[Peace-discuss] Hizbullah's attacks stem from Israeli incursions into Lebanon

[David Green]

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0801/p09s02-coop.htm

Hizbullah's attacks stem from Israeli incursions into
Lebanon 
By Anders Strindberg 
NEW YORK 
As pundits and policymakers scramble to explain events
in Lebanon, their conclusions are virtually unanimous:
Hizbullah created this crisis. Israel is defending
itself. The underlying problem is Arab extremism.

Sadly, this is pure analytical nonsense. Hizbullah's
capture of two Israeli soldiers on July 12 was a
direct result of Israel's silent but unrelenting
aggression against Lebanon, which in turn is part of a
six-decades long Arab-Israeli conflict.

Since its withdrawal of occupation forces from
southern Lebanon in May 2000, Israel has violated the
United Nations-monitored "blue line" on an almost
daily basis, according to UN reports. Hizbullah's
military doctrine, articulated in the early 1990s,
states that it will fire Katyusha rockets into Israel
only in response to Israeli attacks on Lebanese
civilians or Hizbullah's leadership; this indeed has
been the pattern.

In the process of its violations, Israel has
terrorized the general population, destroyed private
property, and killed numerous civilians. This past
February, for instance, 15-year-old shepherd Yusuf
Rahil was killed by unprovoked Israeli cross-border
fire as he tended his flock in southern Lebanon.
Israel has assassinated its enemies in the streets of
Lebanese cities and continues to occupy Lebanon's
Shebaa Farms area, while refusing to hand over the
maps of mine fields that continue to kill and cripple
civilians in southern Lebanon more than six years
after the war supposedly ended. What peace did
Hizbullah shatter?

Hizbullah's capture of the soldiers took place in the
context of this ongoing conflict, which in turn is
fundamentally shaped by realities in the Palestinian
territories. To the vexation of Israel and its allies,
Hizbullah - easily the most popular political movement
in the Middle East - unflinchingly stands with the
Palestinians.

Since June 25, when Palestinian fighters captured one
Israeli soldier and demanded a prisoner exchange,
Israel has killed more than 140 Palestinians. Like the
Lebanese situation, that flare-up was detached from
its wider context and was said to be "manufactured" by
the enemies of Israel; more nonsense proffered in
order to distract from the apparently unthinkable
reality that it is the manner in which Israel was
created, and the ideological premises that have
sustained it for almost 60 years, that are the core of
the entire Arab-Israeli conflict.

Once the Arabs had rejected the UN's right to give
away their land and to force them to pay the price for
European pogroms and the Holocaust, the creation of
Israel in 1948 was made possible only by ethnic
cleansing and annexation. This is historical fact and
has been documented by Israeli historians, such as
Benny Morris. Yet Israel continues to contend that it
had nothing to do with the Palestinian exodus, and
consequently has no moral duty to offer redress.

For six decades the Palestinian refugees have been
refused their right to return home because they are of
the wrong race. "Israel must remain a Jewish state,"
is an almost sacral mantra across the Western
political spectrum. It means, in practice, that Israel
is accorded the right to be an ethnocracy at the
expense of the refugees and their descendants, now
close to 5 million.

Is it not understandable that Israel's ethnic
preoccupation profoundly offends not only
Palestinians, but many of their Arab brethren? Yet
rather than demanding that Israel acknowledge its
foundational wrongs as a first step toward equality
and coexistence, the Western world blithely insists
that each and all must recognize Israel's right to
exist at the Palestinians' expense.

Western discourse seems unable to accommodate a
serious, as opposed to cosmetic concern for
Palestinians' rights and liberties: The Palestinians
are the Indians who refuse to live on the reservation;
the Negroes who refuse to sit in the back of the bus.

By what moral right does anyone tell them to be
realistic and get over themselves? That it is too much
of a hassle to right the wrongs committed against
them? That the front of the bus must remain ethnically
pure? When they refuse to recognize their occupier and
embrace their racial inferiority, when desperation and
frustration causes them to turn to violence, and when
neighbors and allies come to their aid - some for
reasons of power politics, others out of idealism - we
are astonished that they are all such fanatics and
extremists.

The fundamental obstacle to understanding the
Arab-Israeli conflict is that we have given up on
asking what is right and wrong, instead asking what is
"practical" and "realistic." Yet reality is that
Israel is a profoundly racist state, the existence of
which is buttressed by a seemingly endless succession
of punitive measures, assassinations, and wars against
its victims and their allies.

A realistic understanding of the conflict, therefore,
is one that recognizes that the crux is not in this or
that incident or policy, but in Israel's foundational
and per- sistent refusal to recognize the humanity of
its Palestinian victims. Neither Hizbullah nor Hamas
are driven by a desire to "wipe out Jews," as is so
often claimed, but by a fundamental sense of injustice
that they will not allow to be forgotten.

These groups will continue to enjoy popular legitimacy
because they fulfill the need for someone - anyone -
to stand up for Arab rights. Israel cannot destroy
this need by bombing power grids or rocket ramps. If
Israel, like its former political ally South Africa,
has the capacity to come to terms with principles of
democracy and human rights and accept egalitarian
multiracial coexistence within a single state for Jews
and Arabs, then the foundation for resentment and
resistance will have been removed. If Israel cannot
bring itself to do so, then it will continue to be the
vortex of regional violence.

• Anders Strindberg, formerly a visiting professor at
Damascus University, Syria, is a consultant on Middle
East politics working with European government and
law-enforcement agencies. He has also covered Syria,
Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories as a
journalist since the late 1990s, primarily for
European publications. 



__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com