"Stop that
shit!"
Uri Avnery, 18.7.06
A WOMAN, an immigrant from Russia, throws herself on the
ground in total despair in front of her home that has been hit by a missile,
crying in broken Hebrew: "My son! My son!" believing him dead. In
fact he was only wounded and sent to the hospital.
Lebanese children,
covered with wounds, in Beirut hospitals. The funeral of the victims of a
missile in Haifa. The ruins of a whole devastated quarter in Beirut.
Inhabitants of the north of Israel fleeing south from the Katyushas.
Inhabitants of the south of Lebanon fleeing north from the Israeli Air
Force.
Death, destruction.
Unimaginable human suffering.
And the most disgusting
sight: George Bush in a playful mood sitting on his chair in St. Petersburg,
with his loyal servant Tony Blair leaning over him, and solving the problem:
"See? What they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbullah to stop doing
that shit, and it's over."
Thus spake the leader of
the world, and the seven dwarfs - "the great of the world" - say Amen.
SYRIA? BUT only a few months ago it was Bush - yes, the same
Bush - who induced the Lebanese to drive the Syrians out of their country. Now
he wants them to intervene in Lebanon and impose order?
31 years ago, when the
Lebanese civil war was at its height, the Syrians sent their army into Lebanon
(invited, of all people, by the Christians). At the time, the then Minister of
Defense Shimon Peres and his associates created hysteria in Israel. They
demanded that Israel deliver an ultimatum to the Syrians, to prevent them from
reaching the Israeli border. Yitzhak Rabin, the Prime Minister, told me then
that that was sheer nonsense, because the best that could happen to Israel was
for the Syrian army to spread out along the border. Only thus could calm be
assured, the same calm that reigned along our border with Syria.
However, Rabin gave in
to the hysteria of the media and stopped the Syrians far from the border. The
vacuum thus created was filled by the PLO. In 1982, Ariel Sharon pushed the PLO
out, and the vacuum was filled by Hizbullah.
All that has happened
there since then would not have happened if we had allowed the Syrians to
occupy the border from the beginning. The Syrians are cautious, they do not act
recklessly.
WHAT WAS Hassan Nasrallah thinking of, when he decided to
cross the border and carry out the guerilla action that started the current
Witches' Sabbath? Why did he do it? And why at this time?
Everybody agrees that
Nasrallah is a clever person. He is also prudent. For years he has been
assembling a huge stockpile of missiles of all kinds to establish a balance of
terror. He knew that the Israeli army was only waiting for an opportunity to
destroy them. In spite of that, he carried out a provocation that provided the
Israeli government with a perfect pretext to attack Lebanon with the full
approval of the world. Why?
Possibly he was asked by
Iran and Syria, who had supplied him with the missiles, to do something to
divert American pressure from them. And indeed, the sudden crisis has shifted
attention away the Iranian nuclear effort, and it seems that Bush's attitude
towards Syria has also changed.
But Nasrallah is far
from being a marionette of Iran or Syria. He heads an authentic Lebanese
movement, and calculates his own balance sheet of pros and cons. If he had been
asked by Iran and/or Syria to do something - for which there is no proof - and
he saw that it was contrary to the aims of his movement, he would not have done
it.
Perhaps he acted because
of domestic Lebanese concerns. The Lebanese political system was becoming more
stable and it was becoming more difficult to justify the military wing of
Hizbullah. A new armed incident could have helped. (Such considerations are not
alien to us either, especially before budget debates.)
But all this does not
explain the timing. After all, Nasrallah could have acted a month before or a
month later, a year before or a year later. There must have been a much
stronger reason to convince him to enter upon such an adventure at precisely
this time.
And indeed there was:
Palestine.
TWO WEEKS before, the
Israeli army had started a war against the population of the Gaza Strip. There,
too, the pretext was provided by a guerrilla action, in which an Israeli
soldier was captured. The Israeli government used the opportunity to carry out
a plan prepared long before: to break the Palestinians' will to resist and to
destroy the newly elected Palestinian government, dominated by Hamas. And, of
course, to stop the Qassams.
The operation in Gaza is
an especially brutal one, and that is how it looks on the world's TV screens.
Terrible pictures from Gaza appear daily and hourly in the Arab media. Dead
people, wounded people, devastation. Lack of water and medicaments for the
wounded and sick. Whole families killed. Children screaming in agony. Mothers
weeping. Buildings collapsing.
The Arab regimes, which
are all dependent on America, did nothing to help. Since they are also
threatened by Islamic opposition movements, they looked at what was happening
to Hamas with some Schadenfreude. But tens of millions of Arabs, from the
Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf, saw, got excited and angry with their
government, crying out for a leader who would bring succor to their besieged,
heroic brothers.
Fifty years ago, Gamal
Abd-el-Nasser, the new Egyptian leader, wrote that there was a role waiting for
a hero. He decided to be that hero himself. For several years, he was the idol
of the Arab world, symbol of Arab unity. But Israel used an opportunity that
presented itself and broke him in the Six-day war. After that, the star of
Saddam Hussein rose in the firmament. He dared to stand up to mighty America
and to launch missiles at Israel, and became the hero of the Arab masses. But
he was routed in a humiliating manner by the Americans, spurred on by Israel.
A week ago, Nasrallah
faced the same temptation. The Arab world was crying out for a hero, and he
said: Here am I! He challenged Israel, and indirectly the United States and the
entire West. He started the attack without allies, knowing that neither Iran
nor Syria could risk helping him.
Perhaps he got carried
away, like Abd-el-Nasser and Saddam before him. Perhaps he misjudged the force
of the counter-attack he could expect. Perhaps he really believed that under
the weight of his rockets the Israeli rear would collapse. (As the Israeli army
believed that the Israeli onslaught would break the Palestinian people in Gaza
and the Shiites in Lebanon.)
One thing is clear:
Nasrallah would not have started this vicious circle of violence, if the
Palestinians had not called for help. Either from cool calculation, or from
true moral outrage, or from both - Nasrallah rushed to the rescue of
beleaguered Palestine.
THE ISRAELI reaction
could have been expected. For years, the army commanders had yearned for an
opportunity to eliminate the missile arsenal of Hizbullah and destroy that
organization, or at least disarm it and push it far, far from the border. They
are trying to do this the only way they know: by causing so much devastation,
that the Lebanese population will stand up and compel its government to fulfill
Israel's demands.
Will these aims be
achieved?
HIZBULLAH IS the
authentic representative of the Shiite community, which makes up 40% of the
Lebanese population. Together with the other Muslims, they are the majority in
the country. The idea that the weakling Lebanese government - which in any case
includes Hizbullah - would be able to liquidate the organization is ludicrous.
The Israeli government
demands that the Lebanese army be deployed along the border. This has by now
become a mantra. It reveals total ignorance. The Shiites occupy important
positions in the Lebanese army, and there is no chance at all that it would
start a fratricidal war against them.
Abroad, another idea is
taking shape: that an international force should be deployed on the border. The
Israeli government objects to this strenuously. A real international force -
unlike the hapless UNIFIL which has been there for decades - would hinder the
Israeli army from doing whatever it wants. Moreover, if it were deployed there
without the agreement of Hizbullah, a new guerilla war would start against it.
Would such a force, without real motivation, succeed where the mighty Israeli
army was routed?
At most, this war, with
its hundreds of dead and waves of destruction, will lead to another delicate
armistice. The Israeli government will claim victory and argue that it has
"changed the rules of the game". Nasrallah (or his successors) will claim
that their small organization has stood up to one of the mightiest military
machines in the world and written another shining chapter of heroism in the
annals of Arab and Muslim history.
No real solution will be
achieved, because there is no treatment of the root of the matter: the
Palestinian problem.
MANY YEARS ago, I was
listening on the radio to one of the speeches of Abd-el-Nasser before a huge
crowd in Egypt. He was holding forth on the achievements of the Egyptian
revolution, when shouts arose from the crowd: "Filastine, ya Gamal!"
("Palestine, oh Gamal!") Whereupon Nasser forgot what he was talking
about and started on Palestine, getting more and more carried away.
Since then, not much has
changed. When the Palestinian cause is mentioned, it casts its shadow over
everything else. That's what has happened now, too.
Whoever longs for a
solution must know: there is no solution without settling the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And there is no solution to the Palestinian
problem without negotiations with their elected leadership, the government
headed by Hamas.
If one wants to finish,
once and for all, with this shit - as Bush so delicately put it - that is the
only way.