Attacking Lebanon is one big fat Israeli f-up

1. Israel Will Create More Terrorists Than It Kills -- by Stephen Zunes

The Bush administration's contempt for the United Nations Charter, the Fourth Geneva Convention and the other fundamental principles of international law has once again been laid bare by its defense of the ongoing Israeli assault against Lebanon.

The seizure of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah militiamen, apparently taken in retaliation against Israeli attacks against civilian targets in the Gaza Strip, was clearly wrong.

Israel would have a right to engage in a targeted paramilitary action to free the hostages and, if necessary, kill their captors.

However, large-scale attacks against civilian targets unrelated to the kidnapping is an act of collective punishment, a clear violation of international law.

Israel holds thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners seized within the territory of those nations by Israeli forces. Most of these Arab prisoners have not engaged in terrorism and many are non-combatants. How is Israel's seizure and detention of these people different from Hezbollah's seizure and detention of the two Israeli soldiers? Does Israel's refusal to release its hostages give Lebanon or Palestine, if they were capable of it, the right to engage in a massive bombardment of civilian targets in Israel?

Most of the targets of the Israeli air strikes have nothing to do with Hezbollah, which does not control the Lebanese government and is only a minority party in the Lebanese parliament. Israel has bombed the Beirut International Airport, the main seaport of Juniyah and even the historic lighthouse on the Beirut esplanade, none of which is controlled by Hezbollah. Israel has also bombed bridges, power stations, civilian neighborhoods and villages miles from any Hezbollah militia. And, despite insisting that the Lebanese army take stronger action against the Hezbollah militia, the Israelis have bombed Lebanese army facilities as well.

Close to 200 Lebanese civilians have died in these attacks so far, as well as over a dozen foreigners, including a Canadian family on vacation.

The European Union, consisting of 25 democracies, condemned Hezbollah's seizure of the Israeli soldiers, but also noted that Israel's military retaliation against Lebanon is "grossly disproportionate." The United States is virtually alone in the international community in its defense of the Israeli assault.

Despite President George W. Bush's claim on Monday that the crisis started because Hezbollah decided to "fire hundreds of rockets into Israel from southern Lebanon," Hezbollah did not attack civilian areas in Israel until after Israel began attacking civilian areas in Lebanon last week.

In fact, until Israel began its recent assault on Lebanon, not a single Israeli civilian had been killed by Hezbollah since well before Israel's withdrawal of its occupation forces from southern Lebanon in 2000. Virtually all of Hezbollah's military actions since then have been against Israeli occupation forces in a disputed border region between Lebanon and an Israel-occupied portion of southwestern Syria, not against Israel.

Congressional leaders of both parties have called for tough action against Syria for allowing the transshipment of rockets to Hezbollah forces, which have killed up to a dozen Israeli civilians. However, they have refused to consider suspending the shipments of F-16 jet fighters and other weapons and delivery systems to Israel. These weapons have inflicted far more civilian casualties on the Lebanese side of the border, despite provisions of the U.S. Arms Export Control Act which prohibits U.S. arms transfers to countries that use American weaponry against non-military targets.

In short, both Republicans and Democrats recognize that while arming those who kill innocent Israeli civilians is wrong, they support arming those who kill innocent Lebanese civilians. This is racism, pure and simple.

Not only is Israel's offensive against Lebanon illegal and immoral, it does not increase Israel's security or curb the threat of Islamic radicalism. In fact, it does the opposite.

Hezbollah gained popular support in the Shiite community in recent decades largely as a result of the failure of the central government to protect the population from Israeli air and naval attacks and the mass kidnapping and imprisonment of thousands of young men.

Israel's current offensive will only strengthen Hezbollah's appeal and undermine Lebanon's pro-Western government.

This is not about Israel's legitimate right to self-defense. As with the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, it will create far more terrorists than it destroys.

(Stephen Zunes, who serves as Middle East editor for Foreign Policy In Focus , is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and the author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism)



2. The child lies like a rag doll - a symbol of the latest Lebanon war
By Robert Fisk in Beirut

How soon must we use the words "war crime"? How many children must be scattered in the rubble of Israeli air attacks before we reject the obscene phrase "collateral damage" and start talking about prosecution for crimes against humanity?

The child whose dead body lies like a rag doll beside the cars which were supposedly taking her and her family to safety is a symbol of the latest Lebanon war; she was hurled from the vehicle in which she and her family were traveling in southern Lebanon as they fled their village - on Israel's own instructions. Because her parents were apparently killed in the same Israeli air attack, her name is still unknown. Not an unknown warrior, but an unknown child.

The story of her death, however, is well documented. On Saturday, the inhabitants of the tiny border village of Marwaheen were ordered by Israeli troops - apparently using a bullhorn - to leave their homes by 6pm. Marwaheen lies closest to the spot where Hizbollah guerrillas broke through the frontier wire a week ago to capture two Israeli soldiers and kill three others, the attack which provoked this latest cruel war in Lebanon. The villagers obeyed the Israeli orders and initially appealed to local UN troops of the Ghanaian battalion for protection.

But the Ghanaian soldiers, obeying guidelines set down by the UN's headquarters in New York in 1996, refused to permit the Lebanese civilians to enter their base. By terrible irony, the UN's rules had been drawn up after their soldiers gave protection to civilians during an Israeli bombardment of southern Lebanon in 1996 in which 106 Lebanese, more than half of them children, were slaughtered when the Israelis shelled the UN compound at Qana, in which they had been given sanctuary.

So the people of Marwaheen set off for the north in a convoy of cars which only minutes later, close to the village of Tel Harfa, were attacked by an Israeli F-16 fighter-bomber. It bombed all the cars and killed at least 20 of the civilians travelling in them, many of them women and children. Twelve people were burnt alive in their vehicles but others, including the child who lies like a rag doll near the charred civilian convoy, whose photograph was taken - at great risk - by an Associated Press photographer, Nasser Nasser, were blown clear of the cars by the blast of the bombs and fell into fields and a valley near the scene of the attack. There has been no apology or expression of regret from Israel for these deaths.

The innocent continued to die yesterday in Israeli air attacks across Lebanon. Five civilians were killed when an Israeli missile struck a house near the town of Nabatea. Three members of the Hamed family were killed along with their Sri Lankan maid. In the village of Srifa, in the south, Israeli air strikes flattened 15 houses which were homes to at least 23 people but - with no lifting vehicles able to reach that part of the country - there was no way of rescuing anyone alive trapped in the buildings.

The Lebanese civil authorities, however, were able to give names to the dead after an Israeli air raid on the Bekaa Valley village of Nabi Chit; they included Ali Suleiman; Daoud Hazima; Khadija Moussawi and her children Bilal, Talal and Yasmine; Maouffaq Diab; Ahmed and Khairallah Mouawad; Mustafa Jroud and Bushra Shuqr. At least three of the names were female. Another four civilians were killed in an air raid on the village of Loussi in eastern Lebanon.

The Israelis constantly boast of their "pin-point" or "surgical" precision in air attacks. If this is true, then there are far too many civilians being killed in the Lebanese bloodbath to make every one of them an accident. And since Israel's target list now includes obviously civilian targets - deliberately bombed to punish the civilian population - the evidence is mounting that these air raids are intended to kill the innocent as well as the Hizbollah guerrillas whom Israel claims to be fighting.

True, the Hizbollah are killing civilians in Israel, but their missiles are inaccurate and the West, which has done no more than mildly disapprove of Israel's retaliatory onslaught, must surely expect higher standards of the Israeli armed forces than of the men whom both Israel and President George Bush describe as "terrorists".

Why, for example, did the Israelis attack and destroy the headquarters of the Liban-Lait company in the Bekaa Valley, the largest milk factory in Lebanon? Why did they bomb out the factory of the main importer for Proctor and Gamble products in Lebanon, based in Bchmoun? Why did they destroy a paper box factory outside Beirut? And why did Israeli planes attack a convoy of new ambulances being brought into Lebanon from Syria yesterday, vehicles which were the gift of the medical authorities of the United Arab Emirates? The ambulances were clearly marked as a relief aid convoy, according to an Emirates official. Were all these "terrorist" targets? Was the little girl in the field at Tel Harfa a "terrorist" target?

An example of Israel's lack of care in targeting Lebanon came yesterday morning when an Israeli plane fired four missiles into a disused parking lot in the Christian district of Ashrafieh in Beirut. Their targets turned out to be two derelict water drilling lorries which were standing tyre-deep in weeds. Were the tubes on the back of the lorries supposed to be missile launchers? And if so, who imagined that Hizbollah would ever try to conceal such weapons in a Christian area of Beirut where Hizbollah believe many of Israel's own collaborators live.

In Beirut and Nabatea, Lebanese security men claim to have arrested "collaborators" who were "painting" houses and cars with phosphorus to guide in Israeli jets to destroy them. At the same time, the Lebanese Minister of Finance, Jihad Azour, stated that 45 bridges had been destroyed across Lebanon and 60,000 families - 500,000 civilians - have been displaced.

Thousands of foreigners - many of them Lebanese holding dual citizenship - continued to leave the country by bus and ship yesterday, including hundreds of Britons who started the evacuation on Monday in HMS Gloucester. Americans were leaving by sea, although a French security company in Amman - SPO Middle East - was reported to have been hired by the US to evacuate its citizens by bus at a cost of $3,000 (£1,700) a head.

They, of course, are the lucky ones, who will finish their journeys in Damascus or Cyprus rather than beside a burnt convoy at Tel Harfa.


3. The Lebanon Blitz
Israel is a nation that stands for moral rectitude. But how can it win people over when it uses means that make a mockery of those very principles?
By Alvaro Vargas Llosa (from Mother Jones magazine)

WASHINGTON—Israel's pursuit of Hezbollah in Lebanon is a mistake. It is unwittingly targeting the best hope of civilized life in the Middle East (outside of Israel itself) and creating the kind of moral and institutional vacuum that engenders sectarian violence.

As I traveled in Lebanon two weeks ago, four things struck me: the almost miraculous reconstruction of Beirut; the free-thinking cosmopolitanism of its middle class; the spirit of peaceful coexistence among the various religious groups, thanks in part to the open-mindedness of much of the Sunni population; and the resentment against Hezbollah among Christians (who comprise more than 35 percent of the population) and Muslims almost everywhere except the Bekaa Valley and southern Lebanon.

Compared to any other Arab country, Lebanon was the closest thing to paradise. Yes, Hezbollah's mighty presence was obvious as I drove around Baalbek, in the east, and from Tyre to the border with Israel in the south, where the Shiite population is concentrated. The yellow Hezbollah banners, pictures of Hasan Nasrallah's bearded face or of the late Ayatollah Khomeini indicated whose bastion I was in. And I heard Walid Jumblatt, one of the leaders responsible for forcing Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon and a pillar of the parliamentary majority, express frustration with Hezbollah's influence in the nation's politics.

But Lebanon was obviously making progress. Its legendary entrepreneurial drive was back. Even with an economy not fully recovered from a civil war that reduced the country's GDP by half, one sensed a spirit of optimism. People were planning all sorts of personal projects—an unmistakable sign of civil society, whether it be opening new bars on Beirut's Monot Street or, as Nada, an assistant working at a cultural institute, had just done, persuading a publisher to start an imprint devoted to translations of Spain's modern literature.

All of this progress has now been reduced to rubble. The infrastructure that took billions of dollars to rebuild is being pulverized. The institutions that managed to hold the internal peace are being blown away. The confident embrace of the outside world is dissipating. An atmosphere is now emerging in which civil society will shrink and extremists will thrive, as happened between 1975 and 1990. The country will now be hostage to the ideological and personal designs of power-hungry leaders. (As I write these words, I get an e-mail from Nada: “... We are trapped. If Israel stops, the threat of this happening again will hang over us forever because Hezbollah is still strong. If they don't, we will be paying too high a price. ... They have just bombed Byblos (a city in northern Lebanon) ... this is hell, we are running out of fuel!”)

It is true that Lebanon in transition had many problems, including the political survival of many leaders who fought the war, a power-sharing arrangement entirely based on religious grounds and, especially, the incapacity of the political institutions to disarm Hezbollah. But Israel's reprisals are not making that right. They are punishing a moderately successful attempt at religious diversity in a climate of peaceful coexistence and modernization in the Arab world.

Hezbollah is in part a creature of Israel's presence in Lebanon from 1982 until 2000. Unlike the civil society that is being bombed, Hezbollah is trained in guerrilla fighting. And if things continue as they are, these terrorists will now be handed a failed state in which they will make themselves the only operative Lebanese force.

Few things can be more legitimate than defending oneself against the attacks of an organization such as Hezbollah, whose cowardly rockets are aimed at terrorizing the whole of the Galilee hills area in Israel, whose allies—Iran and Syria—are two of the worst human-right offenders in the history of mankind, and whose ideology is simply barbaric. But Israel's response places collective guilt on an entire society for the atrocities of a minority of which that society is itself the victim.

Gideon Levy, an Israeli commentator, put it like this in an article published in Haaretz: “Eight soldiers are killed and two abducted to Lebanon? All of Lebanon will pay. ... The (army) absorbed two painful blows, which were particularly humiliating, and in their wake went into a war that is all about restoring its lost dignity, which on our side is called 'restoring deterrent capabilities.’”

It is hard to see how a nation that stands for moral rectitude and civilization can win people over to its struggle for security by using means that tarnish that very objective.

(Alvaro Vargas Llosa is a Senior Fellow and director of The Center on Global Prosperity at the Independent Institute. He is the author of Liberty for Latin America.)


4. Hunker down with history – by Richard Cohen (from the Washington Post)

The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.

This is why the Israeli-Arab war, now transformed into the Israeli-Muslim war (Iran is not an Arab state), persists and widens. It is why the conflict mutates and festers. It is why Israel is now fighting an organization, Hezbollah, that did not exist 30 years ago and why Hezbollah is being supported by a nation, Iran, that was once a tacit ally of Israel's. The underlying, subterranean hatred of the Jewish state in the Islamic world just keeps bubbling to the surface. The leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and some other Arab countries may condemn Hezbollah, but I doubt the proverbial man in their street shares that view.

There is no point in condemning Hezbollah. Zealots are not amenable to reason. And there's not much point, either, in condemning Hamas. It is a fetid, anti-Semitic outfit whose organizing principle is hatred of Israel. There is, though, a point in cautioning Israel to exercise restraint -- not for the sake of its enemies but for itself. Whatever happens, Israel must not use its military might to win back what it has already chosen to lose: the buffer zone in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip itself.

Hard-line critics of Ariel Sharon, the now-comatose Israeli leader who initiated the pullout from Gaza, always said this would happen: Gaza would become a terrorist haven. They said that the moderate Palestinian Authority would not be able to control the militants and that Gaza would be used to fire rockets into Israel and to launch terrorist raids. This is precisely what has happened.

It is also true, as some critics warned, that Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon was seen by its enemies -- and claimed by Hezbollah -- as a defeat for the mighty Jewish state. Hezbollah took credit for this, as well it should. Its persistent attacks bled Israel. In the end, Israel got out and the United Nations promised it a secure border. The Lebanese army would see to that. (And the check is in the mail.)

All that the critics warned has come true. But worse than what is happening now, would be a retaking of those territories. That would put Israel smack back to where it was, subjugating a restless, angry population and having the world look on as it committed the inevitable sins of an occupying power. The smart choice is to pull back to defensible -- but hardly impervious -- borders. That includes getting out of most of the West Bank -- and waiting (and hoping) that history will get distracted and move on to something else. This will take some time, and in the meantime terrorism and rocket attacks will continue.

In his forthcoming book, "The War of the World," the admirably readable British historian Niall Ferguson devotes considerable space to the horrific history of the Jews in 19th- and 20th-century Europe. Never mind the Holocaust. In 1905 there were pogroms in 660 different places in Russia, and more than 800 Jews were killed -- all this in a period of less than two weeks. This was the reality of life for many of Europe's Jews.

Little wonder so many of them emigrated to the United States, Canada, Argentina or South Africa. Little wonder others embraced the dream of Zionism and went to Palestine, first a colony of Turkey and later of Britain. They were in effect running for their lives. Most of those who remained -- 97.5 percent of Poland's Jews, for instance -- were murdered in the Holocaust.

Another gifted British historian, Tony Judt, wraps up his recent book "Postwar" with an epilogue on how the sine qua non of the modern civilized state is recognition of the Holocaust. Much of the Islamic world, notably Iran under its Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stands outside that circle, refusing to make even a little space for the Jews of Europe and, later, those from the Islamic world. They see Israel not as a mistake but as a crime. Until they change their view, the longest war of the 20th century will persist deep into the 21st. It is best for Israel to hunker down.

(cohenr@washpost.com)


5. Willful Fantasies and Reality in Today's Mideast Conflict -- by James Zogby

Reading US, Israeli and Arab commentaries and analyses of the current conflicts raging in the Middle East is a disturbing exercise.

Israelis are reading off of the same script they wrote decades ago. In 1982, for example, they convinced themselves that by using overwhelming force they would, as General Eitan put it, once and for all "crush the head and break the fingers" of the Palestinian resistance and then turn establish a relationship with a pacified Lebanon.
Their long and brutal assault on Lebanon, however, yielded a very different outcome.

After 18,000 Lebanese and Palestinian deaths and the massive destruction of Lebanon, up to and including West Beirut, the PLO was forced to leave the country. But the story was far from over.

The Lebanese President elected under the cloud of this war did sign a peace agreement with Israel. But then in rapid succession: this Lebanese President was assassinated; Lebanese militia, with the support of Israel, massacred hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra & Shatila refugee camps; world-wide revulsion forced Israel to redeploy to the area of the south of Lebanon they had occupied since 1978; and the Lebanese civil war continued to rage for another 8 years.

There were other unintended consequences resulting from this 1982 "war to end terror". Palestinian resistance to Israel's occupation moved "inside" to the West Bank and Gaza where after 5 years it erupted in a full blown "Intifada." Bitter Lebanese hostility to Israel's invasion and occupation coalesced into a more lethal resistance, Hezbollah. And the US, which had given Israel the green light to invade Lebanon in the first place, and then provided military cover to facilitate Israel's redeployment south, now became a target of terror. Hundreds of Americans died in Hezbollah attacks at the US Embassy and marine barracks and several innocent US civilians were held as hostages for years (until they were freed as part of the Iran-Contra debacle).

Given this history, I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I hear Israelis describe their current campaign in Lebanon using the same language they used 24 years ago. It failed then, with tragic consequences. And, because it ignores stubborn realities, it will fail again.

Similarly, it is disturbing to read some Arab commentaries on the current crisis, coughing up old fanciful themes. Some make bizarre boasts of Hezbollah's strength and valor which, they claim, has exposed Israel's weaknesses. Hezbollah, we are told, has restored Arab honor and demonstrated that Israelis can be defeated.

But we've heard all this before, and to what end? It is, at best, bizarre, and at worst pathetic, to compare reckless adventurism with heroics. The overwhelming numbers of Lebanese and Palestinians killed and the massive destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure -- not to speak of the ruins left in Gaza and the West Bank -- should point to a different reality. There is no honor and there should be no pride or satisfaction in these outcomes.

Given Israel's asymmetrical power edge and its unrestrained use of that power, provocations only result in terrible losses of life and property.

The US political discourse is no better. Once again, pressure to uncritically support Israel has trumped right reason.

While some conservatives and Democrats have learned lessons from past Israeli-Arab conflicts and from the recent US experiences in Iraq, the Administration and most members of Congress have fallen in line, uttering banalities like, "Israel has a right to defend itself" (even, if that means killing hundreds of civilians and destroying Lebanon in the process), or "let Israel finish the job it started" (as if the deaths and devastation resulting from this war will have no consequences in Lebanon and the broader Middle East).

A symptom of this warped mind-set is the now widely-shared and dangerous notion that has equated calls for ceasefire with weakness. In a rare display of agreement, both the White House and the Washington Post promoted this view last week. In response to a question from Helen Thomas as to why the President opposed calls for a ceasefire, White House spokesperson Tony Snow rudely thanked Ms. Thomas for what he characterized as her "Hezbollah view." Likewise, the Post editorialized that call for a ceasefire would only "reward the aggressors."

In this environment, it has been difficult to promote reasoned discourse and promote political solutions. Calls from the Maronite Catholic Patriarch to end the hostilities, or Lebanese Prime Minister Siniora who challenged the West to express outrage over the damage being done to Lebanon and the Lebanese, have fallen on deaf ears in Washington.

Even more tragic has been the total blackout of any news coming out of Gaza regarding the suffering of Palestinians now enduring their fifth week of Israeli assault.

As I have said before, no good will come of this. Absent international pressure to pursue a political solution within Lebanon and Palestine and between Lebanese, Palestinians, and Israelis, the devastation of the past month will, as in the aftermath of 1982, morph into a new and potentially more lethal extremism.

The prerequisite to beginning such a political process is, of course, a ceasefire. But with the US blocking such an effort, and still believing that good will come from Israel's "cleansing war," the tragic dance of death continues.

(Dr. James J. Zogby is founder and president of the Arab American Institute (AAI), a Washington, D.C.-based organization which serves as the political and policy research arm of the Arab American community. Since 1985, Dr. Zogby and AAI have led Arab American efforts to secure political empowerment in the U.S. Through voter registration, education and mobilization, AAI has moved Arab Americans into the political mainstream.)


6. War Savages Everything -- by Dahr Jamail

War savages everything.

As Lebanon bleeds and the humanitarian crisis there deepens among the craters left by Israeli bombs, those who can have fled -mostly to Syria.

Not long ago at the northern border of Lebanon, streams of people, wary with the aimless stare generated by living in terror for days on end, shuffled across into Syria.

Pushing wheelbarrows full of what belongings they managed to get out, they had come from all parts of Lebanon; from the northern coastal city of Tripoli, down the coast a short ways to Batroun and the once beautiful city of Byblos where I once shared tea with my cousins in Lebanon-who we have yet to hear a word from since Israel's war of aggression against the Lebanese began.

Most were, of course, from Beirut. The rest, including cars with luggage strapped atop them , came from the ravaged lands of southern Lebanon-the cities of Sidon, Tyre, Marjeyun and so many villages closer to the southern border.

Over 140,000 refugees from Lebanon have now crossed through border posts into Syria. As the UN impotently urges a cease fire from war-mongering Israel, backed by their greatest enabling ally, the veto-wielding US, two of their personnel in Tyre were killed by an Israeli air strike.

"They [Israelis] are taking it out on the people who are not Hezbollah," an American man told me while fleeing with his mother. They had been vacationing in Beirut with family members there. "This is a catastrophe, their bombs are falling everywhere," the 25 year-old social studies teacher added while wiping sweat from his forehead inside the sweltering border crossing, "They are destroying all of Lebanon!"

With the death toll in Lebanon now well over 350, over one third of them are children, who would have taken part in creating the future of Lebanon.

After interviewing several refugees , my interpreter Abu Talat and I made our way to a taxi to head further north up the coast of Syria. Our taxi driver, Abdo al-Hamre, a 32 year-old farmer told us he'd been driving refugees from the border for days.

"I'm crying every day now for the Lebanese," he said strongly, "All of them are crying in my car as I drive. This is really too much to bear."

War stops everything. War kills a country-whether it be those dropping the bombs, or those being shredded by them. Countries who wage war, like Israel now in Lebanon, or the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, make the choice to sell their soul…perhaps a payment nearly as great as those whose lives are extinguished by the aggression waged against them.

War stops everything. School, food deliveries, public transportation, picnics, dancing, kite flying, laughing with loved ones, everything is stopped as the struggle to remain alive becomes paramount.

At that point, nothing else matters. Only to remain alive. Humans are reduced to the level of basic survival, for there is no room for anything else.

Earlier today we were at the Red Crescent headquarters in Damascas interviewing refugees. An old man, holding his head in his hands, had just arrived after fleeing his village in southern Lebanon.

We began to talk and I asked him if the Israeli plan of bombing the Lebanese in order to force them to pressure Hezbollah out of the south of their country was working. Was it turning the Lebanese against Hezbollah?

He promptly stood up, forcing me to step back.

"More Lebanese are now with Hezbollah than ever before," he yelled while pointing to the sky as his eyes widened in fury, "God damned the Israelis for destroying Lebanon! They will never destroy our spirit! The resistance is an idea, and you can never kill off an idea!"

He was mad with rage. And why shouldn't he have been?

But this man, who should be perhaps tending a field, playing with his grandchildren, sharing meals with his wife as the sun set, was raging at a journalist in Damascas because everything he knew is now smoldering rubble.

War stops life. War stops everything.

(Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who spent over 8 months reporting from occupied Iraq. He maintains his own website dahrjamailiraq.com)


7. 'Civilian Casualty'? It Depends
Those who supports terrorists are not entirely innocent.
By Alan Dershowitz

THE NEWS IS filled these days with reports of civilian casualties, comparative civilian body counts and criticism of Israel, along with Hezbollah, for causing the deaths, injuries and "collective punishment" of civilians. But just who is a "civilian" in the age of terrorism, when militants don't wear uniforms, don't belong to regular armies and easily blend into civilian populations?

We need a new vocabulary to reflect the realities of modern warfare. A new phrase should be introduced into the reporting and analysis of current events in the Middle East: "the continuum of civilianality." Though cumbersome, this concept aptly captures the reality and nuance of warfare today and provides a more fair way to describe those who are killed, wounded and punished.

There is a vast difference — both moral and legal — between a 2-year-old who is killed by an enemy rocket and a 30-year-old civilian who has allowed his house to be used to store Katyusha rockets. Both are technically civilians, but the former is far more innocent than the latter. There is also a difference between a civilian who merely favors or even votes for a terrorist group and one who provides financial or other material support for terrorism.

Finally, there is a difference between civilians who are held hostage against their will by terrorists who use them as involuntary human shields, and civilians who voluntarily place themselves in harm's way in order to protect terrorists from enemy fire.

These differences and others are conflated within the increasingly meaningless word "civilian" — a word that carried great significance when uniformed armies fought other uniformed armies on battlefields far from civilian population centers. Today this same word equates the truly innocent with guilty accessories to terrorism.

The domestic law of crime, in virtually every nation, reflects this continuum of culpability. For example, in the infamous Fall River rape case (fictionalized in the film "The Accused"), there were several categories of morally and legally complicit individuals: those who actually raped the woman; those who held her down; those who blocked her escape route; those who cheered and encouraged the rapists; and those who could have called the police but did not.

No rational person would suggest that any of these people were entirely free of moral guilt, although reasonable people might disagree about the legal guilt of those in the last two categories. Their accountability for rape is surely a matter of degree, as is the accountability for terrorism of those who work with the terrorists.

It will, of course, be difficult for international law — and for the media — to draw the lines of subtle distinction routinely drawn by domestic criminal law. This is because domestic law operates on a retail basis — one person and one case at a time. International law and media reporting about terrorism tend to operate on more of a wholesale basis — with body counts, civilian neighborhoods and claims of collective punishment.

But the recognition that "civilianality" is often a matter of degree, rather than a bright line, should still inform the assessment of casualty figures in wars involving terrorists, paramilitary groups and others who fight without uniforms — or help those who fight without uniforms.

Turning specifically to the current fighting between Israel and Hezbollah and Hamas, the line between Israeli soldiers and civilians is relatively clear. Hezbollah missiles and Hamas rockets target and hit Israeli restaurants, apartment buildings and schools. They are loaded with anti-personnel ball-bearings designed specifically to maximize civilian casualties.

Hezbollah and Hamas militants, on the other hand, are difficult to distinguish from those "civilians" who recruit, finance, harbor and facilitate their terrorism. Nor can women and children always be counted as civilians, as some organizations do. Terrorists increasingly use women and teenagers to play important roles in their attacks.

The Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit. Some — those who cannot leave on their own — should be counted among the innocent victims.

If the media were to adopt this "continuum," it would be informative to learn how many of the "civilian casualties" fall closer to the line of complicity and how many fall closer to the line of innocence.

Every civilian death is a tragedy, but some are more tragic than others.

(ALAN DERSHOWITZ is a professor of law at Harvard. He is the author, most recently, of "Preemption: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways.")