Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel: Everything You Need To Know

A perilous excursion into the distant past, starting seven whole weeks
ago

Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel: Everything You Need To Know

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

http://counterpunch.org/Cockburn07212006.html

As the tv networks give unlimited airtime to Israel¹s apologists, the
message rolls out that no nation, least of all Israel, can permit
bombardment or armed incursion across its borders without retaliation.


The guiding rule in this tsunami of drivel is that the viewers should
be denied the slightest access to any historical context, or indeed to
anything that happened prior to June 28, which was when the capture of
an Israeli soldier and the killing of two others by Hamas hit the
headlines, followed soon thereafter by an attack by a unit of
Hezbollah¹s fighters.

Memory is supposed to stop in its tracks at June 28, 2006.

Let¹s go on a brief excursion into pre-history. I¹m talking about June
20, 2006, when Israeli aircraft fired at least one missile at a car in
an attempted extrajudicial assassination attempt on a road between
Jabalya and Gaza City. The missile missed the car. Instead it killed
three Palestinian children and wounded 15.

Back we go again to June 13, 2006. Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a
van in another attempted extrajudicial assassination. The successive
barrages killed nine innocent Palestinians.

Now we¹re really in the dark ages, reaching far, far back to June 9,
2006, when Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing 8 civilians
and injuring 32.

That¹s just a brief trip down Memory Lane, and we trip over the bodies
of twenty dead and forty-seven wounded, all of them Palestinians, most
of them women and children.

Israel regretsŠ But no! Israel doesn¹t regret in the least. Most of the
time it doesn¹t even bother to pretend to regret. It says, ³We reserve
the right to slaughter Palestinians whenever we want. We reserve the
right to assassinate their leaders, crush their homes, steal their
water, tear out their olive groves, and when they try to resist we call
them terrorists intent on wrecking the Œpeace process¹².

Now Israel says it wants to wipe out Hezbollah. It wishes no harm to
the people of Lebanon, just so long as they¹re not supporters of
Hezbollah, or standing anywhere in the neighborhood of a person or a
house or a car or a truck or a road or a bus or a field, or a power
station or a port that might, in the mind of an Israeli commander or
pilot, have something to do with Hezbollah. In any of those
eventualities all bets are off. You or your wife or your mother or your
baby get fried.

Israel regretsŠ But no! As noted above, it doesn¹t regret in the
least. Neither does George Bush, nor Condoleezza Rice nor John Bolton
who is the moral savage who brings shame on his country each day that
he sits as America¹s ambassador (unconfirmed) at the UN and who has
just told the world that a dead Israel civilian is worth a whole more
in terms of moral outrage than a Lebanese one.

None of them regrets. They say Hezbollah is a cancer in the body of
Lebanon. Sometimes, to kill the cancer, you end up killing the body. Or
bodies. Bodies of babies. Lots of them. Go to the website
fromisraeltolebanon.info and take a look. Then sign the petition on the
site calling on the governments of the world to stop this barbarity.

You can say that Israel brought Hezbollah into the world. You can prove
it too, though this too involves another frightening excursion into
history.

This time we have to go far, almost unimaginably far, back into
history. Back to 1982, before the dinosaurs, before CNN, before Fox TV,
before O¹Reilly and Limbaugh. But not before the neo-cons who at that
time had already crawled from the primal slime and were doing exactly
what they are doing now: advising an American president to give Israel
the green light to ³solve its security problems² by destroying Lebanon.

In 1982 Israel had a problem. Yasir Arafat, headquartered in Beirut,
was making ready to announce that the PLO was prepared to sit down with
Israel and embark on peaceful, good faith negotiations towards a
two-state solution.

Israel didn¹t want a two-state solution, which meant -- if UN
resolutions were to be taken seriously -- a Palestinian state right
next door, with water, and contiguous territory. So Israel decided
chase the PLO right out of Lebanon. It announced that the Palestinian
fighters had broken the year-long cease-fire by lobbing some shells
into northern Israel.

Palestinians had done nothing of the sort. I remember this very well,
because Brian Urquhart, at that time assistant secretary general of the
United Nations, in charge of UN observers on Israel¹s northern border,
invited me to his office on the 38th floor of the UN hq in
mid-Manhattan and showed me all the current reports from the zone. For
over a year there¹d been no shelling from north of the border. Israel
was lying.

With or without a pretext Israel wanted to invade Lebanon. So it did,
and rolled up to Beirut. It shelled Lebanese towns and villages and
bombed them from the air. Sharon¹s forces killed maybe 20,000 people,
and let Lebanese Christians slaughter hundreds of Palestinian refugees
in the camps of Sabra and Chatilla.

The killing got so bad that even Ronald Reagan awoke from his slumbers
and called Tel Aviv to tell Israel to stop. Sharon gave the White House
the finger by bombing Beirut at the precise times -- 2.42 and 3.38 --
of two UN resolutions calling for a peaceful settlement on the matter
of Palestine.

When the dust settled over the rubble, Israel bunkered down several
miles inside Lebanese sovereign territory, which it illegally occupied,
in defiance of all UN resolutions, for years, supervising a brutal
local militia and running its own version of Abu Graibh, the torture
center at the prison of Al-Khiam.

Occupy a country, torture its citizens and in the end you face
resistance. In Israel¹s case it was Hezbollah, and in the end Hezbollah
ran Israel out of Lebanon, which is why a lot of Lebanese regard
Hezbollah not as terrorists but as courageous liberators.

The years roll by and Israel does its successful best to destroy all
possibility of a viable two-state solution. It builds illegal
settlements. It chops up Palestine with Jews-only roads. It collars all
the water. It cordons off Jerusalem. It steals even more land by
bisecting Palestinian territory with its ³fence². Anyone trying to
organize resistance gets jailed, tortured, or blown up.

Sick of their terrible trials, Palestinians elect Hamas, whose leaders
make it perfectly clear that they are ready to deal on the basis of the
old two-state solution, which of course is the one thing Israel cannot
endure. Israel doesn¹t want any ³peaceful solution² that gives the
Palestinians anything more than a few trashed out acres surrounded with
barbed wire and tanks, between the Israeli settlements whose goons can
murder them pretty much at will.

So here we are, 24 years after Sharon did his best to destroy Lebanon
in 1982, and his heirs are doing it all over again. Since they can¹t
endure the idea of any just settlement for Palestinians, it¹s the only
thing they know how to do. Call Lebanon a terror-haven and bomb it back
to the stone age. Call Gaza a terror-haven and bomb its power plant,
first stop on the journey back to the stone age. Bomb Damascus. Bomb
Teheran.

Of course they won¹t destroy Hezbollah. Every time they kill another
Lebanese family, they multiply hatred of Israel and support for
Hezbollah. They¹ve even unified the parliament in Baghdad, which just
voted unanimously -- Sunnis and Shi¹ites and Kurds alike -- to
deplore Israel¹s conduct and to call for a ceasefire.

I hope you¹ve enjoyed these little excursions into history, even though
history is dangerous, which is why the US press gives it a wide birth.
But even without the benefit of historical instruction, a majority of
Americans in CNN¹s instant poll *- about 55 per cent out of 800,000 as
of midday, July 19 -- don¹t like what Israel is up to.

Dislike is one thing, but at least in the short term it doesn¹t help
much. Israel¹s 1982 attack on Lebanon grew unpopular in the US, after
the first few days. But forcing the US to pressure Israel to settle the
basic problem takes political courage, and virtually no US politician
is prepared to buck the Israel lobby, however many families in Lebanon
and Gaza may be sacrificed on the altar of such cowardice.

In article , Sean C
wrote:

To alt.astronomy readers:

I am sorry about posting this message to your group. I was trying to
post it to alt.atheism, where I am a regular, but accidentally posted
it to your group instead. Unfortunately, I am unable to cancel it.