[Peace-discuss] How Israel makes war

[C. G. Estabrook]

   August 3, 2006
   Israel's Raid on Baalbeck's Hospital
   Time to Call It Quits
   By SAREE MAKDISI

Israeli commandos staged a daring raid the other night on the
ancient Lebanese town of Baalbeck, catching Hassan Nasrallah
asleep, bundling him into a waiting helicopter, and spiriting
him back to Israel.

But as the dust settled and reports from the ground began to
emerge, it turned out that the Hassan Nasrallah that Israel's
most elite military unit had captured-with the assistance of
the formidable intelligence capabilities of the legendary
Mossad-was apparently not Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of
Hizballah, but rather Hassan Nasrallah, the owner of a small
toyshop on the dusty outskirts of Baalbeck. They also nabbed
his son, another relative, and a neighbor for good measure.
Israel claims that the men are members of Hizballah, albeit
not the ones they were hoping for. Their relatives and
neighbors, and Hizballah itself, deny this.

The raid was focused on the Dar al Hikma hospital, which was
heavily damaged by the Israeli raiders and supporting fire
from aircraft. The hospital, however, was found to be empty.
The kidnapped men were, according to local sources, taken from
their homes.

To provide cover before and during the raid on the hospital,
Israeli aircraft subjected residential neighborhoods of
Baalbeck and neighboring towns to a withering bombardment, in
which seventeen people, almost all of them civilians, were
killed. The dead included the son of the mayor of al
Jamaliyeh, his brother, and five other relatives. The mayor of
al Jamaliyeh, incidentally, held a distinctly anti-Hizballah
position in local politics.

Israel's aerial torment of a population entirely lacking in
air defenses and even proper air raid shelters has now killed
some 900 people, the overwhelming majority of them civilians,
and about a third of them children. It has displaced almost a
million people from their homes. It has devastated Lebanon's
civilian infrastructure. It has reduced entire towns in the
south-including Bint Jbeil, once home to 30,000 people-to
rubble. And it has left block after block after block of
Beirut in total ruins. (All this while Israel is at the same
time holding the 1.4 million destitute people of the Gaza
Strip in the world's largest prison, bombarding them day and
night, and sadistically depriving them of sleep at night by
repeatedly breaking the sound barrier at low altitude).

After three weeks of devastating bombardment, Israel's much
vaunted army finds itself unable to fight its way more than a
few kilometers into Lebanon. The heavy resistance they have
encountered on the ground is the most obvious explanation for
why the Israelis prefer on the whole to go on dropping bombs
on children from a safe distance: not only is it less
dangerous, it also involves much less effort.

The "deep penetration" raid on Baalbeck was meant to show off
the capabilities of Israel's armed forces, to make up for
their humiliating performance on the ground and their repeated
massacres of civilians from the air, including the refugees
sheltering in Qana (an event whose cover story has gone
through at least three variations, none of them convincing to
anyone other than the Israelis themselves).

Instead, it left a hospital in ruins, more than a dozen
civilians dead, and elite forces in possession of an
unfortunate middle-aged shopkeeper and an assortment of his
friends and relatives.

Surely this would be the right moment for Israel to give up
and call it quits.

Saree Makdisi, a professor of English at UCLA, is the author
of Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of
Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and William Blake
and the Impossible History of the 1790s (University of Chicago
Press, 2003). He can be reached through his blog or at:
makdisi at humnet.ucla.edu