What’s Israel up to in Lebanon?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
AS the intensity of Israel’s savagery against the Palestinians and the Lebanese increases by the hour, two questions are agitating many a mind: how could Israel ‘fight’ two wars simultaneously — in Gaza and Lebanon — and what is it that Israel seeks to achieve in Lebanon?
The answer to the first question is easy. Israel is not ‘fighting’ on two fronts; it’s merely decimating and pulverising two defenceless peoples in Gaza and Lebanon. There’s no element of a fight between a Goliath armed to the teeth, by the generosity of the sole superpower of our times, and two minuscule Davids, armed with only stones and brickbats (as in the case of the hapless Palestinians) or piddling Katyusha rockets (in the ‘arsenal’ of the much-maligned Hezbollah in Lebanon) carrying more pyrotechnics than payloads.
Arrayed against this pittance is formidable state-of-the-art weaponry — F-16s, helicopter gunships, 1000-pound ‘bunker busters’, napalms, sophisticated missiles, ‘smart bombs’ et al. You name any weapon worthy of being in the arsenal of a superpower and you can rest assured that Israel would have it, thanks to its mentors and partners in Washington. In more than 40 years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy (whose demise was engineered, many suspect, because he wasn’t too enthusiastic about Israel’s then budding nuclear arsenal), Israel has received more than 110 billion dollars in military and economic assistance from Washington; the bulk of it in the form of military aid.
As if all this wasn’t enough for the partisans of Israel in Washington, Pentagon announced a ‘gift’ of $210 million worth of aviation fuel for Israel to help it “keep peace and security in the region” just as the Israeli warplanes and bunker busters were raining down hell-fire on the hapless civilians of Beirut. No wonder Israeli warplanes have been roaming the skies over Lebanon with such abandon in this age of costly aviation fuel; they can always count on their pipeline to the Pentagon.
Pentagon’s largesse was followed by the US ambassador to the UN John Bolton’s yet another veto to kill a Security Council draft resolution critical of Israel. In the years since the 1967 Six-Day Arab-Israeli war, the US has exercised its veto more than 90 times; and each time in support of Israel, rendering the UN totally impotent to act as a referee between Israel and the Palestinian and Arab victims of its aggression.
A tail wagging the dog is always a funny situation. However, a pigmy state dictating the policies of a giant power isn’t funny but tragic, both for the superpower itself and for the world, too. In its unabashed infatuation with the Israeli agenda of expansionism in the Middle East, Washington has lost all its pretensions of being an honest broker, especially under its neo-conservative ruling elite.
The quest for a ‘final solution’ to the festering Palestinian question has dominated the agenda of Israel and its neo- conservative allies and mentors in Washington, especially since the cataclysm of 9/11 that facilitated the laying down of ideal conditions for reaching this much-desired end-result of nearly 40 years of Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. In other words, the drafting of a joint Israeli-US agenda to hammer out a new political map of the region, favourable entirely to the interests of both allies, was undertaken in right earnest.
Branding the Palestinian struggle for liberation of their territories as an act of ‘terrorism’ was the first salvo under the new game plan. Yasser Arafat was corralled and incarcerated within the walls of his headquarters in Ramallah, eventually to die there three years later. In that period, the Palestinians were brutally pummelled by an unrepentant Ariel Sharon. His clear intent was to break the back of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. But he failed to extinguish the flame of freedom in the occupied territory, or Gaza, just as he had failed earlier in Lebanon in the 1980.
Even the death of Arafat, or the building of the neo-apartheid ‘wall’ on Palestinian lands didn’t bring Sharon closer to realising his age-old dream of getting done with a people who refused to fade into the shadows of history.
Not only did the Palestinians refuse to submit to Tel Aviv, they also committed the ultimate ‘sin’ of electing Hamas, a terrorist party in Washington’s and Israel’s lexicon, to power, early in January this year, in response to George W. Bush’s clarion call for democracy in the Arab world. What the Palestinians didn’t understand was that they were supposed to exercise their democratic right by only acting within the parameters laid down for them by Washington.
The same medicine of horrendous collective punishment is also being administered on the Lebanese, because Hezbollah dared to upset the apple cart being arranged by the Israelis and the Americans. Hasan Nasrallah, the charismatic leader of Hezbollah, is now the latest candidate fit to be made another horrible example of, in the mould of Arafat and Saddam Hussein, in order to knock the fear of Israel into the hearts of those Arabs who are still unprepared to accept the reality of the Jewish state as the sentinel of Pax Americana in the region.
Why George Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who desperately aspires to be a worthy successor to his mentor Ariel Sharon, are so furious with Hezbollah isn’t so hard to explain. They thought they had taken care of Lebanon for good following the mysterious assassination of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri last year. They were quick to blame the murder on Syria, although the jury is still out on it. But Syria was hounded out of Lebanon in its wake, exactly according to the game plan chalked up by the two allies. Everything was going according to a plan, until Hezbollah spoiled it.
The hawks in Washington, synchronising every move on the political chessboard with their Israeli counterparts, think they can still make the best of a bad situation by inflicting maximum punishment on Hezbollah, for daring to stand up to Israel; on the Lebanese people, for refusing to discard Hezbollah as their only line of defence against Israel; and on the Lebanese government, for not kowtowing to Israel and not denouncing Hezbollah.
Though belatedly, the European countries have started to speak in support of a ceasefire in Lebanon, Washington is still resisting it in order to give as much time as necessary to its ally to finish the job. But the real task, which both Israel and the US want to accomplish, is to somehow entice Syria and Iran to jump into the fray. Bush, in particular, has no qualms about pointing the finger at Syria for its ‘involvement’ in Lebanon, and blaming Iran for arming Hezbollah. He has given a carte blanche to Olmert to pound Lebanon to smithereens. He is at one with Olmert to seek not only a ‘final’ solution in Palestine but also ‘dismantle’ Hezbollah, something that Sharon couldn’t do in a quarter century.
So, the best UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan can do is to make barely audible murmurs of protestations in support of an international force to be sandwiched between Israel and Lebanon — something that looks distant and unfeasible at the moment. Israel, and its American mentors, must have their full pound of Arab flesh before the guns fall silent in Palestine and Lebanon.
And what about the reaction in the Arab world? The silence of the lambs reigns there and stays there. The Arab people may shed all the tears they have over the plight and persecution of their brethren but that doesn’t bother their rulers, whose fealty to Washington is beyond reproach.
The writer is a former ambassador.
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
AS the intensity of Israel’s savagery against the Palestinians and the Lebanese increases by the hour, two questions are agitating many a mind: how could Israel ‘fight’ two wars simultaneously — in Gaza and Lebanon — and what is it that Israel seeks to achieve in Lebanon?
The answer to the first question is easy. Israel is not ‘fighting’ on two fronts; it’s merely decimating and pulverising two defenceless peoples in Gaza and Lebanon. There’s no element of a fight between a Goliath armed to the teeth, by the generosity of the sole superpower of our times, and two minuscule Davids, armed with only stones and brickbats (as in the case of the hapless Palestinians) or piddling Katyusha rockets (in the ‘arsenal’ of the much-maligned Hezbollah in Lebanon) carrying more pyrotechnics than payloads.
Arrayed against this pittance is formidable state-of-the-art weaponry — F-16s, helicopter gunships, 1000-pound ‘bunker busters’, napalms, sophisticated missiles, ‘smart bombs’ et al. You name any weapon worthy of being in the arsenal of a superpower and you can rest assured that Israel would have it, thanks to its mentors and partners in Washington. In more than 40 years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy (whose demise was engineered, many suspect, because he wasn’t too enthusiastic about Israel’s then budding nuclear arsenal), Israel has received more than 110 billion dollars in military and economic assistance from Washington; the bulk of it in the form of military aid.
As if all this wasn’t enough for the partisans of Israel in Washington, Pentagon announced a ‘gift’ of $210 million worth of aviation fuel for Israel to help it “keep peace and security in the region” just as the Israeli warplanes and bunker busters were raining down hell-fire on the hapless civilians of Beirut. No wonder Israeli warplanes have been roaming the skies over Lebanon with such abandon in this age of costly aviation fuel; they can always count on their pipeline to the Pentagon.
Pentagon’s largesse was followed by the US ambassador to the UN John Bolton’s yet another veto to kill a Security Council draft resolution critical of Israel. In the years since the 1967 Six-Day Arab-Israeli war, the US has exercised its veto more than 90 times; and each time in support of Israel, rendering the UN totally impotent to act as a referee between Israel and the Palestinian and Arab victims of its aggression.
A tail wagging the dog is always a funny situation. However, a pigmy state dictating the policies of a giant power isn’t funny but tragic, both for the superpower itself and for the world, too. In its unabashed infatuation with the Israeli agenda of expansionism in the Middle East, Washington has lost all its pretensions of being an honest broker, especially under its neo-conservative ruling elite.
The quest for a ‘final solution’ to the festering Palestinian question has dominated the agenda of Israel and its neo- conservative allies and mentors in Washington, especially since the cataclysm of 9/11 that facilitated the laying down of ideal conditions for reaching this much-desired end-result of nearly 40 years of Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. In other words, the drafting of a joint Israeli-US agenda to hammer out a new political map of the region, favourable entirely to the interests of both allies, was undertaken in right earnest.
Branding the Palestinian struggle for liberation of their territories as an act of ‘terrorism’ was the first salvo under the new game plan. Yasser Arafat was corralled and incarcerated within the walls of his headquarters in Ramallah, eventually to die there three years later. In that period, the Palestinians were brutally pummelled by an unrepentant Ariel Sharon. His clear intent was to break the back of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. But he failed to extinguish the flame of freedom in the occupied territory, or Gaza, just as he had failed earlier in Lebanon in the 1980.
Even the death of Arafat, or the building of the neo-apartheid ‘wall’ on Palestinian lands didn’t bring Sharon closer to realising his age-old dream of getting done with a people who refused to fade into the shadows of history.
Not only did the Palestinians refuse to submit to Tel Aviv, they also committed the ultimate ‘sin’ of electing Hamas, a terrorist party in Washington’s and Israel’s lexicon, to power, early in January this year, in response to George W. Bush’s clarion call for democracy in the Arab world. What the Palestinians didn’t understand was that they were supposed to exercise their democratic right by only acting within the parameters laid down for them by Washington.
The same medicine of horrendous collective punishment is also being administered on the Lebanese, because Hezbollah dared to upset the apple cart being arranged by the Israelis and the Americans. Hasan Nasrallah, the charismatic leader of Hezbollah, is now the latest candidate fit to be made another horrible example of, in the mould of Arafat and Saddam Hussein, in order to knock the fear of Israel into the hearts of those Arabs who are still unprepared to accept the reality of the Jewish state as the sentinel of Pax Americana in the region.
Why George Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who desperately aspires to be a worthy successor to his mentor Ariel Sharon, are so furious with Hezbollah isn’t so hard to explain. They thought they had taken care of Lebanon for good following the mysterious assassination of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri last year. They were quick to blame the murder on Syria, although the jury is still out on it. But Syria was hounded out of Lebanon in its wake, exactly according to the game plan chalked up by the two allies. Everything was going according to a plan, until Hezbollah spoiled it.
The hawks in Washington, synchronising every move on the political chessboard with their Israeli counterparts, think they can still make the best of a bad situation by inflicting maximum punishment on Hezbollah, for daring to stand up to Israel; on the Lebanese people, for refusing to discard Hezbollah as their only line of defence against Israel; and on the Lebanese government, for not kowtowing to Israel and not denouncing Hezbollah.
Though belatedly, the European countries have started to speak in support of a ceasefire in Lebanon, Washington is still resisting it in order to give as much time as necessary to its ally to finish the job. But the real task, which both Israel and the US want to accomplish, is to somehow entice Syria and Iran to jump into the fray. Bush, in particular, has no qualms about pointing the finger at Syria for its ‘involvement’ in Lebanon, and blaming Iran for arming Hezbollah. He has given a carte blanche to Olmert to pound Lebanon to smithereens. He is at one with Olmert to seek not only a ‘final’ solution in Palestine but also ‘dismantle’ Hezbollah, something that Sharon couldn’t do in a quarter century.
So, the best UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan can do is to make barely audible murmurs of protestations in support of an international force to be sandwiched between Israel and Lebanon — something that looks distant and unfeasible at the moment. Israel, and its American mentors, must have their full pound of Arab flesh before the guns fall silent in Palestine and Lebanon.
And what about the reaction in the Arab world? The silence of the lambs reigns there and stays there. The Arab people may shed all the tears they have over the plight and persecution of their brethren but that doesn’t bother their rulers, whose fealty to Washington is beyond reproach.
The writer is a former ambassador.
