Lebanon: Trauma Of A Nation
By Iftikhar H. Malik
29 July, 2006
Countercurrents.orgWitnessing a continuum of horrific tragedies in Lebanon over the last three decades, one is immediately reminded of Afghanistan, a similar society heinously devastated by external invasions and internal fissures. Of course, these are not the only two places simmering in human trauma as the list also includes Chechnya, Palestine, Abkhazia, Vietnam, Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Rwanda, Angola, Iraq, Kurdistan, Darfur and several such other places where millions of innocent people lost lives at a time when the world leaders were sermonising on a new world order, primacy of human rights and world peace, protection of ecology, and globalisation. No wonder, the world’s largest number of refugees and displaced people have come from these unfortunate regions.
The problem with any modern war is that the truth becomes the first casualty and powerful nations with control over global institutions such as media, public diplomacy and dominant cultural forces outdo any contrary view to the extent of misrepresenting objective realities on the ground. Despite a greater sensitivity to subalterns, history is still written by and about victors with a few ceremonial and patronising words thrown in for the victims. It is not merely the global and historical imbalances that underwrite collective injustices; they also unleash a greater sense of disempowerment. Lebanon is caught in a vicious cycle the way a sordid history is repeating itself in Afghanistan—the two West Asian countries thousands of miles apart, yet undergoing similar catastrophes.
Here external forces have routinely mounted annihilative campaigns while concurrently blaming their inhabitants for all the ills, as if the latter lack any respect or even desire to live a normal life. In both the cases, victims are paraded out as the perpetrators who have to be sorted out with F-16s, daisy cutters, cave busters and other incendiary devices. Each such campaign is premised on bringing peace, democracy and civility to these tormented lands but unfolds with many more millions displaced as men get killed or pushed to the neighbouring countries to seek out some existence for their marooned families often left back in the war zones. Ironically, Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kashmir and Iraq are overflowing with widows, orphans and maimed people whereas men have gone deeper into the dust like the hope itself.
While Lebanon bleeds due to the ongoing fifth Israeli invasion of the country in the last thirty years, politicians of fifteen nations and the UN Secretary-General met in Rome to soothe a critical world opinion. How ironic that out of a total 3-hour session, these politicians and technocrats spent ninety minutes haggling over the word, “immediate” with the United States and Britain resisting its inclusion as a prefix to the “cessation of hostilities”. Even the press conference addressed by President Bush and Prime Minister Blair on 28 July in Washington avoided using “immediate” or “urgent” so that Israeli forces could lay some more devastation to a marooned land. By speeding up the supply of ammunition to Israel, a totally partisan Washington with an obliging London in its toe is determined on destabilising entire West Asia.
All the way from Palestine to Pakistan, West Asian heartland is bleeding with collective violence claiming hundreds of lives everyday. The Neocons and such other Muslim bashers have never had so well! The UN Security Council has been logjammed by its two permanent members who are cobbling together “a stabilising force” to be stationed on the Israeli-Lebanese borders though one wonders whether its remit will cover Israel’s territories and its operations as well, or is simply meant to fight Hezbollah! For the moment, Israel storms ahead with its stated and pernicious aim of pushing Lebanon back by twenty years and its invasion of Gaza goes on underreported and totally unrebuked. The UN Secretary-General might have some queries regarding the death of its four monitors in Lebanon but if Tel Aviv can afford to defy 69 UN resolutions, why should it be bothered at a press statement in Rome, where Israel itself could not care less to be present.
The problem with Washington’s policy is its acute contradictions and a dare-devil indifference to the agonies of the ordinary populace in West Asia. On the one hand, it has allowed Israel to unilaterally and militaristically change and expand its borders, build the 12-metre wall and pursue a policy of collective punishment and starvation of Palestinians in the worst kind of apartheid in our times, simultaneously, it has now permitted Tel Aviv to mount this massive campaign against Lebanon, which, curiously, Washington was parading as its ally in this entire project of democratisation in the Middle East. With the Syrians gone, everyone assumed Lebanon’s promotion as a showcase for peace and stability in the region where American influence and likewise of other coalition partners has been immensely tarnished following unilateralist policies and unjustified invasions. If this is how Washington rewards one ally for its serious violations of Palestinian rights over the last six decades while denying basic succour to another, and even allows and abets aggression to go on, then how does it see itself as a credible force in the region where except for some surrogate elements nobody trusts it at all?
Supporting Israel for so long unconditionally is one thing yet wilfully antagonising the public opinion on such a massive scale without any rational or balanced objective in sight only underlines the short-sighted and equally dangerous pursuit lacking common sense. If punishing the Lebanese population is something presumably sane aimed at neutralising trumped-up “Shia crescent of crisis” as suggested by the Necons then they are gravely mistaken. After being bogged down in two countries in a rather inglorious and irreparable way, the expansion of such new misadventures to Syria and Iran even under the high-sounding premise of the Third World War, is mindlessly sleepwalking into “unknowns”. A partisan United States can still make a fresher and more balanced beginning in the Middle East without ditching Israel but by pursuing even-handed policies as an honest broker which will not only help guarantee its own interests but will also obviate the recurrence of large-scale massacres of innocent people. How long can the United States keep on pursuing these unilateral policies in the region which have not only brought its millions of Muslim and other critics together but have even equally led to loud whispers within its own academic corridors demanding America’s emancipation from monopolist lobbies and their debilitating influence.
It is certainly interesting to note that the alarmist views of an emerging Shia arc of crisis started to emanate from Washington in the last few weeks following a continued volatility in Iraq. Here, despite Sunni-Shia discord, the expectations of a peaceful situation evaporated long time back making the invasion into one of the most controversial and even dangerous decisions reached by an administration since Vietnam. More and more Americans perceive Iraq not only turning into an abyss of despair and disorder but also quite conducive to the Iranian interests. The Israeli and American hostility towards Iran knows no bounds and the nuclear issue and Tehran’s support for Hizbollah are merely blocks in a jigsaw puzzle where Iran defies every move geared towards its destabilisation under the loose dictum of regime change. The concept of a Shia threat from this Lebaon+Syria+Iraq+Iran axis has come about on the heels of the US single-factor policy towards Tehran, which has been obsessively and selectively focused on a feared nuclear arms proliferation and has expectedly run into a cul-de-sac.
Egged on by the Christian Zionists and some vengeful, self-seeking Iranian émigrés, the latterly emphasis on a Shia threat to the West is a new area to bring several rent seeking actors together besides shoring up the Sunni regimes of Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. These autocracies, owing to their unrepresentative nature and surrogacy to external interests, certainly fear combustive forces gearing up from within, which if combined with regional chaos can only hasten the dissolution of a US-led power elite. The US policy featuring a disproportionate and exclusive preoccupation with the Iranian nuclear programme is not only alarmist it is equally premised upon pitting Muslims against fellow Muslims by playing on the vulnerabilities of autocratic Arab regimes. Obviously, along with the local communities and Western interests being the main casualties of any such pernicious trajectory Israelis may cynically and temporarily claw one more pound of Arab flesh, yet in the longer term these benefits would evaporate in a thin air. How can Israel survive or prosper as an island of peace while encircled by a sea of turbulence, itself inflicted by the worst human tsunami!
As expressed in a letter to Tony Blair by some diplomats, Oxfam, Church groups and the Muslim Council of Britain, the UK like the United States is dangerously isolated and is under severe criticism from several directions including the European Union and Muslim opinion groups. Its former diplomats such as David Hannay, Stephen Wall, Oliver Miles and Christopher Meyers have been cautioning against having been overpowered by a rather inane and daredevil Bush Administration. The columnist, Andrew Alexander, writing for ultra-right Daily Mail (28 July) took Blair to task for poodling to Bush and for seriously compromising British interests. More like the French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, such analysts have been warning Blair of a Muslim backlash against the West per se, and have sought a ceasefire especially when after the Rome meeting, the Israeli Justice Minister boasted to have been green signalled by the United States and EU to go further ahead with a total debilitation of Lebanon.
The Finnish government, currently holding the EU presidency, also rejected the Israeli interpretation right away though the fact remains that Condoleezza Rice was being loyally supported by Margaret Beckett despite the general desire to call for immediate end to hostilities. Beckett’s own lack-lustre position at this critical stage while reposing loyalty in Washington and 10 Downing Street assumed pitiable dimensions when following her protest to Washington on the supply of American ammunition through Prestwick Airport in Scotland, she was reminded by the American officials that the Pentagon had already made the logistical arrangement to the effects with the British Ministry of defence. Surprisingly, the British Foreign Secretary, as was obvious from her facial expressions in an interview with John Snow of Channel Four on 26 July, was genuinely shocked on the disclosure and her own lack of prior knowledge of such arrangements. Latterly, a single-sentence American apology was reportedly conveyed to London. In the meantime, Rice, despite her Kissingeresque visits to the region, kept calling the situation as “an opportunity” rather than an abysmal human tragedy.
Israel’s onslaught on Lebanon while concurrently starving and killing the Palestinians in Gaza is being presented as a just and moral campaign by Ehud Olmert government, itself a rather weak set-up which is resorting to militarism to shore up its image. This moralist line is largely accepted by many in the Western media organs who posit the recent Israeli invasions of Gaza and Lebanon as retaliatory measures, motivated solely in response to the abductions of its soldiers by Hamas and Hizbollah. Such a simplistic discourse strictly avoids taking into account the preceding Israeli abductions of Arabs and Palestinians through routine trespassing besides the killing of a 7-member family on the Gaza beach which, in a way, led to the recent spate of kidnaps. In other words, both Hamas and Hizbollah did not precipitate the crisis, as in addition to recent kidnaps, killings of Palestinians including children and women, Israel has been holding hundreds of Lebanese and thousands of Palestinians in prisons for years.Many of these detention centres are not better than Guantanamo Bay, as has been disclosed by several probing correspondents. In fact, as recounted by Robert Fisk on 27 July in the Independent, several Lebanese prisoners released following the exchange in 2000 are now leading the resistance. Interestingly, they are using former Israeli underground bunkers and prisons on Lebanese soil to fight the Israeli ground troops. One such notorious bunker built by Israelis and used by their allies, the Southern Christian Army (SLA), is at Khiam and after changing hands was renamed as the Museum of Torture. As suggested by Jonathan Steele in the Guardian on 28 July, Israel will not be able to crush Hizbollah since the group is deeply rooted among the Lebanese Shia majority and like Hamas, retains a strong and devoted fighting force. If despite its 18-year long vigilant and often volatile control of Southern Lebanon, Israel could not contain Hizbollah, how could it be possible now! The US, despite its massive campaign in Afghanistan could not eliminate the Taliban, and in the same vein, the UK was eventually compelled to negotiate with the Irish Republicans.
It is true that while the US and Israel have been punishing the entire nations on account of a few elements, the UK refused to penalise entire Irish/Catholic populace for violence committed by the IRA. In West Asia, sadly, even that thin yet crucial line has never existed. It is important to note that several superficial analyses of the Islamist movements presently in currency fail to see the grassroots support that they retain owing to their social and educational work besides looking after the needy and widows—all those sectors where the governments including the Palestinian Authority failed miserably. The policy of collective punishment and annihilation of civic facilities as adopted by Israel, the US and other active partners in the war on terror has further weakened the state authority in West Asia while the welfare and charity work undertaken by the Islamists all across the Muslim regions has brought the latter to the fore. Hizbollah can also survive without the external support as it receives khumas (lit: one-fifth), a tax/donation from the Shias which accounts for most of its finances.
It is true that the Israeli official version of the sequence of events without any reference to killing of seven members of a pinioning family in Gaza in June and the abduction of two Arab doctors before the recent fracas is unquestionably accepted across Israel and the West. No wonder, 95% of Israelis support Ehud Olmert’s bi-frontal strategy of using massive air bombardment and heavy artillery besides encircling and even starving the Gazans and now the Lebanese. Israel may consider it a just war but still a thin minority of intellectuals and activists are warning against the moral and humanitarian dilemmas that Jewry is confronted with owing to Israel’s policies. Ze’ev Moaz, a professor of political science at Tel Aviv University, in a piece in Haaretz, refused to accept the war as a just war, and observed: “We invaded a sovereign state, and occupied its capital in 1982. In the process of this occupation, we dropped several tons of bombs from the air, ground and sea, while wounding and killing thousands of civilians. Approximately 14,000 civilians were killed between June and September of 1982, according to conservative estimate. The majority of these civilians had nothing to do with the PLO, which provided the official pretext of war”.Coming back to current invasion, Moaz notes: “What exactly is the difference between launching Katyushas into civilian population centers in Israel and the Israel Air Force bombing population centers in south Beirut, Tyre, Sidon and Tripoli?... Worst yet, bombing infrastructure targets such as power stations, bridges and other civil facilities turns the entire Lebanese civilian population into a victim and hostage, even if we are not physically harming civilians”. The Israeli professor feels that Israel has a serious moral dilemma which urgently needs to be taken aboard, as he concludes: “But in terms of our own national soul searching, we owe ourselves to confront the bitter truth – maybe we will win this conflict on the military field, maybe we will make some diplomatic gains, but on the moral plane, we have no advantage, and we have no special status”. Groups such as Gush-Shalom and activist-intellectuals like Uri Avnery have been steadfastly flagging these human issues for a long time, though such groups remain marginalised before the Likud onslaught.
In 1982, while going beyond his cue cards, President Reagan, during his meeting with Prime Minister Menachem Begin, had described the then Israeli devastation of Lebanon as a Holocaust, but a quarter of century later, Bush and Blair would not agree even to the inclusion of the prefix such as ‘immediate’ or `urgent’ to forestall brutalisation in Lebanon and Gaza. Looks like our world has come to a very sad impasse and no wonder people across the world demanding peace and justice are all Lebanese, Palestinians, Afghans and Iraqis!
Iftikhar H. Malik is a Professor of History at Bath Spa University, England, and is also associated with Wolfson College, Oxford. An author of several books, the following two are his more recent publications:
-Crescent between Cross and Star: Muslims and the West after 9/11 (Oxford University Press, 2006).
-Jihad, Hindutva and the Taliban: South Asia at the Crossroads (OUP, 2005).
