The Rise of Hezbollah in "The New Middle East"
"In conclusion, an odd fact. The severest
condemnation of Israel's
destruction of Lebanon that any Arab
government handed out came not
from Saudi Arabia, the Keeper of Islam's
Holy Places, nor from Egypt, the
largest and most powerful country in
the Arab world, but from the
U.S.-occupied Iraq where the
U.S.-confected Parliament passed a
unanimous resolution of outrage
against Israel's action and the U.S.-
appointed Prime Minister openly
joined Syrian and Iranian demand
for an immediate ceasefire. A sign of
the times yet to come?"
MER - MiddleEast.Org -
Washington - 13 August 2006:
The United Nations and the so-called "International Community" have
failed badly, again. Weeks of tragic delays, the destruction of much
Lebanon with a million plus homeless refugees, unaccoutable Israeli
bombing and killing of official and unarmed U.N. observer bases, Qana
massacre II and others. But of course on matters of war and peace the
U.N. is in fact a creature of the major states who created it, dominate
it, and insist on controlling it -- the U.S. of course by far the
superpower at the top. The institution of the Secretary-General is
without independent power and weak, as is the American-selected man who
now holds the position. The institution of the Security Council is
hamstrung because the U.S. has a long record of vetoing anything it
does not desire, more vetos from the U.S. than from all the other
countries combined over the years. Moreover this veto threat from
Washington is continually used to badger and warn, weakening and
neutering U.N. resolutions and actions even before they are taken, as
has just happened again with likely still more tragic results ahead.
Journalists and experts around the world are not nearly as taken in by
the American, Israeli, and Jewish propaganda onslaught which is so
effective in stiffling both understanding and criticism. The
powerful 'Jewish/Israel Lobby' does in fact have the Congress by the
balls; and much of the major corporate media cowering from the
pressures and threats. The U.S. government and the
military-industrial complex also now have many ways to spew forth their
own propaganda greatly spinning and watering down what comes from
quasi-independent media. And overseas of course the U.S. not only has
the expanded CIA but now spends hundreds of millions yearly funding
many media organizations and on-the-take quasi-agents in a worldwide
'information' war.
And yet just look at opinion polls around the world when even ordinary
people are asked about the policies of the U.S. and Israel -- never
ever so dangerously off the charts. Here is the origin of the
disgust, the hatred, and the desire for revenge that is propelling so
many to decide that they must themselves find ways to fight, to defend,
to revenge. This substantial cover story comes from India, from the
well-known magazine Frontline published by The Hindu.
COVER STORY
Empire comes to
Lebanon
AIJAZ AHMAD
The U.S.-Israel
axis goes all out to remove the last impediments to building a "New
Middle East".
|
Volume 23 - Issue 15 :: Jul. 29-Aug. 11, 2006
INDIA'S NATIONAL MAGAZINE
from the publishers of THE HINDU |
|
ISSAM KOBEIS/REUTERS
HIZBOLLAH'S POLITICAL HEADQUARTERS In Southern Beirut,
after
Isreel's air strike on July 21.
LET us begin with a supposedly "undisputed" fact:
The official story, told first by the Israeli
government and automatically accepted by governments and media outlets
across the world, is that Hizbollah is a Muslim fundamentalist,
terrorist organisation which periodically lobs shells and rockets into
civilian population centres of northern Israel and that, in its latest
outrage on July 12, it attacked a border military post inside Israeli
territory, killing six Israeli soldiers and capturing two. Having
waited several years for "the international community" and the Lebanese
government to disarm this "terrorist" organisation, Israel is said to
have been finally exasperated by this latest outrage and, acting in
self-defence, it decided to retaliate so as to "break Hizbollah" for
ever and ever, for the sake of the security of its citizens.
This official version raises some basic
questions regarding the character of Hizbollah itself, about the very
incident that is supposed to have "provoked" Israel beyond endurance,
and about the scope of Israel's "retaliation".
The background to the rise of Hizbollah is
instructive, as is its present role in Lebanese politics in general.
There is a long history of United States and Israeli military
interventions in Lebanon, dating back to the landing of U.S. Marines
there in 1958 and including major Israeli invasions in 1978 and 1982,
which predate the very formation of Hizbollah. It was in 1978 that
Israel first captured a large swath of territory in the predominantly
Shia region of southern Lebanon and held it as a self-declared
"security zone" until a Lebanese armed resistance movement, led by
Hizbollah, put an end to that occupation, except for a mountainside at
the point where the borders of Israel and Syria meet with that of
Lebanon, known as Shebaa Farms, which Israel has continued to occupy
and which therefore continues to be a point of military contention
between the occupiers and the resistance.
Hizbollah itself came into being some four
years after the invasion of 1982, when Israel occupied about half of
Lebanon, destroyed much of Beirut and oversaw the infamous massacres of
Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps on the outskirts of the
city. In its formative phase, Hizbollah drew many of its guerilla
fighters from among the relatives of those who had been killed during
the Israeli invasions and, throughout its history, it has been based
predominantly among the Shias who constitute roughly half the
population of Lebanon, the overwhelming majority in the south and the
bulk of the urban poor in Beirut itself. Until 2000, it was devoted
almost exclusively to fighting the Israeli occupiers. After evicting
the Israelis from virtually the whole of southern Lebanon, it entered
into Lebanese politics as a party and now has 12 members in Parliament
and two in the Cabinet; there are other forces, including wholly
secular as well as non-Muslim forces, which are allied with it in a
parliamentary bloc. In fact, the list of candidates for the alliance it
led during the 2005 elections included five Christians, three Sunni
Muslims and a Druze alongside 14 Shia candidates.
MAHMOUD TAWIL/AP
A LEBANESE MAN kisses a poster of Hizbollah leader
Sheikh
Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut.
Certain facts stand out in sharp relief here.
First, Hizbollah is undoubtedly an Islamicist organisation but it arose
not to turn Lebanon into a theocratic state; it arose as a resistance
movement against Israeli occupation. That its mass base is exclusively
among Shias reflects, in the first pace, the sectarian nature of the
Lebanese political chessboard, based as it is on the constitutional
arrangements devised by the French colonial authority before its
departure, in which every party, except the Left parties, represents an
ethnic and/or religious grouping. Moreover, this mass base is owed also
to the fact that Shias were the vast majority who lived under Israeli
occupation and who inhabit the slums of Beirut.
Second, perhaps the majority of the Lebanese
look upon it as a movement of anti-colonial resistance, so that the
U.S.-Israeli-British characterisation of it as "terrorist" falls on
deaf ears.
Third, Hizbollah certainly arose as a guerilla
force but, through an evolution and expansion over two decades, it has
become an influential political party in Parliament and the Cabinet,
while it also maintains a militia which fights Israel over the little
sliver of Lebanese territory which is still occupied. There is no
history of Hizbollah ever committing violence against a Lebanese
citizen, and though a Christian militia, known as the Southern Lebanon
Army (SLA), fought alongside the Israelis during 22 years of full-scale
occupation of Lebanon, Hizbollah undertook no acts of revenge or
retribution against that client force after its Israeli masters had
been forced to withdraw. Most of the fire between Israel and Hizbollah
is exchanged not over northern Israel, as the global propaganda machine
would have us believe, but over the Shebaa Farms which Israel occupies
and which Lebanon considers its own (Syria also claims that little
patch of a mountainside).
As for the incident of July 12 which is said
to have "provoked" Israel into attacking Lebanon, the primary fact is
that Israel holds in its prisons hundreds of Lebanese nationals, most
of whom it does not acknowledge and many of whom have been held for
well over a decade - not to speak of some 10,000 Palestinians who are
currently held in Israeli prisons. Hizbollah is always on the lookout
to capture Israelis so that it can then exchange them for some of
Israel's Arab prisoners. Such prisoner exchanges have happened in the
past, and the current Israeli claim that it does not exchange prisoners
is a straightforward lie.
As for the incident of July 12 itself, when
Hizbollah is supposed to have attacked a military post inside Isreal,
there is reason to be sceptical.
ABDELJALIL BOUNHAR/AP
IN THE MOROCCAN capital of Rabat, a protest against Israeli
aggression.
The initial report filed by Agence
France-Presse (AFP) actually said that "According to the Lebanese
police force, the two Israeli soldiers were captured in Lebanese
territory, in the area of Aitaa al-Chaab, near to the border with
Israel, where an Israeli unit had penetrated in middle of morning."
The Associated Press (AP) gave the same
version on July 12: "The militant group Hizbollah captured two Israeli
soldiers during clashes Wednesday across the border in southern
Lebanon, prompting a swift reaction from Israel, which sent ground
forces into its neighbour to look for them. The forces were trying to
keep the soldiers' captors from moving them deeper into Lebanon,
Israeli government officials said on condition of anonymity."
This was also the account published in The Hindustan Times
the same day: "The Lebanese Shi'ite Hizbollah movement announced on
Wednesday that its guerillas have captured two Israeli soldiers in
southern Lebanon. `Implementing our promise to free Arab prisoners in
Israeli jails, our strugglers have captured two Israeli soldiers in
southern Lebanon,' a statement by Hizbollah said. `The two soldiers
have already been moved to a safe place,' it added. The Lebanese police
said that the two soldiers were captured as they `infiltrated' into the
town of Aitaa al-Chaab inside the Lebanese border."
This line of reporting was completely
suppressed after Israel put forward its claim that it was Hizbollah
that had attacked its territory, killed its soldiers and kidnapped two
others, so that it could claim to be attacking Lebanon in retaliation.
We do know that an Israeli tank got blown up in Lebanese territory in
the course of that incident. Israelis claim that they had sent that
tank to chase the Hizbollah guerillas who had kidnapped Israeli
soldiers. Hizbollah, by contrast, claims that the tank was part of the
Israeli incursion into Lebanon, got blown up by a landmine, and Israeli
soldiers were taken prisoner after a gun battle. Hizbollah's version
seems more credible in the light of the reports we have quoted above.
Israel "Retaliates"
Two soldiers taken prisoner - on Israeli territory, let us grant for arguments' sake.
Israel responds by bombing three runways and
fuel depots of Beirut International Airport, all the country's
seaports, most highways and roads connecting various parts of the
country as well as those leading to Syria, tens of bridges in Lebanon's
south and east, factories, army bases, trucks, ambulances, hospitals,
schools, television transmitters, the whole of southern Beirut, Sidon,
Tyre, Baalbek, other towns, other villages. Six hundred dead, thousands
injured. Half a million refugees in the first week. Eight hundred
thousand by the end of the second week. At the time of writing, on July
27, one out of five Lebanese citizens has been rendered homeless. Tens
of billions of dollars of damage inflicted upon a tiny country, one of
the most beautiful and vibrant on this planet of ours, which had only
recently pulled itself out, gloriously and with great aesthetic
finesse, out of the devastations of a civil war and foreign - Israeli!
- occupation. "Lebanon has been put back 20 years," an Israeli general
exults on television. Precisely. Because Hizbollah took two prisoners
and wanted to exchange them for some Lebanese prisoners in Israeli
jails.
Tzipi Livni, the glamorously dressed Israeli
Vice-Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, sits in the glare
of television cameras and justifies the carnage in suave tones,
invoking the "axis of terror and hate created by Iran, Syria, Hizbollah
and Hamas that want to end any hope for peace". She says that the best
way to retrieve the two captured soldiers "is to destroy totally the
international airport of Beirut", so that they are not taken out of
Lebanon. "But they can sneak them away in a car," her interlocutor
says. "Oh, indeed," says the Israeli Foreign Minister, "This is why we
also destroy all the roads in Lebanon leading out of the country." And,
one would suppose that a fifth of the Lebanese population is rendered
homeless so that Hizbollah has no buildings left to hide those two
soldiers; once all the buildings are gone, the Israeli Army will then
find those two soldiers, just sitting somewhere out in the open, and
bring them home.
It is difficult to say just when the planning
for this war began. We know that for well over a year now, senior
military officers have been giving a Power Point presentation, the
"Three-Week War," to their U.S. counterparts, U.S. think-tanks and
pro-Israeli members of the U.S. Congress, selected European diplomats
and journalists, spelling out the plans for what is now unfolding. We
do not know who was behind the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the
former Lebanese Prime Minister, in February 2005, but we do know that
the assassination was used by the U.S.-Israeli axis to obtain the
withdrawal of the Syrian forces from Lebanon (who had come there
initially on U.S. and Saudi Arabian promptings, to save Lebanon from
the secular Left) and to get the U.N. Security Council to pass a
resolution calling for the disarming of Hizbollah.
But who in Lebanon was going to be strong
enough to disarm Lebanon's most popular political entity? Not the
Lebanese government, overwhelmingly inclined towards the
U.S.-Saudi-Israeli axis but too weak internally and also much too
dependent on Hizbollah itself. So, with the Syrians gone, Israel may
itself return, take care of Hizbollah, turn Lebanon into the kind of
Israeli protectorate that Jordan already is, and re-occupy southern
Lebanon, as in days of yore before Hizbollah threw them out, and
re-create there a "security zone" alongside northern Israel, as Amir
Peretz, the Labour Party chief and the current Defence Minister of
Israel, said a couple of days ago - right up to the Litani river, some
32 km into Lebanese territory, whose water resources Israel covets.
If that were to come to pass, Israel would
have achieved all the aims it has been pursuing in Lebanon since the
invasions of 1978 and 1982. At that time, the Palestine Liberation
Organisation (PLO) had established its headquarters, camps and
institutions in Lebanon, after it had been evicted out of Jordan in
1971, and getting the PLO to leave Lebanon was a major aim, which was
realised after the blitzkrieg of 1982 when the U.S. brokered Yasser
Arafat's departure to Tunis. However, Syrian forces were already in
Lebanon, invited initially by that same Israeli-U.S.-Saudi axis. Israel
shot down about a 100 Syrian airplanes during that invasion but the
Syrian ground troops remained, and a sort of truce came in force. Syria
would continue to occupy its positions but it would also not directly
challenge Israel's right to occupy southern Lebanon, while the
government in Beirut remained weak in relation to both neighbouring -
and occupying - powers.
Hizbollah arose out of this crucible, with the
single aim of throwing out the Israelis, and therefore aligned itself
with Syria - with converging interests but by no means a creature of
Syria, which initially backed not Hizbollah but Amal, a much less
militant Shia organisation. Israel could in any case not turn Lebanon
into a protectorate at that time, given the Syrian presence on Lebanese
territory and major Lebanese elite interests aligned with it.
Since its very inception in 1948, Israel is
used to capturing Arab territory and retaining it. The state was
created by an act of the U.N. and it immediately proceeded to capture
much more territory than it was granted; today's Israel, which most
governments of the world recognise, includes that additional occupied
territory. In the Six-Day War of 1967, it captured the rest of
Palestine and has refused to vacate even an inch of it, despite all the
heroic resistance that the Palestinians have mounted; the
"disengagement" from Gaza has simply meant turning it all into a mass
prison and daily military attacks, which take dozens of Palestinian
lives each week. It also captured the Syrian territory of the Golan
Heights and never returned it, despite all sorts of Syrian overtures
and offers. It returned the Sinai peninsula to Egypt only when Egypt
bent down on its knees, recognised it, opened itself up to it, took
itself out of any Arab resistance to the Zionist design, and in effect
became an ally; after Israel launched its ongoing destruction of
Lebanon, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak denounced Hizbollah and, pro forma, requested Israel for some restraint.
Hizbollah has been thus far, in some 60 years
of Israeli settler-colonial enterprise, the only entity which has
through armed resistance forced the Israelis to relinquish any
territory that the Jewish state has ever captured. For that
unforgivable sin Hizbollah must be punished and destroyed, and Israel's
original plan to turn Lebanon into a dependency be implemented, just as
brutally as it was attempted in 1978 and 1982.
The Present Context
The historical moment now is auspicious for
Israel, in terms of the enormous shifts that have taken place in global
politics. Under the guise of the "war on terror", the U.S. is
determined to undo whatever losses it had to incur in the days of the
Soviet Union-aligned Arab nationalist regimes, and after the fall of
the Shah in Iran. Within this larger context, Israel can again make a
bid to dominate permanently the entire landmass from the Euphrates to
the Nile, and from the shores of the Red Sea to the Turkish border -
all the Arab lands, in short, which were once part of the Ottoman
Empire. Most of the key Arab governments - those of Saudi Arabia,
Egypt, Jordan and so on - have already been secured for the
U.S.-Israeli axis; Libya has been tamed and, with the fall of Iraq,
another major adversary is gone. Britain is now fully a part of the
U.S.-Israeli axis, and aside from those two countries, British Prime
Minister Tony Blair was the only one defying the global call for an
immediate ceasefire in Lebanon after what Israel has wrought.
In Germany, we now have a government more
closely aligned with the U.S. than any since the days of Chancellor
Konrad Adenaur. French President Jacques Chirac regrets that he
distanced France from the U.S. plan of action during the invasion of
Iraq in 2003, and he has been trying to undo his sin ever since. France
was therefore a partner of the U.S. in engineering the coup in Haiti
that overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and was again a key
player in getting the U.N. Security Council to pass a resolution
demanding the departure of Syrian troops from Lebanon and the disarming
of Hizbollah. Russia, China and India - strutting like giants in Asia,
acting like pygmies in international affairs - issue prim little
protests against the killing of four U.N. personnel in Israeli shelling
but keep their mouths shut about a fifth of the Lebanese population
being made homeless in less than two weeks.
And there is the historical moment within
Israel itself. When Ariel Sharon, as Defence Minister, invaded Lebanon
in 1982, 20,000 Israelis demonstrated against it and hundreds of
serving soldiers and officers joined the protests, some returning their
medals won for bravery in previous wars. Now, as the new invasion from
the air unfolded, the anti-war demonstration attracted barely 800. Even
the pretence of a two-party system no longer functions in Israel. If
Sharon ruled Israel as a leader of Likud with Labour in his coalition
and under his wing, the new government of Ehud Olmert, a favourite of
Sharon, has the Labour chief Amir Peretz, a Sephardic Jew and the grand
hope of the Zionist left, as his Defence Minister, executing these
policies of mass destruction not just in Lebanon but also in Gaza. With
the moral sentiments of most of the population made coarse by decades
of occupying other people's lands and killing anyone who resists,
virtually the whole nation supports the atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Ilan Pappe, a distinguished Israeli historian and commentator,
estimates that some 80 per cent of the members of the Knesset have been
elected on what he calls "the race ticket". The result is that the
marginalised minority in Israel which still keeps alive in its hearts
the sense of injustice toward Palestinian victims and the spiritual
vision of a different kind of Judaism is condemned to intensities of a
moral loneliness which is difficult to imagine for an outsider.
With the exception of parties dominated by
the Arab citizens of Israel, all others are agreed that there shall be
no withdrawal from all the territories that Israel occupied in 1967, no
right of return given to Palestinians uprooted from their homes by
Israel's wars, and no equality of citizenship between Jewish and
non-Jewish citizens of Israel. Kadima, the ruling party, fought the
recent elections and won 29 seats on a platform which promised that
Israel would retain in perpetuity all the major settlements established
after the conquest of the West Bank and the bulk of the territories
occupied in 1967. Avigdor Lieberman's party, Israel Our Home, won 11
seats and comprises one of the larger blocs in Parliament on the
platform that calls for denying to current Israeli citizens "the right
to live in the state on the grounds of religion and race" - a clear
promise that, if elected to form the government, Lieberman would no
longer allow Muslim and Christian Arab citizens to reside in Israel.
According to a poll published in March 2006 in Haaretz,
Israel's most prestigious newspaper, more than two-thirds of Israeli
Jews stated that they would not live in the same building with the
Palestinian citizens of Israel and 40 per cent believed that "the state
needs to support the emigration of Arab citizens". With this kind of
mentality rampant in the nation, the Israeli state, a regional
superpower whose military might dwarfs all other states in the region,
feels free to kill and burn as much as it wishes.
"New Middle East"
Behind this historical moment there lies that
vision of "the New Middle East" that Condoleezza Rice now mentions in
every speech that she delivers on affairs of that region. Risen from
the corporate offices of Chevron and the petrodollar industry in
general, and serving these days as the U.S. Secretary of State, she
dismisses all the destruction of Lebanon over the past two weeks as the
"birth-pangs of the New Middle East". As late as July 23 when a sixth
of the Lebanese population had been rendered homeless, she dismissed
the idea of a ceasefire, saying "we have to be certain that we are
pushing forward to the New Middle East, not going back to the old one",
while President George W. Bush has openly said that he will give Israel
all the time and latitude it requires to annihilate Hizbollah. The
phrase seems to have become something of a mantra but one may well ask: what, precisely, is this "New Middle East"?
A large number of documents exist written by
U.S. rightwing radicals - some of them neoconservative - which spell
out the project in great detail, and many of these thinkers and doers
of the far right, such as Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, have divided
their time between occupying high places in the U.S. government and
working for high Israeli officials. The power of the "Israeli lobby"
has been much in the news recently because two mainstream Professors
from Harvard University and the University of Chicago published a
lengthy article documenting that power. There is, in addition, close
cooperation between elite U.S. think-tanks and their Israeli
counterparts.
The ensuing vision of the "New Middle East"
has some key features. In country after country, client regimes are to
be imposed, with the force of arms if necessary, on the model of
Afghanistan. In the larger countries, such as Iran, violent overthrow
of the existing government is envisioned as a prelude to not only the
imposition of a client regime but also the break-up of the country
along ethnic and denominational lines, as is now unfolding in Iraq;
Saudi Arabia itself may be up for such a break-up if the
anti-monarchical insurgency cannot be contained within existing
political and territorial parameters.
The "rollback of Syria", a favourite phrase
of the neocons, has begun with the assassination of Hariri and the
forced withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon; Hizbollah is seen as a
strategic ally of Syria and its destruction is sought on its own merits
as well as in the campaign for that "rollback". As the Iraqi insurgency
spreads in provinces adjoining the Syrian border, the urgency to
control Syria increases, and President Bashar al-Assad is being told
that he can save his skin, and save Syria from invasion, if he
cooperates with the U.S.-Israeli axis in Iraq and Lebanon, and if he
breaks his alliance with Iran. Part of the demands on Syria is that it
cooperate in the construction of an oil pipeline from Kirkuk in Iraqi
Kurdistan to Israel, through Syrian territory - this, while Israel
continues to occupy Syrian territory in the Golan.
The U.S.-Israeli axis perceives two types of
remaining impediments. At the level of state formation, only the
regimes of Iran and Syria remain which are to any degree still
independent, though both have cooperated with the U.S., notably in Iraq
where the U.S.-sponsored and Shia-dominated regime would have been
impossible without extensive collusion on the part of Iran. Syria has
likewise provided key information to the U.S. in its pursuit of the
Iraqi resistance and has even hosted the U.S. offshore torture
chambers. Yet, both have their own distinct national interests which
clash with those of the U.S. and Israel, and a complicated game of
coercion and concession is being played, but with the aim of
emasculating both, with "regime change" and even invasion looming on
the horizon.
The more immediate threat is perceived to
come from a variety of non-state but armed actors, notably the
Hizbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine and such entities elsewhere as
Muqtada al Sadr's militia, the Sadr Brigade, in Iraq. Each of these
three "enemies" arose outside the authorised structures of the
nation-state formation, as militias and then as full-fledged guerilla
forces; each has eventually decided to participate in the political
process in their respective areas and even in government formation.
Hamas was actually elected to governmental power; Hizbollah and
Muqtada's forces also have substantial presences in the current, newly
erected political structures of Lebanon and Iraq respectively. However,
each of them participates in rituals of the state in pursuit of
strategic advantage and each would be perfectly content to withdraw
into the arena of guerilla warfare if its legitimate political aims are
blocked in the political arena and/or it comes under military siege.
Moreover, each of them draws its main mass
base from among the slum-dwellers, the unemployed and the pauperised,
the proletarianised masses making a precarious living in the so-called
"informal economy", the direct victims of past aggressions, relatives
of the dead and the injured, the wretched of the earth. They have been
uprooted from their traditional ways of life and religion serves for
them as an opiate for their wounds, as the soul of a soulless world, as
the encyclopaedic compendium of the knowledge of this world, as promise
of a better one. They are neither state functionaries nor bourgeois,
hence cannot be bribed into submission. They must be annihilated.
These armies of the poor are also seen by the
U.S.-Israeli axis as flanks for the Iranian and Syrian regimes, and
since the imperial imagination is incapable of seeing slum-dwellers as
being autonomous subjects of their own history they are perceived as
"agents" of the regimes which give them some rudimentary weapons for
their own reasons. That there are practical relationships between
Hizbollah and the Iranian and Syrian regimes is undeniable, but what
the U.S.-Israeli axis does not comprehend is that there is a
convergence of interests and convictions, not a relationship of
clientalism. Nor can they perceive that the mass base of President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his Basij militia in Iran is exactly the same
as that of Hamas in Palestine and Hizbollah in Lebanon: the rejects of
capital and empire. The U.S.-Israeli axis believes that if the militias
elsewhere can be beaten to pulp, Iran will lose its flanks and can then
be dealt the final blow. All this is expected to be in place over the
next couple of years and Olmert has said that he will declare Israel's
"final" borders sometime by 2010.
The state of Israel is now close to 60 years
old and already the pre-eminent power in the region, but it is also the
only state in the world, and so recognised by the world system, that
has never revealed what its borders are. The borders it had achieved
for itself by 1967 are simply called "the Green Line", because it
expects to annex more territory from the Palestinian population that it
occupies as well as from its neighbours. Olmert's promise that he will
declare Israel's "final" borders in a few years is premised on the
belief that the U.S.-Israeli project for the "New Middle East" shall
have been realised by then, and those "final" borders are likely to
include not only the areas within the "Green Line" but also much of the
Palestinian West Bank as well as parts of Syrian and Lebanese
territories. That is what Hamas and Hizbollah, with their little armies
of the poor and their rudimentary weapons, are up against. A new,
sanitised phrase seems to have become very fashionable over the past
few months to encapsulate this confrontation between vast imperial
armies and little bands of nationalist soldiers: "asymmetrical
warfare."
In this "New Middle East", reduced to a
patchwork of ethno-religious entities, the whole history of oil
nationalisations shall be reversed, control over oil resources of the
region shall be transferred to the petrodollar corporations of the core
capitalist countries, primarily the U.S. and Britain, and Israel's
"energy security" shall be guaranteed, as part of the Jewish state's
national security. Moreover, the water and land resources of Palestine
shall come under permanent Israeli control, and the water resources of
Lebanon may also be partially diverted for use in Israel. Various
military arrangements are envisioned for the realisation of this
project.
The U.S. itself has taken the main
responsibility for Iraq and Israel is doing the same in Lebanon, while
the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) is already embroiled in
Afghanistan and is now being slated for a very large role in Lebanon
after Israel has finished off with Hizbollah, destroying much of the
country in the process. Britain is already in the U.S. pocket, Chirac
has become extraordinarily belligerent on issues of "terror" emanating
from the Middle East (West Asia) and North Africa, and, with Chancellor
Angela Merkel of Germany in toe, there is now emerging a new definition
of NATO's global responsibilities. Its expansion "eastward" now means
not only in the direction of Russia but also towards West Asia.
A NATO-Israel protocol was signed in Brussels
in November 2004 whereby closer cooperation was envisaged and Israel
was invited to participate in military exercises and "anti-terror
manoeuvres" with NATO, along with some Arab countries such as Egypt,
Jordan and Algeria. Under this aegis, joint exercises of U.S., Israeli
and Turkish forces did take place in the eastern Mediterranean, off the
Syrian coast, in January 2005. Similar exercises were held for Israel
with a larger number of NATO countries the following month and have
since then become a regular feature. The premise of this growing
integration of Israel into NATO is that Israel is under threat from the
same sources which pose a threat to NATO countries - and, in deed, to
their selected clients in the Arab world itself.
Hizbollah Plays the Spoiler
In the fatefully consequential year of 1967,
Israel fought a swift war and not only destroyed the air forces of
Egypt and Syria but also captured the remaining Palestinian territories
as well as Syria's strategic Golan Heights and Egypt's vast Sinai
peninsula, placing its armour on the embankments of the Suez Canal -
all in a matter of six days. Subsequently, it invaded Lebanon at will
and imposed upon the country whatever arrangements suited its purposes.
All through these years, it has killed, maimed, kidnapped, imprisoned
as many Palestinians as it wished, while the loss of even a couple of
Israeli lives in retaliation became the reason for more bombings,
killings, kidnappings and so on. Thus it has been, and Israel's
arrogance of power is based on concrete historical experience.
The notable feature of Israel's current
onslaught against Lebanon is that it began with the usual,
made-for-television spectacle of mass destruction of civilian
populations and infrastructure that has become the norm in recent
years, reaching a particularly high-pitched crescendo in the
"Shock-&-Awe" U.S. blitzkrieg against Baghdad in the opening days
of that invasion. Much of the Lebanese national infrastructure was
destroyed in a matter of days, as were the habitats of hundreds of
thousands people in southern Beirut and other Lebanese cities; half a
million refugees were generated in a week in a country half the size of
Uttaranchal and more sparsely populated than it.
On the ground, however, the supposedly
invincible Israeli Army simply could not move even half a kilometre
without casualties. Hizbollah had evidently mastered the Vietminh-style
art of laying landmines and building underground bunkers and tunnels
for guerillas to operate from. From the skies, they destroyed cities
and villages alike but, on the ground, they had to fight fierce battles
to capture even single villages, inflicting but also taking casualties.
Used to being masters of the West Asian skies for half a century, they
could not intercept the ramshackle short-range missiles of Hizbollah,
which fell at the rate of hundred a year on Israeli soil - for the
first time in the history of the imperious Jewish state.
During its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Israel
had shot down over a 100 Syrian aircraft without losing one of its own
(U.S.-supplied, of course). Now, when Hizbollah could not even imagine
having an air force of any kind, Israel lost four Apache helicopters
and an F-16 jet - state-of-the-art U.S. hardware - during the first 10
days of its invasion: a stunning first in the history of Israel's
perpetual assaults on Arab lands. As the Israeli attacks began, their
generals announced on television that they are going to "eliminate"
Hizbollah and Western newsprint was ablaze with headlines saying that
Bush had given Israel a week to do the eliminating, knowing that
pressure to impose a ceasefire shall soon mount internationally. By the
end of the second week, Israeli ground forces had made no significant
progress while casualties were mounting beyond the endurance of the
Israeli population which is used to not only victories but also
victories without any significant casualties of their own; only the
others are supposed to die. Israel had amassed troops on the Lebanese
border with the assumption that Hizbollah shall be rendered powerless
soon enough and the Israeli forces shall move quickly up to at least
the Litani river.
With no significant progress on the ground and
Israeli soldiers dying each day, while the Israeli government itself
starting to talk not of "eliminating" Hizbollah but "weakening" it and
"pushing" it farther away from the Israeli border, there began another
kind of parade on Israeli television: retired high military brass and
"experts" coming forward to say that the whole plan had been
misconceived, that it needed re-thinking and so on. The latest news,
before this article goes to press, is that Israel has "halted" its
much-awaited "ground assault" in Lebanon but has called up three full
divisions of reservists for active military duty. Only the next few
days will tell whether Israel will play safe and hope that the U.S.
will arrange for a NATO force to occupy southern Lebanon on its behalf
(with the consent of the Lebanese government), or will undertake that
ground offensive later, with more massive forces.
When Israelis began shelling an area in
southern Lebanon which had U.N. personnel in it, the U.N. Deputy
Secretary-General contacted them 10 times to request cessation of the
bombardment and an Irish military officer warned them six times;
despite all these requests and warnings, the bombing continued and four
U.N. personnel were killed in a direct hit. By the time U.N.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan arrived in Rome to attend the G8 Summit
(plus Arab emissaries) to discuss the Lebanese situation, he was
furious and demanded an immediate ceasefire; the Americans had already
vetoed his bid to have his post as Secretary-General renewed, and they
had dragged his name in mud on the issue of his son's involvement in
the oil-for-food programme in Iraq, so he had nothing to lose. But he
was then joined by everyone demanding a ceasefire, so that the U.S. and
Britain found themselves isolated. The Israelis had had two weeks and
they had simply not delivered, and, defiant as ever, Bush simply
announced that he was going to give the Israelis as much time as they
needed to do whatever they have planned. The Rome meeting ended in a
fiasco, the so-called "international community" having made no
decisions except to leave the Lebanese to the mercies of Israel.
Hence the season of leaks. It is said that
much is going on behind the scenes. That there shall be a multinational
force of perhaps as many as 20,000 or 30,000, led by Turkey or Germany
or both, and involving contingents from a variety of countries,
including India, Pakistan and Egypt. That it will start arriving in 60
days (plenty of time for Israel to do as it wishes) and the rest shall
trickle in later. That its job shall be not to "disarm" Hizbollah but
to re-locate it far away from the Israeli border. Whether that force
shall be "led" by the U.N., or "mandated" by it but "led" by another
country, or assembled and "led" by NATO is unclear, even in these
leaks.
None of it can happen without simultaneous
agreement of the Israeli and the Lebanese governments, and the latter
has no power to agree to anything not acceptable to Hizbollah. If that
fragile government is forced to proceed without the consent of
Hizbollah, the government will fall and, with political vacuum at home
and Israelis pounding the country from the outside, Lebanon may
gradually return to a sectarian civil war, an outcome that Israel shall
greatly welcome because Hizbollah then can be sucked into fighting that
civil war and relieve the pressure on Israel; Israel, in turn, can then
start arming yet another rightwing Maronite militia, as in the past.
The catch in all this is that the situation
within Lebanon has changed drastically over the past decade or more.
Having been brought up under the dark shadow of a civil war fought by a
previous generation and fuelled in part by the Israelis, the
new-generation Lebanese, who have seen their country go from rubble to
prosperity, have no stomach for another civil war. There is undoubtedly
a Far Right as well as a pro-Israeli elite which would like to see
Hizbollah wiped off the face of the earth. But those forces no longer
dominate Lebanese society as they did in the past. Most Lebanese view
Hizbollah as a legitimate part of their national polity, and even its
enemies have no sense of a blood feud against it, since it has never
taken any Lebanese lives. As Azmi Bishara, the distinguished
Palestinian member of the Israeli Knesset, wrote recently in the
Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram, everything now depends on Lebanese unity; if that goes, everything goes.
Having come into Lebanon after being driven out
of it with the force of arms, Israel cannot now retreat from this
fight. Only the coming days shall show whether there is going to be a
long-drawn-out war of attrition or a massive land assault; massive
destruction through aerial bombings shall in any case continue, since
that kills the Lebanese with no risk of Israeli casualties. Israel has
claimed that Iranian arms are being brought to Hizbollah through Syria
and it has gone to great lengths in asserting that it has carried out
forensic tests which show that some of the most lethal rockets that
have been fired by Hizbollah into Israel are of Syrian manufacture.
This alone can be used as a justification for mounting an attack on
Syria, or even Iran. Hence the Syrian-Iranian Summit in Damascus which
is going on even as I write these lines.
Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are behind
us, possible invasions of Syria and Iran are perhaps ahead of us,
Lebanon is currently at the heart of the Zionist-imperial offensive.
Meanwhile, a dozen or more keep getting killed in Palestine every week,
a hundred or more in Iraq every day. The bloodlust of the imperium is
unrelenting.
In conclusion, an odd fact. The severest
condemnation of Israel's destruction of Lebanon that any Arab
government handed out came not from Saudi Arabia, the Keeper of Islam's
Holy Places, nor from Egypt, the largest and most powerful country in
the Arab world, but from the U.S.-occupied Iraq where the
U.S.-confected Parliament passed a unanimous resolution of outrage
against Israel's action and the U.S.-appointed Prime Minister openly
joined Syrian and Iranian demand for an immediate ceasefire. A sign of
the times yet to come?
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