Five
Myths That Sanction
Israel’s War Crimes
By Jonathan Cook
25 July, 2006
Countercurrents.org
This week I had the pleasure
to appear on American radio, on the Laura Ingraham show, pitted against
David Horowitz, a “Semite supremacist” who most recently
made his name under the banner of Campus Watch, leading McCarthyite
witch-hunts against American professors who have the impertinence to
suggest that maybe, just maybe, Arabs have minds and feelings like the
rest of us.
It was a revealing experience, at least for a British journalist rarely
exposed to the depths of ignorance and prejudice in the United States
on Middle East matters -- well, apart from the regular whackos who fill
my email in-tray. But five minutes of listening to Horowitz speak, and
the sympathy with which his arguments were greeted by Laura (“The
Professors -- your book’s a great read, David”), left me
a lot more frightened about the world’s future.
Horowitz’s response to every question, every development in the
Middle East, whether it concerns Lebanon, the Palestinians, Syria or
Iran, is the same: “They want to drive the Jews into the sea”.
It’s as simple as that. Not even a superficial attempt at analysis;
just the message that the Arab world is trying to finish off the genocide
started by Europe. And if Laura is any yardstick, a lot of Americans
buy that stuff.
Horowitz is keen to bang the square peg of the Lebanon story into the
round hole of his claims that the “Jews” are facing an imminent
genocide in the Middle East. And to help him, he and the massed ranks
of US apologists for Israel -- regulars, I suspect, of shows like Laura’s
-- are promoting at least four myths regarding Hizbullah’s current
rockets strikes on Israel. Unless they are challenged at every turn,
the danger is that they will win the ground war against common sense
in the US
The first myth is that Israel was forced to pound Lebanon with its military
hardware because Hizbullah began “raining down” rockets
on the Galilee. Anyone with a short memory can probably recall that
was not the first justification we were offered: that had to do with
the two soldiers captured by Hizbullah on a border post on July 12.
But presumably Horowitz and his friends realised that 400 Lebanese dead
and counting in little more than a week was hard to sell as a “proportionate”
response. In any case Hizbullah kept telling the world how keen it was
to return the soldiers in a prisoner swap.
Hundreds of dead in Lebanon, at least 1,000 severely injured and more
than half a million refugees -- all because Israel is not ready to sit
down at the negotiating table. Even Horowitz could not “advocate
for Israel” on that one.
So the chronology of war has been reorganised: now we are being told
that Israel was forced to attack Lebanon to defend itself from the barrage
of Hizbullah rockets falling on Israeli civilians. The international
community is buying the argument hook, line and sinker. “Israel
has the right to defend itself”, says every politician who can
find a microphone to talk into.
But, if we cast our minds back, that is not how the “Middle East
crisis”, as TV channels now describe it, started. It is worth
recapping on those early events (and I won’t document the long
history of Lebanese suffering at Israel’s hands that preceded
it) before they become entirely shrouded in the mythology being peddled
by Horowitz and others.
Early on July 12 Hizbullah launched a raid against an army border post,
in what was in the best interpretation a foolhardy violation of Israeli
sovereignty. In the fighting the Shiite militia killed three soldiers
and captured two others, while Hizbullah fired a few mortars at border
areas in what the Israeli army described at the time as “diversionary
tactics”. As a result of the shelling, five Israelis were “lightly
injured”, with most needing treatment for shock, according to
the Haaretz newspaper.
Israel’s immediate response was to send a tank into Lebanon in
pursuit of the Hizbullah fighters (its own foolhardy violation of Lebanese
sovereignty). The tank ran over a landmine, which exploded killing four
soldiers inside. Another soldier died in further clashes inside Lebanon
as his unit tried to retrieve the bodies.
Rather than open diplomatic channels to calm the violence down and start
the process of getting its soldiers back, Israel launched bombing raids
deep into Lebanese territory the same day. Given Israel’s worldview
that it alone has a right to project power and fear, that might have
been expected.
But the next day Israel continued its rampage across the south and into
Beirut, where the airport, roads, bridges, and power stations were pummelled.
We now know from reports in the US media that the Israeli army had been
planning such a strike against Lebanon for at least a year.
In contrast to the image of Hizbullah frothing at the mouth to destroy
Israel, its leader Hassan Nasrallah held off from serious retaliation.
For the first day and a half, he limited his strikes to the northern
borders areas, which have faced Hizbullah attacks in the past and are
well protected.
He waited till late on June 13 before turning his guns on Haifa, even
though we now know he could have targeted Israel’s third largest
city from the outset. A small volley of rockets directed at Haifa caused
no injuries and looked more like a warning than an escalation.
It was another three days -- days of constant Israeli bombardmeent of
Lebanon, destroying the country and injuring countless civilians --
before Nasrallah hit Haifa again, including a shell that killed eight
workers in a railway depot.
No one should have been surprised. Nasrallah was doing exactly what
he had threatened to do if Israel refused to negotiate and chose the
path of war instead. Although the international media quoted his ominous
televised message that “Haifa is just the beginning”, Nasrallah
in fact made his threat conditional on Israel’s continuing strikes
against Lebanon. In the same speech he warned: “As long as the
enemy pursues its aggression without limits and red lines, we will pursue
the confrontation without limits and red lines.” Well, Israel
did, and so now has Nasrallah.
The second myth is that Hizbullah’s stockpile of 12,000 rockets
-- the Israeli army’s estimate -- poses an existential threat
to Israel. According to Horowitz and others, Hizbullah collected its
armoury with the sole intent of destroying the Jewish state.
If this really was Hizbullah’s intention in amassing the weapons,
it has a very deluded view of what is required to wipe Israel off the
map. More likely, it collected the armoury in the hope that it might
prove a deterrence -- even if a very inadequate one, as Lebanon is now
discovering -- against a repeat of Israel’s invasions of 1978
and 1982, and the occupation that lasted nearly two decades afterwards.
In fact, according to other figures supplied by the Israeli army, at
least 2,000 Hizbullah rockets have already been fired into Israel while
the army’s bombardments have so far destroyed a further 2,000
rockets. In other words, northern Israel has already received a fifth
of Hizbullah’s arsenal. As someone living in the north, and within
range of the rockets, I have to say Israel does not look close to being
expunged. The Galilee may be emptier, as up to third of Israeli Jews
seek temporary refuge in the south, but Israel’s existence is
in no doubt at all.
The third myth is that, while Israel is trying to fight a clean war
by targeting only terrorists, Hizbullah prefers to bring death and destruction
on innocents by firing rockets at Israeli civilians.
It is amazing that this myth even needs exploding, but after the efforts
of Horowitz and co it most certainly does. As the civilian death toll
in Lebanon has rocketed, international criticism of Israel has remained
at the mealy-mouthed level of diplomatic requests for “restraint”
and “proportionate responses”.
One need only cast a quick eye over the casualty figures from this conflict
to see that if Israel is targeting only Hizbullah fighters it has been
making disastrous miscalculations. So far some 400 Lebanese civilians
are reported dead -- unfortunately for Horowitz’s story at least
a third of them children. From the images coming out of Lebanon’s
hospitals, many more children have survived but with terrible burns
or disabling injuries.
The best estimates, though no one knows for sure, are that Hizbullah
deaths are not yet close to the three-figures range.
In the latest emerging news from Lebanon, human rights groups are accusing
Israel of violating international law and using cluster grenades, which
kill indiscriminately. There are reports too, so far unconfirmed, that
Israel has been firing illegal incendiary bombs.
Conversely, the breakdown of the smaller number of deaths of Israelis
at the hands of Hizbullah -- 42 at the time of writing -- show that
more soldiers have been killed than civilians.
In fact, although no one is making the point, Hizbullah’s rockets
have been targeted overwhelming at strategic locations: the northern
economic hub of Haifa, its satellite towns and the array of military
sites across the Galilee.
Nasrallah seems fully aware that Israel has an impressive civil defence
program of shelters that keep most civilians out of harm’s way.
Unlike Horowitz I won’t presume to read Nasrallah’s mind:
whether he wants to kill large numbers of Israeli civilians or not cannot
be known, given his inability to do so.
But we can see from the choice of the sites he is striking that his
primary goal is to give Israelis a small taste of the disruption of
normal life that is being endured by the Lebanese. He has effectively
closed Haifa for more than a week, shutting its port and financial centres.
Israeli TV is speaking increasingly of the damage being inflicted on
the country’s economy.
Because of Israel’s press censorship laws, it is impossible to
discuss the locations of Israel’s military installations. But
Hizbullah’s rockets are accurate enough to show that many are
intended for the army’s sites in the Galilee, even if they are
rarely precise enough to hit them.
It is obvious to everyone in Nazareth, for example, that the rockets
landing close by, and once on, the city over the past week are searching
out, and some have fallen extremely close to, the weapons factory sited
near us.
Hizbullah seems to have as little concern for the collateral damage
of civilian deaths as Israel -- each wants the balance of terror in
its favour -- but it is nonsense to suggest that Hizbullah’s goals
are any more ignoble than Israel’s. It is trying to dent the economy
of northern Israel in retaliation for Israel’s total destruction
of the Lebanese economy. Equally, it is trying to show Israel that it
knows where its military installations are to be found. Both strategies
appear to be having an impact, even if a minor one, on weakening Israeli
resolve.
The fourth myth is a continuation of the third: Hizbullah has been endangering
the lives of ordinary Lebanese by hiding among non-combatants.
We have seen this kind of dissembling by Israel and Horowitz before,
though not repeated so enthusiastically by Western officials. The UN
head of humanitarian affairs, Jan Egeland, who is in the region, accused
Hizbullah of “cowardly blending” among the civilian population,
and a similar accuation was levelled by the British foreign minister
Kim Howells when he arrived in Israel.
In 2002 Israel made the same charge: that Palestinians resisting its
army’s rampage through the refugee camps of the West Bank were
hiding among civilians. The claim grew louder as more Palestinian civilians
showed the irritating habit of gettting in the way of Israeli strikes
against population centres. The complaints reached a crescendo when
at least two dozen civilians were killed in Jenin as Israel razed the
camp with Apache helicopters and Caterpillar bulldozers.
The implication of Egeland’s cowardly statement seems to be that
any Lebanese fighter, or Palestinian one, resisting Israel and its powerful
military should stand in an open field, his rifle raised to the sky,
waiting to see who fares worse in a shoot-out with an Apache helicopter
or F-16 fighter jet. Hizbullah’s reluctance to conduct the war
in this manner, we are supposed to infer, is proof that they are terrorists.
Egeland and Howells need reminding that Hizbullah’s fighters are
not aliens recently arrived from training camps in Iran, whatever Horowitz
claims. They belong to and are strongly supported by the Shiite community,
nearly half the country’s population, and many other Lebanese.
They have families, friends and neighbours living alongside them in
the country’s south and the neighbourhoods of Beirut who believe
Hizbullah is the best hope of defending their country from Israel’s
regular onslaughts.
Given the indigenous nature of Hizbullah’s resistance, we should
not be surprised at the lengths the Shiite militia is going to ensure
their loved ones, and the Lebanese people more generally, are not put
directly in danger by their combat.
If only the same could be said of the Israeli army and airforce. One
need only look at the images of the victims of its strikes against residential
neighbourhoods, car, ambulances and factories to see why most of the
dead being extracted from the rubble are civilians.
And finally, there is a fifth myth I almost forgot to mention. That
people like David Horowitz only want to tell us the truth…
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth,
Israel. His book “Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish
and Democatic State” is published by Pluto Press. His website
is www.jkcook.net