"Stop
That shit!"
By Uri Avnery
20 July, 2006
Gush Shalom
A woman, an immigrant from Russia,
throws herself on the ground in total despair in front of her home that
has been hit by a missile, crying in broken Hebrew: "My son! My
son!" believing him dead. In fact, he was only wounded and sent
to the hospital.
Lebanese children, covered
with wounds, in Beirut hospitals. The funeral of the victims of a missile
in Haifa. The ruins of a whole devastated quarter in Beirut. Inhabitants
of the north of Israel fleeing south from the Katyushas. Inhabitants
of the south of Lebanon fleeing north from the Israeli air force.
Death, destruction. Unimaginable
human suffering.
And the most disgusting sight:
George Bush in a playful mood sitting on his chair in St Petersburg,
with his loyal servant, Tony Blair, leaning over him, and solving the
problem: "See? What they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbullah
to stop doing that shit, and it's over."
Thus spoke the leader of
the world, and the seven dwarfs - "the great of the world"
- say Amen.
Syria? But only a few months
ago it was Bush - yes, the same Bush - who induced the Lebanese to drive
the Syrians out of their country. Now he wants them to intervene in
Lebanon and impose order?
Thirty-one years ago, when
the Lebanese civil war was at its height, the Syrians sent their army
into Lebanon (invited, of all people, by the Christians). At the time,
the then Israeli minister of defence, Shimon Peres, and his associates
created hysteria in Israel. They demanded that Israel deliver an ultimatum
to the Syrians, to prevent them from reaching the Israeli border. Yitzhak
Rabin, the prime minister, told me then that that was sheer nonsense,
because the best that could happen to Israel was for the Syrian army
to spread out along the border. Only thus could calm be assured, the
same calm that reigned along our border with Syria.
However, Rabin gave in to
the hysteria of the media and stopped the Syrians far from the border.
The vacuum thus created was filled by the Palestine Liberation Organization.
In 1982, Ariel Sharon pushed the PLO out, and the vacuum was filled
by Hizbullah.
All that has happened there
since then would not have happened if we had allowed the Syrians to
occupy the border from the beginning. The Syrians are cautious, they
do not act recklessly.
What was Hassan Nasrallah
thinking of, when he decided to cross the border and carry out the guerrilla
action that started the current Witches' Sabbath? Why did he do it?
And why at this time?
Everybody agrees that Nasrallah
is a clever person. He is also prudent. For years he has been assembling
a huge stockpile of missiles of all kinds to establish a balance of
terror. He knew that the Israeli army was only waiting for an opportunity
to destroy them. In spite of that, he carried out a provocation that
provided the Israeli government with a perfect pretext to attack Lebanon
with the full approval of the world. Why?
Possibly he was asked by
Iran and Syria, who had supplied him with the missiles, to do something
to divert American pressure from them. And indeed, the sudden crisis
has shifted attention away from the Iranian nuclear effort, and it seems
that Bush's attitude towards Syria has also changed.
But Nasrallah is far from
being a marionette of Iran or Syria. He heads an authentic Lebanese
movement, and calculates his own balance sheet of pros and cons. If
he had been asked by Iran and/or Syria to do something - for which there
is no proof - and he saw that it was contrary to the aims of his movement,
he would not have done it.
Perhaps he acted because
of domestic Lebanese concerns. The Lebanese political system was becoming
more stable and it was becoming more difficult to justify the military
wing of Hizbullah. A new armed incident could have helped. (Such considerations
are not alien to us either, especially before budget debates.)
But all this does not explain
the timing. After all, Nasrallah could have acted a month before or
a month later, a year before or a year later. There must have been a
much stronger reason to convince him to enter upon such an adventure
at precisely this time.
And indeed there was: Palestine.
Two weeks before, the Israeli
army had started a war against the population of the Gaza Strip. There,
too, the pretext was provided by a guerrilla action, in which an Israeli
soldier was captured. The Israeli government used the opportunity to
carry out a plan prepared long before: to break the Palestinians' will
to resist and to destroy the newly-elected Palestinian government, dominated
by Hamas. And, of course, to stop the Qassams.
The operation in Gaza is
an especially brutal one, and that is how it looks on the world's TV
screens. Terrible pictures from Gaza appear daily and hourly in the
Arab media. Dead people, wounded people, devastation. Lack of water
and medicaments for the wounded and sick. Whole families killed. Children
screaming in agony. Mothers weeping. Buildings collapsing.
The Arab regimes, which are
all dependent on America, did nothing to help. Since they are also threatened
by Islamic opposition movements, they looked at what was happening to
Hamas with some Schadenfreude. But tens of millions of Arabs, from the
Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf, saw, got excited and angry with
their government, crying out for a leader who would bring succor to
their besieged, heroic brothers.
Fifty years ago, Gamal Abd-el-Nasser,
the new Egyptian leader, wrote that there was a role waiting for a hero.
He decided to be that hero himself. For several years, he was the idol
of the Arab world, symbol of Arab unity. But Israel used an opportunity
that presented itself and broke him in the June 1967 war. After that,
the star of Saddam Hussein rose in the firmament. He dared to stand
up to mighty America and to launch missiles at Israel, and became the
hero of the Arab masses. But he was routed in a humiliating manner by
the Americans, spurred on by Israel.
A week ago, Nasrallah faced
the same temptation. The Arab world was crying out for a hero, and he
said: Here am I! He challenged Israel, and indirectly the United States
and the entire West. He started the attack without allies, knowing that
neither Iran nor Syria could risk helping him.
Perhaps he got carried away,
like Abd-el-Nasser and Saddam before him. Perhaps he misjudged the force
of the counter-attack he could expect. Perhaps he really believed that,
under the weight of his rockets, the Israeli rear would collapse. (As
the Israeli army believed that the Israeli onslaught would break the
Palestinian people in Gaza and the Shi'is in Lebanon.)
One thing is clear: Nasrallah
would not have started this vicious circle of violence, if the Palestinians
had not called for help. Either from cool calculation, or from true
moral outrage, or from both - Nasrallah rushed to the rescue of beleaguered
Palestine.
The Israeli reaction could
have been expected. For years, the army commanders had yearned for an
opportunity to eliminate the missile arsenal of Hizbullah and destroy
that organization, or at least disarm it and push it far, far from the
border. They are trying to do this the only way they know: by causing
so much devastation, that the Lebanese population will stand up and
compel its government to fulfill Israel's demands.
Will these aims be achieved?
Hizbullah is the authentic
representative of the Shi'i community, which makes up 40 per cent of
the Lebanese population. Together with the other Muslims, they are the
majority in the country. The idea that the weakling Lebanese government
- which in any case includes Hizbullah - would be able to liquidate
the organization is ludicrous.
The Israeli government demands
that the Lebanese army be deployed along the border. This has by now
become a mantra. It reveals total ignorance. The Shi'is occupy important
positions in the Lebanese army, and there is no chance at all that it
would start a fratricidal war against them.
Abroad, another idea is taking
shape: that an international force should be deployed on the border.
The Israeli government objects to this strenuously. A real international
force - unlike the hapless UNIFIL which has been there for decades -
would hinder the Israeli army from doing whatever it wants. Moreover,
if it were deployed there without the agreement of Hizbullah, a new
guerrilla war would start against it. Would such a force, without real
motivation, succeed where the mighty Israeli army was routed?
At most, this war, with its
hundreds of dead and waves of destruction, will lead to another delicate
armistice. The Israeli government will claim victory and argue that
it has "changed the rules of the game". Nasrallah (or his
successors) will claim that their small organization has stood up to
one of the mightiest military machines in the world and written another
shining chapter of heroism in the annals of Arab and Muslim history.
No real solution will be
achieved, because there is no treatment of the root of the matter: the
Palestinian problem.
Many years ago, I was listening
on the radio to one of the speeches of Abd-el-Nasser before a huge crowd
in Egypt. He was holding forth on the achievements of the Egyptian revolution,
when shouts arose from the crowd: "Filastin, ya Gamal!" ("Palestine,
oh Gamal!") Whereupon Nasser forgot what he was talking about and
started on Palestine, getting more and more carried away.
Since then, not much has
changed. When the Palestinian cause is mentioned, it casts its shadow
over everything else. That's what has happened now, too.
Whoever longs for a solution
must know: there is no solution without settling the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. And there is no solution to the Palestinian problem without
negotiations with their elected leadership, the government headed by
Hamas.
If one wants to finish, once
and for all, with this shit - as Bush so delicately put it - that is
the only way.
Uri Avnery is an Israeli
journalist, writer and peace activist