southern Beirut with three other participants in Voices
campaign work who joined international solidarity efforts
in Beirut during August, 2006.

**********************************************************

(15) What Does Israel Want?

It isn't just Lebanon...

By Justin Raimondo

Antiwar
22 August 2006

http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=9570

Is anyone really surprised that Israel violated the
cease-fire? Here, after all, is a nation that has defied
the United Nations on 321 different occasions, refused to
sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and proudly
proclaims its own lawlessness. Only a fool, or a
masochist, would count on Tel Aviv to keep its agreements.
Apart from that, however, this latest raid underscores the
real objective of what the American media insists on
calling the Israeli "incursion" (never "invasion") into
Lebanon: it's all about Syria and Iran.

The Israelis justified the raid on the grounds that:

"The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and
the Lebanese army were not showing any intention to end
the rearmament of Hezbollah, since the former was
unwilling to confront the 'terrorist organization.' Thus,
Israel had no choice but to act itself to stop the flow of
weapons and missiles to the Shiite group, the official
added."

This means the Israelis will continue striking at any
targets, especially along the border with Syria, that they
deem necessary to stop the "rearmament" of Hezbollah. But
of course, Hezbollah is already very well armed, as the
Israelis discovered to their sorrow and surprise, and
their arms are hardly exhausted. This is yet another
pretext, just like the kidnapping of the two Israeli
soldiers, for continued aggression against Lebanon - and a
means for the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to
avoid or at least ameliorate the political consequences of
its abortive military campaign. It has more to do with the
political situation in Israel than the military situation
on the ground in Lebanon. As the Los Angeles
Timesreported, the real objective of the Israeli raid may
not have been interdicting arms at all:

"At least one independent analyst expressed skepticism of
Israel's claim that the raid was intended to intercept
arms supplies. Arthur Hughes, former director-general of
the Egypt-Israel Multinational Force and Observers, said
the operation was so risky - both for the Israeli soldiers
and the country's international standing - that he found
the government's official explanation implausible. 'I
would guess there was something of high value they were
trying to accomplish,' Hughes said, suggesting that a
rescue mission for the captive Israeli soldiers was more
likely."

If the two Israeli soldiers could be rescued, then so
could Olmert's government - but it is more than just
internal Israeli politics that is driving the IDF. As I
pointed out last week, we were warned by Israeli Foreign
Minister Tzipi Livni, who admitted "The war isn't over
yet." Indeed, if the Israelis have their way, it has
barely begun: they are now shifting their focus to a
full-fledged effort to embroil Damascus in the conflict,
and I wouldn't rule out air strikes on Syrian territory
before all this is over.

Lebanon is just a pawn in the game: Israel's real
objective is toppling Bashar al-Assad and militarily
confronting the Iranian mullahs - using U.S. troops, of
course. The resulting incredibly destructive regional war
will see not a few of their old enemies tossed in
history's dustbin.

Israel's partisans in the U.S. have, in some instances,
been quite open about this objective: Michael Ledeen's
infamous taste for "creative destruction" is vivid
evidence of the neocons' nihilism. But this is nihilism
with a purpose: out of all that death and destruction will
come a new world, the vaunted "transformation" of the
region that was supposed to lead to democratic societies
in nations that had never known any such thing. But, as it
turns out, democracy has nothing to do with it: it's all
about destabilizing the region to pursue an Israeli
agenda. That agenda is the breakup and atomization of the
Arab-Muslim world, so that it is little more than a
collection of splinters. Lebanon is only the first phase
of this campaign, and the Israelis are pushing ahead no
matter what Washington thinks.

That is really the big question: is the U.S. going to go
along with this crazed Israeli campaign? So far, George W.
Bush has gone along for the ride. However, the distance
between American and Israeli interests - never as aligned
as the two governments averred in public - is fast
becoming apparent, and it is only a matter of time before
there is a public split.

I would qualify that, however, by adding that the
prospects of a coming split are based on the assumption
that the White House is putting American interests first,
or is even concerned in the least with pursuing them. In
the case of thisWhite House, however, that may be assuming
far too much.

There is no doubt that the U.S. put pressure on Israel to
bring the "incursion" to a swift conclusion, but that
wasn't the White House talking. The direction and control
of U.S. foreign policy is the object of much internal
contention and is shaped by this internecine struggle
rather than any central authority.

To be sure, a pro-American faction in U.S. policymaking
circles exists but, so far, has been relatively powerless
to exert any significant influence: only when U.S. policy
seems to go off the rails does it reassert itself. This
impulse resulted in the U.S./French effort to engineer a
cease-fire, but, as we have seen, the Israelis can violate
this and face no immediately discernible consequences.

Condoleezza Rice went to Israel to try to cobble together
a cease-fire and was undercut by the IDF's murderous
assault on Qana. Condi was reportedly furious, but hers
was an impotent rage. The Israelis delight in giving the
finger to foreigners who would limit the scope of their
actions, and especially, one suspects, to the Americans,
whose largess makes the Israeli state possible. Every form
of dependency breeds resentment, and in this case it is
bound to come to a head in a very public way - given a
U.S. commitment to its own interests, that is. But don't
expect that from this White House:

"In Washington, the White House declined to criticize the
raid, noting that Israel said it had acted in reaction to
arms smuggling into Lebanon and that the UN resolution
called for the prevention of resupplying Hezbollah with
weapons. 'The incident underscores the importance of
quickly deploying the enhanced UNIFIL,' a White House
spokeswoman, Jeanie Mamo, said, referring to a force of
15,000 UN peacekeeping troops called for by the cease-fire
agreement to police the truce."

With 130,000 American troops in the midst of a Shi'ite sea
in Iraq, with the entireArab-Muslim worldturningagainstthe
U.S. on account of our countenancing the rape of Lebanon,
with our supply of vital oil and gas supplies endangered
by the outbreak of a regional war and our military at the
breaking point - in spite of all this, the president of
the United States forges ahead with this mad plan to
"transform" the Middle East. It's an outrage, an act of
treachery, and, yes, treason on a scale never before seen.

For years, we've been telling our readers that American
foreign policy has been hijacked, and here we have the
confirmation. The invasion of Iraq, the campaign of
threats and provocations directed at Iran, and the
destruction of Lebanon have all served the interests of a
single country, and that country is not the United States
of America. In the most successful covert action in
history, Israel's amen corner in the U.S. has essentially
seized effective control of the American giant, and is now
riding the dumb elephant for all he's worth through the
rubble of the Middle East.

The Israeli raid has showed how powerless the UN and the
U.S. are against not Hezbollah, but Tel Aviv. As Maj. Gen.
William L. Nash, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations, put it to the New York Times:

"We know what they're not going to do, but what will they
do. They're not going to disarm Hezbollah. But are they
going to stop Israel from re-attacking Hezbollah? If the
Israeli government decides there is an imminent threat,
and attacks with F-16s, what is the mandate for the UN?
What does the UN do?"

There is only one power on earth that can restrain the
Israelis, and that is Israel's American sponsors and
financiers. But I wouldn't bet the ranch on that
happening, as long as George W. Bush - or his Democratic
equivalents - reside in the White House. What we have to
look forward to, in short, is perpetual war in the Middle
East, for as far as the eye can see - unless a miracle
occurs and we can reclaim U.S. foreign policy for American
interests.

**********************************************************

(16) Israeli stoners against Hizbullah

By Daphna Baram

The Guardian
22 August 2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1855356,00.html

Forward, a Jewish publication based in New York, had one
of these "aren't we cool, look what we are writing about"
items last week, informing its readers of an Israeli
"phenomenon". Apparently, "activists" have decided to
boycott hashish originating from Lebanon, in order to
avoid indirect sponsorship of Hizbullah, who are believed
to be involved in smuggling the drug over the Israeli
border.

This news originated in the blog of a well-meaning bloke
calling himself Anarchist Orthodox, who announced his
intention to stop buying Lebanese hash, "effective
immediately". This act of selflessness is obviously aimed
at making Sheikh Nasrallah and his ilk think twice before
messing with Israel. Furthermore, Anarchist Orthodox
called for the legalisation of marijuana, which, he
explained, would cut our dependency on imported goods.

One needn't be a Middle East expert to recognise the holes
in this idea. Even moderate experience of being a pothead,
or an Israeli, would suffice. It is true that Nasrallah
has his ear tuned to the finest details of Israel's
leisure culture. The man made a career based on the idea
of Israel being a "spider web society", soaked so deeply
in hedonism, decadence and debauchery that it is ripe and
ready to crumble at the touch of a broomstick. Indeed, it
seems that the hash-boycott sanction stands little chance
of success. Israelis are infamous for being rubbish at
alcohol consumption, but what we forgo in booze we more
than compensate for with the spliffy side of things. It is
almost unthinkable for Israelis to come home after a hard
day's work and pour themselves a glass of wine, but among
secular Israelis from the ages of 20 to 45, rolling a
joint under such circumstances is not generally frowned
on. Unlike Britons, Israelis are not keen on cocaine. We
have little need or desire to consume a drug that makes us
even cockier and more arrogant. It is chilling out a bit,
relaxing, calming down, that we crave.

Like anywhere else in the world where marijuana is banned
by law, however, Israelis don't purchase their gear in
air-conditioned supermarkets. Tel Aviv may be one of the
hippest cities around the Mediterranean, and it is open 24
hours, but it is not Amsterdam. One basically smokes what
one can get from that friend of a friend who knows a sort
of a dealer who knows a real dealer and the supply is
dependent on activity in neighbouring countries. So when
the Egyptian police raid the fields of northern Sinai and
demolish the livelihood of the nomad Bedouins there, there
will be a shortage of weed; when the border with Lebanon
is tense and heavily patrolled by the police, there will
be less hashish.

Such is the uncertainty of supply that the chances of a
pothead (or satlan, as they are known in Hebrew) halting
pre-inhalation to check the origins of the stash are as
ludicrous as the idea that an hour later, when succumbing
to a full-on attack of the munchies, he or she would
reject a bar of chocolate because its packaging was tested
on animals. No way, man.

It seems, at any rate, that if there is a drug-related
problem with Israel's recent invasion of Lebanon, it does
not have much to do with the hash coming in from Lebanon,
but with the fungi seemingly mushrooming around the
Cabinet buildings. Because only hallucinogens could have
invoked the notion that another "limited" invasion and air
blitz on Lebanon could solve Israel's problems with its
neighbours.