_______________________________
WEEKDAY PRESS PICKS FROM
THE ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
ELECTRONIC LEBANON
AND ELECTRONIC IRAQ
http://electronicIntifada.net
http://electronicIraq.net
http://electronicLebanon.net
_______________________________
Items For 24 July 2006
NEWS:
1) Israel shells Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon (AFP)
2) Lebanese town lays its loved ones, anonymous to rest (LA Times)
3) UN aid chief: destruction in Beirut "horrific" (BBC)
4) Family blasted on the road to safety (Guardian)
5) Palestinian refugees host Lebanese displaced by Israeli attack (AFP)
6) Flight of 700,000 refugees puts massive strain on Syria (Ind)
7) Patience and food run low in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon (IRIN)
8) U.S. speeds up bomb deliveries to Israel (NY Times)
9) Israel planned war on Lebanon more than a year ago (SF Chronicle)
10) Hizbullah using tough, Viet Cong-style tactics: Jane's (AFP)
11) Israel, allies acknowledge impossibility of defeating Hizbullah (WP)
12) Israeli soldiers use civilians as human shields in Gaza (B'Tselem)
13) Israel sends odious propagandist Peres to lie to Europeans (Reuters)
14) Bombs kill 64 Iraqis on Sunday alone (AFP)
ANALYSIS & VIEWS:
15) Israel's Catastrophe (Ali Abunimah/EI)
16) Another Act in the Mizrahi-Palestinian Tragedy (Abarjel/Lavie/EI)
17) Lies, Double Standards, and Culpable Fallacies (Raja Halwani/EI)
18) A new Middle East, or Rice's fantasy ride? (Rami Khouri/Daily Star)
19) Letting Lebanon Burn (Editorial/MERIP)
20) Britain stands alone with Israel and Bush (Independent)
21) Meanwhile, More Than 100 Iraqis Being Killed Each Day (Patrick Cockburn)
Ali Abunimah
**********************************************************
(1) Israel targets Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon: police
Agence France Presse
24 July 2006
TYRE, Lebanon, July 24 2006-- The Israeli military early
Monday hit the Rashidiyeh Palestinian refugee camp in
south Lebanon with artillery fire for the first time in
its offensive, wounding six people, Lebanese police said.
Five shells fell on the camp, police and Palestinian
sources said.
One of the wounded was a four-month-old baby while two
other seriously injured people were hospitalised in the
nearby city of Tyre.
One of the shells hit the house of the representative in
Lebanon of the Palestinian Fatah movement, Sultan Abul
Aynain.
"This bombardement will not prevent us from continuing our
aid to the Lebanese," he told AFP, confirming the attack
had taken place.
Lebanon houses 12 refugee camps which accommodate half of
the 380,000 Palestinians living in the country and have
now been opened to Lebanese fleeing the Israeli
bombardment.
**********************************************************
(2) Lebanese Town Lays Its Loved Ones, Anonymous to Rest
By Megan Stack
Los Angeles Times
22 July 2006
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-
tyre22jul22,1,4363659.story?coll=la-headlines-world&ctrack
=1&cset=true
TYRE, Lebanon -- They would bury their dead in mass
graves, the doctors decided.
The government hospital had run out of room for human
remains by Friday. More than 100 bomb-wrecked bodies were
already crammed into poorly refrigerated container trucks,
and more corpses were pouring in daily.
So they built cheap coffins of pine. Bulldozers carved
6-foot-deep trenches into a desolate lot littered with old
telephone poles.
The stench of death seeped into the warm seaside air as
the dead were brought out. Children pinched their noses;
the men's faces grew a little stonier. Men and boys
jostled on the streets and hoisted themselves up hospital
walls to better view the spectacle.
There was no opportunity for a more dignified burial: The
clashes between Israel and Hezbollah have been too fierce
for people to collect their loved ones or hold funerals.
"I've been a doctor for years, and I've never seen
anything like this," said Nabil Harkus, a slight man who
stood over a trio of unidentified corpses and spoke with
slow, intense rage.
"They can't fight Hezbollah because Hezbollah is not an
army," he said, referring to the Israeli warplanes
overhead. "They kill the people because they think it's
the only way to stop Hezbollah."
The Lebanese government has confirmed the deaths of about
350 people in the fighting, but rescue workers here warn
that the tally is probably much higher. Relentless
bombing has wrecked roads and rendered communication so
spotty that no one knows how many people have died.
Soubiha Abdullah rocked back and forth as she waited for
the bodies of her family to be pulled from a heap of
remains. The doctors had given her rubber gloves and a
surgical mask, which she wore over her head scarf.
She had come to identify and bury 24 members of her
family, including her sister and her sister's nine
children. They died trying to escape their village;
Israeli planes had attacked the road as they drove.
"I'm saying, 'God give me the strength to see them,' " she
said. "We just want to see them, even if they're pieces of
meat."
It was a crude burial carried out under a baking sun, but
even that was much better than most people felled in south
Lebanon's furious fighting could expect.
In the 75 villages surrounding Tyre, at least 180 people
have been killed, according to the district's Red Cross
office. The International Committee of the Red Cross says
those are only the ones it knows about and that there may
be more.
In the village of Srifa, just 10 minutes outside Tyre, 60
to 80 corpses remain trapped in the rubble of a building,
according to the Red Cross.
"There's no way to get them out," said Qasim Chaalan, a
Red Cross volunteer. "The firemen are afraid to go to that
area, and they're the ones with the equipment."
At least one Red Cross ambulance has been hit by an
Israeli missile, Chaalan said, and there have been
near-misses as well.
Rescue workers have decided that there's no point in
risking their necks to pick up a corpse.
"They'll take the risk if there's a wounded casualty," he
said, "but not if there's just a body."
In Tibnin, hard against the border with Israel, about
1,200 wounded have been rushed to a hospital that has no
doctor, said Stephane Sisco, a physician with the French
humanitarian group Doctors of the World. He sat in an army
office in Tyre on Friday, pleading for help getting to the
border.
His prospects didn't look good.
"Too many people are dying because we can't get to them
and give medicine. It's the same with food," Chaalan said.
"Most times the volunteers are just sitting by themselves
and just crying because they can't do anything for these
people."
Nearby, the mass burial was about to begin.
It was an oddly workmanlike event, largely lacking in the
outbursts of wailing and keening that often provide
catharsis at funerals. There was a hardness in the air,
perhaps brought forth by anger, exhaustion and a general
sense of dread.
The coffins were plain and thin, hammered together
overnight. They had been stacked tidily in the hospital
gardens, their lids off to one side. Some were short,
designed for children.
A man with a canister sprayed clouds of formaldehyde over
the empty pine boxes; the haze of chemicals caught in the
breeze and carried over the crowd. The mourners and
townspeople coughed and rubbed tears from reddened eyes.
Then the hospital workers opened the back doors of the
refrigerated truck full of bodies, and the ritual began: A
man in a surgical mask stood in the back of the truck. He
shouted out the name of each dead person as he lowered the
remains. Whole bodies had been shrouded in blankets,
wrapped in sheets of plastic and bound by duct tape.
Other bodies, more badly broken, were handed down in
plastic trash bags.
The man held aloft a baby so tiny it was unclear if it was
a late-term fetus or a newborn. Its skin was mottled and
purple.
"Look at this!" he shouted. A murmur passed through the
crowd. "Oh no, no, no," a man muttered. "God is great!"
shouted others.
Family members waiting in the crowd came forward to unwrap
their relatives from the plastic, line their coffins with
bedsheets and say goodbye. But most of the victims had no
relatives present; their coffin lids were nailed shut by
strangers.
A woman named Wafah Abdullah broke from the crowd around
the coffins and walked dizzily in a circle. "I just saw my
nephew," she said.
She wandered over to a flowering shrub, stood staring at
it for a moment and then walked some more. She flapped
her hands in front of her face as if she could push away
what she'd seen.
Then she spoke: "He was beautiful."
Bombs exploded in the distance; jet trails were visible
against the blue sky. On the ground, a woman dressed in
black sat by an empty coffin and sang a traditional
mourning song.
"Where are the young men?" she sang, and then sang it
again.
When the lids were hammered tight, men spray-painted
victims' names onto the coffins. Once the fighting
subsides, families will be able to reclaim their loved
ones from the mass grave.
They carried the coffins through the hospital gates and
then lined them up along the muddy road. The hospital is
in the middle of a Palestinian refugee camp. They would
bury 72 on Friday and leave the rest for another day.
Fresh graffiti on the wall read "72 martyrs."
Onlookers muttering curses against Israel and America
milled around the stairs and shop doors of the refugee
camp, which were covered with old pictures of Yasser
Arafat, the late Palestinian Authority president.
The sun was hot, the flies thick and the crowds
persistent. Sunni and Shiite Muslim clerics prayed over
the dead.
The Lebanese army sent trucks to collect the coffins and
soldiers to serve as pallbearers. Four soldiers hoisted
each coffin; they stacked them in the backs of the trucks.
The streets held the unnatural quiet that settles
uncomfortably over a crowd awed by death.
By the time the green army trucks made their way to the
vacant lot, shadows had grown long.
As the coffins lined the trenches, a man with white hair
began to yell.
"This is what Bush wants! This is what this dog wants!" he
cried. "It's full of children!"
An elderly woman in black perched at the edge of the
grave. "My darling Mariam, my only daughter," she moaned.
"Twenty-seven years old, my darling, 27 years old."
It was a singsong of grief. People stood by silently. In
the town, fresh smoke rose into the sky. Another bomb had
fallen.
**********************************************************
(3) UN appalled by Beirut devastation
BBC News
23 July 2006
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/5207478.
stm
The UN's Jan Egeland has condemned the devastation caused
by Israeli air strikes in Beirut, saying it is a violation
of humanitarian law.
Mr Egeland, the UN's emergency relief chief, described the
destruction as "horrific" as he toured the city.
He arrived hours after another Israeli strike on Beirut.
Israel also hit Sidon, a port city in the south crammed
with refugees, for the first time.
In Haifa, two people were killed amid a volley of rockets
on the Israeli city.
Fifteen people are reported injured by the rockets,
launched by Hezbollah militants over the border with
Lebanon.
The BBC News website's Raffi Berg visited the scene of one
of the rocket attacks in northern Haifa.
He says the rocket exploded next to a carriageway, raking
passing cars with shrapnel and ball bearings and killing a
man in a nearby vehicle.
'Block after block'
Mr Egeland arrived in southern Beirut on Sunday just hours
after Israeli strikes on the Hezbollah stronghold.
A visibly moved Mr Egeland expressed shock that "block
after block" of buildings had been levelled.
He said the "disproportionate response" by Israel was a
"violation of international humanitarian law".
He appealed for both sides to halt attacks and said UN
supplies of humanitarian aid would begin to arrive in the
next few days.
"But we need safe access," he said. "So far Israel is not
giving us access."
Israel has said it will lift its blockade on Beirut's port
to allow aid through, but with roads, bridges and trucks
among Israel's targets, transporting it around the country
is difficult.
UK Foreign Minister Kim Howells is due to meet Israeli
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. A day after accusing Israel
of targeting "the entire Lebanese nation", he said the
British government understood Israel's need to defend
itself and criticised Hezbollah for hiding weapons in
civilian areas.
The US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is due to leave
for the Middle East later on Sunday.
Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz said Israel supports
the idea of an international peacekeeping force in south
Lebanon, and suggested it should be led by Nato.
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Israel had
"pushed the button for its own destruction".
Syria's information minister said his country would enter
the conflict if a major Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon
threatened the security of Damascus.
An unarmed UN observer was seriously wounded by small arms
fire - thought to be from Hezbollah - at a UN position in
the village of Maroun al-Ras, which Israeli said it had
taken control of on Saturday. Sidon targeted
Israel's bombing campaign continued, with strikes on
Beirut and on southern and eastern Lebanon in the early
hours of Sunday.
The Associated Press news agency reported at least eight
deaths on Sunday - an eight-year-old boy, a Lebanese
photographer, three civilians fleeing in a minibus, and
three Hezbollah fighters. One target was the southern port
of Sidon, a city not previously targeted by Israel, where
42,000 refugees from the surrounding area have flooded in
the hope of safety.
The BBC's Roger Hearing in the city reports that a mosque
was destroyed in one strike, which hit less than 500m (550
yards) from a hospital. At least four people were injured.
While Israel said the mosque was a meeting place for
Hezbollah militants, local doctors insisted it was just "a
place for prayers".
Bombing intensifies
The BBC's Jim Muir in the southern city of Tyre says there
has also been intense bombardment there, striking at least
nine civilian vehicles. Some were hit within sight of
hospitals where they were trying to take injured people,
he says.
Further east, engineers trying to mend impassable roads to
allow a UN-escorted aid convoy also came under fire, our
correspondent reports.
He says that bombing has intensified in the region since
Israel dropped warning leaflets on Friday, and the
Israelis are now shooting at almost anything on moving on
the roads.
More than 350 Lebanese have been killed in the 11 days of
violence, many of them civilians, and angry protests
condemning Israeli attacks have been held in cities around
the world.
At least 36 Israelis have been killed, including 17
civilians killed by rockets fired by Hezbollah into
Israel.
**********************************************************
(4) Blasted by a missile on the road to safety; Family ordered
to flee were targeted because they were driving minivan
Suzanne Goldenberg in Kafra, Lebanon
The Guardian
24 July 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/story/0,,1827422,00.html
The ambulanceman gave Ali the job of keeping his mother
alive. The 12-year-old did what he could. "Mama, mama,
don't go to sleep," he sobbed, gently patting her face
beneath her chin. Behind her black veil, her eyelids were
slowly sinking. "I'm going to die," she sighed. "Don't say
that, mama," Ali begged, and then slid to the ground in
tears.
On the pavement around mother and son were the other
members of the Sha'ita family, their faces spattered with
each other's blood. All were in varying shades of shock
and injury. A tourniquet was tied on Ali's mother's arm. A
few metres away, his aunt lay motionless, the white
T-shirt beneath her abaya stained red. Two sisters hugged
each other and wept, oblivious to the medics tending their
wounds. "Let them take me, let them take me," one
screamed.
Their mother was placed on a stretcher, and lifted into
the ambulance. "God is with you, mama," Ali said. She
reached up with her good arm to caress his face.
The Sha'itas had thought they were on the road to safety
when they set out yesterday, leaving behind a village
which because of an accident of geography - it is five
miles from the Israeli border - had seemed to make their
home a killing ground. They had been ordered to evacuate
by the Israelis.
But they were a little too slow and became separated from
the other vehicles fleeing the Israeli air offensive in
south Lebanon. Minutes before the Guardian's car arrived,
trailing a Red Cross ambulance on its way to other
civilian wounded in another town, an Israeli missile
pierced the roof of the Sha'itas' white van. Three
passengers sitting in the third row were killed instantly,
including Ali's grandmother. Sixteen other passengers were
wounded. In recent days, families like the Sha'itas are
bearing the brunt of Israel's air campaign and its efforts
to rid the area of civilians before ground operations. A
day after Israel's deadline for people to leave their
homes and flee north of the Litani river, roads which in
ordinary times wind lazily through tobacco fields and
banana groves have been turned into highways of death.
Plumes of smoke rise in the distance, and the road in
front of us offers up signs of closer peril: car wrecks,
still smoking after Israeli strikes, and abandoned
vehicles with shattered rear windows. Some were direct
hits by Israeli aircraft. Others were drivers who had lost
control. Overhead is the menacing roar of Israeli
warplanes and the buzz of drones tracking every movement.
With bridges on the main coastal roads severed by Israeli
air strikes, and secondary mountain routes scarred by
craters, the means of escape for Lebanese trying to follow
Israel's orders are limited. "All the smaller roads
leading to the coastal roads are destroyed," said a
spokesman for the UN in the border town of Naqoura. "In
some areas you have people pushing cars by hand through
obstacles made by a rocket or a bomb." By yesterday
afternoon, for many villagers, there was truly no way out.
Death came crashing into the Sha'ita family soon after
10am, in the form of an Israeli anti-tank missile,
seemingly fired from an Israeli helicopter high overhead,
in Kafra, about nine miles from their home. Those
passengers who were not killed or injured by shards of
burning metal were hurt when the van plunged into the side
of a hill.
In their village of et-Tiri, the Sha'itas were an extended
clan of 54 people. Between them they had three cars. When
the Israeli evacuation order came, in leaflets shot out of
aircraft, the family planned at first to stay. "We were at
home living our lives," said Musbah Sha'ita, Ali's uncle.
By 7pm on Saturday night, the deadline set by Israel for
people in about a dozen villages in south Lebanon to
leave, the Sha'itas were close to panic. "Whoever could
run was running," said Mr Sha'ita. "I pushed them to go."
One of their fleeing neighbours said he would send
transport for them, and the next morning all 54 of the
Sha'itas set out in a convoy of three white minivans. That
choice of transport proved a fatal mistake.
In their leaflet campaign, the Israelis have warned
repeatedly they would consider minivans, trucks and
motorcyles as targets. "The minivans are a target for
Israel because they can take Katyusha rockets for
Hizbullah, so they do not contemplate too long," the UN
official said. "They just shoot it."
Dozens of others have met a similar fate as Israeli F-16
jet fighters and attack helicopters intensify a campaign
meant to cut off the supply of Hizbullah rockets, and the
movement of its fighters.
But Israel's offensive is being felt across a much wider
swath of south Lebanon. The Lebanese Red Cross in Tyre
said 10 cars carrying civilians and three or four
motorcycles had been hit by Israeli missiles yesterday.
Red Cross ambulances were no safer; a spokesman said an
ambulance had narrowly escaped a missile near the village
of el-Qlaile, south of the city. A number of the dead,
including the three members of the Sha'ita family,
remained trapped in their cars because it was too
dangerous to retrieve their bodies.
In Tyre, south Lebanon's main town and a stopping point on
the flight to the north, the hospital received a steady
flow of injured. By late afternoon there were three dead
and 41 injured, two critically."They are bombing them all
in their cars," said Ahmed Mrowe, the director of Jabal
al-Amal hospital.
Those who choose not to flee - the UN estimates that
35%-40% of villagers are too poor or too frail to make the
journey - are being left stranded.
That was the predicament facing the Sha'itas when Musbah
Sha'ita urged them to flee. In a car on the way to the
hospital, his ear was welded to his phone, trying to find
out where his wounded relatives were, and he could not
stop blaming himself.
"We put a white flag. We were doing what Israel told us to
do," he says. "What more do they want of us?"
**********************************************************
(5) Palestinian refugees host Lebanese displaced by Israeli raids
By Muntasser Abdallah
Agence France Presse
26 July 2006
SIDON, Lebanon, July 22 2006--Despite meager resources,
the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain el-Helweh, once wiped
out during the 1982 Israeli invasion, opened its doors
Saturday to local villagers escaping Israel's return to
Lebanon.
Calls were raised from mosque minarets across the
shantytown, urging refugees to welcome the southern
villagers fleeing their homes under Israeli bombardments
and threats of a full-scale invasion from the south.
Refugees at Ain el-Helweh, Lebanon's largest Palestinian
camp with 45,000 residents, have offered mattresses,
blankets and food to the villagers.
Ain el-Helweh was totally destroyed by two weeks of
bombings during the Israeli invasion of 1982. While the
men were detained, the camp was mostly rebuilt by women
and youngsters who had refused to sleep in tents.
"Since Friday, we have received 110 families in Ain
el-Helweh and 70 others in the nearby refugee camp of)
Mieh Mieh. There are about 1,000 people, mostly women and
children," said Abu Tarek, an official of a Palestine
Liberation Organisation committee.
Further south near Tyre, the three Palestinian refugee
camps of Rashidiyeh, Al-Bass and Burj al-Shemali have also
started to distribute bread, flour and other basic
necessities to displaced Lebanese.
Abdel Rahman Bizri, head of the municipality in the nearby
port city of Sidon, told AFP that the number of displaced
people in Sidon had risen to at least 30,000.
"Part of the problem was resolved when the Palestinian
refugee camps in Sidon received the displaced people of
the south," he said. "They opened their schools to receive
them and made dispensaries available for them."
More than 400,000 Palestinian refugees are registered in
Lebanon. Half of them live in miserable conditions at 12
camps scattered across the country.
In front of a school in Ain el-Helweh, a 50-year-old woman
was stirring a soup in a giant pot boiling over a gas
heater.
"I volunteered with two neighbors to make dinner. We are
refugees and we know the pain of being exiled, we are
trying to ease their ordeal," said Um Mahmud Awad, whose
parents were forced to leave their village of Hittin in
the north of what was then Palestine in 1948.
Her grandson, Mohammed, 10, invited displaced Lebanese
children to play with his toys at his small house.
At the rundown camp school, Abdallah Mahmud Sakiki sits
with his wife and five children, including a newborn, as
well as another family in a small classroom.
"We stayed 10 days under the bombardments, without water,
electricity and just a bit of bread and thyme. But since
yesterday, the situation became unbearable, I do not know
who died and who survived in my village of Ain Baal,"
south of Tyre, said the 35-year-old.
When he reached Sidon, he could not find a place at the
centers for the displaced so he decided to head to the
camp.
Hiam Sakiki, 23, had to carry her mother on her back
before finding a truck that transported them to the camp
near Sidon.
"We sought refuge at the Palestinian refugee camp because
our fate is similar," she said.
**********************************************************
(6) Flight of 700,000 refugees puts massive strain on Syria
By Paul Cochrane in Damascus
The Independent
23 July 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/
article1191945.ece
With nearly 370 killed and 700,000 Lebanese displaced
following Israel's 12-day bombardment of Lebanon, tens of
thousands of people are trying to flee across the border
to Syria. Lebanon's border crossings with Syria to the
north and east have been inundated with people, with up to
a million Lebanese seeking refuge, according to state-run
Syria TV. The Lebanese government and the United Nations
yesterday warned that there is an impending humanitarian
crisis in Lebanon.
The exodus is putting a serious strain on Syria, which has
300,000 Palestinian refugees and over 450,000 Iraqis who
fled Iraq after the US-led invasion in 2003. With hotels
full in Damascus, people are staying in orphanages,
schools and university dormitories, or travelling to
neighbouring Jordan, or to other Syrian cities. Flights
out of Syria are booked up for at least five days, despite
airlines increasing the number of outward flights.
At the eastern border, the Red Crescent welcomed vehicles
packed with people and belongings with bottled water, food
and medical assistance.
"We have had people come to us with burns, broken bones
and other wounds from the bombings," said a
representative.
The usual one-and-a-half-hour trip to the border from
Beirut is taking up to nine hours, said one bus driver,
who, like his colleagues, is having to negotiate difficult
mountain roads and use shortwave radios to relay the
safety of certain routes. After dropping off passengers at
the border, public buses return to Lebanon. Two empty
buses returning to the Lebanese capital were bombed on
Friday in the Bekaa valley.
People entering Syria showed mixed feelings, relief at
being safe and utter sadness. German-Iranian businessman
Mohamed Reza was shaking every time he raised a bottle of
water to his mouth. A bomb had landed 200m from him. "I
wasn't fearful there, but I am now," he said. "The
Israelis will destroy the country."
**********************************************************
(7) Patience and food running low in Palestinian refugee camps
in Lebanon
IRIN
23 July 2006
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5186.shtml
BEIRUT -- From the roof of his crumbling house, Mahmoud
Kallam has a clear view across the slums of south Beirut
where Palestinian children play football in streets lined
with rotting bones and discarded clothes.
As he looks, columns of brown smoke from Israeli air
strikes rise into the sky. "My children are asleep now
because they spent all night watching the missile attacks.
They have started playing a game of who can spot the drone
first," says Kallam, a Palestinian researcher and
life-long resident of the Shatila Camp.
Shatila is one of dozens of camps where over half
Lebanon's estimated 400,000 Palestinian refugees live in
squalid, cramped conditions. The camps are fully built up
with concrete buildings and infrastructure, albeit in a
deteriorating state.
Shopkeepers in Shatila say they have been unable to bring
in fresh supplies of food since Israeli air strikes began
targeting suspected Hizbullah strongholds in the south of
Beirut, on 12 July. Most of the bakeries that supplied
bread to the camp have closed since the conflict started.
"Ninety percent of our goods came from the southern
suburbs," says refugee Khaled Yousef, sitting in his small
store in the labyrinthine streets of Shatila. "Many women
and children have left the camp and now I'm just selling
what I have left."
Behind him, shelves are sparsely furnished with bottles of
olive oil, tinned food and kitchen cleaner, while the
fridge at the front of the shop - once filled with
yoghurt, milk and fresh meat - lies empty. On the streets
outside, the voice of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of
Hizbullah, blares out through old speakers.
Richard Cook of the UN's Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) says
UNRWA completed its three-monthly delivery of food aid to
the poorest Palestinian families in Shatila before the
attacks. The priority, he says, is to get aid to
Palestinian camps around Lebanon's southern port city of
Tyre, which has been heavily bombed.
"We still have no guarantee of a safe passage, and so at
the moment we cannot risk the lives of staff," Cook says.
"The camps in Tyre did not receive the three-monthly
delivery and have been cut off for many days."
In Shatila, rubbish has not been collected in over a week,
say residents, who have begun a local campaign to remove
the waste themselves. Others have begun burning growing
piles of food waste openly in the streets, producing acrid
smoke.
Cook says rubbish collection by UNRWA is continuing,
though waste remains piled up on the edge of the camp
because Sukleen, a Lebanese waste disposal firm, has
stopped collecting it for now.
Residents also say clinics are closing earlier than usual,
some having only been open for a couple of hours. Early on
Friday morning, Kallam says he witnessed an Israeli
missile hit a car just past the east end of the Shatila
camp. It was over an hour before an ambulance arrived to
help the wounded driver.
"How do the Israelis expect peace when we are raising our
children under the sound of explosions?" he asks. "My
five-year-old son has a bullet case he found on the street
and insists on carrying it around with him."
Many in Shatila remember the slaughter 24 years ago of
Palestinians in the camp by Phalangists, a right-wing
Christian militia allegedly allied to the Israelis during
Israel's occupation of Beirut in 1982. Photographs of dead
bodies are displayed at the camp entrance.
A development worker says the current Israeli attacks in
areas around Palestinian camps could radicalise youngsters
here. "The Palestinians should have had their living
conditions in Lebanon improved a long time ago but they
have always just been pawns in a political game," says
Annie Kanafani, Vice Chairperson of the Ghassan Kanafani
Cultural Foundation (GKCF).
Since 1974, the GKCF has run kindergartens and art centres
that thousands of Palestinian children in the camps have
benefited from. Among young people IRIN spoke to, there is
universal agreement that Hizbullah's current conflict with
Israel is also a Palestinian conflict.
"No government has done anything to face Israel," says
Rabih Zaarour, as he e-mailed friends inbetween power
cuts. "Hizbullah is now the only choice for resisting
Israel, and as ours is a war of existence, we will take
every occasion to fight for it."
For Kallam, the priority throughout remains his children's
welfare: "This is hell. I am a human like you and I like
life as you do. I want my children to be able to play
football on green grass and watch cartoons. Is it normal
for children to spend a night outside watching shelling?"
This item comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian news
and information service, but may not necessarily reflect
the views of the United Nations or its agencies. All IRIN
material may be reposted or reprinted free-of-charge;
refer to the copyright page for conditions of use. IRIN is
a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs.
**********************************************************
(8) U.S. Speeds Up Bomb Delivery for the Israelis
By DAVID S. CLOUD and HELENE COOPER
The New York Times
22 July 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/world/middleeast/
22military.html
WASHINGTON, July 21 -- The Bush administration is rushing
a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which
requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning
its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon,
American officials said Friday.
The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was
made with relatively little debate within the Bush
administration, the officials said. Its disclosure
threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of
the appearance that the United States is actively aiding
the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be
compared to Iran's efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah.
The munitions that the United States is sending to Israel
are part of a multimillion-dollar arms sale package
approved last year that Israel is able to draw on as
needed, the officials said. But Israel's request for
expedited delivery of the satellite and laser-guided bombs
was described as unusual by some military officers, and as
an indication that Israel still had a long list of targets
in Lebanon to strike.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday that she
would head to Israel on Sunday at the beginning of a round
of Middle Eastern diplomacy. The original plan was to
include a stop to Cairo in her travels, but she did not
announce any stops in Arab capitals.
Instead, the meeting of Arab and European envoys planned
for Cairo will take place in Italy, Western diplomats
said. While Arab governments initially criticized
Hezbollah for starting the fight with Israel in Lebanon,
discontent is rising in Arab countries over the number of
civilian casualties in Lebanon, and the governments have
become wary of playing host to Ms. Rice until a cease-fire
package is put together.
To hold the meetings in an Arab capital before a
diplomatic solution is reached, said Martin S. Indyk, a
former American ambassador to Israel, "would have
identified the Arabs as the primary partner of the United
States in this project at a time where Hezbollah is
accusing the Arab leaders of providing cover for the
continuation of Israel's military operation."
The decision to stay away from Arab countries for now is a
markedly different strategy from the shuttle diplomacy
that previous administrations used to mediate in the
Middle East. "I have no interest in diplomacy for the sake
of returning Lebanon and Israel to the status quo ante,"
Ms. Rice said Friday. "I could have gotten on a plane and
rushed over and started shuttling around, and it wouldn't
have been clear what I was shuttling to do."
Before Ms. Rice heads to Israel on Sunday, she will join
President Bush at the White House for discussions on the
Middle East crisis with two Saudi envoys, Saud al-Faisal,
the foreign minister, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the
secretary general of the National Security Council.
The new American arms shipment to Israel has not been
announced publicly, and the officials who described the
administration's decision to rush the munitions to Israel
would discuss it only after being promised anonymity. The
officials included employees of two government agencies,
and one described the shipment as just one example of a
broad array of armaments that the United States has long
provided Israel.
One American official said the shipment should not be
compared to the kind of an "emergency resupply" of
dwindling Israeli stockpiles that was provided during the
1973 Arab-Israeli war, when an American military airlift
helped Israel recover from early Arab victories.
David Siegel, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in
Washington, said: "We have been using precision-guided
munitions in order to neutralize the military capabilities
of Hezbollah and to minimize harm to civilians. As a rule,
however, we do not comment on Israel's defense
acquisitions."
Israel's need for precision munitions is driven in part by
its strategy in Lebanon, which includes destroying
hardened underground bunkers where Hezbollah leaders are
said to have taken refuge, as well as missile sites and
other targets that would be hard to hit without laser and
satellite-guided bombs.
Pentagon and military officials declined to describe in
detail the size and contents of the shipment to Israel,
and they would not say whether the munitions were being
shipped by cargo aircraft or some other means. But an
arms-sale package approved last year provides authority
for Israel to purchase from the United States as many as
100 GBU-28's, which are 5,000-pound laser-guided bombs
intended to destroy concrete bunkers. The package also
provides for selling satellite-guided munitions.
An announcement in 2005 that Israel was eligible to buy
the "bunker buster" weapons described the GBU-28 as "a
special weapon that was developed for penetrating hardened
command centers located deep underground." The document
added, "The Israeli Air Force will use these GBU-28's on
their F-15 aircraft."
American officials said that once a weapons purchase is
approved, it is up to the buyer nation to set up a
timetable. But one American official said normal
procedures usually do not include rushing deliveries
within days of a request. That was done because Israel is
a close ally in the midst of hostilities, the official
said.
Although Israel had some precision guided bombs in its
stockpile when the campaign in Lebanon began, the Israelis
may not have taken delivery of all the weapons they were
entitled to under the 2005 sale.
Israel said its air force had dropped 23 tons of
explosives Wednesday night alone in Beirut, in an effort
to penetrate what was believed to be a bunker used by
senior Hezbollah officials.
A senior Israeli official said Friday that the attacks to
date had degraded Hezbollah's military strength by roughly
half, but that the campaign could go on for two more weeks
or longer. "We will stay heavily with the air campaign,"
he said. "There's no time limit. We will end when we
achieve our goals."
The Bush administration announced Thursday a military
equipment sale to Saudi Arabia, worth more than $6
billion, a move that may in part have been aimed at
deflecting inevitable Arab government anger at the
decision to supply Israel with munitions in the event that
effort became public.
On Friday, Bush administration officials laid out their
plans for the diplomatic strategy that Ms. Rice will
pursue. In Rome, the United States will try to hammer out
a diplomatic package that will offer Lebanon incentives
under the condition that a United Nations resolution,
which calls for the disarming of Hezbollah, is
implemented.
Diplomats will also try to figure out the details around
an eventual international peacekeeping force, and which
countries will contribute to it. Germany and Russia have
both indicated that they would be willing to contribute
forces; Ms. Rice said the United States was unlikely to.
Implicit in the eventual diplomatic package is a
cease-fire. But a senior American official said it
remained unclear whether, under such a plan, Hezbollah
would be asked to retreat from southern Lebanon and commit
to a cease-fire, or whether American diplomats might
depend on Israel's continued bombardment to make
Hezbollah's acquiescence irrelevant.
Daniel Ayalon, Israel's ambassador to Washington, said
that Israel would not rule out an international force to
police the borders of Lebanon and Syria and to patrol
southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah has had a stronghold.
But he said that Israel was first determined to take out
Hezbollah's command and control centers and weapons
stockpiles.
Thom Shanker contributed reporting for this article.
**********************************************************
(9) Israel set war plan more than a year ago
Strategy was put in motion as Hezbollah began gaining
military strength in Lebanon
By Matthew Kalman
San Francisco Chronicle
21 July 2006
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/07/21/MNG2QK396D1.DTL
(07-21) 04:00 PDT Jerusalem -- Israel's military response
by air, land and sea to what it considered a provocation
last week by Hezbollah militants is unfolding according to
a plan finalized more than a year ago.
In the six years since Israel ended its military
occupation of southern Lebanon, it watched warily as
Hezbollah built up its military presence in the region.
When Hezbollah militants kidnapped two Israeli soldiers
last week, the Israeli military was ready to react almost
instantly.
"Of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for
which Israel was most prepared," said Gerald Steinberg,
professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University. "In
a sense, the preparation began in May 2000, immediately
after the Israeli withdrawal, when it became clear the
international community was not going to prevent Hezbollah
from stockpiling missiles and attacking Israel. By 2004,
the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks
that we're seeing now had already been blocked out and, in
the last year or two, it's been simulated and rehearsed
across the board."
More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began
giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record
basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think
tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in
revealing detail. Under the ground rules of the briefings,
the officer could not be identified.
In his talks, the officer described a three-week campaign:
The first week concentrated on destroying Hezbollah's
heavier long-range missiles, bombing its
command-and-control centers, and disrupting transportation
and communication arteries. In the second week, the focus
shifted to attacks on individual sites of rocket launchers
or weapons stores. In the third week, ground forces in
large numbers would be introduced, but only in order to
knock out targets discovered during reconnaissance
missions as the campaign unfolded. There was no plan,
according to this scenario, to reoccupy southern Lebanon
on a long-term basis.
Israeli officials say their pinpoint commando raids should
not be confused with a ground invasion. Nor, they say, do
they herald another occupation of southern Lebanon, which
Israel maintained from 1982 to 2000 -- in order, it said,
to thwart Hezbollah attacks on Israel. Planners
anticipated the likelihood of civilian deaths on both
sides. Israel says Hezbollah intentionally bases some of
its operations in residential areas. And Hezbollah's
leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has bragged publicly that the
group's arsenal included rockets capable of bombing Haifa,
as occurred last week.
Like all plans, the one now unfolding also has been shaped
by changing circumstances, said Eran Lerman, a former
colonel in Israeli military intelligence who is now
director of the Jerusalem office of the American Jewish
Committee.
"There are two radical views of how to deal with this
challenge, a serious professional debate within the
military community over which way to go," said Lerman.
"One is the air power school of thought, the other is the
land-borne option. They create different dynamics and
different timetables. The crucial factor is that the air
force concept is very methodical and almost by definition
is slower to get results. A ground invasion that sweeps
Hezbollah in front of you is quicker, but at a much higher
cost in human life and requiring the creation of a
presence on the ground."
The advance scenario is now in its second week, and its
success or failure is still unfolding. Whether Israel's
aerial strikes will be enough to achieve the threefold aim
of the campaign -- to remove the Hezbollah military
threat; to evict Hezbollah from the border area, allowing
the deployment of Lebanese government troops; and to
ensure the safe return of the two Israeli soldiers
abducted last week -- remains an open question. Israelis
are opposed to the thought of reoccupying Lebanon.
"I have the feeling that the end is not clear here. I have
no idea how this movie is going to end," said Daniel
Ben-Simon, a military analyst for the daily Haaretz
newspaper.
Thursday's clashes in southern Lebanon occurred near an
outpost abandoned more than six years ago by the
retreating Israeli army. The place was identified using
satellite photographs of a Hezbollah bunker, but only from
the ground was Israel able to discover that it served as
the entrance to a previously unknown underground network
of caves and bunkers stuffed with missiles aimed at
northern Israel, said Israeli army spokesman Miri Regev.
"We knew about the network, but it was fully revealed
(Wednesday) by the ground operation of our forces," said
Regev. "This is one of the purposes of the pinpoint ground
operations -- to locate and try to destroy the terrorist
infrastructure from where they can fire at Israeli
citizens."
Israeli military officials say as much as 50 percent of
Hezbollah's missile capability has been destroyed, mainly
by aerial attacks on targets identified from intelligence
reports. But missiles continue to be fired at towns and
cities across northern Israel.
"We were not surprised that the firing has continued,"
said Tzachi Hanegbi, chairman of the Knesset Foreign
Affairs and Defense Committee. "Hezbollah separated its
leadership command-and-control system from its field
organization. It created a network of tiny cells in each
village that had no operational mission except to wait for
the moment when they should activate the Katyusha rocket
launchers hidden in local houses, using coordinates
programmed long ago to hit Nahariya or Kiryat Shemona, or
the kibbutzim and villages."
"From the start of this operation, we have also been
active on the ground across the width of Lebanon," said
Brig. Gen. Ron Friedman, head of Northern Command
headquarters. "These missions are designed to support our
current actions. Unfortunately, one of the many missions
which we have carried out in recent days met with slightly
fiercer resistance."
Israel didn't need sophisticated intelligence to discover
the huge buildup of Iranian weapons supplies to Hezbollah
by way of Syria, because Hezbollah's patrons boasted about
it openly in the pages of the Arabic press. As recently as
June 16, less than four weeks before the Hezbollah border
raid that sparked the current crisis, the Syrian defense
minister publicly announced the extension of existing
agreements allowing the passage of trucks shipping Iranian
weapons into Lebanon.
But to destroy them, Israel needed to map the location of
each missile.
"We need a lot of patience," said Hanegbi. "The (Israeli
Defense Forces) action at the moment is incapable of
finding the very last Katyusha, or the last rocket
launcher primed for use hidden inside a house in some
village."
Moshe Marzuk, a former head of the Lebanon desk for
Israeli Military Intelligence who now is a researcher at
the Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, said
Israel had learned from past conflicts in Lebanon, the
West Bank and Gaza -- as well as the recent U.S.
experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq -- that a traditional
military campaign would be counter-effective.
"A big invasion is not suitable here," said Marzuk. "We
are not fighting an army, but guerrillas. It would be a
mistake to enter and expose ourselves to fighters who will
hide, fire off a missile and run away. If we are to be on
the ground at all, we need to use commandos and special
forces."
**********************************************************
(10) Hezbollah using Viet Cong-style tactics: mag
Agence France Presse
21 July 2006
http://www.dawn.com/2006/07/22/int5.htm
LONDON (AFP) July 21: Hezbollah is proving a tough
opponent for Israel because of its Viet Cong-style network
of tunnels in southern Lebanon, the authoritative Jane's
Defence Weekly magazine said on Friday.
The militia has launched hundreds of rockets on towns in
northern Israel and is seemingly still capable to carry on
with the rocket strikes despite a punishing bombardment by
the Jewish state, Jane's said.
The Israel Defence Force (IDF) has acknowledged that the
number of Hezbollah casualties is low, estimated at no
more than several dozen out of the nearly 350 killed in
Lebanon since the bombing started, the magazine said.
After more than 3,000 air raids against targets in
Lebanon, according to a Jane's tally, the IDF ground units
have now begun operating north of the Lebanese border,
seeking to destroy Hezbollah's first line of defence.
Alon Ben-David, a Jane's Defence Weekly correspondent,
said that intensive Israeli air raids had done limited
damage to Hezbollah's defensive fortifications, despite
IDF special forces launching small incursions into
Lebanese territory.
"The Israeli forces have discovered that Hezbollah has
established a Viet Cong-style network of tunnels and
trenches close to the Israeli border, providing shelter
for its operatives and their weapons," said Ben-David.
"The IDF is meeting a fierce resistance from Hezbollah and
have suffered a considerable number of casualties in the
fighting."
Viet Cong resistance fighters fought from a giant tunnel
network during the Vietnam war, which ended in 1975.
Jane's said that Israel wanted to avoid a ground operation
in Lebanon, though a growing number of IDF commanders were
advocating that only a major offensive could bring about
the collapse of Hezbollah as a fighting force.--AFP
**********************************************************
(11) Israel Will Accept a Disarmed Hezbollah Envoy Talks of
Future As a 'Political Group'
By Robin Wright
The Washington Post
23 July 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/
07/22/AR2006072200906.html
The United States, Israel, the United Nations and the
European Union have reluctantly concluded that despite
punishing military attacks, Hezbollah is likely to survive
as a political player in Lebanon, and Israel now says it
is willing to accept the organization if it sheds its
military wing and abandons extremism, according to several
key officials.
"To the extent that it remains a political group, it will
be acceptable to Israel," Israeli Ambassador Daniel Ayalon
said yesterday in the strongest sign to date that the
Israelis are rethinking the scope and ultimate goals of
the campaign. "A political group means a party that is
engaged in the political system in Lebanon, but without
terrorism capabilities and fighting capabilities. That
will be acceptable to Israel."
In a bid to contain Hezbollah, the United States is hoping
to persuade Arab allies over the next week -- Saudi Arabia
in talks today and Egypt and Jordan at an emergency
meeting Wednesday in Rome -- to get Syria to stop arming,
funding and facilitating Hezbollah's military operations,
U.S. officials said.
Because Syria is also the physical conduit for all Iranian
arms and personnel bound for Lebanon, the regime of
President Bashar al-Assad could be pivotal to helping end
the current hostilities and ensuring that Hezbollah's
options are limited afterward.
The Bush administration's task is all the more difficult
because of the state of its relations with Syria.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice does not plan to hold
talks with Syria, include it in the emergency Rome meeting
or travel to Damascus.
To end the bloody 16-day conflict between Israel and
Hezbollah in 1996, then-Secretary of State Warren
Christopher shuttled for a week between Damascus and
Jerusalem to produce a written agreement that lasted until
this month. Today, relations are so chilly that the U.S.
ambassador to Syria, Margaret Scobey, who was recalled
last year, has been reassigned to Baghdad and will not
return to Damascus.
In the long term, the United States and Israel hope that
Hezbollah is discredited or marginalized politically, too;
Lebanon and the Arab world hold it responsible for the
July 12 cross-border raid and kidnappings of two soldiers
that sparked the punishing Israeli response and widespread
destruction, officials say.
Pressure has been mounting on Hezbollah's leadership.
Israel has specifically targeted Secretary General Hasan
Nasrallah as well as the group's headquarters and
political offices. The international community has blamed
Hezbollah for starting the crisis. And the Lebanese
government has demanded that it disarm.
But Israeli, U.S., U.N. and European officials say they do
not envision a solution in which Hezbollah is eliminated.
Initial U.S., Israeli and U.N. assessments have concluded
that Hezbollah's popularity among Lebanese Shiites is
likely to remain significant -- and no one but the Shiites
will be able to challenge its status, according to U.S.
and U.N. officials.
"Whatever damage Israel's operation may be doing to
Hezbollah's military capabilities, they are doing little
or nothing to decrease popular support for Hezbollah in
Lebanon or the region," U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan
told the Security Council on Thursday.
U.S. experts say Hezbollah's standing may even grow. "Just
because many tens of thousands of Shiite Muslims may be
living in tents does not mean that they are going to
emerge from this war as a diminished political force in
Lebanon. I expect the contrary to be true," said Augustus
R. Norton, a former member of the U.N. force in Lebanon
who now teaches at Boston University.
Hezbollah's future is a contentious issue within the Bush
administration. Rice lashed out at the group Friday for
violating "every conceivable international norm," as well
as several U.N. resolutions, and for ignoring the Lebanese
government. "You cannot have people with one foot in
politics and one foot in terror," Rice told reporters.
Hezbollah is on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations,
but the group, whose name means "party of God," has been
elected to parliament in four democratic elections since
1992 and would be hard to squeeze out of Lebanon's complex
political system, U.S. officials say. All 17 recognized
sects are guaranteed a percentage of seats in parliament
and government jobs.
"Ultimately, the question of Hezbollah has to be dealt
with politically," a senior U.S. official said, speaking
anonymously because of the new diplomatic effort. "If it
disarms and abandons terrorism, it's fundamentally a
different group."
"If we get rid of the missiles, then we have solved the
problem of Israel," a senior European official said, "and
Hezbollah will continue to exist as a political force."
**********************************************************
(12) Israeli soldiers use civilians as human shields in Beit
Hanun
B'Tselem
21 July 2006
http://www.btselem.org/english/Human_Shields/
20060720_Human_Shields_in_Beit_Hanun.asp
B'Tselem's initial investigation indicates that, during an
incursion by Israeli forces into Beit Hanun, in the
northern Gaza Strip, on 17 July 2006, soldiers seized
control of two buildings in the town and used residents as
human shields.
After seizing control of the buildings, the soldiers held
six residents, two of them minors, on the staircases of
the two buildings, at the entrance to rooms in which the
soldiers positioned themselves, for some twelve hours.
During this time, there were intense exchanges of gunfire
between the soldiers and armed Palestinians. The soldiers
also demanded that one of the occupants walk in front of
them during a search of all the apartments in one of the
buildings, after which they released her.
International humanitarian law forbids using civilians as
human shields by placing them next to soldiers or next to
military facilities, with the intention of gaining
immunity from attack, or by forcing the civilians to carry
out dangerous military assignments.
B'Tselem has demanded that the Judge Advocate General
immediately order a Military Police investigation into the
matter and prosecute the soldiers responsible for the
action.
Chronology of the Events
In the IDF's Operation Summer Rains in the Gaza Strip
following the abduction of Cpl. Gilad Shalit, engineer,
artillery, and infantry forces made an incursion into Beit
Hanun, a town of some 32,000 people in the northern Gaza
Strip, early in the morning on 17 July. According to the
IDF Spokesperson, during the incursion, "IDF struck
approximately twenty armed terrorists." The announcement
added that, "Forces also carried out engineering work to
harm terror organizations' infrastructure and hamper their
activity, and arrested a number of wanted men... During
searches, forces discovered three Kalashnikov rifles, a
carbine, a pistol, and ammunition."
Around 6:00 A.M., troops in armored personnel carriers and
bulldozers drove up to two adjacent four-story buildings
in the middle of the town, near the al-Nasser mosque. The
bulldozers destroyed the concrete wall around each
building and then destroyed one of the external walls on
the ground floor of each of the buildings. The extended
Kafarneh family lives on the bottom three floors of one of
the buildings. On the fourth floor are the offices of the
Ramatan Palestinian News Agency. The 'Ali family lives in
the other building.
Part of the force, twelve soldiers in the estimate of one
of the witnesses, burst into the Kafarneh building through
the area where the wall was destroyed, firing stun
grenades as they entered. At the time, there were 25
people in the building, including 11 children. Some of
those present were from the 'Ali family who left the
adjacent building when the military entered Beit Hanun.
The soldiers called all the residents to gather in the
living room on the ground floor, and then searched them.
Threatening the occupants with his weapon, one of the
soldiers ordered 'Aza Kafarneh, a 43-year old woman, to
accompany him to search each of the floors in the building
and to open the doors of each of the rooms. At the end of
the search, the soldiers ordered all the occupants, except
for three, to leave the building. As they left, there was
a heavy exchange of gunfire between IDF soldiers and
Palestinians. In her testimony to B'Tselem, 'Aza Kafarneh
related that, in light of the situation, she requested the
soldier to let them remain in the building, but the
soldiers refused. "We had to lay flat on the ground and
crawl to the neighbor's house..."
The three who were kept in the building were two of her
sons, Hazem, 14, and Qusay, 16, and her nephew, Khaled,
23. The three were taken to the staircase, at the
entrance to the third-floor apartment, where the soldiers
were located. The three sat there until around 8:00 P.M,
about 45 minutes before the soldiers left the building.
During this time, soldiers inside and outside the building
were engaged in exchanges of gunfire with armed
Palestinians. The staircase was not in the direct line of
gunfire. Just before the end of the incident, the
soldiers ordered the three to go downstairs, in front of
them, to the entrance of the building.
At the same time (around 6:00 AM), other members of the
military force had seized control of the building in which
the 'Ali family lives. The only people in the building
were the mother, 'Ayesha, 60, and her three sons, Hazem,
29, Tareq, 25, and 'Emad, 41. 'Ayesha 'Ali was taken into
an interior room on the ground floor, where she stayed
with her hands tied until the end of the events.
The soldiers ordered her three sons to undress and then
searched them. The soldiers then cuffed their hands behind
their back and blindfolded them. According to the
testimony of Hazem, the soldiers tightened the cuffs
intentionally so as to hurt them. One of the soldiers
kicked him in the chest after he complained about the
pain. However, when his hands began to swell and bleed
from the cuffs, another soldier put a new pair of cuffs on
his hands.
'Emad, who serves in the Palestinian police force, handed
over his personal weapon at the beginning of the events,
in response to the soldiers' demand. Another member of the
family who also serves in a Palestinian police unit was
not present at the time. Soldiers searched for his weapon,
but they did not find it. During the search, the soldiers
broke a lot of the family's furniture and caused great
destruction in some of the apartments.
Following the search, one of the soldiers took Hazem's
cell phone and called four persons whose numbers were in
the phone's memory. The soldier told each of them: "If you
want Hazem, Tareq, and 'Emad released, bring your
weapons." According to Hazem's testimony, the four persons
work with him at Ramatan and were selected at random; none
of them have any weapons.
Around 8:00 A.M., the three men were taken to the
staircase next to the third-floor apartment, where the
soldiers were gathered. The three remained on the stairs,
their hands cuffed behind their back and their eyes
covered, until 8:45 P.M., when the soldiers left the
building. At a certain point, one of the brothers, Tareq,
moved a bit, and a soldier hit him in the chest and
threatened to kill him. While they sat there, an intense
exchange of gunfire took place between soldiers in the
building and armed Palestinians outside. In contrast to
the situation in the other building, many bullets entered
the staircase area via the window and struck the wall,
above the heads of the three occupants. One of the
brothers, 'Emad, was taken by the soldiers at the end of
the incident and remains in Israeli detention.
During the events, 'Aza Kafarneh was in contact with
B'Tselem and asked the organization to help attain the
release of her family members who were being held by the
soldiers. A B'Tselem staff member, Najib Abu Rokaya,
called the IDF's District Coordination Office in the Gaza
Strip and warned them about the incident. The soldier on
the other end of the phone referred Abu Rokaya to the
DCO's legal advisor, Captain Haim Sharbit. After Abu
Rokaya spoke with him, Sharbit said that he could do
nothing about the matter because "we are not familiar with
the incident."
Legal Background
The testimonies taken by B'Tselem indicate that the
Israeli soldiers who took over the buildings used the
occupants as human shields. They placed civilians on the
staircase, next to the rooms where the soldiers were
located, with the intention of deterring the armed
Palestinians from attacking the building and/or so that
the civilians would be located between the soldiers and
the armed Palestinians, should the latter manage to
penetrate the building and try to shoot them. The soldiers
used one of the occupants to open the doors of the
apartments, apparently out of fear that other persons were
hiding there and would open fire when the door was opened.
International humanitarian law, which states the rules
applying in armed conflicts, requires the sides to
distinguish between combatants and civilians, and to
protect the lives and dignity of civilians. The Fourth
Geneva Convention, in Article 27, states that civilians
who find themselves in the hands of one of the parties are
"entitled, in all circumstances, to respect... They shall
at all times be humanely treated, and shall be protected
especially against all acts of violence or threats
thereof..."
Article 28 of the Convention expressly prohibits the use
of civilians as human shields by placing them alongside
soldiers or military facilities, with the hope of
attaining immunity from attack. The official commentary of
the Convention refers to this practice, which was common
in the Second World War as "cruel and barbaric." The
Convention, in Articles 31 and 51, also prohibits the use
of physical or moral coercion on civilians or forcing them
to carry out military tasks.
Despite these prohibitions, for a long period of time
following the outbreak of the second intifada,
particularly during Operation Defensive Shield, in April
2002, the IDF systematically used Palestinian civilians as
human shields, forcing them to carry out military actions
which threatened their lives. It was not until a High
Court petition was filed by Israeli human rights
organizations opposing such action, in May 2002, that the
IDF issued a general order prohibiting the use of
Palestinians as "a means of 'human shield' against gunfire
or attacks by the Palestinian side.'" Following this
order, the use of this practice declined sharply. However,
according to IDF interpretation, assistance by
Palestinians, with their consent, in warning a wanted
person hiding in a certain location is not deemed use of a
human shield. However, this practice was also outlawed
following the ruling of the Israeli High Court of Justice
that this practice is inconsistent with the Fourth Geneva
Convention.
Clearly, then, the IDF's treatment of the Palestinian
occupants in the two Beit Hanun buildings flagrantly
breached fundamental rules of international humanitarian
law, as well as IDF regulations. B'Tselem wrote to the
military's Judge Advocate General and demanded that he
immediately order a Military Police investigation
regarding this incident, and that he prosecute all those
responsible for these illegal acts.
**********************************************************
(13) Peres to put Israel's case in Lebanon war to world
By Emma Thomasson
Reuters
23 July 2006
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L23854174.htm
JERUSALEM, July 23 (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert is sending elder statesman Shimon Peres on an
image-mending tour of Europe and the United States after
accusing the foreign media of bias in favour of Hizbollah.
An official in Olmert's office said Peres -- Israel's vice
premier and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate -- would travel
to several cities to explain Israel's position.
The Web site of Israel's Maariv newspaper said Peres' tour
would focus on media appearances and visits to Jewish
communities. It was unclear when he would leave.
Thousands protested against Israel's attacks on Lebanon in
London, Amsterdam and Chicago on Saturday.
The war broke out on July 12 when Hizbollah captured two
Israeli soldiers and killed eight others in a cross-border
raid. Israel retaliated with attacks that have wrecked
Lebanon's infrastructure and killed 365 people, mostly
civilians.
At least 37 Israelis have died, 17 of them civilians
killed by Hizbollah rockets on the north of the country.
Israel has said it wants to cripple Hizbollah, which is
sworn to destroy the Jewish state. The Shi'ite militia
group is backed by Iran and Syria, both arch enemies of
Israel.
On Sunday, Olmert said the international media was biased
in its reporting of the conflict. "The massive, brutal and
murderous viciousness of Hizbollah is unfortunately not
represented in its full intensity on television screens
outside of Israel," Olmert told reporters. "A twisted
image is presented, where the victim is presented as an
aggressor."
British Foreign Office minister Kim Howells, who visited
Israel on Sunday, said Israel had to be aware of the
effect its offensive was having on public opinion
worldwide.
"It knows only too well it is not enough just to seek a
military victory," Howells told a news conference.
"They have to win the wider political battle and they have
to think very hard about those children who are dying. It
is not enough to just say 'unfortunate collateral
damage'."
**********************************************************
(14) Bombs kill 64 as Iraq peace hopes rocked
By Wissam Al-Ukaili
Agence France Presse
23 July 2006
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060723/wl_mideast_afp/
iraq_060723121129
Bombers have killed at least 64 people, striking a bloody
blow against Iraq's fledgling hopes for peace just one day
after the government launched national reconciliation
talks.
A suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden minibus
amid a crowd of day labourers seeking work in a crowded
market in Baghdad's mainly Shiite district of Sadr City at
9:20 am (0520 GMT) Sunday, killing at least 34 people.
This was followed by a bomb attack in front of the area's
town hall, which killed eight, Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki's office said in a statement.
Three hours later a one-tonne car bomb exploded outside a
courthouse in the mixed northern city of Kirkuk, leaving
at least 22 dead and 100 injured, according to Kirkuk
police chief General Borhan Habib Tayeb.
Tayeb said the car had been rigged with several bombs to
produce a cascading series of explosions designed to
maximise loss of life.
"There was a single car which exploded. The police believe
that there were 1,000 kilos (2,200 pounds) of TNT packed
into several bombs," he said.
In Sadr City, a police officer said: "A man parked a
minibus in a busy street next to a police station, where
day labourers were waiting for work. He wasn't aiming for
police -- he wanted to kill as many people as possible."
Maliki's statement said that 34 people had been killed and
73 injured, with eight more killed in the follow-up bomb
and 20 more injured.
The bomber has not yet been identified, but suspicion will
fall on Sunni extremists who have been competing with
Shiite death squads in a tit-for-tat series of sectarian
massacres from Iraq's rival Muslim communities.
These killings continued on Sunday, when five civilians
were gunned down in separate attacks in the Baquba region
north of Baghdad.
Further north, in Moqtadiya, four Shiites who were
kidnapped on Saturday were found murdered, according to
the interior minister.
In Baghdad, the first powerful explosion shook windows
across the capital and smoke could be seen rising over the
Jamila area of Sadr City.
Workers seeking short-term employment throng Jamila market
in the mornings, and the bomb went off by the outer wall
of a police station.
US security contractors buzzed the area in helicopters
shortly after the blast, but there were no reports of
casualties among coalition forces.
It was the fourth serious bomb attack against Shiite
districts across Iraq in the past week, and the most
deadly in Baghdad itself since July 1, when 66 people were
killed.
The capital has fallen prey to a rising tide of sectarian
attacks, and a month ago Iraq's embattled government
launched a beefed-up security strategy in an attempt to
restore order to a city on the brink of all-out civil war.
Nevertheless, the overstretched Iraqi security forces and
their allies in the US-led coalition have struggled to
halt the killings.
And on Saturday, the country's senior leadership opened a
process of national reconciliation seeking to draw violent
elements into the constitutional process and halt the
bloodletting.
Before Sunday's blast, Iraqi troops had been in action in
eastern Baghdad, hunting Shiite death squads that have
brought terror to the Sunni minority, according to a
statement from the US-led coalition.
On approaching their target building accompanied by US
troops "they received heavy and sustained small arms,
machine gun and rocket-propelled grenade fire from several
positions", the statement said.
"Government and coalition troops responded with
appropriate force," it added. "During this operation,
Iraqi forces also freed two Iraqi citizens held hostage
and detained eight insurgents."
One Iraqi soldier was wounded in this operation, the
coalition said.
In a separate incident in Ramadi, 100 kilometres (62
miles) west of Baghdad, Iraqi soldiers conducting a census
were fired on from a mosque with rocket-propelled grenades
and assault rifles, a coalition statement said.
The soldiers later entered the mosque, arrested two
suspects and found a small cache of guns and bomb-making
equipment.
****************
ANALYSIS & VIEWS
****************
(15) Israel's Catastrophe
By Ali Abunimah
Sunday Business Post (Ireland)
23 July 2006
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5176.shtml
Israel wants us to believe that its wholesale destruction
of Lebanon and killing to date of nearly 400 civilians is
about the capture of two of its soldiers by Hizbullah.
This focus on the "latest incident" is designed to obscure
what truly lies at the heart of this ongoing conflict:
Israel's violent takeover of Palestine.
Palestinians, expelled from their country in 1948, had
continued their struggle against Israel from Lebanon. In
1982, Israel invaded that country in an attempt to destroy
the Palestine Liberation Organisation, killing tens of
thousands of civilians. On that occasion, Israel's
official pretext was a failed assassination attempt
against its London ambassador.
Rather than ending resistance, Israel laid the seeds for
what we see today.
The mostly Shia villagers in southern Lebanon who bore the
brunt of Israel's 1982 invasion are the core constituency
of Hizbullah, founded in 1983 to resist Israel's
occupation.
The fighting in Lebanon, and to the south in Gaza, are
directly related to Israel's origins, and the regional
violence will only spiral until there is a just solution
to the Palestine question.
Israel was established in 1948 as an explicitly ''Jewish
state'' in a country whose overwhelming majority
population at the time was not Jewish and had no desire to
live under such a government. Such a project could only
generate enormous resistance.
Because of this, Israel has never gained legitimacy among
the people who paid the price for its creation.
Lacking such legitimacy, Israel exists only by the
constant exercise of brute force - first to expel the
majority of Palestinians, to prevent the return of
refugees and, after 1967, to settle as many of its Jewish
citizens as it could in east Jerusalem, the West Bank and
Gaza Strip.
Zionist leaders hoped that the transformation of Palestine
from a multicultural, multireligious society into one
ruled exclusively by and for Jews would have been
completed by now, with the Palestinians merely a distant
memory.
Instead, Israel created a catastrophe.
Today because of their determination not to be driven from
what remains of their land, and due to their higher birth
rate, Palestinians are once again becoming the majority
population. Their struggle draws support across the Arab
world, including from groups like Hizbullah.
For the first time since the 1948 expulsions accompanying
Israel's foundation, Jews no longer form the absolute
majority in the territory they control.
Israeli and Palestinian official statistics count 5.3
million Jews living in Israel-Palestine and 5.6 million
non-Jews (this does not include millions more Palestinian
refugees outside the country).
Israeli leaders understand what this means. Prime minister
Ehud Olmert said in 2003: "We are approaching the point
where more and more Palestinians will say 'There is no
place for two states between the [River] Jordan and the
[Mediterranean] sea. All we want is the right to vote'.
The day they get it, we [Israeli Jews] will lose
everything."
Olmert added: "I shudder to think that liberal Jewish
organisations that shouldered the burden of struggle
against apartheid in South Africa will lead the struggle
against us."
The internationally-endorsed solution for the dilemma is a
complete Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied
in 1967 so that Palestinians can establish a state in
these areas, which amount to just 22 per cent of their
original homeland.
Unfortunately, Israel used the years of the peace process,
not to begin to end its occupation, but to entrench it -
doubling the number of settlers in the West Bank. While it
pulled 8,000 settlers out of Gaza last year, former
Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres explained on the BBC
in August:' 'We are disengaging from Gaza because of
demography."
Israel hoped that, distracted by the pulling out of a few
settlers, the world would not notice its continued
military control of Gaza, as well as its annexation wall
and the massive expansion of Jews-only colonies throughout
the West Bank.
Israel's full-scale assault on Lebanon and its
round-the-clock bombardment of Gaza have nothing to do
with the recent attacks on its army.
The indiscriminate killing of civilians can only be
understood as an attempt to put fear back into the Arabs,
in a desperate effort to maintain Israel as a
Jewish-dominated garrison state surrounded by concrete
walls.
But groups like Hizbullah and Hamas, which emerged as a
direct response to the brutality of decades of Israeli
occupation, and an absence of principled international
intervention, represent a generation no longer cowed by
Israel's US-supplied missiles and jets.
FW de Klerk, the last president of apartheid-era South
Africa, calculated when he took office that the white
government could retain power for many years, but only at
the cost of inflicting enormous casualties.
Both he and Nelson Mandela concluded that nothing could be
gained from further bloodshed and that the time had come
to negotiate the peaceful end of apartheid.
Looking back on the apartheid regime's long history of
violence, de Klerk wrote in his memoirs: "There is no
evidence that the assassination of opponents had the
slightest effect on the final outcome of the struggle,
other than causing further personal suffering and
bitterness."
It is only by ending their claims of superior rights and
power that Israeli Jews, like white South Africans, will
gain the legitimacy and acceptance from people in Lebanon,
Palestine and across the Middle East that cannot be won
with violence.
Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, and
author of the forthcoming book One Country: A Bold
Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. This
article first appeared in Ireland's Sunday Business Post
on 23 July 2006.
**********************************************************
(16) Another Act in the Mizrahi-Palestinian Tragedy
By Reuven Abarjel and Smadar Lavie
The Electronic Intifada
24 July 2006
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5174.shtml
On January 25, 2006, Hamas won a landslide victory in the
democratic Palestinian legislative elections. The
elections were conducted under tight U.S. supervision.
Immediately thereafter, Israel's general attorney, Menny
Mazouz, started exploring the legal procedures to jail the
movement's leadership. Soon the IDF started executing the
Gazan leadership of the movement by air strikes. Several
dozen innocent Palestinian civilians were casualties in
the process. On June 24 the IDF land forces entered the
Gaza strip and kidnapped two Hamas men. As a response, on
June 25 Hamas captured Gilad Shalit, an IDF soldier. The
IDF immediately launched "Operation Summer Rains," to
inflict large-scale destruction and to press for Shalit's
release. On 12 July, Hizbollah captured two more Israeli
soldiers--Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser--in the Lebanese
border zone. From then on, IDF's "Operation Just Reward"
has been inflicting heinous carnage and destruction all
over Lebanon.
And now here we are, in front of the Israeli TV screen,
bombarded by the discourse of experts. The channels are
broadcasting live from studios and battlefields.
Commercial interludes are part of the show. By default the
majority of experts are Ashkenazi (European Jewish) males.
They are flanked by a handful of Mizrahi men (Oriental
Jews who immigrated to Israel mainly from the Arab World).
These men climbed the public service ladder within the
nationalist hegemonic confines. Together, they are
Israel's knowledge mercenaries. Through the tube -
Israel's tribal campfire -- they dictate the national
agenda. The viewers are convinced it must be humanistic,
because it is calmly narrated by handsome necktied men.
They use professional lingo and have the standardized,
de-Semitized Hebrew accent. These talking heads say this
war is not only for our own good, but is also for the
civic betterment of Palestinians and Lebanese. Their sober
discourse facilitates public compliance with IDF's shift
of tactics--from warplane "surgical killings" to a
combination of marine, air and land forces, to destroy the
Hizbollah using the massive weaponry that the U.S.
allocates to the IDF.
The three Israeli TV channels bombard us with metaphors
like "crushing Hizbollah," "the return of Israeli
deterrence," and "the rehabilitation of the Israeli
soldier's fighter image." Such imagery enables us to peer
into the blood, smoke and devastation the IDF sows. Veiled
by the fuss over Lebanon, Israel concurrently continues to
plan and execute the socio-cide of both public and
intimate spheres of the West Bank and Gaza. The present
results: reaping the temporary unity of the Jewish
victim-turned-warrior nation-state.
When the cannons roar, the Mizrahi communities fall
silent. Like servants before the master, the Mizrahim
habitually comply. They are the generations flowing from
the Jews who were in Palestine from time immemorial, as
well as descendants of those brought here from the Arab
World and other non-European countries during the previous
century. They are the local hosts for those fleeing the
New European anti-Semitism. Mizrahim provide the
demographic majority on whose civic docility the
Eurocentric Israeli regime rests. Mizrahim have been the
Jewish labor turning the cogs of the European-Zionist
colonial project ever since its inception, with the
Yemeni-Jewish labor migration of 1882. Mizrahim freed
Zionism from its total dependency on indigenous
Palestinian labor. Mizrahim were the Zionists' "natural
laborers," employed in near-slavery conditions. In order
for Mizrahim to work with efficacy, the Zionist hegemonic
patriarchy ruptured Mizrahi extended families. For
themselves, they used the appellation "ideological
laborers," and went on to found Israel's socialist-liberal
Left. It is this very Left that is now fighting yet
another self-righteous Israeli war. The Zionist movement's
leadership has always conducted itself, in front of the
Mizrahim, the Palestinians, and the citizens of the Arab
World, through the tools of occupation, oppression and
humiliation. Yet Mizrahi communities keep silent. Along
the way, the US-European minority has co-opted the Mizrahi
moral, economic and cultural power to resist.
Israel has always compartmentalized its occupation into
different categories, as if Gaza, the West Bank, the
Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the Palestinian
Diaspora were not all consequences of the 1948 Nakba and
1967 Naqsa. Yet even such a divisive strategy has failed
to diminish the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle for
a homeland. Despite the peace agreements with Egypt and
Jordan, this strategy has nevertheless resulted in an
almost across-the-board refusal of the Arab body of
citizenry to normalize Israel into the region. The
Ashkenazi leadership has repeatedly evoked the image that
Israel is a European villa, planted in the midst of the
regional jungle, from Bible times to the present day.
Mizrahi communities are intricately positioned along the
Israel/Palestine divide as a result of the hegemonic
sophistication of the Ashkenazim. Historically, under
Menachem Begin, it was the Right who offered the Mizrahim
a political home of sorts by not forcing them to
secularize in imitation of the Labor party regime.
Mizrahim are situated between the rock of
economic-cultural oppression caused by the US-European
capitalist Israeli rule, and the hard place of Palestine's
war of independence. Zionism was superimposed on Mizrahi
communities, yet they welcomed it with open arms. Many
still believe in its deceitful vision of an
integrationalist inter-racial utopia, even though they are
systematically excluded from the centers of power due to
Zionism's intra-Jewish racism. Those few who succeeded in
securing high-ranking positions in the Ashkenazi regime
have long since erased their own past, as they adopted
their masters' worldview. Rebuilding the ruptured Mizrahi
families was difficult, because they were denied access to
the financial and cultural resources necessary to
facilitate an equal participation in the Zionist
patriarchy. Mizrahi men's feminism is epitomized in their
struggle to mimic handsomely crested Sabra masculinity,
hoping it might provide them with equal opportunities.
Even with the arrival of South Asian maids in the 1990s,
Mizrahi women continue to occupy the lowest-paying scale
of the Israeli job market. Having lost their production
line and house cleaning jobs to Filipinas, they work as
lower level secretaries and service providers, and they
constitute the majority of the unemployed.
Most of the Palestinian suicide attacks have occurred in
the public spaces of the economically deprived and legally
disenfranchised Mizrahi communities: bus rides taken by
people who can't afford to have a private car, markets
frequented by those who can't afford to shop in air
conditioned malls and supermarkets, and 'hoods too poor to
afford to purchase the patrol services of private security
companies, and where the police avoid entering except
during drug raids. The majority of the dead and wounded
have been Mizrahim, destitute immigrants from the former
Soviet Union, and foreign guest workers.
The majority IDF casualties of the al-Aqsa intifada since
October 2000 have been Mizrahim, Druze, Russian
immigrants, and Ethiopians - the marginal groups that
comprise the majority of Israel's social fabric. Since the
1982 Lebanon war, frontline military service is out of
fashion among the Ashkenazi elite, who no longer find it
necessary for upward mobility. Due to the historical
conjunction of ethnicity and poverty typical of Mizrahi
communities, young Mizrahi men are excluded from avenues
of upward mobility that would require a major capital
investment. Alas, combat zone service is one of the few
routes for socio-economic mobility -- an integrationist
phantom of sorts.
Sderot, a borderzone Mizrahi town often bombarded by
Qassam missiles, has a high percentage of Ethiopian and
Russian immigrants, and high unemployment rates. It is the
Israeli town closest to Gaza. The same demography is true
of the development towns and agricultural co-ops on the
Lebanese border, and even of some of the Haifa 'hoods hit
by the Hizbollah Katiushas.
Mizrahi communities were pushed into the West Bank and
Gaza post-1967 settlements through the back door. Both the
Right and Left wing Israeli governments prevented any
reasonably priced housing solutions for residents of
Mizrahi slums. The mass Soviet immigration of the 1990s
transformed Israel's center, the source of most decently
paying jobs, into a real estate bubble. This prohibited
Mizrahi families from leaving the ghettos, unless for
subsidized houses in the settlements. These were built by
the housing ministry on the pristine West Bank hills and
virgin Gaza beaches. They made the Israeli dream of a
single-family dwelling come true. The superior public
school system was an additional benefit. The Judaization
of the Galilee project was designed for Ashkenazim who
could not afford single-family dwellings in central Israel
- gated communities with strict admission committees,
whose majestic mansions overlook Palestinian villages
situated within the 1949 Rhodes armistice agreement.
In the mid 1980s, when the welfare state disappeared from
Mizrahi communities' lives (if it had ever been there),
ultra-orthodox Sephardic Judaism entered the scene in the
form of the SHAS party. At its height, during the 1999
elections, SHAS won 17 seats in the Knesset. Four of them
were ministers of influential government offices, and four
were deputy ministers. SHAS offered an apparatus of
education and food to rehab Mizrahi honor, either by
preaching the return to the forefathers' pious morality or
by exposing the racism in the disenfranchisement and
poverty. Eventually, such an intrusion was destructive. In
fact, the ultra-orthodox Mizrahi new sages adopted the old
Ashkenazi method of discipline: a controlled dispensation
of charity so that the very act of dispensing becomes a
shock absorber against any possible social upheaval. Since
SHAS's entry into the public sphere, even the feeble
resistance of Mizrahi ghettos has ceased to exist.
The centrist walls of the Arab nation-state cracked during
the Infitah with Anwar Saadat's Opening-to-the-West
policy. Multinational cultural and market globalization
forces entered the Arab World's civic sphere. Forming
alternative societal institutions, the Islamist movements
started substituting for the state. Like SHAS, these
institutions were constructed on the premise of injecting
pious morality into the civic sphere. The communalist
power of both SHAS and the Islamist movements rested in
part on a reformulation of strict religious familial
patriarchy as a liberating feminist praxis. Concurrently,
the Islamist movements, as in the cases of Egypt and the
Occupied Territories, have integrated women into all
spheres of their public activism but fighting.
We do not wish here to judge Arab society. Yet to the best
of our understanding, the impact of Islamist movements in
the Arab public sphere has been diametrically opposite to
that of SHAS in the Mizrahi ghettos. With a middle class
professional core, the Islamists presented the Arab world
with a new agenda. All the while, the Mizrahi
ultra-orthodoxy imposed the forefathers' morality as yet
another strategy for integrating the Mizrahim into the
bosom of the Zionist lived reality. But how could they
not? SHAS sensed it had no other option. Its middle class
emerged from the rank and file of party apparatchiks. The
Question of Palestine was one of the unifying themes of
the Islamist movements. During the 1980s, Sabra and
Shatila reverberated into the First Intifada. Palestinian
nationalism gathered constituencies in the West. Hoping to
counter Palestine's secular nationalism, the worried
Israeli regime nurtured the Islamist movements in Lebanon
and the Occupied Territories. Assuming that these
movements would be nothing but SHAS-style charities, the
Israeli regime hoped they might also serve as its tools to
deny yet again the Question of Palestine. As the PLO
welfare apparatus relocated from Lebanon to Tunis, the
Islamist movements patched the cracks and flowered forth.
The 2006 democratic elections in the Palestinian authority
ended in a sweeping Hamas victory, which of course
disappointed Israel's expectations. This time around, the
Zionist regime preferred the necktied and conventionally
handsome Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) over hennaed and
long-bearded Muhammad abu-Tir. Henceforth Israel, backed
by the US, sweepingly refused to recognize and negotiate
with the legitimate government of the Palestinian people.
These days the Mizrahim are the ones who pay the high
price required to join Israel's "family of blood," a key
concept in the Zionist discourse of national honor. They
fall like ripe fruit into Ashkenazi-Zionist militant
adventurism. The Western pro-Israeli lobby, with its
Israeli branches, does not pay the price. On the contrary,
it shares the profits with the G-8 superpowers. This axis
of evil will come to an end only if Mizrahi communities
are able to conjoin the memories of their Arab past with a
vision for a future that will be shared with the people of
this region--not just the Palestinians, but the rest of
the Arab World as well.
As long as the Arab World's public discourse does not
differentiate between Yahud (Jews), Sahyoniyin (Zionists),
and Yahud-Arab (Arab Jews), and as long as all Israelis
are considered Yahud-wa-bas (just Jews), such a process is
impossible. As long as the Western peace discourse does
not designate separate categories for Mizrahi Jewry, the
majority of Israel's Jewry, for the Ashkenazi peace
movements, and for Zionism, Mizrahi communities'
processual reworking into the region will lack the
transnational aura necessary to render it possible. As
long as the Arab leadership, not to mention the
Palestinians, prefers talking peace with the ruling
Ashkenazi minority -- be it Zionists, post-Zionists, even
anti-Zionists - Mizrahi communities will continue to view
the peace discourse as part of the repertoire of exotic
antics that the Ashkenazi cosmopolitan elite perform for
the West. At the same time, they will continue to conceive
of the Arabs, particularly Palestinians, only as lethal
enemies.
Those who present themselves as seekers of peace -- Shimon
Peres and Yossi Beilin -- are actually supporting the
present destruction of civil society in Lebanon, the West
Bank and Gaza. They are the spokesmen explaining the
necessity for the atrocious measures taken by the Israeli
government. Mizrahim remember them mainly as those who
started the move to privatize and outsource labor from
their community into the globalized economic wonderland
that the peace dons termed "the New Middle East." For
Mizrahi communities, unemployment and debt were the most
immediate results of the Oslo agreement's peace festival.
These days the peace dons also brandish a Moroccan defense
minister, Amir Peretz, to execute their policies, even
though they are the ones who publicly dissed him and
failed him along his political career. No wonder this
discourse of peace is so alien to Mizrahi communities.
The experts on TV tell us that the purpose of the present
destruction is to secure the release of the "kidnapped"
soldiers. If this were indeed the purpose of operations
"Summer Rains" and "Adequate Pay," the release of all
Palestinian and Lebanese political prisoners from Israeli
jails would be far more cost effective, whether in blood
or money. But, alas, when the canons stop roaring, when we
finish counting our dead and cleaning up our ruins, we are
likely to return to point zero--1882. The Mizrahim,
Palestinians and foreign guest workers will resurrect
Lebanon, Palestine and Israel from under the rubble, at
near-slavery wages and with no social benefits. The US
will provide the funding. As long as Mizrahi communities
fail to understand that these wars commemorate their
disenfranchised poverty, as long as there is no insistence
on organized, popular Mizrahi resistance, no just peace
will be achieved in our region.
Reuven Abarjel is co-founder of the Israeli Black
Panthers; Smadar Lavie is a Professor of Anthropology and
Mizrahi Feminist Activist.
**********************************************************
(17) Lies, Double Standards, and Culpable Fallacies
By Raja Halwani
Electronic Lebanon
23 July 2006
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5181.shtml
The following is a list - by no means exhaustive - of
lies, double standards, and culpable fallacies perpetrated
by US and Israeli officials.
Lie: On Thursday, July 20, the Israeli ambassador to the
UN, Dan Gillerman, claimed that Israel's current attack on
Lebanon is a war for its very existence. Indeed, every
time Israel has entered into a war with its Arab
neighbors, be it the 1956 war, the 1967 war, the 1973 war,
the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, or its perpetual war with
the Palestinians, Israeli officials have claimed that
Israel is fighting for its survival, defending its very
existence from Arabs who want to annihilate it.
This is a blatant lie. First, Israel has the mightiest
military in the region, possessing state-of-the-art
weapons, including nuclear ones (Israel's "open secret").
How the area's strongest country faces existential threats
by its far weaker neighbors has yet to be explained. The
Palestinians, always portrayed by Israel as threatening
its existence, are basically an unarmed people, relying on
rocks, firearms, and crudely made rockets to fight
Israel's occupation. Second, any careful reading of
history shows that it was Israel that has proved over and
over again to be resistant to Arab overtures of peace,
pursuing a policy of territorial expansion at the expense
of a lasting and just settlement to its conflict with the
Palestinians. Virtually every single Israeli prime
minister, from David Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, Yitzhak
Shamir, Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon, to Ehud Olmert, has
rejected a just settlement. Even the much vaunted
peaceniks Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak had their own view
of what a Palestinian state should be: a shrunken one,
with no full sovereignty, a view that no Palestinian
leader could accept without rejection from his people.
Double Standard: On Friday, July 21, US Secretary of State
Condoleeza Rice claimed during a press conference that
Hizbullah's penetration of Israeli territory and its
abduction of two Israeli soldiers on July 12 violated
numerous international laws. That may be so, but her
statement is a blatantly selective application of
international law. Rice did not, for example, mention the
numerous international laws that Israel has violated and
continues to violate. Here are a few examples: UN General
Assembly resolution 194, which calls on Israel to
repatriate the Palestinian refugees; UN Security Council
resolutions 242 and 338, which demand of Israel to
withdraw from the territories it occupied in the 1967 war;
and the various UN resolutions calling on Israel to
withdraw from Lebanon after its 1982 invasion (which
Israel eventually heeded, but fully only in 2000, thus
defeating the very point of issuing such resolutions).
Culpable Fallacy: On Thursday, July 19, US ambassador to
the UN, John Bolton, repeated the claim during a press
conference that it was Hizbullah that started and caused
the current conflict. First, assuming for a moment that we
agree that Hizbullah's abduction of the two Israeli
soldiers is the appropriate starting point, it does not
follow that just because Hizbullah "started" and "caused"
this conflict Israel's responsibility somehow disappears
and Israel can take a moral holiday. For surely Israel can
choose to end the conflict or can choose to take it in a
non-military direction. Or are Israeli officials mere
robots, such that by pressing the right buttons Hizbullah
can unleash a wholesale attack by Israel on Lebanon?
Second, why begin with Hizbullah's abduction of the two
Israeli soldiers? Why not begin with Israel's continual
violations of Lebanon's sovereignty? Why not Israel's
continued occupation of Lebanon till 2000 that helped to
give Hizbullah its continued reason for existing and
operating? Why not its 1982 invasion that helped sow the
seeds for Hizbullah's very existence? Why not even begin
with Israel's occupation in 1967 of more Palestinian
lands? Indeed, why not begin in 1948, with Israel's
creation and the simultaneous creation of the Palestinian
refugee problem and future turmoil in the region?
Lie: Israeli officials, supported by the US mainstream
media, continually assert that Israel targets only
Hizbullah positions, and that any civilian casualties are
due to either mistakes or to Hizbullah's hiding amidst
civilian populations. But anyone who takes a good look at
the havoc that Israel has wreaked on Lebanon since its
attack 10 days ago cannot but dispute such a claim. Are
the factories, the power-grids, the trucks, the homes, and
other civilian infrastructures Hizbullah positions? This
is clearly not so. Indeed, Israel has admitted that it has
targeted these places in order to cripple Hizbullah. But
with this admission, the game is up. What about when
Israel hits a civilian building with the excuse that
Hizbullah uses it? Why does this count as targeting
civilians? Well, someone can say that the Israeli pilot's
intention is not to kill civilians, but Hizbullah
fighters, and so he is not, after all, targeting
civilians. But this won't do. When I fell a tree to build
a house, the distinction here is not between intending to
build a house and not intending to fell the tree. I intend
to do both. The distinction here is rather between
ultimate or final intentions and mediate ones: the Israeli
pilot ultimately intends the death of Hizbullah fighters,
but mediately intends the death of civilians. There is no
way around it. In any case, the record speaks for itself:
can the overwhelming deaths over the past decades of
Palestinian civilians, and, over the past 10 days, in
Lebanon (setting aside those during Israel's many
incursions into this country) all be due to accidents and
mistakes? Israel certainly needs to explain these numbers,
and by "explain" I don't simply mean repeating over and
over the mantra that Israel does not target civilians.
But doesn't Hizbullah hide among civilians? I don't know
about the word "hide" - after all, Hizbullah fighters have
not exactly proven themselves cowardly - but Hizbullah is
not a state army, it is a militia, a military organization
(that some describe as a resistance movement and others as
a terrorist organization). Historically, such groups have
operated among civilian populations, populations that
typically allow them to do so because they come from and
are supported by these populations. If they are to
successfully carry out their goals, they have to;
otherwise, they would be continuously defeated. This is
why, while Israel surely prefers that Hizbullah operate
from tall buildings with neon signs that say, "THIS IS
HIZBULLAH; COME BOMB US," Hizbullah is not about to do so.
And unless we totally rule out the moral permissibility of
such groups - and we shouldn't, since we then rob people
of their right to resist oppression - then we cannot
condemn in a blanket way the fact that they tend to
operate from among civilians.
Double Standard: Both US and Israeli officials claim that
Hizbullah is a terrorist organization. I do not wish to
argue that it is not one (it has targeted civilians),
though Hizbullah itself vehemently denies the claim and
most Arabs in the region do not see it as one. I do want
to take issue with the double standard: if Israel targets
civilians, then Israel is a terrorist state. And not only
has Israel targeted civilians in its day to day military
operations in Lebanon and in the occupied Palestinian
territories, it has also maintained a military occupation
of the Palestinians since 1967 that has wreaked havoc and
fear on their lives - in a word, terrorized them.
Moreover, nothing hinges on the fact that Hizbullah is an
organization while Israel is a state; this is utterly
irrelevant: if the essence of terrorism is the targeting
of civilians for political purposes, then one can be an
organization, a state, and even Santa Claus, can be
terrorist.
Culpable Fallacy: We have been told repeatedly in recent
days by Israeli officials that Israel is not interested in
occupying Lebanon but only in getting get rid of
Hizbulllah or at least weakening it. I will not dispute
the first claim: given Israel's experience in Lebanon from
1982 to 2000, it makes sense that it does not wish to
occupy the country (although Israel's intentions and plans
are not clear, and, in any case, events in the region have
a way of wresting things from the hands of leaders and
their desires). But the second claim contains a fallacy.
Let us suppose that Israel succeeds to the fullest extent:
it goes into Lebanon, dismantles all Hizbullah's
infrastructure, and arrests or kills every single one of
their fighters. Then what? Has it gotten rid of Hizbullah?
For a while, yes it has. But then more fighters will crop
up, learning from their predecessors' mistakes and more
determined to inflict even more damaging blows on Israel,
with far more serious repercussions for its citizens. And
then we're back to square one, with Israel attacking again
and claiming that it wants to defeat Hizbullah II. My dear
Israeli brethren: if you want to defeat Hizbullah, then
get rid of its popular support and the reason for its
being. But to do that, you'll have to start treating the
Palestinians, the Lebanese, and other Arabs with a lot
more respect, far less racism, and with bushels of moral
decency and justice.
A Few Words on Being Patronizing: In the last couple of
days, a few Israeli officials have started saying that
they want to get rid of Hizbullah not just for Israel's
sake, but also for the sake of the Lebanese, so that
Lebanon can become a truly sovereign nation. God help us.
We have a saying back from where I come from (Lebanon):
"He killed us with his kindness." This is exactly what
Israel is doing. In its zeal to help Lebanon become a
sovereign nation, it has so far managed to kill about 300
Lebanese, injure over 500, and displace over 500,000. I
shudder at the thought of more help from Israel. But it
seems that Israel wants to add to its glittering list of
adjectives - being arrogant, racist, aggressive,
domineering, unjust - the word "patronizing."
Nothing I have said here is original. But in a world whose
leaders are almost completely deaf, these claims bear
repeating, even shouting.
Associate Professor of Philosophy at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago, Raja Halwani is currently
co-authoring a book on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
**********************************************************
(18) A new Middle East, or Rice's fantasy ride?
By Rami G. Khouri
The Daily Star
24 July 2006
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&
categ_id=5&article_id=74184#
American officials are very good at vernacular
descriptions, but lousy at history and political reality
in the Middle East. As US Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice sets off Sunday on her short trip to a Middle East
that is increasingly engulfed in violent confrontations
and political turmoil, she has described the massive
destruction, dislocation and human suffering in Lebanon as
an inevitable part of the "birth pangs of a new Middle
East."
From my perspective here in Beirut, watching
American-supplied Israeli jets smash this country to
smithereens, what she describes as "birth pangs" look much
more like a wicked hangover from a decades-old American
orgy of diplomatic intoxication with the enticements of
pro-Israeli politics.
We shall find out in the coming years if indeed a new
Middle Easy is being born, or - as I suspect - we are
witnessing the initial dying gasps of the Western-made
political order that has defined this region and focused
primarily on Israeli national dictates for most of the
past half-century. The way to a truly new and stable
Middle East is to apply policies that deliver equal rights
to all concerned, not to favor Israel as having greater
rights than Arabs.
Rice declared that Israel should ignore calls for a
cease-fire, saying: "This is a different Middle East. It's
a new Middle East. It's hard, We're going through a very
violent time."
Behind the American position to support Israel's massive
attacks against Lebanon's civilian infrastructure and
Hizbullah positions is a sense - widely reported from
Washington in recent days - that the Bush-Rice team wants
to use this conflict to achieve short-term tactical aims
and long-term strategic goals that serve the interests of
America, Israel and their few allies in the region.
Short-term, the US would like Israel to wipe out
Hizbullah, allow the Lebanese government to send its
troops to the South of the country, ensure the safety of
northern Israel, cut Syria's influence down to size, and
apply greater pressure on Hizbullah supporter Iran. The US
opposes a cease-fire, therefore, because, "a cease-fire
would be a false promise if it simply returns us to the
status quo," Rice said.
This diplomatic position to support Israel's attacks on
Lebanon, coupled with rushing sophisticated
precision-guided bombs to Israel from the US arsenal,
indicates that Washington seriously aims to fundamentally
redraw the political and ideological map of the Middle
East in the longer term. If this means yet another Arab
land goes up in flames and war, so be it, Washington seems
to be saying. So we now have three Arab countries where
American policies and arms have played a major role in
promoting chaos, disintegration and mass death and
suffering: Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon. You can watch them
burn, live on your television sets.
Ironically, these were the three countries that Bush-Rice
& Co. have held up as models and pioneers of the American
policy to promote freedom and democracy as antidotes to
Arab despotism and terrorism.
Washington's desire to change the face of the Arab world
requires removing the last vestiges of anti-American
defiance and anti-Israel resistance. The problem for
Bush-Rice is that such sentiments probably comprise a
majority of Arab people. Most of them flock to Islamist
parties and resistance groups like Hamas, Hizbullah, the
Muslim Brotherhood and assorted Shiite groups in the Iraqi
government.
Syria and Iran are the most problematic governments for
Washington in this respect. So there is further irony and
much incoherence in the latest American official desire
for Arab governments to pressure Syria to reduce its
support for Hizbullah and other groups who defy the US and
Israel. The numbing fact that Bush-Rice fail to
acknowledge - perhaps understandably, given the
alcoholic's tendency to evade reality - is that Washington
now can only speak to a few Arab governments (in Saudi
Arabia, Egypt and elsewhere) who are in almost no position
to impact on anyone other than their immediate families
and many guards.
Washington is engaged almost exclusively with Arab
governments whose influence with Syria is virtually
nonexistent, whose credibility with Arab public opinion is
zero, whose own legitimacy at home is increasingly
challenged, and whose pro-US policies tend to promote the
growth of those militant Islamist movements that now lead
the battle against American and Israeli policies. Is Rice
traveling to a new Middle East, or to a diplomatic
Disneyland of her own imagination?
If Rice pursues contacts in the coming five days that
increase Washington's bias toward Israel, tighten its
links with isolated, increasingly impotent Arab
governments, and further alienate the masses of Arab
public opinion, she will exacerbate the very problem she
claims she wants to fix: the spread of violence and
terror, practiced simultaneously by the armies of states
like the US and Israel, by police-state governments in the
Middle East who live by violence as a rule, and by
non-state actors like Hizbullah and others like it.
On her long flight from Washington to Palestine-Israel
Sunday night, someone should give Condoleezza Rice a
modern history book of the Middle East, so that she can
cut through the haze of her long political drunken stupor,
and finally see more clearly from where the problems of
this region emanate, where the solutions come from, and
how her country can become a constructive rather than a
destructive force.
Rami G. Khouri writes are regular commentary for The Daily
Star.
**********************************************************
(19) Letting Lebanon Burn
Editorial, MERIP
21 July 2006
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5154.shtml
Israel is raining destruction upon Lebanon in a purely
defensive operation, according to the White House and most
of Congress. Even some CNN anchors, habituated to
mechanical reporting of "Middle East violence," sound
slightly incredulous. With over 300 Lebanese dead and
easily 500,000 displaced, with the Beirut airport, bridges
and power plants disabled, the enormous assault is more
than a "disproportionate response" to Hizballah's July 12
seizure of two soldiers and killing of three others on
Israeli soil. It is more than the "excessive use of force"
that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan decries. The aerial
assault dwarfs the damage done by Hizballah's rocket
attacks on Israeli towns. Entire villages in south Lebanon
lie in ruins, unknown numbers of their inhabitants buried
in the rubble and tens of others incinerated in their
vehicles by Israeli missiles as they attempted to escape
northward. As it awaits the promised "humanitarian
corridor," Lebanon remains almost entirely cut off from
the outside world by air, sea and land. As of July 20,
thousands of Israeli troops have moved across the
UN-demarcated Blue Line. Yet virtually the entire American
political class actively resists international calls for
an immediate ceasefire, preferring to wait for an Israeli
victory.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert set the tone
immediately after Hizballah struck, branding the
cross-border raid as "an act of war" whose consequences
would be "very, very, very painful." Moreover, Israel
would hold the Lebanese government and the Lebanese nation
as a whole responsible. Israel's determination to inflict
pain upon Lebanon was fanned on the fourth day of Israeli
bombardment when Hizballah Secretary-General Sheikh Hasan
Nasrallah likewise declared "open warfare," and the Shiite
movement's militia stepped up rocket fire that has taken
15 Israeli civilian lives. Though the Katyushas and larger
projectiles are much deadlier than the Qassams of Hamas,
Israel faces no existential threat from the rockets on
either front. It is in Lebanon, to paraphrase Israeli army
chief of staff Gen. Dan Halutz, where the clock has been
turned back 20 years.
The American broadcast media nevertheless labor to fashion
symmetry where there is none. There is balanced treatment
of the casualties on both sides. The Israelis forced into
bomb shelters are juxtaposed with the Lebanese politely
warned to flee their homes. For competing renditions of
the day's bloodletting, CNN's avuncular Larry King turns
first to nonchalantly windblown Israeli spokeswoman Miri
Eisen and then to a program director from Hizballah's
al-Manar satellite channel, Ibrahim al-Musawi, who always
seems to have one eye on the sky. The rock-star reporters
who parachuted in to cover the story dispense dollops of
confusion. CNN's Anderson Cooper in Cyprus explained that,
since Hamas members are Sunni and Hizballah members Shi'i,
they are "historic rivals." MSNBC's Tucker Carlson, sans
bowtie to convey the seriousness of the occasion, wondered
if Hizballah had rocketed Nazareth because its residents
are all Christian, ignoring the images on the screen
behind him from the attack victims' funeral at a mosque.
The likes of Carlson can perhaps be forgiven for grasping
at clash-of-civilizations straws. The White House's
immediate fingering of Iran and Syria as the masterminds
of Hizballah's self-described "adventure" substituted
phantoms and bogeymen for real political causes. Israel
was similarly quick to espy an "axis of Islamic terror"
stretching to Damascus and Tehran. Former Speaker of the
House and would-be presidential candidate Newt Gingrich
went officialdom one better, declaring on NBC's Meet the
Press that the US and its allies are in "World War III." A
steady stream of Congressmen goes before the cameras to
aver that Tehran and Damascus are pulling the strings.
No evidence, beyond leaked Israeli intelligence of secret
meetings between Nasrallah and his alleged Syrian and
Iranian puppeteers, has been presented for the thesis of
broader conspiracy, let alone for the core proposition
that Hizballah snatched the Israeli soldiers on orders
from Bashar al-Asad and/or Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. (Who
else sees the hand of Iran, by the way? Saddam Hussein,
admonishing Syria from his Baghdad jail cell not to
"deepen its coalition with Iran, because Iranians have bad
intentions toward all Arabs and they hope to do away with
them.") The fact that Hizballah's arsenal includes
missiles of Iranian and Syrian provenance is also adduced
as proof. By this same logic, of course, Washington must
be ordering every sortie of Israeli F-16s over Beirut and
every demolition of Palestinian homes by Caterpillar
bulldozers.
Hizballah is not shy about acknowledging its external
patrons, who presumably assented to its operation. But the
timing of the militia's cross-border raid, as Israel was
punishing all of Gaza for the capture of one soldier,
suggests another motivation rooted in regional politics --
namely, that Hizballah aimed to impress the Arab public as
capable champions of the Palestinians, in contrast to the
impotent grumbling of the US-allied Arab regimes. Surely,
as well, Saudi and Egyptian criticisms of Hizballah stem
more from the popularity of Nasrallah among their own (all
or mostly Sunni) populations than from a genuine fear of a
"Shiite crescent."
The scholars who know Hizballah best say the movement is
more Lebanese and nationalist now than any time in its
history. Even before the departure of Syrian troops in the
spring of 2005, Hizballah was increasingly speaking with
nationalist rhetoric. While their political opponents
staged what they call the Independence Uprising,
Hizballah-mobilized demonstrators "thanked" the Syrians
for their services, rather than demanding that they stay,
and waved Lebanese flags alongside the party's yellow
banners. Hizballah has been pressing the issue of Lebanese
prisoners in Israeli jails, along with Lebanon's claim to
the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms along the
Syrian-Lebanese border, for some time. The Lebanese
government backs both of these causes.
But it is odd, to say the least, to hold the Lebanese
government responsible for Hizballah's initial
cross-border operation. To the contrary, the evidence
suggests that the Islamist party acted unilaterally,
despite having representatives in the cabinet and in
Parliament. This circumstance suggests that the raid
should be interpreted as Hizballah muscle flexing on the
domestic stage to ward off pressure to relinquish its arms
to the Lebanese army, as per the requirements of UN
Security Council Resolution 1559. Perhaps, having
exchanged prisoners with Israel as recently as 2004, the
movement miscalculated how Israel would react, and now
they are getting more than they bargained for. Certainly,
Lebanon is.
Whichever combination of these factors accounts for
Hizballah's action, the real question is what Israel hopes
to accomplish by bombing the whole of Lebanon in reprisal.
The strategy behind the assault, apart from blind
retribution, is difficult to fathom. Even though Israeli
jets buzzed Asad's presidential palace after Hamas
captured an Israeli soldier, and even though evidence of
Syrian influence over Hamas is far wispier than its ties
to Hizballah, Israel seems disinclined to draw Damascus
into the fighting. "We're not a gang that shoots in every
direction," an Israeli officer told Ha'aretz. Nor, despite
bellicose talk of "root causes" and rumors of Iranian
Revolutionary Guards firing from Hizballah launching pads,
does Israel or the US appear prepared to do more than
trade insults with Tehran. There is a risk of catastrophic
escalation, but it is reasonable to hope it is not
planned.
Rather, the stated objective (beyond the recovery of the
captive soldiers) is the implementation of a UN
resolution, an instrument of international diplomacy for
which Israeli spokespeople have developed a touching new
fondness. If the Lebanese government will not disarm
Hizballah, then Israel will. If the Lebanese will not
"exercise their sovereignty," as Eisen demanded on CNN,
then Israel will appropriate that sovereignty and exercise
it in Lebanon's stead. Perhaps because the US has its own
history of invading Middle Eastern countries to "enforce
UN resolutions," the American media seem to regard
Israel's case as entirely sensible. One wonders how the
media would have treated similar external intervention to
impose UN Security Council Resolution 425, which called
for Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 1978, and, of
course, was not honored until 2000, under the pesky fire
of Hizballah.
But that is what-if history. Back in the present, says the
tough-talking Israeli ambassador in Washington, David
Ayalon: "We'll have to go for the kill -- Hizballah
neutralization." Thus far, independent assessments of
"operational success" are bleak. On July 20, the Times of
London quoted "a senior British official" as saying: "Our
concern is that Israeli military action is not having the
desired effect ... . We are concerned that continued
military operations by Israel will cause further damage to
infrastructure and loss of civilian life which the damage
to Hizballah will not justify." The well-connected
military affairs columnist for Ha'aretz, Ze'ev Schiff,
penned a similarly pessimistic appraisal.
Hence the large-scale Israeli ground incursion that
commenced on July 20. While Halutz told the troops that
the incursion could last for "an extended period of time,"
Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz has stressed that it
will not lead to permanent reoccupation of south Lebanon.
Indeed, from the Israeli government's perspective, one
benefit of Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000,
like its pullout from Gaza in August 2005, is the latitude
to deploy the full force of bombs and tanks unavailable as
long as Israel was the occupying power. The architect of
Gaza disengagement, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon,
came to appreciate this logic despite having vehemently
denounced the peril to Israel's "deterrence capability"
when the Labor government brought troops home from
Lebanon. Whether the ground incursion will "degrade"
Hizballah's fighting effectiveness or strengthen their
argument that Lebanon needs their independent militia for
its own national defense remains to be seen. It seems that
Israeli strategists are making up the military objectives
as they go along, with one eye on the degree of
"operational success" and another eye on what Washington
will let its tank commanders and bombardiers get away
with.
Asked how long Israel's campaign could continue, a
high-ranking US official told the Washington Post:
"There's a natural dynamic to these things. When the
military starts, it may be that it has to run its course."
Many European chanceries, like Annan, evoking rules-of-war
distress at Israel's "excessive use of force," are calling
for an immediate ceasefire. These calls were faint indeed
amidst a week of air raids and the Group of Eight's
toothless tut-tutting about "extremist forces." From
Washington came the bright green go-ahead to keep on
bombing. Asked how long Israel's campaign could continue,
a high-ranking US official told the Washington Post:
"There's a natural dynamic to these things. When the
military starts, it may be that it has to run its course."
So we arrive at the Bush administration's breathtakingly
cavalier stance and, again, the human cost of its decision
to use Lebanon's agony to tilt at Iranian and Syrian
windmills. On July 15, by several accounts, US Ambassador
to the UN John Bolton blocked Security Council discussion
of the ceasefire resolution for which Lebanese Prime
Minister Fuad Siniora has pleaded in every available
forum. Since then, despite blatant violations of
principles of proportionality and growing international
alarm about the internally displaced Lebanese, Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice pledges only to work for a
ceasefire "as soon as possible when conditions are
conducive to do so." The conditions, of course, grow less
"conducive" the longer Washington's green light glares.
Such signals to Israel are not unprecedented, of course,
but in this case they are completely and rather shockingly
public. The secretary of state has disagreed with the
Egyptian foreign minister about the urgency of a ceasefire
while standing before the same bank of microphones in
Foggy Bottom. Making the Sunday talk show rounds on July
16, Rice again shopped an applause line from her June 2005
American University in Cairo address: "For the last 60
years, American administrations of both stripes --
Democratic, Republican -- traded what they thought was
security and stability and turned a blind eye to the
absence of democratic forces, to the absence of pluralism
in the region." This policy, she still claims, has been
reversed. In reality, with its unabashed approval of
Israel's pounding of Lebanon, the Bush administration has
reversed 60 years of basing US policy toward the
Arab-Israeli conflict on the premise -- however fictional
in practice -- that the US seeks peace between the
parties. Meanwhile, as Rice dithers over setting a date
certain for a Middle East diplomatic mission, the US green
light may actually exacerbate the carnage in Lebanon,
since Israeli military commanders know that they will have
limited time to accomplish their goals.
On July 19, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary
Tony Snow if Bush's insistence that Rice not undertake
shuttle diplomacy until Israel "defangs" Hizballah made
the conflagration in Lebanon a US war as well as an
Israeli one. Snow dissembled: "Why would it be our war? I
mean, it's not on our territory. This is a war in which
the United States -- it's not even a war. What you have
are hostilities, at this point, between Israel and
Hizballah. I would not characterize it as a war."
It is a war, an unjustified war. Israel's legal
justifications -- protecting the sanctity of its borders
and enforcing UN resolutions -- are disingenuous to the
point of being dishonest, after Israel's own years of
ignoring the will of the international community and
crossing and erasing boundaries with impunity. The US is
the only international actor with the power to stop this
war, and instead has chosen to encourage the fighting. So
the US, too, will be held accountable by history.
This article was originally published by The Middle East
Report Online and is republished with permission.
**********************************************************
(20) Editorial: The humiliating death of an independent British
foreign policy
The Independent
22 July 2006
Britain today finds itself more isolated internationally
than at any time since the invasion of Iraq. Our official
position on the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon is at odds
with the European Union, the United Nations and global
opinion in general. By refusing to call for a ceasefire we
find ourselves with only the United States and Israel
itself for company.
We refuse to demand a cessation in hostilities, even
though a fair number of our own citizens are in the firing
line. We had to get permission from the Israeli military
to evacuate thousands of Britons from Beirut this week. We
will presumably have to make a similar request to get our
remaining stranded citizens out of Tyre, in the heavily
bombarded south of Lebanon. How on earth did we get
ourselves into such a humiliating position? How did we end
up supporting a military operation that is so manifestly
against the national interest?
We surely know the answer already. The truth is that
Britain no longer has what can be called an independent
foreign policy. Our Prime Minister long ago threw his lot
in with the Bush administration. And President Bush is
adamant that Israel must be given a free hand in Lebanon.
It is this - and this alone - that explains our
government's refusal to call for a ceasefire. Mr Blair
would not dare risk a breach with the White House now,
especially considering he is off to Washington next week.
In an echo of the build-up to the Iraq invasion, our
leaders are busy coming up with justifications for this
perverse stance. Mr Blair claims that the release of
Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hizbollah would change
British policy. Yet even Israel admits that its operations
now have a wider objective. Our Foreign Secretary Margaret
Beckett desperately claims that the goal of the Israeli
operation is to help the Lebanese government to take full
control of the country. This is laughable. The Lebanese
government has been crippled and the country's
infrastructure all but destroyed. Lebanon will be lucky to
escape a recurrence of civil war when this is over.
All this is symptomatic of a broader dishonesty from our
leaders when it comes to the Middle East at the moment.
They make connections only when it suits them. For
instance, we have heard much recently about Iran and
Syria's support for Hizbollah. But they deny connections
when it could be embarrassing. Mrs Beckett was indignant
this week when it was suggested to her by an interviewer
that the crisis in Lebanon had something to do with the
instability radiating out of the catastrophe in Iraq. For
the most part, our leaders are reduced to parroting the
hopelessly simplistic US line that anyone who opposes US,
UK or Israeli policy in the Middle East must be considered
an enemy in the great "war on terror".
Meanwhile, the situation on the ground in Lebanon gets
worse. After 10 days of Israeli bombardment, more than 330
people have been killed, a third of them children. The UN
emergency relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland has warned of a
humanitarian disaster in the country in the absence of a
truce to allow the distribution of aid. Even leaving aside
the unacceptable humanitarian cost, the bombardment is not
going to enhance Israel's own security. Hizbollah will be
damaged but it is not going to disappear. In the long term
it may even be strengthened, as Israel creates more
enemies for itself through its collective punishment of
the Lebanese people.
Guerrilla armies cannot be bombed into submission. But
neither President Bush nor Mr Blair will say as much to
the Israeli government. Instead our leaders find
themselves acquiescing in the shameful notion that
indiscriminate violence by Israel can help to deliver
justice in the Middle East.
Bush is adamant that Israel must be given a free hand.
This explains our Government's refusal to cal for a
ceasefire
**********************************************************
(21) More Than 100 Iraqis Being Killed Each Day, Says UN; 3,149
Killed in June Alone
By PATRICK COCKBURN
Counterpunch
24 July 2006
http://www.counterpunch.org/Patrick07242006.html
BAGHDAD: The number of Iraqi civilians being murdered or
killed in the current fighting has been revealed for the
first time by the United Nations. It is far higher than
previous estimates. More people are dying here - probably
more than 100 a day, now maybe 150 - in the escalating
sectarian civil war between Shia and Sunni Muslims and the
continuing war with US troops than in the bombardment of
Lebanon.
Some 3,149 people were killed in June alone, or more than
100 a day, and the figure is likely to rise higher this
month because of tit-for-tat massacres by Sunni and Shia
Muslims. Some 120 Shias were killed in two attacks earlier
in the week and gunmen yesterday kidnapped 20 employees of
a government agency in Baghdad looking after Sunni mosques
and shrines.
The death toll has risen every month this year and
totalled 5,818 in May and June. This far exceeds the
number given by the Iraqi Coalition Casualty Count, a web
site that compiles casualty figures based on published
accounts, which said that 840 civilians died in June.
Overall 14,000 civilians were killed in the first half of
the year says the UN.
Ever since the invasion in 2003 the US military and later
US-supported Iraqi governments have sought to conceal the
number of Iraqi civilians being killed. The US Army for
long denied that it counted the number of civilians killed
by its soldiers. The Iraqi Ministry of Health also refused
to reveal to the UN the civilian casualty figures.
Now, for the first time, the health ministry in Baghdad
has told the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq, which
publishes a bimonthly report on human rights, the exact
death toll recorded by hospitals around the country. The
central morgue in Baghdad provides figures for
unidentified bodies, of which there were 1,595 in June. In
the first six months of the year the number of Iraqi
civilians dying violently rose by 77 per cent.
The UN report paints a picture of Iraqi society dissolving
under the stress of cumulative violence. Nobody is safe. A
tennis coach and two players were shot dead in Baghdad for
wearing shorts. Militias threaten the families of
homosexuals "stating they will begin killing family
members unless men are handed over or killed by the
family". Sectarian differences are behind most killings.
Assassinations are often carried out by the security
forces themselves. On June 3, for instance, 50 police
cars surrounded the al-Arab mosque in Basra and killed 10
of the 20 people inside. Sunni suicide bombers attack
crowded Shia mosques and markets in order to cause maximum
casualties.
Kidnapping, often of children, is common and the victims
are frequently killed regardless of whether or not they
have paid a ransom. "In one case the body of 12-year-old
Osama was reportedly found by the Iraqi police in a
plastic bag after his family paid a ransom of $30,000
[#16,300]. The boy had been sexually assaulted by the
kidnappers, before being hanged by his own clothing. The
police captured members of this gang who confessed to
raping and killing many boys and girls before Osama."
Many Iraqis have fled the country, mostly to Jordan and
Syria, to avoid the violence. Syria now has 351,000 and
Jordan 450,000 of these refugees, including 40 per cent of
all Iraqi professionals, according to the US Committee for
Refugees and Immigrants. It is increasingly difficult to
get into Jordan from Iraq but Syria still issues visas
easily.
All of the 18 Iraqi provinces are dangerous, outside the
three Kurdish provinces. The health ministry revealed for
the first time in June that 50,000 Iraqis have been killed
violently since 2003, but added that this was probably an
under-estimate. Medical care for the wounded is declining
because so many doctors have left the country. The
ministry says 106 doctors and 164 nurses have been killed.
Doctors in Baghdad hospitals complain that even the
operating theatres are not safe because soldiers or
militiamen will order them to stop an operation half way
through.
Parents dare not let their children wander the dangerous
streets of Baghdad alone, but until a few days ago they
could give them a treat by taking them to al-Jillawi's
toyshop, the biggest and best in the city, its windows
invitingly filled with Playstations, Barbie dolls and
bicycles.
They go there no longer. Today the shop on 14 Ramadan
Street in the once-affluent al-Mansur district is closed,
with a black mourning flag draped across its front. The
three sons and the teenage grandson of the owner, Mehdi
al-Jillawi, were shutting down for the evening recently,
bringing in bicycles and tricycles on display on the
pavement in front of the shop. As they did so, two BMWs
stopped close to them, and several gunmen got out armed
with assault rifles. They opened fire at point-blank
range, killing the young men.
Sectarian slaughter is not the only way to die in Iraq.
Yesterday US troops killed five people, including two
women and a child, in the city of Baquba during a raid,
claiming they had been shot at. At best it was a tragic
error, at worst it spoke to the cavalier attitude of the
US towards Iraqi civilian lives. Local police said that a
man had fired from a rooftop at the Americans because he
thought a hostile militia force was approaching.
While the eyes of the world are elsewhere, Baghdad is
still dying and the daily toll is hitting record levels.
While the plumes of fire and smoke over Lebanon have
dominated headlines for 11 days, with Britain and the US
opposing a UN call for an immediate ceasefire, another
Bush-Blair foreign policy disaster is unfolding in Iraq.
In a desperate effort to stem the butchery, the government
yesterday imposed an all-day curfew on Baghdad, but tens
of thousands of its people have already run for their
lives. In some parts of the city, dead bodies are left to
rot in the baking summer heat because nobody dares to
remove them. I drove through empty streets in the heart of
the city yesterday, taking a zigzag course to avoid police
checkpoints that we thought might be doubling as death
squads. Few shops were open. Those still doing business
are frantically trying to sell their stock. A sign above
one shop read: "Italian furniture: 75 per cent
reductions.''
Iraqis are terrified in a way that I have never seen
before, since I first visited Baghdad in 1978. Sectarian
massacres happen almost daily. The UN says 6,000 civilians
were slaughtered in May and June, but this month has been
far worse. In many districts it has become difficult to
buy bread because Sunni assassins have killed all the
bakers who are traditionally Shia.
Baghdad is now breaking up into a dozen different hostile
cities, Sunni or Shia, heavily armed and living in terror
of the other side. On July 9, Shia gunmen from the
black-clad Mehdi Army entered the largely Sunni al-Jihad
district in west Baghdad and killed 40 Sunni after
dragging them from their cars or stopping them at false
checkpoints. Within hours the Sunni militias struck back
with car bombs killing more than 60 Shia.
The Iraqi government is a prisoner of the Green Zone, the
heavily fortified enclave defended by US troops in the
centre of Baghdad. Entering it is like visiting another
country. Soldiers at the gates spend longer looking at
documents than do officials at most European frontiers.
"Some ministers have never visited their ministries
outside the Green Zone," said one ex-minister. "They have
their officials bring them documents to sign."
It seems unlikely that Baghdad will ever come together
again. Sunni are frightened of being caught in a Shia
district, and vice versa. Many now carry two sets of
identity documents, one Sunni and one Shia. Checkpoints
manned by the Mehdi Army know this and sometimes ask
people claiming to be Shia questions about Shia theology.
One Shia who passed this test was still killed because he
was driving a car with number plates from Anbar, a Sunni
province.
Where are the Americans in all this? Iraqis who used to
say that they were against the US occupation but at least
the Americans prevented civil war now think that a civil
war has started regardless of their presence.
The Iraqi army and police are themselves divided along
sectarian lines. Recognizing this, the Shia-controlled
Interior Ministry ludicrously suggested that people
challenge the ferocious police commanders and demand their
identity cards in order to distinguish real police from
death squads. It is hard to think of a surer way of
getting oneself killed.
I never expected the occupation of Iraq by the US and
Britain to end happily. But I did not foresee the present
catastrophe. Baghdad has survived the Iran-Iraq war, the
1991 Gulf War, UN sanctions, more bombing and, finally, a
savage guerrilla war. Now the city is finally splitting
apart, and - most surprising of all - this disaster
scarcely gets a mention on the news as the world watches
the destruction of Beirut.
Postscript
AMMAN -- The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, meets
with Tony Blair in London as violence in Iraq reaches a
new crescendo and senior Iraqi officials say the break up
of the country is inevitable.
A car bomb in a market in the Shia stronghold of Sadr City
in Baghdad Sunday killed 34 people and wounded a further
60 and was followed by a second bomb in the same area two
hours later that left a further eight dead. Another car
bomb outside a court house in Kirkuk killed a further 20
and injured 70 people.
"Iraq as a political project is finished," a senior
government official was quoted as saying, adding: "The
parties have moved to plan B." He said that the Shia,
Sunni and Kurdish parties were now looking at ways to
divide Iraq between them and to decide the future of
Baghdad, where there is a mixed population. "There is
serious talk of Baghdad being divided into [Shia] east and
[Sunni] west," he said.
Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, told me in an
interview, before joining Mr Maliki to fly to London and
then Washington, that in theory the government should be
able to solve the crisis because Shia, Kurd and Sunni were
elected members of it.
But he painted a picture of a deeply divided
administration in which senior Sunni members praised
anti-government insurgents as "the heroic resistance".
In the past two weeks, at a time when Lebanon has
dominated the international news, the sectarian civil war
in central Iraq has taken a decisive turn for the worse.
There have been regular tit-for-tat massacres and the
death toll for July is likely to far exceed the 3,149
civilians killed in June.
Mr Maliki, who is said to be increasingly isolated, has
failed to prevent the violence. Other Iraqi leaders claim
he lacks experience in dealing with security, is
personally very isolated without a kitchen cabinet and is
highly dependent on 30-40 Americans in unofficial advisory
positions around him.
"The government is all in the Green Zone like the previous
one and they have left the streets to the terrorists,"
said Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Iraqi politician. He said
the situation would be made worse by the war in Lebanon
because it would intensify the struggle between Iran and
the US being staged in Iraq. The Iraqi crisis would now
receive much reduced international attention.
The switch of American and British media attention to
Lebanon and away from the rapidly deteriorating situation
in Baghdad is much to the political benefit of Mr Bush and
Mr Blair.
"Maliki's trip to Washington is all part of the US
domestic agenda to put a good face on things for
November," a European diplomat in Baghdad was quoted as
saying.
Ever since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein a succession of
Iraqi political leaders have been feted in London and
Washington where they claimed to have the insurgents on
the run. Mr Maliki's meetings with Mr Blair today and Mr
Bush tomorrow are likely to be lower key but will serve
the same purpose before the US Congressional elections in
November. US commanders are considering moving more of
their troops - there are some 55,000 near the capital
into Baghdad to halt sectarian violence.
Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein has begun to receive fluids
voluntarily after being taken to hospital following 17
days on a hunger strike to protest against biased court
procedures and the murder of three defence lawyers. Among
fellow Sunni his defiant court performances have
rehabilitated his reputation, though he is still detested
by Kurds and Shia.