[Peace-discuss] Israel piece for the N-G

[C. G. Estabrook]

[I'm submitting this as a proposed "guest commentary" to the 
News-Gazette.  Comments welcome.  --CGE]

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ISRAEL: A MILITARIZED OFFSHOOT OF THE U.S.

The U.S. government, having devastated one Middle Eastern people, the 
Iraqis, for fifteen years, and having allowed the devastation of 
another, the Palestinians, for almost forty, has now licensed its client 
state once again to murder Lebanese, as it did twenty-four years ago. 
Israel killed more that 20,000 people when it invaded Lebanon in 1982: 
in the first weeks of its current assault on the Lebanese, it has killed 
hundreds.

Two things should be recognized about the killing of Arab men, women and 
children in Gaza and Lebanon: (1) these attacks were long planned and 
are not simply responses to the capture of Israeli soldiers; and (2) 
Israel does nothing without the assent of the US government.  Therefore 
as Americans our objections to these murderous policies should be 
addressed to the American rather than to the Israeli government (still 
less to a supposedly all-powerful Israeli lobby).

It is reported that the the Israeli military wanted to launch these 
attacks last summer but were denied permission by the US Secretary of 
State.  This summer the signal from the Bush administration was 
different -- perhaps because Rice had lost an internal fight to the 
Rumsfeld-Cheney faction.  In any case, she has now been made the 
spokesperson for the administration's position that the Israeli attacks 
should continue, that there should be no ceasefire.

We as US citizens continue to pay for planes and bombs that are killing 
and maiming people in Lebanon and Gaza, destroying the county, and 
instructing a new generation of “terrorists” in hatred for the US and 
Israel.  In the last weeks the Israelis' attacks in Gaza and throughout 
Lebanon – including deliberate attacks on a U.N. installation and 
medical vehicles – have killed mostly civilians, with thousands wounded; 
at least a third of the casualties have been children, according to the 
U.N. Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs.  Israeli deaths in the 
attacks – mostly soldiers, not civilians – have been a tenth of those of 
Arabs.

US politicians of both parties pretend Israelis' murder of Arabs is 
justified because Israeli soldiers were captured by Arab guerrillas. 
They ignore the Israeli military's ravaging of Gaza, from which Israel 
did not "withdraw" when it removed Jewish settlements: instead, it 
established perhaps the world's largest prison camp, controlled from the 
outside by the Israeli army.  They ignore the hundreds of prisoners from 
Lebanon (and the thousands of Palestinians) held by the Jewish state, 
often in conditions that may have been a model for Abu Ghraib.

The US and Israel arbitrarily say that the crisis began with the 
“kidnapping” of Israeli soldiers.  But the taking of the Israeli soldier 
in Gaza was preceded by the Israelis' abduction of a Palestinian doctor 
and his brother; and the internment of much of the Palestinian Authority 
government preceded the capture of two Israeli soldiers on the 
Israel/Lebanon border.  Even the circumstances of that incident may not 
be what is assumed in the US: there is some evidence that the Israeli 
patrol was attacked on Lebanese territory, not in Israel.

But why did Hizbullah, the Lebanese Shia political party that drove the 
Israelis out of southern Lebanon in 2000, give Israel an excuse for 
making war by capturing Israeli soldiers?  Although spokespeople for the 
Israeli military are frequently allowed by the American media to offer 
explanations (often in American accents) for their operations, Hizbullah 
Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah rarely is.  But he explained clearly 
what the leadership of Hizbullah was thinking: “We are telling the 
Palestinians, you should not lose hope ... [and] it was logical for such 
an act to solve the prisoners' issue” -- i.e., by an exchange of 
prisoners, as had been arranged before.

With the Israelis (and apparently the Bush administration) spoiling for 
war – perhaps because as in 1982 there was danger that peace might break 
out - Hizbullah's capture of the soldiers provided the excuse, weak as 
it was, for the Israelis to loose terror and destruction upon the 
Lebanese people - from planes, rockets and bombs made in the USA.  “No 
ceasefire,” says Secretary of State Rice, because “Israel has a right to 
defend itself.”

Many Americans seem to find that argument persuasive, but as British MP 
George Galloway points out, “Imagine if Lebanon destroyed every bridge 
in Israel, blew up the international airport, blockaded the ports, 
severed every arterial road, ordered people to leave their homes and 
then bombed them to pieces when they did... Do you think any Western 
leader would utter the words 'Lebanon has a right to defend itself'?”

Some Americans think that the US/Israeli actions are justified because 
they're aimed at stopping the rockets into northern Israel, including 
the city of Haifa, some twenty miles south of the border.  But Hizbullah 
began firing those rockets – puny in comparison with Israeli munitions – 
only after the Israeli air force had attacked Beirut and much of the 
rest of Lebanon.

British journalist Jonathan Cook describes the situation. “In contrast 
to the image of Hizbullah frothing at the mouth to destroy Israel, its 
leader Hassan Nasrallah held off from serious retaliation. For the first 
day and a half, he limited his strikes to the northern borders areas, 
which have faced Hizbullah attacks in the past and are well protected. 
He waited till late on July 13 before turning his guns on Haifa, even 
though we now know he could have targeted Israel's third largest city 
from the outset. A small volley of rockets directed at Haifa caused no 
injuries and looked more like a warning than an escalation ... [It is 
likely that Hizbullah] collected the armory in the hope that it might 
prove a deterrence - even if a very inadequate one, as Lebanon is now 
discovering - against a repeat of Israel's invasions of 1978 and 1982, 
and the occupation that lasted nearly two decades afterwards.”

Cook, who writes from the city of Nazareth under Israeli censorship, 
notes that “Hizbullah's rockets have been targeted overwhelming at 
strategic locations: the northern economic hub of Haifa, its satellite 
towns and the array of military sites across the Galilee ... we can see 
from the choice of the sites he is striking that his primary goal is to 
give Israelis a small taste of the disruption of normal life that is 
being endured by the Lebanese. He has effectively closed Haifa for more 
than a week, shutting its port and financial centres.  Israeli TV is 
speaking increasingly of the damage being inflicted on the country's 
economy.  Because of Israel's press censorship laws, it is impossible to 
discuss the locations of Israel's military installations. But 
Hizbullah's rockets are accurate enough to show that many are intended 
for the army's sites in the Galilee, even if they are rarely precise 
enough to hit them. It is obvious to everyone in Nazareth, for example, 
that the rockets landing close by, and once on, the city over the past 
week are searching out, and some have fallen extremely close to, the 
weapons factory sited near us.”

If there were any justice in this world, Bush and Cheney, Rice and 
Rumsfeld, Olmert and Halutz would be standing before a new Nuremberg 
Tribunal.  Instead, they will simply stoke their “global war on 
terrorism,” the excuse offered for the crimes they are committing.

[C. G. Estabrook (Ph.D. in history, Harvard) is a retired visiting 
professor at UIUC.]

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