A drop in the bucket

The other day I received an appeal from the American Task Force for Lebanon (ATFL) requesting tax deductible donations to assist in clearing mines in Lebanon.

During the 2006 war, Israel air-dropped and ground-launched cluster munitions into South Lebanon. These munitions are supposed to open in mid-air so that the bomblets contained inside scatter and explode. Except the bomblets do not always explode.

HERE ARE THE GRIM STATISTICS: From August 14, 2006 to March 31, 2009: 21 civilians were killed; 204 civilians were injured...

Hardly more than a year and a half into the mine clearing operation,

Since March 2008, the ATFL has been working with the U.S. Department of State, Congress, and Lebanon's Ambassador to the U.S. to ensure that additional funding is available to continue the clearance operations in Lebanon. Thankfully, in 2008, the Department of State provided $825,000 from the global de-mining budget for this urgent, life-saving cluster munitions clearance operation.

In 2009, the ATFL again worked with the State Department, which was able to secure an additional $1.5 million for the demining operations in South Lebanon. However, these funds are not sufficient to clear the remaining cluster bomblets strewn in South Lebanon.

When we asked the State Department for more funding, they challenged us to raise funds for the demining operations and committed to match what we raise at the rate of two-for-one.

As I reported last month, the funding shortfall is well in excess of US$300,000. More importantly, according to Christina Bennike, country programme manager for the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), the largest international demining organisation working in Lebanon, ‘…with 20 demining teams working in Lebanon clearing 800 square metres per working day, clearing the remaining 12 million square metres of affected land will take over eight years to finish’.

If it costs $300,000 to field ten teams for one month and it’s going to take 20 teams eight years to complete the demining, that would bring the total cost to some $8.64 million. Obviously, in the grand scheme of things, the arms and legs of Lebanese kids are not in the same league as the mansions and yachts of the banksters. Still $200k, or even $1.5 million, seems a trifle stingy for the US government, which did after all supply the cluster bombs in the first place.

The other grim statistic ATFL cites is ‘14 deminers were killed; and 43 deminers were injured’ since the 14 August 2006 ceasefire. While Briton and Bosnian deminers are sacrificing their feet and their lives, nobody is calling for the Israeli government, who are even more directly responsible for the bombs, most of which they dropped in the last two days of the war with the clear intention of creating the disaster we are now observing, to contribute to the clean up operation.

Pity the nation

Bylining AP, Ha’aretz reported last week ‘that the Israel Defense Forces has handed over data on cluster bombs fired during the 2006 war’, confirming their moral purity. After all, legend has it that the US still hasn’t provided maps of their landmines in Vietnam more than three decades down the track.

Photo: Manoocher Deghati/IRIN

Cluster bomblets gathered to be destroyed by de-miners in Tyre, southern Lebanon. Israel fired over four million bomblets during last year's war, according to the UN [IRIN caption]

And in case you were entertaining any lingering doubts, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’s Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) reported in December 2007 that no less an authority than

Israel's military advocate-general, Brig-Gen Avihai Mendelblit, has said the military's use of cluster munitions during the conflict in Lebanon in 2006 was in accordance with international humanitarian law. Human rights groups and the UN had previously condemned the use of the bombs.

The " majority of the cluster munitions were fired at open and uninhabited areas", but in some cases the military hit residential areas, responding to rocket attacks by Hezbollah. In Maroon a-Ras, the bombs were used to "allow the evacuation" of Israeli soldiers.

But,

In August 2006, Jan Egeland, then the UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, had harshly condemned Israel's use of cluster bombs, calling it "shocking and completely immoral."

"Ninety percent of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution," he said, adding that populated areas, such as homes and agricultural land were now covered with unexploded bomblets.

Last Thursday, IRIN reported

Coming nearly three years after the war ended, despite repeated requests by the UN, Lebanon and other governments, the move was met with little cheer by the Lebanese authorities.

Since the end of hostilities in 2006, 40 Lebanese have been killed by unexploded ordnance and a further 300 injured, many left permanently disabled.

Photo: Dina Debbas/IRIN

Marwa, an 11-year-old from Aita Shaab in southern Lebanon, receiving treatment last year for injuries stemming from a cluster bomblet that exploded while she was playing with it [IRIN caption]

Diplomatically neglecting to mention the three years between the requests and the delivery of the maps, the Ha’aretz article reports, ‘The move follows UN and Lebanese calls for information that could help eliminate the threat...’

Unfortunately, it takes more than maps to demine Southern Lebanon.

Deminers in south Lebanon clearing hundreds of thousands of unexploded Israeli-dropped cluster bomb sub-munitions will lose two thirds of their teams this year unless a drastic funding shortfall is addressed.

...with 20 demining teams working in Lebanon clearing 800 square metres per working day, clearing the remaining 12 million square metres of affected land will take over eight years to finish...

Having started the year with 26 demining teams, plus five from UNIFIL, the UN peacekeeping force in south Lebanon, the number of teams will fall to just nine plus UNIFIL by the end of the year, according to figures from the Lebanon Mine Action Centre (LMAC), which has recently been absorbed into the Lebanese Army's demining division.

As always, it goes without saying that it’s The International Community that is left to pick up the tab for cleaning Israel’s mess.

So it’s beginning to look like it will be more than another eight years before it’s safe for kids to play and farmers to cultivate their land, assuming, that is, that Israel doesn’t drop any more over that period. We know that the US made an emergency shipment to Israel as the war on Lebanon had depleted their existing supply.

In February 2007, Dianne Feinstein introduced her Cluster Munitions Civilian Protection Act, which banned sales of cluster munitions with a failure rate exceeding 1%. But never mind, at least it’s not the reported 40% of the older models. This past February, Ms Feinstein reintroduced her bill, which now languishes in committee. So there’s no major impediment to Israel importing more vintage bombs, and even if it ever passes, with up to 2000 ‘submunitions’ in each cluster bomb, we’d still end up with 20 little landmines scattered around each bomb site.

Human shields

Back in August, I posted on Jonathan Cook’s discussion of Israeli use of Israeli citizens as human shields in last year’s Lebanon war. In an important new article in yesterday’s Counterpunch, he provides new evidence that it was overwhelmingly Israel and not Hizb’allah that was ‘cowardly blending’ with the civilian population and the inconsistent approach that the Human Rights Watch reports adopted to war crimes.

HRW did made a brief reference to the possibility that Israeli military installations were located close to or inside civilian communities. It cited examples of a naval training base next to a hospital in Haifa and a weapons factory built in a civilian community. Its researchers even admitted to watching the Israeli army firing shells into Lebanon from a residential street of the Jewish community of Zarit.

This act of “cowardly blending” by the Israeli army -- to echo the UN envoy Jan Egeland’s unwarranted criticism of Hizbullah -- was a war crime. It made Israeli civilians a potential target for Hizbullah reprisal attacks.

So what was HRW’s position on this gross violation of the rules of war it had witnessed? After yet again denouncing Hizbullah for its rocket attacks, the report was mealy-mouthed: “Given that indiscriminate fire [by Hizbullah], there is no reason to believe that Israel’s placement of certain military assets within these cities added appreciably to the risk facing their residents.”

In other words, some are guilty unless proven innocent and others are innocent even after proven guilty.

Soul searching

Colum Lynch reports from New York in this morning’s Melbourne Age that Lebanese Minister of Culture, Tareq Mitri, called yesterday’s UN Security Council decision to establish an international criminal tribunal to prosecute the masterminds of the February 2005 suicide-bomb killing of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, ‘the path of the salvation of Lebanon’.

The US also hailed the decision. "People who have committed political assassination need to be brought to justice," said Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to the UN. "They cannot have impunity."

Mr Khalilzad acknowledged that the council's action might trigger a violent reaction, but he said "many of us believe that the risks of not moving forward are greater".

Political assassins must never go unpunished. That would send entirely the wrong signal. Unless, of course, they are committed in pursuit of a higher principle. Like Saddam Hussein, not to delve too deeply into ancient history. Oh, but that wasn’t a political assassination. That was a legitimate execution carried out on the express instructions of the sovereign people of Iraq after due process and a fair trial. Of course. Well, then, what about Uday and Qusay Hussein? They never had their day in court, did they? Were they political assassinations? Of course not! They were fugitives from justice. The legitimate invaders and occupiers of Iraq had decided they were a threat, tracked them down and shot them to pieces. It’s only fair. After all, America did it, so it wasn’t an assassination.

What about other unpunished political assassinations? It wasn’t all that long ago that Sheikh

Ahmed Yassin was killed in an Israeli attack on March 22, 2004. While he was being wheeled out of an early morning prayer session, an Israeli helicopter gunship fired Hellfire missiles at Yassin and both of his bodyguards. They were killed instantly, along with eight other bystanders. Allegedly, more than a dozen people were injured in the operation, including two of Yassin's sons. Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi replaced him as Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, and Rantissi himself was assassinated by Israel on April 17, 2004.

Anyway, same old, same old. It’s not who you kill – it’s who does the killing. If ‘we’ do it, or ‘our friends’ do it, it’s not political assassination. It’s execution, it’s killing a fleeing escapee, it’s combat… Same goes for terrorists, if you’re Jose Padilla, you’re a terrorist. If you’re Luis Posada Carriles, or Robert Ferro, you’re not.

So, anyway, you’d think that the Lebanese authorities might like to investigate and punish their own murderers, but as the BBC reported yesterday

A UN inquiry has suggested that Syrian and Lebanese intelligence forces played a role - which Syria denies.

And anyway, according to Robert Fisk in today’s Independent,

…the UN Security Council invoked Chapter VII of the UN Charter to create a special international court to try the suspects in Hariri's murder but the very fact that the Lebanese government could not formally request the court spoke volumes about its own impotence.

The point is that tracking down the murderers of one rich former politician in February 2005 is of the utmost concern to the UN Security Council, while the well known murderers of over a thousand Lebanese civilians and UN personnel, including attacks on ambulances and other crimes against humanity, pissing all over the last remaining shreds of credibility the UN might have been able to lay claim to last July and August, well they’re Israeli, so that’s ok then. Anway, the Israelis have already had their own painful soul searching Winograd Commission inquiry that named names and blaced the blame on the highest levels of government. Curiously, among the 21 main findings summarised on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, there is no mention of the decimation of Lebanese infrastructure, the deaths or injuries, the Qana massacre, or indeed any indication with any concern other than Israel’s failure to win.

An independent UN?

Way back in September 2002, the leader of the free world made these remarks

The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?

I thought, well, if anyone is still entertaining any illusions that the UN is anything other than an instrument of US ‘foreign policy’, Dubya has well and truly put paid to that. It wasn’t the first time I’d made the mistake of overestimating the ability to arrive at obvious conclusions from the evidence presented.

Or the last. When Israeli bombers took out a UNIFIL ‘peacekeeper’ and his wife in Tyre on 17 July and the UN uttered not a peep, I was again surprised that people still harboured expectations of the by now thoroughly discredited ‘world body’. When they shelled the UNIFIL post at Khiyam for six hours on 25 July despite repeated requests to cease and Kofi Annan said he was ‘…shocked and deeply distressed by the apparently deliberate targeting by Israeli Defence Forces’, I thought perhaps the UN was finally going to grow a spine. But no, within a couple of days, he had recanted.

And yet, after its utter failure even to protest the slaughter of its own personnel at Israel’s hands, much less protect them, everybody still thought the UN was the agency to enforce a ceasefire. And what a ceasefire! Where Israeli Foreign Minister openly boasted of the Israeli government’s intimate involvement in setting its terms, and in the same breath expressed reservations about whether Israel would see fit to comply. Not to mention the cluster bomblets scattered all over southern Lebanon as a little parting gift just before the ceasefire took effect that are still killing and maiming UN disposal experts.

A series of surveys conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org and its research partners between July 2006 and March 2007, found overwhelming support for enhanced powers for the UN. In particular, across the fourteen countries where the question was asked, the average of 64% supported ‘Having a standing UN peacekeeping force selected, trained and commanded by the United Nations’. Majorities of up to 77% (Peru) favoured the measure, and even in Argentina and the Philippines, pluralities of 48% and 46%, respectively, were in favour. A surprising 72% in the US and 64% in Israel also supported it.

Clearly respondents have not thought too deeply about how such a force would achieve the kind of independence of individual countries that they seem to desire. Only 46% overall from the same fourteen countries supported ‘Giving the UN the power to fund its activities by imposing a small tax on such things as the international sale of arms or oil’. Only in France did a big majority (70%) agree with such an initiative. So did small majorities in China, Israel, and South Korea, and pluralities in six other countries. In the US, a plurality of 50% opposed the measure, as did 55% and 56% majorities in Peru and the Philippines.

Furthermore, it doesn’t go without saying that troops and officers, all of whom come from and owe allegiance to particular states, indeed, who are members of the armed forces of particular states, will actually be able to act independently of their home countries’ expressed interests in any given situation.

What emerges from this is a picture of a widespread illusion that the UN can and should have the power to act independently of the states that comprise it. There would seem to be little understanding of the role of the Security Council and the way the structure of the UN ensures that it can only act when the US, the world’s principal transgressor of ‘international law, agrees, and that when carrots and sticks fail to procure the votes it requires, the US will act without reference to the UN. The independent peacekeeping force, presumably also hamstrung by Security Council control, is obviously not going to be strong enough to challenge outright aggression by a strong state like the US or Israel in any case. Indeed, the history of UNIFIL and other UN peacekeeping operations are not such as to instil confidence that they can protect the innocent in zones of conflict, or keep the peace between determined antagonists, much less make peace.

So I think we have to interpret the results in the context of an understanding of a myth of UN neutrality and commitment to peace. What respondents seem to be trying to express through these surveys is that they prefer states acted responsibly and that there be some agency to constrain them.

In this context, overall 64% in those fourteen countries favoured ‘Giving the UN the authority to go into countries in order to investigate violations of human rights’. In a sample of twelve countries, 73% agreed that the Security Council should have the power to intervene in a country ‘To prevent severe human rights violations such as genocide’ and 74% ‘To defend a country that has been attacked’.

On the other hand, when asked ‘When dealing with international problems, [survey country] should be more willing to make decisions within the United Nations even if this means that [survey country] will sometimes have to go along with a policy that is not its first choice?’, overall only 45% of respondents in sixteen countries agreed to limiting the independence of ‘their own’ states to that extent. According to the report,

Not surprisingly the three countries most ready to accept UN decisions are also permanent members of the UN Security Council: China (78%), France (68%), and the United States (60%). The public in Russia, also a member, tend to be opposed to abiding by such decisions by 44 percent to 33 percent, however.
Israel, surprisingly, is another county where there is strong support for making decisions within the United Nations. Fifty-four percent of Israelis agree that their leaders should abide by such decisions even if they disagree. This is striking given the extent to which opponents of Israel have used the United Nations as a platform for criticism of the Jewish state.
In sharp contrast, the Palestinians are the only public polled with a majority opposed to accepting such collective decisions. A large 81 percent majority of Palestinians say their government should not go along with policies they oppose. This is also striking given that Palestinian leaders have used UN resolutions as a basis for legitimating their demands for statehood.

Actually, this is probably not as striking as the authors think. Their reasoning is that is unsurprising that those countries with the most influence over the decisions they are to be bound by should support them. So surely by the same reasoning those whose ‘governments’ have no say whatsoever in the decisions that are to bind them are unlikely to support abiding by such decisions willy nilly.

A recent post on lenin’s tomb suggested that public opinion polls evidence a shift to the left in the US. Some of these results appear to support such a conclusion, provided we stipulate that the shift is a shift in opinion only. More direct and reliable indicators of an actual substantive shift, like number involved, length, militancy, and success of strikes, and attendance at demonstrations, would seem to suggest otherwise. The demonstrations commemorating the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq a few weeks ago were not inspiring, even taking into account any impact UfPJ’s refusal to participate might have had. I certainly hope to see impressive turnouts at next month’s actions commemorating 40 years of military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Pots, kettles

‘Olmert a “terrorist”’

A Palestinian source called Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Kadima a "terrorist" and accused him of transferring more than $1 billion to militants to carry out attacks against Lebanon, in an interview with The Bureau of Counterpropaganda released Friday.

Olmert said the statements were "confused and irresponsible".

Palestine has been urging other countries to shun Olmert and the Israeli government, citing Israel’s refusal to recognize Palestine or renounce violence.

"He's a terrorist," added the source. "You have a terrorist who is prime minister of the State of Israel now."

The Bureau learned that the funds came from outside Israel and were transferred to the Israeli armed forces for the "explicit purpose of carrying out terrorist actions." Outside sources also transferred large quantities of sophisticated armaments for terrorist purposes. These included obsolete cluster munitions known to have high failure rate, deliberately strewn throughout southern Lebanon in the last hours of last summer’s war with the specific intention of killing and maiming unsuspecting civilians and UN mine disposal personnel.

He offered no other details about the transfer.

A Palestinian security source said Palestine believes that Olmert was directly involved in the decision to make the transfer, which took place last summer.

"The terrorist is the one who kills children, raids villages and [refugee] camps, builds settlements and confiscates the land. It is not Ismail Haniyeh."

[With apologies to Ha’aretz.]

More than just cluster bombs; The rise and fall of the yes person

Today’s Times sported some truly shocking revelations. In an editorial entitled ‘Learning from Iraq’, they divulge that the function of the euphemistically labeled ‘Department of Defence’ in reality is much more sinister than we thought.

despite six years of ideologically driven dictates from Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, Army leaders remain usefully focused on the real world, where actual soldiers daily put their lives on the line for their country and where the quality of military planning goes a long way toward determining whether their sacrifices help achieve America’s national purposes.

Achieving ‘America’s national purposes’. Whatever those might be. In any case, at least we know it’s not to defend US citizens from marauding barbarians. But I guess we already knew that. It’s just kind of interesting for one of the premier instruments of propaganda lay it all out in black and white. It’s not entirely obvious what they aim to achieve by placing distance between ‘America’s national purposes’ and what’s ‘ideologically driven’. Are we supposed to be more comfortable that what drives ‘our’ heros to face down bows and slingshots with 500kg bombs, helicopter gunships, and remote controlled drones is naked greed?

But wait, there’s more!

Modern innovations in warfare make it possible for America’s technologically proficient forces to vanquish an opposing army quickly and with relatively few troops. But re-establishing order in a defeated, decapitated society demands a much larger force for a much longer time.

It’s just one astonishing revelation after another. The principal function of the ‘technologically proficient forces’ is to create disorder.

Correcting deficiencies in American military training is also essential, since the biggest reason the United States has not been able to withdraw significant numbers of its own troops over the past three years has been the lack of adequately prepared and reliable Iraqi security forces.

It’s true that it has largely been the peaceloving Democrats who have been braying for more troops, but it’s news to me that the Bush regime has been trying so hard to withdraw significant numbers of its own troops over the past three years. But on reflection, I suppose it’s obvious that it would have been far better if the Iraqi troops had been sufficiently reliable to bomb Fallujah hospitals and snipe at pedestrians from the rooftops.

when a host government lacks the will to rid its security forces of sectarian militia fighters more intent on waging civil war than achieving national stability. That so far has been the biggest obstacle in Iraq.

The ‘host government’, the puppet regime holed up in the Emerald City and owned lock, stock, and barrel by the occupiers – they’re the ones who are responsible. And fancy treating their invited guests this way by not trying to achieve the national stability. It’s all ‘we’ have ever asked for. And what is all this an obstacle to? Why, of course, America’s national purposes!

Also in today’s Times, one Alan Ehrenhalt, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of William H Whyte Jr’s Organization man, writes in his op-ed,

What we can say with confidence half a century later is that Whyte got the future almost entirely wrong. He saw conformity and the social ethic as the values that would shape America — much to its detriment — for the remainder of the century.

But was Whyte really so wrong? In a world where alternative sources of information are so readily available, the vast majority of people seem content with the pablum they get from the educational system and the Times. I read an article by Howard Zinn about American exceptionalism yesterday on ICH (originally from the Boston review), and I couldn’t believe that he still thought he had to say those same old things about the annexation of most of Mexico in the 1840s, about the slaughter in the Philippines after the Spanish American War, about the twenty year military occupation of Hispaniola – both Haiti and the Dominican Republic – from 1915…

On the eve of the war with Mexico in the middle of the 19th century, just after the United States annexed Texas, the editor and writer John O’Sullivan coined the famous phrase “manifest destiny.” He said it was “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” At the beginning of the 20th century, when the United States invaded the Philippines, President McKinley said that the decision to take the Philippines came to him one night when he got down on his knees and prayed, and God told him to take the Philippines.

It’s as if people live in the world, even in cyberspace, and somehow remain insulated from the history that would let them make sense of what they observe around them? Sure, they don’t teach this stuff in school. But if all you knew was what they told you in school, you’d be pretty bloody ignorant, now wouldn’t you? Worse. You’d be actively disinformed. Are there really still people around who think the US removed Saddam Hussein from power, but didn’t put him there in the first place? Well, it would seem so, judging from the kind of stuff I found on the Dilbert blog yesterday after Scott Adams put in his two bob about why he reckoned ‘we’ should get out of Iraq. So where does this come from? Presumably not from the independent thinking iconoclasm that Ehrenhalt imagines has replaced the organization persons of the mid fifties.

In case you were concerned about the ‘one million cluster bombs dropped by Israeli aircraft during the July-August war against Hizbullah remain unexploded in south Lebanon, where they continue to threaten civilians’, the Jerusalem Post reports that they are not the only little traps the moral Israeli military left behind for Lebanese children.

After ‘two European disposal experts’ lost their feet ‘and a Lebanese medic’ was wounded, the UN Mine Action Coordination Center in south Lebanon divulged that

The detonating object was an Israeli anti-personnel land mine placed in a mine field newly laid during the fighting in July and August… Lebanon's south is riddled with land mines, laid by retreating IDF soldiers who pulled out of the region in 2000…Lebanon has long called for Israel to hand over maps of the minefields.

Now what good would those mines be against unsuspecting terrorists if they had maps showing just where they were? Preposterous!

High on what?

According to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour in an interview with The Jerusalem Post Thursday,

"In one case you could have, for instance, a very objectionable intent - the intent to harm civilians, which is very bad - but effectively not a lot of harm is actually achieved," she said. "But how can you compare that with a case where you may not have an intent but you have recklessness [in which] civilian casualties are foreseeable? The culpability or the intent may not sound as severe, but the actual harm is catastrophic."

Believe it or not, she is attributing the objectionable intent to those firing Qassam rockets. I suppose it should be welcome that she at least recognizes that the IOF is culpable for the foreseeable, but of course unintentional, Palestinians who just happen to be accidentally killed and injured by Israeli artillery barrages, missiles, bullets and other obviously harmless projectiles.

On CounterPunch the other day, Kathleen Christisson issued a moral challenge,

…any Jew anywhere who allows Israel to commit these acts and pursue these policies in the name of all Jews -- for Israel does claim to act in the name of Jews everywhere -- without speaking out against Israel, without screaming protests, must be ashamed. Any American who allows the United States to support Israel -- to support it militarily with infusions of arms in the billions of dollars every year and to sustain it morally and psychologically -- without loud protest should be ashamed.

Further on the Gemayel assassination, Charles Glass writes,

So, what can the United States do? I can tell you what it has done. In 1976, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger approved the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. In 1982, his successor, Al Haig, encouraged Israel's invasion. Then, in 1990, another American secretary of state, James Baker, gave the go-ahead for the Syrian army to return to the parts of Lebanon from which it had been excluded in 1982. Neither Syria nor Israel entered Lebanon without an American okay. An American diktat could keep them both out, if the US cared as much about Lebanon as its politicians claim.

Jonathan Cook, as always worth a read, makes a convincing, if admittedly inconclusive, case that the Syrians are not necessarily the ones with most to gain from the assassination,

Gemayel's death, and Syria's blame for it, strengthens the case of the neoconservatives in Washington -- Israel's allies in the Administration -- whose star had begun to wane. They can now argue convincingly that Syria is unreformed and unreformable. Such an outcome helps to avert the danger, from Israel's point of view, that White House doves might win the argument for befriending Syria.

For all these reasons, we should be wary of assuming that Syria is the party behind Gemayel's death -- or the only regional actor meddling in Lebanon.

In much the same vein, Robert Fisk writes,

That little matter of the narrative - and who writes it - remained a problem yesterday, as the Western powers pointed their fingers at Syria. Yes, all five leading Lebanese men murdered in the past 20 months were anti-Syrian. And it's a bit like saying "the butler did it". Wouldn't a vengeful Syria strike at the independence of Lebanon by killing a minister? Yes. But then, what would be the best way of undermining the new and boastful power of the pro-Syrian Hizbollah, the Shia guerrilla army which has demanded the resignation of Siniora's cabinet? By killing a government minister, knowing that many Lebanese would blame the murder on Syria's Hizbollah allies?

For another take on the NYT coverage of the assassination, Chris Marsden writes in WSWS,

What the Times presents as an accidental result of Gemayel’s assassination provides a more convincing argument for anti-Syrian forces being responsible than its own efforts to blame Hezbollah or Syria.

As the Times predicted, Hezbollah has been forced to put the planned anti-government rallies announced earlier by its leader Sheik Hasan Nasrallah on hold. Instead, Gemayel’s funeral yesterday was the focus of a massive demonstration by anti-Syrian and pro-government forces.

In today’s Times, Steven Erlanger, always ready to cast a critical eye on events in Palestine, writes,

After another surge of violence in and around the Gaza Strip over the past month, Israel and the Palestinians moved gingerly on Friday toward reinstating an often-broken cease-fire between them.

Not worth mentioning in the newspaper of record is that the surge of violence has been perpetrated by the occupying military force. Not worth mentioning is that artillery and firearms are discharged with an intent to cause harm. And above all, it is not only not worth mentioning, but forbidden to mention, that the ‘often-broken cease-fire’ was unilateral, that Hamas refused to respond to Israeli provocation for over a year and a half.

True to form, history in the NYT’s view, began on 25 June,

Israel re-entered Gaza in late June in response to the capture of a soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, by a group of Palestinian militants that included Hamas.

That the Israeli military kidnapped two Palestinian civilians the previous day, civilians, not coincidentally, whose names the NYT will not publish, couldn’t possibly have anything whatever to do with Shalit’s capture. Once again, small mercies. At least Mr Erlanger has managed to temper his language – usually, Shalit is ‘kidnapped’ or ‘abducted’, as if his tank crew were not a legitimate military target. As if it was some kind of crime. Which of course it was. By definition. What the occupied and oppressed do is criminal, what the occupiers and oppressors do is anticipatory retaliation, or the like.

Sometimes I feel like it must be tiresome reading about the cynical bullshit I see in the media. But people read the bullshit itself every day, day in day out – I know people who actually subscribe to the hard copy of the Times, so I guess I’ll just keep it up.

There is a solution, after all!

In case you were wondering what to do about all those Qassam rockets terrorizing the innocent Israelis whose precious lives American Friends of MDA enjoin us to save, Evelyn Gordon has the answer. In today’s Jerusalem Post, she writes,

…a military solution not only exists; it is already being successfully employed in the West Bank: a Defensive Shield-type operation followed by a long-term deployment aimed at achieving comprehensive territorial control.

Sderot residents can’t relax yet, though,

Israel must prepare for a military operation …the government must begin preparing the diplomatic case for such an operation. Currently, most of the world views the rocket attacks as a mere annoyance, and one does not launch a major invasion in response to a minor annoyance.

That shouldn’t be too difficult, considering the ‘world’ response to the Beit Hanoun slaughter.

Human Rights Watch has now come out against people protecting each other’s houses from Israeli Air Force attacks. They would be right if someone were actually forcing people to act as human shields, but how can it be a war crime for people to do a courageous thing and for their elected representatives to praise them for it?

Even if the houses were not legitimate military targets, added HRW, it was still a violation of international humanitarian law to call on civilians to protect them.

Of course HRW must always be and appear to be even handed.

At the same time, HRW demanded that Israel explain what its military objective was in seeking to destroy the houses.

And once they have the explanation of the military objective, it will be ok, then.

The cynicism and hypocrisy sometimes reaches shocking proportions. Today’s NYT editorializes, in the wake of the murder of Falangist politician, a member of a party inspired by Franco and directly responsible for Sabra and Shatila, ‘Lebanon’s pro-Western government’ is in danger of collapse. Obviously, the Times reckons that would be a bad thing, although I’m not convinced it goes without saying.

In a Middle East plagued by constant tragedy and defeat, Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution and the ousting of Syrian troops last year was a rare and precious victory. The United States and the international community must now rally to support Prime Minister Fouad Siniora — with cash, security advisers, and anything that might help him and his government survive.

Clearly it won’t do to speculate on the sources of the tragedy and defeat. Nor about why it wasn’t so important for the US and the ‘international community’ to rally in support of the Cedar Revolution in July, when it wasn’t just one politician, but over a thousand regular people who were being murdered.

Damascus must also be told that it will pay a high price — in scorn, isolation and sanctions — if it is found to have ordered Mr. Gemayel’s death, or the deaths or maiming of a half-dozen other anti-Syrian politicians and journalists.

It’s curious that Syria will have to pay a price if accusations of involvement in half a dozen murders turn out not to be entirely baseless, while another of Lebanon’s two neighbours, about whose culpability there has never been any doubt for far far graver crimes, has only rewards to look forward to – a blank check to replace their cluster bombs, carte blanche to shell civilian areas of Gaza, the right to violate the ceasefire and Lebanese airspace at will with impunity, not to mention all the other privileges, and international law get out of jail free cards they have always enjoyed. The Times editorialists haven’t entirely forgotten about July, though.

We would urge Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to go immediately to Beirut, except we’re not sure she would be welcome after President Bush’s failure last summer to restrain Israel’s disastrous air war.

Failure? Or refusal? Sometimes I think I’d like to see the expression on their faces as they write this stuff, but I’m afraid I’d find out they actually take themselves seriously.

For a more informed account of Friedman's work than I could hope to offer, check this link. Also, a fawning encomium, cynically entitled ‘The Great Liberator’ by none other than the disgraced former President of Harvard, Lawrence Summers.

For more on Altman, David Walsh in WSWS.

Unparalleled moral standards

The Jerusalem Post reports (courtesy, as usual, of the indefatigable Tom Feeley of ICH),

The Rabbinical Council of America (RCA) has called on Israel to reevaluate its military rules of war in light of Hizbullah's "unconscionable use of civilians, hospitals, ambulances, mosques and the like as human shields, cannon fodder and weapons of asymmetric warfare."

…Rabbi Basil Herring, executive vice president of the RCA, … said that …the IDF may have unnecessarily endangered its forces out of moral considerations.

"Like Jews everywhere, we as members of the RCA have always admired the unparalleled moral standards of Israel's armed forces in their military engagements, including sensitivity to the suffering of civilians and other innocents who find themselves caught up in the entanglements of war," said the RCA statement. …

According to Herring, the new combat realities of fighting an enemy that uses its own civilians as human shields dictate a rethinking of IDF military ethics.

…The RCA's delicate criticism of IDF morality was echoed by Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu of Safed and Rabbi Tzefania Drori of Kiryat Shmona. …

"Our corrupt military morality, which tells us that our soldiers must endanger their lives to protect enemy civilians, is the reason we lost the war," said Eliyahu.

"Anti-Semites demand that we use Christian morality while our enemies act like barbarians," said Drori, accusing the IDF of adopting "Christian morality" as its own.

Three weeks ago, Rabbi Dov Lior announced in the name of the Yesha Council of Rabbis that "when our enemies hold a baby in one hand and shoot at us with the other, or when missiles are purposely aimed at civilian populations in the Land of Israel in blatant disregard for moral criteria, we are obligated to act according to Jewish morality, which dictates that 'he who gets up to kill you, get up yourself and kill him first.'"

"There are no innocent parties in a time of war," he continued. "Rather, one must battle a bellicose city until it is captured. All types of Christian morality weaken the spirit of our army and our nation and cost us the lives of our soldiers and citizens."

My understanding is that there is indeed a Talmudic principle of the rodef ‘pursuer’, which sanctions preemptive actions. The unparalleled moral standards of the Israeli military, however, take this a few steps further - If you can imagine anyone threatening your interests in any way, pre-emptively obliterate them and anyone else who happens to be around at the time and might get in the way.

The principle has doubtless been subject to a millennium of interpretation and commentary. For example, an article by Rabbi Jill Jacobs asserts,

Even as rabbinic law commands the killing of the rodef, this mandate, like the laws of war and punishment, comes with restrictions. Before killing a rodef, one must be certain that this person actually intends to murder, and may even need to verify that the rodef understands the implications of this crime (Talmud, Yoma 85b and Talmud, Sanhedrin 72b). Furthermore, one must do the least harm necessary to stop the rodef from murdering. Thus, one who kills a rodef when breaking a limb would have sufficed is liable for capital punishment (Talmud, Sanhedrin 57a).

And of course, unparalleled moral standards do not prevent the Israeli military from siting its headquarters in a densely populated area of Tel Aviv, or its munitions factories and stores among civilians. And all the other atrocities we have witnessed over the last 58 years and more.

Unparalleled moral standards also apparently sanction violation of the ceasefire whose terms were so favourable to Israel, as Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said after the cabinet decision to accept them, but apparently not to comply with them. As Jonathon Cook wrote a few days ago:

In fact, this was no simple “clash” during an intelligence-gathering mission, as early reports in the Israeli media made clear before the official story was established. Israeli special forces launched the covert operation to capture a Hizbullah leader, Sheikh Mohammed Yazbak, way beyond the Litani River, the northern extent of Israel’s supposed “buffer zone”. The hit squad were disguised not only as Arabs -- a regular ploy by units called “mistarvim” -- but as Lebanese soldiers driving in Lebanese army vehicles. When their cover was blown, Hizbullah opened fire, killing one Israeli and wounding two more in a fierce gun battle.

…It is difficult to see how this operation could be characterized as “defensive” except in the language employed by Israel’s army -- which, after all, is misleadingly known as the Israel Defence Forces. UN Resolution 1701, the legal basis of the ceasefire, calls on Israel to halt “all offensive military operations”. How much more offensive could the operation be?

The question keeps arising of whether the ceasefire will hold. This can only mean, ‘will Hizballah abide by the ceasefire’, because Israel has already violated the limp ‘offensive operations’ clause that was supposed to have applied to it. UNSC 1701 was arrived at through such a corrupt and cynical process without consultation with Hizballah, which everyone asserts is one of the chief protagonists, that they would be well within their rights to ignore it. And then there is the little matter of the continuing Israeli occupation, permitted, up to a point, by 1701. Why would Hizballah, or any Lebanese, accept this infringement of their sovereignty, much less tolerate thousands of yobbos armed to the teeth stomping around their communities? As for UNIFIL, under 1701, it becomes a proxy occupation force and is in principle fair game. Under 1701 or any imaginable scenario, UNIFIL could never deploy on the Israeli side of the Blue Line. Their task is to disarm the defenders and it is unthinkable that the aggressor should be disarmed. The answer of course is that any hint of defence or retaliation on Hizballah’s part would reset the clock, becoming the provocation for entirely justified Israeli ‘self defence’ that the ‘international community’ would applaud. Unparallelled moral double standards, but who’s counting?

Without provocation

Writing about Israeli racism, ‘Fighting Jim Crow in Israel’, Mike Whitney, makes some useful points. But he seems to believe that ‘Nations, like people, can change their behavior if they see it is in their own best interests.’ This is unnecessarily naïve. Israel needs to change more than its behaviour. The very racism he identifies in Israeli behaviour arises directly from the racism that underlies the entire Zionist project. In advocating ‘move towards an integrated, multi-ethnic society’, he implicitly rejects this, but offers no more by way of a strategy than ‘Israel should consider the same path that every other democratic, pluralistic society has taken; tear down the walls, amend the laws so that everyone’s rights are respected equally’. As if! And he doesn’t even mention the refugees – one of the central issues that needs to be addressed before justice, and the potential for peace, will come to Palestine.

In his latest brilliant diatribe against the execrable Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Professor of Torture, Norman Finkelstein aptly quotes Hitler’s Commissar Order:

In the fight against Bolshevism it must not be expected that the enemy will act in accordance with the principles of humanity or international law - any attitude of consideration or regard for international law in respect of these persons is an error.

As Finkelstein emphasises, this has an uncannily familiar ring to it. Now, ‘we’ are ‘facing an unprecedented threat’ requiring ‘us’ to dispense with any consideration of civilians in waging ‘war’ against it.

I’m delighted to be able to report that the eminent Robert Fisk shares my scepticism about the Heathrow gatorade terrorism plot, although he doesn’t mention November’s US mid term elections as a factor:

And I'm sure it's quite by chance that the lads in blue chose yesterday - with anger at Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara's shameful failure over Lebanon at its peak - to save the world. After all, it's scarcely three years since the other great Terror Plot had British armoured vehicles surrounding Heathrow on the very day - again quite by chance, of course - that hundreds of thousands of Britons were demonstrating against Lord Blair's intended invasion of Iraq.

He also has intelligent things to say about anti Muslim racism, the terror he and other Beirut residents have been experiencing for over a month, and the real causes of the retail terrorism that the ‘war on terror’ aims to eradicate, or exacerbate, through wholesale terror.

Ha’aretz reports that, in response to accusations by the Palestnian Israeli legal association:

In reference to the incident in Qana, in which many Lebanese civilians were killed in an Israel Air Force strike on a heavily populated building, [attorney Nick] Kaufman [who was the prosecutor at the international former Yugoslavia trial, which ruled, "The international community must not tolerate such crimes, no matter where they may be perpetrated, no matter who the perpetrators are and no matter what the reasons for them may be.”] says that the killing was apparently inadvertent. "It was not malicious, not intentional and not impulsive. This was not a criminal action," he said.

According to Kaufman, there have been instances reminiscent of the current situation in Lebanon that have not been considered in violation of international law, such as the current U.S. military operation in Iraq.

Can’t quibble with that. A perfect illustration that ‘international law’ does not apply to actions, but to actors, protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

Further to the last post, here is a link to part two of the Shaoul article on the Israeli ‘peace movement’ on WSWS.

There’s been a lot of intelligent commentary on UNSC 1701, but one aspect that nothing I’ve seen so far has touch upon is in Article 6, which:

Calls on the international community to take immediate steps to extend its financial and humanitarian assistance to the Lebanese people, including through facilitating the safe return of displaced persons and, under the authority of the government of Lebanon, reopening airports and harbors, consistent with paragraphs 14 and 15, and calls on it also to consider further assistance in the future to contribute to the reconstruction and development of Lebanon.

Now how does it come to pass that anyone could envisage that it is the responsibility of ‘the international community’, that is, taxpaying grunts around the world, to clean up the mess that Israel made? I suppose US taxpayers footed the bill for the planes and ordnance, and paid for Bush and Rice and Bolton to prevent a timely ceasefire, and underwrote the people who either directed or approved Israel to cause the damage, so they ought to contribute something to the cleanup. But surely the Israelis must bear some responsibility?

For a moving and insightful commentary, Azmi Bishara writes in al Ahram, ‘The peoples of the world are divided into the haves and have-nots of F-15s and F-16s.’

Last night Sam Bahour sent around this timely reminder on his ePalestine list:

“I want to make it clear: This morning’s events were not a terrorist attack but the action of a sovereign state that attacked Israel for no reason and without provocation. The Lebanese government, of which Hezbollah is a member, is trying to undermine regional stability. Lebanon is responsible and Lebanon will bear the consequences of its actions.” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, July 12, 2006

There was an interesting article in yesterday’s NYT providing a blow by blow account of the negotiations leading to UNSC1701. It suggests that the deal on the final wording arose from US concern about Israel losing the war:

As evidence of how committed the United States had become to the notion that an Israeli military victory was no longer an option, Ms. Rice and other administration officials posed pointed questions to the Israelis about the likely consequences of an intensified military push.

While omitting passages referring to Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the drafters still wanted

to give the force the power that France, the United States and Israel felt it needed to keep Hezbollah from reoccupying southern Lebanon.

But southern Lebanon is where Hizballah were born and raised and have always lived. Why shouldn’t they occupy it? Unless of course, ethnic cleansing is the name of the game.

I heard last night that the ceasefire was holding, at the same time as they reported that Israeli troops had killed one ‘Hisballah fighter’ who was threatening them. It was probably just some poor guy coming to give them a cake or something.

Robert Fisk is predicting that the ceasefire will not last:

But if the ceasefire collapses, as seems certain, neither the Israelis nor the Americans appear to have any plans to escape the consequences. The US saw this war as an opportunity to humble Hizbollah's Iranian and Syrian sponsors but already it seems as if the tables have been turned. The Israeli military appears to be efficient at destroying bridges, power stations, gas stations and apartment blocks--but signally inefficient in crushing the "terrorist" army they swore to liquidate.

"The Lebanese government is our address for every problem or violation of the [ceasefire] agreement," Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, said yesterday, as if realising the truce would not hold.

And that, of course, provides yet another excuse for Israel to attack the civilian infrastructure of Lebanon.

I have often wondered when reading George Lakoff whether he is actually aware of the ‘frames’ he is using himself. It seemed implausible, but my inclination was to give him the benefit of the doubt, despite his weird notion that the Democratic party was, or could become, if they framed their policies correctly, a progressive force. Robert Jensen shares my concern in his review of Lakoff’s latest book:

Ironically, Lakoff's new book -- Whose Freedom? The Battle over America's Most Important Idea -- demonstrates that problem all too well. His worldview seems to keep him from the very critical self-reflection that he counsels for liberal/progressive people.

Information Clearing House posted an interesting piece by Antony D’Amato this morning dissecting UNSC1701.

OP1. Calls for a full cessation of hostilities based upon, in particular, the immediate cessation by Hezbollah of all attacks and the immediate cessation by Israel of all offensive military operations;

Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah has called this provision unfair: it only bars "offensive" military operations by Israel while prohibiting "all" Hezbollah attacks. Yet this is what lawyers would call a distinction without a difference. So long as Hezbollah ceases all attacks, Israel would not have any justification for offensive or defensive operations.

The problem with this analysis is that the distinction does make a difference. Israel claims that its devastation of Lebanon over the last month was entirely defensive. Indeed, I’m not aware of any military action Israel has ever engaged in, whether against neighbouring states or against the Palestinians under their occupation, that was anything other than defensive in character. This is patently rubbish, as anyone can attest. But when push comes to shove, it will be up to the US, in the guise of John Bolton who will determine whether Israel has violated the letter or the spirit of 1701, and I don’t think there is any doubt how that will swing. Meanwhile, Hizballah is banned from taking any military action whatsoever against the Israeli troops occupying their country. So go figure.

D’Amato considers article OP6, calling on ‘the international community’ to clean up Israel’s mess, ‘A sound humanitarian provision to which no one could object.’ Well, maybe not quite no one, as noted above.

He anticipates that OP8, which creates a ‘security zone’ from the Blue Line to the Litani, will be an ‘economic bonanza’ for the region. That must be why they decided to create it on Lebanese territory, rather than on the Israeli side of the line! He goes on to envisage, ‘Not only will displaced Lebanese civilians return to the area, but Palestinian refugees might also emigrate there to take up the many jobs that will be created.’ So it will also assist in the Israeli ambition to transfer the Palestinians out of Palestine.

And finally, today’s Times reports:

The Lebanese war also raises even more serious questions, suggests Shai Feldman, director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis, about the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Israel respected the international border with Lebanon as verified by the United Nations, and it was Hezbollah that violated the border. “If international borders mean nothing,” Mr. Feldman asked, “why should the Israeli public support a withdrawal from the West Bank to create a Palestinian state?”

Preserving the idea of a two-state solution is one reason Mr. Olmert went to war, Mr. Feldman said. And it is one reason the Security Council acted as strongly as it did to defend the integrity of the international border and mandate an expanded United Nations force to protect it. But whether Israelis will trust those guarantees is yet another open question.

In NYT parlance, apparently, daily flights across the border with sonic booms over populated areas for a period of years constitutes respect for the border. Steven Erlanger may be right to assert that Olmert’s objective was to preserve the idea of a two state solution, but surely everything he’s said and done shows that he will go to any length to avoid the idea becoming a reality. In any case, creating a sectarian non Jewish state alongside the sectarian Jewish state has never been a solution to anything.

Reductio ad absurdum

I seem to be falling behind, and as I will be on the road for the next several weeks, this situation is likely to persist. A few days ago, I received a link to this analysis by Michel Chossudovsky ("Triple Alliance": The US, Turkey, Israel and the War on Lebanon). The paper was in my view much too long and didn’t really contribute much, but concludes with an interesting approach to ‘international law’, which I interpreted as a reductio ad absurdum argument, although I’m not at all confident it was intended that way.

Worth reading however, is ‘War now, peace later: Israel’s doves line up behind war Part one’ By Jean Shaoul in the 12 August WSWS. I’m looking forward to part 2.

Last night while subjecting myself to CNN, there was a long interview with Israeli ambassador to the US, Daniel Ayalon. I could hardly believe how cynical and mendacious he was. When asked whether he thought Hizb'allah would abide by the ceasefire, and he went on about how you couldn’t trust people who…and went on to spin a buch of crap about alleged Hizballah atrocities. Until, that is, they broadcast FM Tzipi Livni’s statement on the Israeli cabinet’s ‘acceptance of the UNSC resolution. She blathered on about how they would never consider a prisoner swap and effectively said that while the cabinet accepted the resolution, they weren’t about to comply with it in any meaningful sense, even though Israeli officials had drafted it and it was very advantageous to Israel. It was amazing how self righteous Ayalon and Livni sounded about how important it was to ensure that every UN resolution was implemented to the letter. CNN is a real education. Meanwhile, they've been dropping as many bombs as they can on Beirut before the ceasefire takes effect in what was then about 16 hours' time – now about half an hour off. It’s a funny way to prepare for a ceasefire. I'm not optimistic. Hizb'allah says they'll go on fighting until the last Israeli soldier leaves, apparently, and Israel says it will only fire in self defence. But then, when has Israeli ever done anything that was not in self defence?

A friend wrote the other day:

In your True to Form article, you say:

And they have united the Arab ‘street’ across the Middle East, undermining the Sunni-Shi’a split and threatening the ‘moderate’ Arab monarchies and dictatorships beloved of the US. You’d almost think these were unintended consequences. But can they really be so stupid as not to have anticipated these outcomes?

All the evidence I've seen indicates that Israel didn't anticipate things to fall out this way. The military promised the Government that it would all be over in days, and the Government promised Bush it would, too. What they got, however, was a war against an opponent who knew how to fight & had the arms to take out some of Israel's high price-tag equipment.

They definitely weren't bargaining on losing an F16, or on losing 15 tanks on Thursday 10 August alone.

From what I understand, Bush is ropeable with Olmert, and the press are full of stories about the backbiting going on in Israel about this developing disaster. And make no mistake - this war is a disaster for Israel. The illusion of invincibility generated by the 6 Day War & the Yom Kippur War has been blown to smithereens. There will now be a lot more pressure for a faction of "realists" to emerge amongst the Zionists, people who recognise that Israel cannot be a new Sparta, and who decide that a deal of some sort with the Palestinians is a necessity. The longer this war goes on, the greater the repurcussions will be. Unless Israel suffers even more serious military setbacks, however, the fallout probably won't be seen until afterwards.

In Solidarity,

Ablokeimet.

"Who was that?" "Oh, just a bloke I met."

And here is my response:

…

As for the substance of your comment, there have been reports that the Israeli military has been planning just such a 'retalliation' ever since Hizb'allah evicted them in 2000 and that this specific campaign was planned over a year ago and divulged in confidence to the US government and even the media and has been simulated and trained for. That plan is purported to have been for a campaign of several weeks' duration. If so, then I don't think it is correct that they expected it to be over in days, although media reports at the time, before the existence of the plan became public knowledge, certainly suggested that.

That said, I'm sure you're right that the steadfastness of the resistance has taken a lot of people by surprise. As I've written somewhere recently, probably in this blog, I consider it imprudent to underestimate the adversary's intelligence. So I tend to operate on the assumption that they have thoroughly thought things through and that whatever the actual turn of events, it is a scenario they have considered and planned for, if only as a contingency. So what surprises me is that to all appearances, Israel's brilliant military planners are on the back foot and were not ready at all for the entirely predictable eventualities.

Unfortunately, the pan Arab uprising that looked like a real possibility a few weeks ago has not happened yet and with the passage of time, I think the likelihood is fading. I'd like to think another Qana or the like might be the last straw, but the bombing of the civilian convoy near Sidon the other night doesn't seem to have triggered anything.

The realistic Zionists know that a Jewish majority cannot be maintained in "Israel proper', much less in the expanded Israel they yearn for, over the long term. If there were a just resolution of the refugees' plight, a Jewish majority would not be sustainable even over the short term. That's what they mean when they speak of the right of return leading to 'national suicide' - with a non Jewish majority, the Jewish state cannot survive.

For a Zionist - for someone who believes that a sectarian Jewish state in Palestine has 'a right to exist' as such - this has certain consequences. A couple of years ago, in an interview in Ha’aretz, prominent revisionist historian, Benny Morris, who was among the first to document the ethnic cleansing that lies at the heart of the Jewish state, was honest enough to enunciate these:

…this place would be quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once and for all. If Ben-Gurion had carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country - the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River. It may yet turn out that this was his fatal mistake. If he had carried out a full expulsion - rather than a partial one - he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations.

If the end of the story turns out to be a gloomy one for the Jews, it will be because Ben-Gurion did not complete the transfer in 1948. Because he left a large and volatile demographic reserve in the West Bank and Gaza and within Israel itself.

The Israeli Arabs are a time bomb…They are a potential fifth column. In both demographic and security terms they are liable to undermine the state. So that if Israel again finds itself in a situation of existential threat, as in 1948, it may be forced to act as it did then…If the threat to Israel is existential, expulsion will be justified.

Obviously, this is not the kind of realist you are talking about. My point is that this is what reality entails for those intent on the survival of Israel as a Jewish state. Maybe you define Zionist differently?

The suggestion that ‘a deal of some sort with the Palestinians is a necessity’ opens a bit of a can of worms. Since the Oslo fiasco in 1993, ‘the Palestinians’ has always been taken to denote the corrupt, morally and financially bankrupt, quisling Palestinian Authority. But, just like a real state, the PA doesn’t even represent its own constituency. And just like Israel, it purports to, but absolutely does not, represent the diaspora.

In my view, the election of a Hamas led government in January had the potential to address at least in part the corruption and the quisling nature of the PA, but I think the Israelis have now rendered that moot. Hamas might have even considered the needs of the refugees in a way that the old Fatah PA never did. But that is not the same as representing them. They don’t even get to vote in PA elections, much less have any real sway over the PA’s actions. In any case, I think you will agree that the right to return is not negotiable. In principle, if rights of this kind have any meaning, they are individual rights, so nobody can negotiate them away on behalf of each individual refugee. Furthermore, if you believe that a right is inalienable, even the individuals who ‘possess’ them can’t negotiate over them.

There can never be peace without justice. And in this situation justice transparently entails redress for the refugees, including the right of return, which would at least erode the Jewish majority as an immediate consequence and certainly terminate the Jewish majority in due course, if not immediately. So even if the existence of a sectarian Jewish state in some distorted way could be seen as consistent with justice, there is no way it can survive what justice requires.

Leaving aside the substance of ‘a deal of some sort with the Palestinians’, the question arises of who will endorse any deal negotiated with, say, the PA? Would there be a global referendum that all Palestinians can participate in? If so, how could you be sure that nobody was disenfranchised? Would it be good enough just to canvass the views of those living in the camps? If not, in what sense would the deal be with the Palestinians, other than in the restricted and meaningless sense of the PA?

To cut to the chase, it seems to me that anyone who is realistic about their Zionism ultimately has to agree with Morris that ‘it was a mistake to think that it would be possible to establish a tranquil state here that lives in harmony with its surroundings… We are doomed to live by the sword.’ In other words, a new Sparta is precisely what a ‘realistic’ Zionism means.

Morris envisaged circumstances in which he thought it would become acceptable to complete the expulsion of 1948:

If we find ourselves with atomic weapons around us, or if there is a general Arab attack on us and a situation of warfare on the front with Arabs in the rear shooting at convoys on their way to the front, acts of expulsion will be entirely reasonable. They may even be essential.

Sometimes I think that Israel’s most recent wave of bombings and shellings, particularly in the wake of the media construction of an ‘Iranian nuclear threat’, is an attempt to manufacture a situation where they can justify further ethnic cleansing to themselves.

A NYT editorial the other day opined:

The resolution that the Council finally passed last night will have to be put into effect as quickly and thoroughly as possible, and must lead to a lasting political solution that can avoid future conflicts. That will require more than just an immediate halt to hostilities by both sides and an early withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon. It will also require the dispatch of an international military force with sufficient authority and firepower to guarantee that there can be no repeat of the Hezbollah provocations that set off this destructive conflict.

As hard as it will be to seal the border against Hezbollah infiltrations into Israel, that will not be enough. Hezbollah has rockets that can be fired from deep inside Lebanon at targets deep inside Israel. These must be stopped as well, ideally by the full disarmament of Hezbollah that the Security Council first called for in 2004.

Obviously, it is Hizballah that must be fully disarmed, in accordance with the UNSC’s dictates. One of the problems with the UN is that its membership is national states. ‘Non state actors’, like Hizballah, simply do not have standing. It is illegitimate for them to defend themselves or others, even where the state that claims jurisdiction does not possess the inclination or the capacity to do so, or as in the case of Lebanon, either the capacity or the inclination. The UN can pass judgement on a non state actor, provided that the US agrees, but the subject of the judgement has no say, no defence, no representation. By the same token, it doesn’t appear to occur to the UN, or most of the commentators, that the party that really needs comprehensive disarmament is the aggressor.

…Washington, which rightly stood by Israel but wrongly refused to call for a cease-fire or engage in meaningful diplomacy with Syria, also paid a price that could further complicate problems in Iraq and Afghanistan. A rapid and effective follow-through on yesterday’s resolution could make up for some of these losses. Anything less will only compound the damage already done.

The real issue, as always, is problems for the US in its humanitarian work.

And on ‘The London Plot’, the NYT again:

Here is what we want to do in the wake of the arrests in Britain. We want to understand as much as possible about what terrorists were planning. To talk about airport security and how to make it better. To celebrate what worked in the British investigation and discuss how to push these efforts farther. It would be a blessed moment in modern American history if we could do that without turning this into a political game plan.

Now I’m going to be doing a lot of flying over the next few weeks and I don’t welcome the inconvenience of increased ‘security’ at the airports. I am not as distressed as some people I’ve been corresponding with about checking the laptop. But when you’re moving for a period of years, you really need the cabin baggage to stay under the 20kg checked baggage limit. None of the coverage I’ve seen has mentioned whether the airlines are relaxing their checked baggage weight limits to compensate when they insist you check your cabin baggage.

As for security, I’d feel a lot more secure if, for example, the US withdrew its troops from Iraq and stopped sending bunker busters and daisy cutters to Israel.

And speaking of daisy cutters, the Times reports:

State Department officials “are discussing whether or not there needs to be a block on this sale because of the past history and because of the current circumstances,” said the senior official, adding that it was likely that Israel will get the rockets, but will be told to be “be careful.”

Everybody knows that these cluster munitions contain a lot of duds that lie around until some child wanders along and picks them up, losing an arm, or an eye, or a life. As Israel has almost exclusively targeted civilians and civilian areas, why would anyone trust them with such stuff, unless, of course, Arab lives have no value.