Israel
Prepares Major Escalation Of Lebanon Aggression
By Patrick Martin
28 July 2006
World
Socialist Web
The Israeli government issued
orders Thursday to mobilize as many as 40,000 additional reserve soldiers
in preparation for an escalation of its war of aggression against Lebanon.
The action was taken by the security cabinet of Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert in response to mounting demands from the military brass and the
media for a full-scale invasion of south Lebanon.
The large-scale reserve call-up
is but one indication that Israel is preparing a massive escalation
of violence against the Lebanese population. Israeli Justice Minister
Haim Ramon gave an interview to Israel’s Army Radio in which he
said that the Israeli air force should bomb Lebanese towns and villages
before the ground forces enter in order to cut Israeli casualties. Asked
if this meant destroying villages and their civilian population, he
responded, “These places are not villages. They are military bases
in which Hezbollah people are hiding and from which they are operating.”
Ramon hailed the outcome
of the Rome conference of the major imperialist powers and selected
Arab countries, held Wednesday to discuss the Lebanese crisis. US Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice blocked all efforts to pass a resolution calling
for an immediate ceasefire. Ramon interpreted this outcome—quite
correctly—as a green light for further Israeli destruction of
Lebanon.
“We received yesterday
at the Rome conference permission from the world... to continue the
operation, this war, until Hezbollah won’t be located in Lebanon
and until it is disarmed,” he declared.
The Israeli ruling elite
has been shocked by the fierce resistance which Hezbollah fighters have
put up in towns like Bint Jbail and Maroun el Ras, just across the border
from Israel. Nine Israeli soldiers were killed early Wednesday when
they were sent into a well-prepared trap in Bint Jbail.
As troops of the Golani Brigade
entered the center of the town, thinking that air strikes had reduced
the resistance to a few dozen men, hundreds of Hezbollah fighters opened
fire on them from all sides. It was an hour before the Israeli troops
could even mount serious return fire, and the town remains contested
despite incessant air and artillery pounding.
The setback at Bint Jbail
triggered a firestorm of media criticism of the Israeli Defense Forces
(IDF) and the Olmert government. Newspapers from the liberal Haaretz
to the more conservative Yediot Aharonot blasted the military tactics
as inept, demanded a commitment of tens of thousands of troops, and
warned that failure to inflict a highly visible military defeat on Hezbollah
would represent an enormous political, psychological and strategic blow
to the Israeli state.
In the daily newspaper Maariv,
Amir Rappaport criticized “the enormous gap between the military
challenge posed by Hezbollah, a shadowy guerrilla organization equipped
with the best Iranian and Syrian weaponry, and the relatively smaller
number of troops that took part in the incursion.”
In Yediot Aharonot, military
correspondent Alex Fishman declared, “The public does not quite
understand the ground offensive and has the feeling that something about
this machine is not working—that it is too slow, too limited,
too many accidents, that it should look different.”
The long-time military affairs
commentator for Haaretz, Ze’ev Schiff, declared that Hezbollah
“must be destroyed at any price,” warning, “If Hezbollah
does not experience defeat in this war, this will spell the end of Israeli
deterrence against its enemies.” He expressed particular concern
that failure to destroy Hezbollah would inspire a new wave of resistance
from the Palestinian population of the West Bank, making the territory
uncontrollable.
The security cabinet’s
order to mobilize three reserve divisions was accompanied by assurances
from Olmert that his government had decided not to carry out a full-scale
invasion of Lebanon or press beyond the border area in which ground
operations have been confined. But as the Associated Press noted, “the
large size of the mobilization—one division has 12,000 to 15,000
soldiers—raised questions about officials’ insistence that
they were not contemplating a wider offensive.”
Defense Minister Amir Peretz
boasted that the campaign of bombing and border incursions had already
inflicted a strategic defeat on Hezbollah, and he declared that the
purpose of the offensive was “changing the reality on the northern
border.” But despite this claim, Hezbollah was able to launch
over 150 rockets in the 24 hours ending Thursday night, Israeli time,
the heaviest bombardment of the two-week-long war. Rockets hit Kiryat
Shmona, Haifa, Safed, Carmiel, Maalot and Shlomi, among other cities
and towns.
A Likud member of the Knesset
who heads a defense preparedness committee, Yuval Steinitz, called for
a far more aggressive prosecution of the war both in the air and on
the ground. Steinitz revealed that secret committee hearings had debated
the IDF plans for an air war against Hezbollah two years ago. This underscores
that despite the media campaign to paint Israeli as the innocent victim
of terrorism, the war of aggression against Lebanon has been in preparation
for a long time, awaiting only a suitable pretext.
While invariably described
in the American and Israeli media as “terrorists,” Hezbollah
has performed as a well-trained military force in the first two weeks
of war. Its fighters should be called what they are: Arab soldiers fighting
courageously for their people and their land against an invading army
which has enormous superiority in firepower and numbers, and uncontested
control of the air.
The saturation bombing of
Lebanon continues, with one report estimating that more than 2,000 Israeli
air strikes have been conducted since the July 12, each strike delivering
anywhere from one to four tons of explosives in the form of bombs and
missiles. In addition, there has been constant shelling of border towns
and villages that are within the range of Israeli artillery, as well
as shelling of coastal areas by Israeli gunboats.
The cumulative bomb tonnage
dropped on Lebanon has probably already exceed the destructive power
of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki (the equivalent of 10,000 tons
of TNT), and will soon approach that of Hiroshima (20,000 tons). This
is a criminal devastation of a largely defenseless country.
The Lebanese health minister
said Thursday that at least 600 civilians have been killed in the bombing,
including as many as 200 still buried in the rubble of destroyed buildings.
Each day brings new reports of atrocities committed by Israeli Air Force:
the targeting of ambulances, cars driven by refugees clearly marked
with white flags, trucks bringing medical supplies, food and water to
the hundreds of thousands trapped in the war zone.
The monitoring group Human
Rights Watch charged that Israel used cluster bombs on the Lebanese
village of Blida July 19, killing one woman and wounding 12 more civilians,
seven of them children. Major General Beni Gantz, the Israeli commander
in the area, admitted that the IDF has employed cluster bombs as part
of the arsenal of weapons unleashed on Lebanon, although he claimed,
“We try to minimize their use.”
Perhaps the most flagrant
war crime was the deliberate destruction of an outpost of the United
Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) on Tuesday, killing four unarmed
observers from China, Canada, Austria and Finland.
UN officials have provided
new details of the doomed effort to persuade the Israeli Defense Forces
not to target the outpost and murder the four observers. Jane Holl Lute,
assistant secretary general for peacekeeping operations, told a Wednesday
session of the Security Council that UN officials in both New York and
Lebanon made repeated calls to the Israeli UN mission and the IDF command
after bombs and missiles began to strike the outpost at Khiam in southern
Lebanon.
Among those making the calls
were Lute herself, deputy secretary general Mark Malloch Brown, Khaled
Mansour, a UN spokesman in Lebanon, and Major General Alain Pellegrini,
commander of UNIFIL. Lt. Col. John Molloy, the senior Irish officer
in the UN observer force in south Lebanon, reported making six calls
to his Israeli counterparts before the strike on the post, according
to an Irish defense ministry spokeswoman. “He warned the Israelis
that they were shelling in very close proximity to the post, and his
warnings were very specific, explicit, detailed and stark. Obviously
those warnings went unheeded,” the spokeswoman said.
A total of 21 strikes were
made on the Khiam post, 11 of them air strikes—in which the pilots
would have had a clear view of the UN flag and insignia—and at
least six artillery strikes. Lute noted that the UN post was “well
known and clearly marked” and said there had been no Hezbollah
activity near it. The post has been used by UNIFIL for decades.
When a UNIFIL force consisting
of soldiers from India went to relieve the outpost, eventually recovering
the bodies of the slain observers, Israeli forces continued firing on
the position.
This war crime has two clear
purposes, one tactical, the other political. The IDF wanted no UN scrutiny
of its cross-border ground operations, which went into high gear shortly
after the UN observers were killed. More broadly, the Israeli regime
is sending a message to any country which might contribute troops to
a future peacekeeping force in the region: the IDF will brook no opposition
to whatever methods it chooses to employ against the Lebanese people
or anyone else it targets.
The Bush administration intervened
in the UN Security Council deliberations, as it did at the Rome conference,
to block any criticism of Israel. The Security Council adopted a resolution
declaring itself “deeply shocked and distressed” by the
attacks on UN peacekeepers, but any stronger language was abandoned
after the US ambassador, John Bolton, threatened a veto.
Bolton cited Israeli assurances
that the killings were “an operational mistake” and said
that he had seen “no evidence to the contrary.” He refused
to permit language directly condemning the killing of United Nations
personnel in a resolution adopted by the UN’s highest body. Even
a general statement which made no reference to the Khiam atrocity or
to Israel—“the Security Council condemns any deliberate
attack against UN personnel”—was blocked. Bolton also insisted
that the resolution should not call for a UN investigation of the killing,
but instead call on Israel to investigate itself.
One only has to contrast
this despicable cover-up to the response from the Bush administration
and the US media to the August 2003 bombing of the UN offices in Baghdad,
in which the top UN official in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was killed.
The targeting of the United Nations, the US government declared, proved
that the bombers were the enemies of all humanity. There is no such
conclusion drawn after an equally deliberate strike on a UN facility
by the state of Israel.