Lebanon cleansing: looks like Israel wants a no-man's land at least 20 miles wide with no human being in it between itself and Hezbollah

A dog walks through the rubble of buildings hit by Israeli airstrikes in the nearly deserted town of Nabatiya, Lebanon.

1. You're all targets, Israel tells Lebanese in South
By Harry de Quetteville in Jerusalem

Everyone remaining in southern Lebanon will be regarded as a terrorist, Israel's justice minister said yesterday as the military prepared to employ "huge firepower" from the air in its campaign to crush Hizbollah.

Haim Ramon issued the warning as the Israeli government decided against expanding ground operations after the death of nine soldiers in fighting on Wednesday.

"What we should do in southern Lebanon is employ huge firepower before a ground force goes in," Mr Ramon said at a security cabinet meeting headed by Ehud Olmert, the prime minister. "Everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist and is connected to Hizbollah. Our great advantage vis-a-vis Hizbollah is our firepower, not in face-to-face combat."

Mr Olmert promised that the army would "continue toward the established goals".

Mr Ramon's comments suggested that civilian casualties in Lebanon, which stand at about 600 after 16 days of bombardment, could rise yet higher.

The government's unrelenting line has the backing of the Israeli media, which are demanding a harsh response to an ambush in the Hizbollah stronghold of Bint Jbeil, in which eight soldiers died .

The country's biggest-selling paper, Yedioth Ahronoth, said the army had raised the threshold of response to Katyusha rockets.

"In other words: a village from which rockets are fired at Israel will simply be destroyed by fire," it said.

"This decision should have been made and executed after the first Katyusha. But better late than never."

Three divisions of reserve soldiers, up to 15,000 men, are to be called up.

Almost 50 Hizbollah missiles landed in northern Israel yesterday, wounding four people and bringing the total number of rockets fired into the country to about 1,400.


2. The call that tells you: run, you're about to lose your home and possessions – by Conal Urquhart in Gaza City

The voice sounded friendly enough. "Hi, my name is Danny. I'm an officer in Israeli military intelligence. In one hour we will blow up your house."

Mohammed Deeb took the telephone call seriously and told his family and neighbours to get out of the building. An hour later, an Israeli helicopter fired three missiles at the four-storey building in Gaza City, destroying the ground floor and damaging the upper storeys.

Mr Deeb was on the receiving end of a new Israeli tactic of using telephone, radio and leaflets to warn Gazans of impending attacks. The army claims it is an attempt to minimise civilian casualties, but Palestinians say it is a new way of terrorising the population.

Raji Serrani, the director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), which has collected several examples of the tactic, described it as "psychological warfare", adding: "Since when did Israel feel the need to warn people that they were about to bomb their homes? They are simply playing with people's minds and inflicting a new panic in Gaza."

The family of Ibrahim Mahmoud in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza were ordered to leave their home by an Israeli intelligence officer. The officer called back one hour later to say she had made a mistake. She ended her call to Mr Mahmoud by telling him to "be safe", he told the Associated Press.

The warnings, which sometimes are followed by an Israeli attack and sometimes not, are happening as Israel continues its latest invasion of the Gaza Strip. Four people were killed and dozens injured yesterday as Israeli tanks patrolled residential areas to the east of Gaza City. Twenty-five people were killed on Wednesday.

Fears that Israel will destroy homes are widespread: 900 residents of the al Nader towers, a complex of 12 apartment blocks in the north of Gaza, fled on Tuesday after 10 Israeli shells landed close to them, killing three residents. According to the PCHR, Israel had also informed Palestinian police that they planned to demolish the towers.

Izzat al Jamal, 38, a Palestinian policeman, moved his wife and eight children out of their apartment to emergency accommodation in a local school. "When they started firing, it was clear it was aimed directly at us and it wasn't a random mistake. I had to leave for the children's sake. I haven't been paid in four months and now I don't even have a home."

Hundreds of families have also moved out of the east of Gaza City in the al Shaaf and al Tuffah suburbs after Israeli tanks took up position on Wednesday. Two tanks were visible on hills above the suburbs and many more could be heard shooting and moving in the narrow streets.

Scores of Palestinian fighters armed with rifles attempted to approach the tanks, which - supported by drones and helicopters - fired shells and machine guns throughout yesterday. At Shifa Hospital, the ambulances lined up to deliver the injured and crowds of men waited to take away the dead.

Dr Jumah Sakkah said the hospital had taken in 16 injured people and two had died. The death toll later rose to four. He said that all of the injured were non-combatants.


3. The "hiding among civilians" myth
Israel claims it's justified in bombing civilians because Hezbollah mingles with them. In fact, the militant group doesn't trust its civilians and stays as far away from them as possible.
By Mitch Prothero (from salon.com)

The bombs came just as night fell, around 7 p.m. The locals knew that the 10-story apartment building had been the office, and possibly the residence, of Sheik Tawouk, the Hezbollah commander for the south, so they had moved their families out at the start of the war. The landlord had refused to rent to Hezbollah when they requested the top floors of the building. No matter, the locals said, the Hezb guys just moved in anyway in the name of the "resistance."

Everyone knew that the building would be hit eventually. Its location in downtown Tyre, which had yet to be hit by Israeli airstrikes, was not going to protect it forever. And "everyone" apparently included Sheik Tawouk, because he wasn't anywhere near it when it was finally hit.

Two guided bombs struck it in a huge flash bang of fire and concrete dust followed by the roar of 10 stories pancaking on top of each other, local residents said. Jihad Husseini, 46, runs the driving school a block away and was sitting in his office when the bombs struck. He said his life was saved because he had drawn the heavy cloth curtains shut on the windows facing the street, preventing him from being hit by a wave of shattered glass. But even so, a chunk of smoldering steel flew through the air, broke through the window and the curtain, and shot past his head and through the wall before coming to rest in his neighbor's home.

But Jihad still refuses to leave.

"Everything is broken, but I can make it better," he says, surrounded by his sons Raed, 20, and Mohammed, 12. "I will not leave. This place is not military, it is not Hezbollah; it was an empty apartment."

Throughout this now 16-day-old war, Israeli planes high above civilian areas make decisions on what to bomb. They send huge bombs capable of killing things for hundreds of meters around their targets, and then blame the inevitable civilian deaths -- the Lebanese government says 600 civilians have been killed so far -- on "terrorists" who callously use the civilian infrastructure for protection.

But this claim is almost always false. My own reporting and that of other journalists reveals that in fact Hezbollah fighters -- as opposed to the much more numerous Hezbollah political members, and the vastly more numerous Hezbollah sympathizers -- avoid civilians. Much smarter and better trained than the PLO and Hamas fighters, they know that if they mingle with civilians, they will sooner or later be betrayed by collaborators -- as so many Palestinian militants have been.

For their part, the Israelis seem to think that if they keep pounding civilians, they'll get some fighters, too. The almost nightly airstrikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut could be seen as making some sense, as the Israelis appear convinced there are command and control bunkers underneath the continually smoldering rubble. There were some civilian casualties the first few nights in places like Haret Hreik, but people quickly left the area to the Hezbollah fighters with their radios and motorbikes.

But other attacks seem gratuitous, fishing expeditions, or simply intended to punish anything and anyone even vaguely connected to Hezbollah. Lighthouses, grain elevators, milk factories, bridges in the north used by refugees, apartment buildings partially occupied by members of Hezbollah's political wing -- all have been reduced to rubble.

In the south, where Shiites dominate, just about everyone supports Hezbollah. Does mere support for Hezbollah, or even participation in Hezbollah activities, mean your house and family are fair game? Do you need to fire rockets from your front yard? Or is it enough to be a political activist?

The Israelis are consistent: They bomb everyone and everything remotely associated with Hezbollah, including noncombatants. In effect, that means punishing Lebanon. The nation is 40 percent Shiite, and of that 40 percent, tens of thousands are employed by Hezbollah's social services, political operations, schools, and other nonmilitary functions. The "terrorist" organization Hezbollah is Lebanon's second-biggest employer.

People throw the phrase "ghost town" around a lot, but Nabatiya, a bombed-out town about 15 miles from the Lebanon-Israel border, deserves it. One expects the spirits of the town's dead, or its refugees, to silently glide out onto its abandoned streets from the ruined buildings that make up much of the town.

Not all of the buildings show bomb damage, but those that don't have metal shutters blown out as if by a terrible wind. And there are no people at all, except for the occasional Hezbollah scout on a motorbike armed only with a two-way radio, keeping an eye on things as Israeli jets and unmanned drones circle overhead.

Overlooking the outskirts of this town, which has a peacetime population of 100,000 or so -- mostly Shiite supporters of Hezbollah and its more secular rival Amal -- is the Ragheh Hareb Hospital, a facility that makes quite clear what side the residents of Nabatiya are on in this conflict.

The hospital's carefully sculpted and trimmed front lawn contains the giant Red Crescent that denotes the Muslim version of the Red Cross. As we approach it, an Israeli missile streaks by, smashing into a school on the opposite hilltop. As we crouch and then run for the shelter of the hospital awning, that giant crescent reassures me until I look at the flagpole. The Lebanese flag and its cedar tree is there -- right next to the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It's safe to say that Ragheh Hareb Hospital has an association with Hezbollah. And the staff sports the trimmed beards and polite, if somewhat ominous, manner of the group. After young men demand press IDs and do some quick questioning, they allow us to enter.

Dr. Ahmed Tahir recognizes me from a funeral in the nearby village of Dweir. An Israeli bomb dropped on their house killed a Hezbollah cleric and 11 members of his immediate family, mostly children. People in Lebanon are calling it a war crime. Tahir looks exhausted, and our talk is even more tense than the last time.

"Maybe it would be best if the Israelis bombed your car on the road here," he said, with a sharp edge. "If you were killed, maybe the public outcry would be so bad in America that the Jews would be forced to stop these attacks."

When I volunteered that the Bush administration cared little for journalists, let alone ones who reported from Hezbollah territory, he shrugged. "Maybe if it was an American bomb used by the Israelis that killed an American journalist, they would stop this horror," he said.

The handful of people in the town include some from Hezbollah's political wing, as well as volunteers keeping an eye on things while the residents are gone. Off to the side, as we watch the Israelis pummel ridgelines on the outskirts of town, one of the political operatives explains that the fighters never come near the town, reinforcing what other Hezbollah people have told me over the years.

Although Israel targets apartments and offices because they are considered "Hezbollah" installations, the group has a clear policy of keeping its fighters away from civilians as much as possible. This is not for humanitarian reasons -- they did, after all, take over an apartment building against the protests of the landlord, knowing full well it would be bombed -- but for military ones.

"You can be a member of Hezbollah your entire life and never see a military wing fighter with a weapon," a Lebanese military intelligence official, now retired, once told me. "They do not come out with their masks off and never operate around people if they can avoid it. They're completely afraid of collaborators. They know this is what breaks the Palestinians -- no discipline and too much showing off."

Perhaps once a year, Hezbollah will hold a military parade in the south, in which its weapons and fighters appear. Media access to these parades is tightly limited and controlled. Unlike the fighters in the half dozen other countries where I have covered insurgencies, Hezbollah fighters do not like to show off for the cameras. In Iraq, with some risk taking, you can meet with and even watch the resistance guys in action. (At least you could during my last time there.) In Afghanistan, you can lunch with Taliban fighters if you're willing to walk a day or so in the mountains. In Gaza and the West Bank, the Fatah or Hamas fighter is almost ubiquitous with his mask, gun and sloganeering to convince the Western journalist of the justice of his cause.

The Hezbollah guys, on the other hand, know that letting their fighters near outsiders of any kind -- journalists or Lebanese, even Hezbollah supporters -- is stupid. In three trips over the last week to the south, where I came near enough to the fighting to hear Israeli artillery, and not just airstrikes, I saw exactly no fighters. Guys with radios with the look of Hezbollah always found me. But no fighters on corners, no invitations to watch them shoot rockets at the Zionist enemy, nothing that can be used to track them.

Even before the war, on many of my trips to the south, the Lebanese army, or the ubiquitous guy on a motorbike with a radio, would halt my trip and send me over to Tyre to get permission from a Hezbollah official before I could proceed, usually with strict limits on where I could go.

Every other journalist I know who has covered Hezbollah has had the same experience. A fellow journalist, a Lebanese who has covered them for two decades, knows only one military guy who will admit it, and he never talks or grants interviews. All he will say is, "I'll be gone for a few months for training. I'll call when I'm back." Presumably his friends and neighbors may suspect something, but no one says anything.

Hezbollah's political members say they have little or no access to the workings of the fighters. This seems to be largely true: While they obviously hear and know more than the outside world, the firewall is strong.

Israel, however, has chosen to treat the political members of Hezbollah as if they were fighters. And by targeting the civilian wing of the group, which supplies much of the humanitarian aid and social protection for the poorest people in the south, they are targeting civilians.

Earlier in the week, I stood next to a giant crater that had smashed through the highway between Tyre and Sidon -- the only route of escape for most of the people in the far south. Overhead, Israeli fighters and drones circled above the city and its outlying areas and regular blasts of bombs and naval artillery could be heard.

The crater served as a nice place to check up on the refugees, who were forced by the crater to slow down long enough to be asked questions. They barely stopped, their faces wrenched in near panic. The main wave of refugees out of the south had come the previous two days, so these were the hard-luck cases, the people who had been really close to the fighting and who needed two days just to get to Tyre, or who had had to make the tough decision whether to flee or stay put, with neither choice looking good.

The roads in the south are full of the cars of people who chose wrong -- burned-out chassis, broken glass, some cars driven straight into posts or ditches. Other seem to have broken down or run out of gas on the long dirt detours around the blown-out highway and bridge network the Israeli air force had spent days methodically destroying even as it warned people to flee.

One man, slowing his car around the crater, almost screams, "There is nothing left. This country is not for us." His brief pause immediately draws horns and impatient yells from the people in the cars behind him. They pass the crater but within two minutes a large explosion behind us, north, in the direction of Sidon, rocks us.

As we drive south toward Tyre, we soon pass a new series of scars on the highway: shrapnel, hubcaps and broken glass. A car that had been maybe five minutes ahead of us was hit by an Israeli shell. Three of its passengers were wounded, and it was heading north to the Hammound hospital at Sidon. We turned around because of the attack and followed the car to Sidon. Those unhurt staked out the parking lot of the hospital, looking for the Western journalists they were convinced had called in the strike. Luckily my Iraqi fixer smelled trouble and we got out of there. Probably nothing would have happened -- mostly they were just freaked-out country people who didn't like the coincidence of an Israeli attack and a car full of journalists driving past.

So the analysts talking on cable news about Hezbollah "hiding within the civilian population" clearly have spent little time if any in the south Lebanon war zone and don't know what they're talking about. Hezbollah doesn't trust the civilian population and has worked very hard to evacuate as much of it as possible from the battlefield. And this is why they fight so well -- with no one to spy on them, they have lots of chances to take the Israel Defense Forces by surprise, as they have by continuing to fire rockets and punish every Israeli ground incursion.

And the civilians? They see themselves as targeted regardless of their affiliation. They are enraged at Israel and at the United States, the only two countries on earth not calling for an immediate cease-fire. Lebanese of all persuasions think the United States and Israel believe that Lebanese lives are cheaper than Israeli ones. And many are now saying that they want to fight.

Israel is maintaining its bombardment of Lebanon, as the conflict enters its third week.


4. In Israel, hints of a deal - but when? – by Amon Regular (from the New Statesman)

"For six years now we have seen Hezbollah quietly strengthening before our eyes," says David Giladi, secretary of the village of Shtula on Israel's north-western border. He points to the Hezbollah military outpost on the hill just in front of the village.

Standing 500 metres from the location of the last kidnapping, Giladi is watching Israeli jets flying overhead into Lebanon. "Hours after the last Israeli soldier left Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah built that outpost," he explains. "For the past three years they have freely shelled any target along the fence. Israeli officers and Hezbollah militants were near enough to see each other's eyeballs, but the confrontation was delayed for the sake of political agreements. Now everything has blown up in our face." Distracted by the Palestinian intifada in the south, he says, the Israeli government preferred to ignore the provocations of Hezbollah. Now it is paying the price.

"Katyushas are no novelty"

Three days later, in the Israeli border village of Dovev, Sami Vaaqnin is watching two Russian Katyusha rockets fall on his peach grove. Again, Israeli jets are roaring overhead, but Vaaqnin is calm. "Katyushas are not a novelty here," he says. "I saw the PLO firing them for years before Hezbollah started. When the attacks were only on us in the north, nobody did anything. But an attack on Haifa is a different story. The best I can expect from this operation is for Hezbollah to be forced away from the border."

A large area of northern Israel, home to 700,000 people, and including the major cities of Tiberias, Nazareth and Haifa, is paralysed. Thousands have fled to safe havens further to the south, but for those who have stayed normal life is impossible. Banks, shops, offices and ATMs are closed; public transport is non-existent. In the first week of the current action, more than a thousand missiles, from Katyushas to heavy rockets, were launched from Lebanon.

But Israelis remain optimistic. The media and the majority of the Israeli public support the attempt to force Hezbollah to withdraw behind the Litani River, 18 kilometres north of the border. For the moment, there is also broad support for the government's handling of the crisis.

Prisoner exchanges

Most people feel they have seen this before. On 10 and 12 July, the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, and Hasan Nasrallah, general secretary of Hezbollah, held separate press conferences emphasising that captured Nasrallah, general secretary of Hezbollah, held separate press conferences emphasising that captured Israeli soldiers would not be returned without a prisoner exchange, a controversial subject in Israeli politics.

In the last swap with Hezbollah in 2004, 400 Palestinian prisoners were released in return for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers captured in 2000, and an Israeli reserve colonel, Elchanan Tenenboim, captured in dubious circumstances in Belgium. The deal proved unpopular: Tenenboim, a businessman involved in deals in Lebanon, is regarded in Israel as a criminal who dragged the country into a dangerous compromise. With this in mind, Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said after the first abduction in Gaza that they would not release any prisoners, arguing that release would lead to further abductions.

Simultaneously, however, Israel gave assurances to Egyptian mediators that it was ready to release Palestinian prisoners - as long as Gilad Shalit was released first. Soon afterwards, the head of the Israeli General Security Service, Yuval Diskin, met the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in Amman to emphasise that if there were to be a swap, the prisoners would be handed over only to Abbas, not Hamas. Similarly, Israeli officials are hinting at the possibility of striking a deal with the Lebanese government rather than Hezbollah. Political and military observers in Israel are convinced a deal will eventually take place. But for now, the issue of the abducted soldiers is overshadowed by the scale of the military operation and Israeli hopes of a shift in the balance of power in southern Lebanon.

(Amon Regular reports for Haaretz)


5. The 'Arab system' is dying in Lebanon
Iran and groups like Hizbullah will emerge stronger from the rubble of Beirut, while the old regimes of the Arab League will be rendered impotent.
By David Hirst

It is has been axiomatic for generations: the Palestine problem is the central issue of Arab politics, and of the so-called "Arab system" which - through its chief institution, the Arab League, embodying the collective will of 22 Arab states - is supposed to guard the higher interests and basic security of the Arab "nation". But the system manifestly does so no more; for Arab commentators the twin crises of Gaza and Lebanon dramatize a tectonic shift in the region's affairs.

"With this Hizbullah operation," said Beirut columnist Hussam Itani, "the collapse of the Arab system has given birth to its alternative." That alternative, anarchic by definition, is one in which non-state actors derive their strength from the very fact that, militant, populist, welling up from below, they have little to do with the system, a system they render yet more impotent and irrelevant as they impose their agenda on it and the world.

These non-state actors are found, typically, in the mayhem that is Iraq. They are both Islamist - as adherents of universalist, fundamentalist, political Islam - and sectarian, in the sense that, in their communal loyalties, they are Shias or Sunnis and, as such, apt to engage in intense, and sometimes murderous, conflict with each other. But they are also found in an around that most critical of Middle Eastern arenas, Israel/Palestine, where they have supplanted or undermined the role of existing authorities. .

If there was long a vast divide between Arab rulers and ruled, a vast contempt of the latter for the former, Hamas and Hizbullah, together, have crystallized them in the most flagrant manner. To be sure, when Saudi Arabia, backed by Egypt and Jordan, those other two pro-American stalwarts of the "system", came out with its harsh criticism of Hizbullah, and its "uncalculated adventurism" that triggered so ferocious an Israeli response, it struck a sympathetic chord not just with the Lebanese state, but much of its people too. And understandably so, incensed as they are by the way in which other states, notably "sister-Syria", with serial obduracy use their small and defenceless country to wage proxy wars, because they will not, dare not, wage direct ones of their own.

Yet for most Arabs, especially Islamists - and, indeed, despite their resentment, many Lebanese too - it was shameful, a stab in the back of the only people who, however irresponsibly, are seen to be defending Arab honour against the historic Zionist foe, and, for the first time, giving as good as they get. Not merely are they waging what some call this "sixth Arab-Israeli war" in the absence, or outright defiance, of Arab regimes, these regimes, in three important cases, can be said, objectively speaking, to have stood with Israel against their own.

Furthermore, their war coincides - with heavy symbolism - with what amounts to a formal admission, by the "system" itself, of its own bankruptcy. "Peace with Israel" - via the American-sponsored "peace process" - has for decades been a strategic option of the system, a few mavericks excepted. But at the last meeting of the Arab League, its secretary general, Amr Moussa, pronounced the whole process "dead"; Arab governments could do no more. In an extraordinary violation of decorum, Arab journalists didn't merely report this abdication, they barracked it

Saudi Arabia's stance - which it has subsequently sought to correct by harshly criticizing America's tolerance of Israel's "savagery, killing and destruction" - was also unashamedly, if surreptitiously, sectarian. A pillar of the region's traditionally dominant Sunni establishment, it is deeply worried by the political ascendancy that the Shia majority have acquired in Iraq, and the place they now occupy in Iran's regional designs.

King Abdullah of Jordan, a second pillar, first raised the alarm about a "Shiite crescent" from the Gulf to the Mediterranean. President Mubarak publicly and notoriously suggested that Arab Shias are more loyal to non-Arab Iran than they are to their own countries. It has long been whispered against Shia that they don't really share their Sunni compatriots' devotion to pan-Arab causes. So it is deeply disconcerting for the Sunni Arab establishment that a purely Shia organization, Hizbullah, should so heroically assume the championship of the main one, Palestine. And it only adds to its embarrassment that the other non-state actor, the purely Sunni Hamas, not merely fails to share that view of Hizbullah, but, under Iranian auspices, operates in growing partnership with it.

The longer Hizbullah holds out, the more blows it deals the awesome Israeli military machine, the more Hassan Nasrallah will stir the Arab public, be they Sunni or Shia, against their paralytic kings and presidents. It was Sunni Muslims who demonstrated in the streets of Cairo, Amman, Damascus last week, Egypt's Sunni Muslim Brother movement that gave voice to what everyone, secular or Islamist, in the Arab world is saying: "Hizbullah, with its modest capabilities, achieved what several Arab governments, with their organized state armies, did not - as they contented themselves with mere silence about the slaughter of our Palestinian brethren." From his bunker beneath the bombs, Nasrallah - composed, charismatic, brilliantly articulate - quietly suggested to the Umma - or "Muslim nation" - that if their leaders were not up to their jobs, then their peoples could, like him, do the jobs in their place.

For Condoleezza Rice the latest crisis is the "birth-pangs" of a new Middle East order to be achieved by tackling the crisis's "root causes". But since, for her, those causes lie on the Arab not the Israeli side, any new order that does come about will belong less to America than to Iran, its principal competitor for ascendancy over the region. It will be an ever more turbulent and belligerent one in which - forecasts Beirut columnist Rami Khouri - "groups like Hizbullah will continue to emerge organically from Middle East soil, regardless of what happens to Hizbullah in the coming weeks."

If so, where? Perhaps Jordan is the likeliest candidate. There, an increasingly nervous and repressive regime faces a disturbing four-fold reality: proximity to Israeli-occupied Palestine, a majority Palestinian population, a widely popular Islamist movement, and the historical precedent that, in an earlier, not dissimilar era of Palestine-centred regional turbulence, it spawned the first of Yasser Arafat's guerrilla states-within-a-state.

Or Syria? It may enjoy the prestige of being on the US blacklist as a backer of Hizbullah, but it is no less despised by its own people than are the pro-American regimes by theirs. When state-mobilized demonstrators paraded through Damascus shouting "O Nasrallah, Hit Tel Aviv too", many of their compatriots cannot but have wondered why the ruling Ba'athists, in charge of their self-styled "citadel of Arabism", failed yet again to lift a finger on "sister" Lebanon's behalf, perhaps by hitting the occupied Golan.

Syria, in this context, cannot be compared with its Iranian ally of convenience. For Syria is an integral component of the Arab system out of whose degeneracy it is that enables Iran, like the US, to fashion its
growing interventionism in the region. Iran may not be widely loved or trusted. But it does stand on history's side; whereas a new US Middle Eastern order would depend on the survival of the decomposing system,

Iran aids and abets the mainly Islamist forces that would hasten its demise. The US, as ever, is now seeking to remedy the adverse consequences of its everlasting, incorrigible indulgence of Israel and all its works with a display of yet further indulgence. And Iran will duly reap the reward of that, and all the rage, humiliation, and sense of injustice it engenders - those popular emotions which, with the degeneracy of the system, are the principal source of the ever-growing disorder, and menace to itself and the world, that is the Middle East today.


6. 1,500 souls in Bint Jbeil, Nasrallah, and the "New Middle East"
Rasha Salti writing from Beirut (from London Review of Books)

My siege notes are beginning to disperse. I write disjointed paragraphs but I cannot discipline myself to write everyday. Despair overwhelms me, along with a profoundly debilitating sense of uselessness and helplessness. Writing does not always help; communicating is not always easy, finding the words, deciding which stories should be included, and which should not. The experience of this siege is so emotionally and psychically draining, the situation is so politically tenuous.

I miss the world. I miss life. I miss myself. People around me also go through these ups and downs, but I find them generally to be more resilient, more steadfast, more courageous than I. I am consumed by other people's despair. It's not very smart, I mean, for a strategy of survival.

My day started today (in effect it is Day 13 of the War, but just another morning under siege in my personal experience) with news from Bint Jbeil, reported on Al-Jazeera. Ghassan Ben Jeddo, the director of the Beirut office was analyzing the situation on the southern front in Bint Jbeil. He announced flatly that Hezbollah had conceded to the military surrender of Bint Jbeil, that the IDF had besieged the town, and that the town had been almost entirely flattened to rubble. My breathing became tight. I knew well, and had been told for days, that military defeats and victories were very tricky to determine in this type of unusual warfare, because a conventional army has clear retreats and advances whereas a band of guerrillas behaves in an entirely different way.

The military defeat in itself did not really matter enough to cause tightness in my chest, although I was a little worried about the IDF feeling empowered to proceed with "scorched earth" plans or some other nightmarish fantasy. My breathing became tight because I immediately thought about some 1,500 people, making up some 400 families whom I had heard the day before were trapped in Bint Jbeil. Some were displaced from villages around Bint Jbeil. They were trapped there in two buildings, one of which was a government school. I could not imagine what they were living. As the Al-Jazeera showed footage from around Bint Jbeil, there was a continuous soundtrack of pounding from Israeli tanks. I could only see them and hear that pounding. Were they huddled together? Were they laying down on the floor, their hands over their heads? How does one survive two days of continuous shelling like that? Had they any hope of fleeing?

They stayed with me, 1,500 souls in Bint Jbeil. I went to the public garden where displaced people were now living, I went to the cooperative supermarket in Sabra, I went to an air-conditioned cafe with WiFi, and the 1,500 souls were with me. I had lunch, tried to write - still with me. Until after sunset, a journalist friend told me he had interviewed the mayor of Bint Jbeil in the afternoon. The man had suffered a stroke this past Sunday and had been evacuated for treatment. By today he had recovered and was struggling to find a way to get the remaining 40 Lebanese-Americans trapped in Bint Jbeil. My friend allowed me to sigh with some relief, the trapped souls were 400 not 1,500 today. (Most of the residents of Bint Jbeil are Lebanese-Americans from Dearborn and Detroit Michigan.)

Is there a point to relaying to you the events of the past few days? I am still stuck to the television. I am still living from breaking news report to breaking news re[prt. I now get things from the second-tier horse's mouth, so to speak, journalists whom I have taken to hovering around.

Khiyam shall soon be rubble. As is Bint Jbeil. After Khiyam will be Tyre. The Beqaa has been pounded. Israelis targeted factories, some operational, others under construction. None were Hezbollah fortresses, of course. They also hit a UNIFIL outpost last night killing UN international observers.

This will be a long note because it is a cluster from the past few days. It will most likely be a tedious read. It reflects my encounters these past few days, conversations and discussions with friends journalists and analysts as well as vignettes from Beirut under siege. As I attempt to tie all of these sections together, I am back at the Cafe with WiFi. Yesterday they played the soundtrack from Lawrence of Arabia. I don't know if they were aware of the "post-colonial" and "post-post-colonial" dimension. Condi was in Jerusalem. The Bedouins were firing rockets at Haifa. And Faisal spoke late into the night, promising the rockets would go further than Haifa.

Today, they have a Charles Aznavour playlist. Somebody with executive power in this cafe is a shameless sentimental. This is the first sign of a return to normalcy in my experience so far. I, an unrepentant sentimental as well, am very fond of Aznavour; this playlist has been the soundtrack to my convalescence from amorous setbacks, it is a first tangible reminder that I had once a different life.

Hezbollah, now the symbol

It took a few days into this war for Hezbollah to acquire a new power of signification. The semiologists, the political sociologists, and hordes of regional experts and policy advisors have to watch this carefully - they better, at least, if they are to understand this moment and the new political idiom. And they have quite something to contend with, Hassan Nasrallah's pronouncements, al-Manar TV, the video productions, the manufacture of image and meaning.

Hezbollah have now become the only Arab force to have refused to accommodate, even slightly, Israel's missives and caprices. They are undaunted by the military might of the IDF, its awesome ability to bring wretchedness to a people and a country and its ability to shrug at international laws regulating warfare, conflict and non-aggression. They are also undaunted by the moral highground provided by the US, and presently the Arab League and the international community (whoever this construct stands for).

Hence, they have won the hearts and minds of Arab masses. The so-called Arab street - that vague, beguiling force at once vociferous and inept that the western media have reified into a pressure valve of the potential/appetite for terror or anti-Western sentiment - has been won in heart and mind by Hezbollah's retaliation to the Israeli assault. The Arab world is mesmerized by this movement that has developed the ability to fight back, inflict pain and for the first time in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, pose a real threat to Israel. Hezbollah does not have the ability to defeat the Israeli army. No one in the region can and none of the Arab states is willing, in jest or merely using the power of suggestion, to challenge Israel's absolute hegemony. (I don't know whether Iran can or not, but in principle Israel's military abilities are superior to the Islamic Republic's conventional army.)

In its careful study of a military strategy for defense, conducted in full cognizance of the movement's weakness and strength and of Israel's weakness and strength, Hezbollah has achieved what all Arab states have failed to achieve. Since the war broke out, Hassan Nasrallah has displayed a persona and public behavior also to the exact opposite of Arab heads of states. He may be in the "underground" for security reasons, but he is not disheveled, he speaks in a cautious, calculated calm - a quiet dignity. His adresses have been punctuated with key notions that have long lapsed from the everyday political vocabulary in the Arab world: responsibility (for defeat, victory and the toll on Lebanon), dignity, justice, compassion (for the suffering inflicted on people and for the Palestinian-Israeli victims of Hezbollah shelling in Nazareth and Haifa).

His rhetoric is in stark contrast to that of the political class in the Arab world that speaks of "calculated retreats", "compromises for peace", and the real politik convictions that induce Amr Moussa to cast himself as the gesticulating pantomime for the Saudis and the Americans. In an interview with Al-Jazeera, Ahmad Fouad Najm, the famous Egyptian popular poet, quoted a Cairene street sweeper who said to him that Hassan Nasrallah brought back to life the dead man buried inside him. This is the "pulse" of the much-dreaded Arab street. This too is a measure of Israel's miscalculation. Moreover, at the moment when Sunnis and Shi'as have been blinded in murderous rage in Iraq, when Idiot-King Abdullah of Jordan and a handful Barbaric Wahabi pundits babbled on about the dangerous emergence of a "Shi'i crescent" in the region, Israel's assault has brought to the fore a solidarity that transcends the Sunni-Shi'a divide in the Arab world, and consolidated a front of those who reject Israeli hegemony and those who cower to it in fear.

This new symbolic power beyond the boundaries of Lebanon was willed by Hezbollah in the postwar; it peeked in 1996, when Israel conducted its notorious "Operation Grapes of Wrath". After the Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon, Hezbollah claimed credit for the liberation. Some analysts saw the Israeli withdrawal from the occupied south as a strategic move to end the "Lebanon" file, and deprive Syria from a crucial hand in its negotiations with Israel (Hafez el-Assad died shortly after). Other analysts saw the Israeli withdrawal as Hezbollah's defeat of the IDF in a long, long war of attrition. Nevertheless, Hezbollah represented itself in its propaganda machine as the only armed force in the Arab and Muslim world to have in fact defeated Israel.

In this present crisis, and from Hassan Nasrallah's first pronouncement (the radio/audio adress he delivered), the "open" belligerance that Israel is conducting on Lebanon has been represented as a turning point battle in the saga of the Arab-Israeli conflict. A saga replete with humiliating defeats for Arab armies, a turning point because Hezbollah promised to deliver a victory (as it has achieved many victories in the past). In other words, he transformed this present conflict from a "Lebanese" question into an Arab and regional conflict.

The significance of defeat and victory is bearing a deep impact far and beyond the boundaries of Lebanon. This is one of the reasons Condoleezza Rice's notion of a "New Middle East" smacks of first-rate hubris. The "New Middle East" is taking shape elsewhere, or the real new Middle East is here, and there is little the White House, Ehud Olmert, 23-ton shells autographed by the beautiful children of Israel (the pictures are quite astounding) dropped in the middle of refugee camps to unearth underground bunkers of "terrorism," can do about it.

In the first few days of the Israeli assault on Lebanon, there was barely any movement in Arab capitals. The Arab world seemed content watching us burn on TV; our fate seemed sealed with the Arab League meeting. I remember writing my rage in one of these dispatches. However, after Nasrallah's first adress, which ended with the spectacularly staged shelling of the Israeli warship, Hezbollah's sustained ability to hold its fort and to shell cities as far as Haifa and Nazareth, in addition to the sight of Israel's sustained massacres of civilians and destruction of Lebanon, turned the tide. Hezbollah's position in the region and in Arab consciousness is etched with an empowering, envigorating significance.

The New Middle East, Conspiracy and Nasrallah's televised address

Condoleezza Rice showed up in Beirut two days ago. The message she carries is that the US will not enforce a ceasfire. Israel estimates it needs an additional week before the atmosphere is "conducive" to a ceasefire. This means they need a week to achieve their aims. Their aims have changed over the past two weeks, although they have formulated a set of demands to the White House and the G8.

Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Saniora, on his way to the Rome conference, said he did not expect the meeting to produce a ceasefire. Only Kofi Annan seems to expect that from this high-profile meeting.

Rice did not speak of a New Middle East in Lebanon; in fact, there were no public pronouncements made in Lebanon, but she did hold several press conferences in Israel, where reference was made to this new map. The "New Middle East" has not been officially unveiled by the Americans. It emerges at a moment when Israel has failed to undermine Hamas with all the means the world has afforded to support it: diplomatic pressure from the US and EU, an effective paralysis of Hamas' ability to govern, an internal conflict between Hamas and Fateh, the incarceration of cabinet members and parliamentarians, a humanitarian siege, and a full scale military assault on Gaza. The Palestinian population has yet to unseat Hamas or question the legitimacy of its position.

This moment is also when Iraq seems to have effectively slipped into a civil war and the US and UK occupation forces are neck-deep in a quagmire, with violence escalating to frightful scale. Civil conflicts and violence develop a momentum and logic of their own that create their own hell, and Iraq seems to be teetering at the precipice of this hell with no sign of decisive and effective intervention to bring it to a halt. This moment is also when the negotiations with Iran over the development of nuclear weapons are made in baby steps and in circles.

With the war in Lebanon, the "moment" in which the "New Middle East" is unveiled is a moment where Hezbollah has emerged as a force that is able to humiliate the Israeli military on the field of battle, and represent the Israeli civilan leadership as reckless, confused and bloodthirsty. Hezbollah define their victory as maintaining their ability to deter Israel from assaulting Lebanon, namely, deterring a ground attack (the battle in a cluster of villages has been going on for five days now) but mostly firing rockets and missiles into the Israeli interior. In that regard, they are so far victorious.

So the question is on what grounds are the US, Israel and the EU imagining the "New Middle East"? And how do they imagine its implementation?

Past midnight last night, al-Manar television announced they would broadcast a pre-recorded adress by Hassan Nasrallah. He wanted to present his views and reactions to the diplomatic activity that has been taking place in the past few days. He also wanted to send a message to the nation, Israel and the wider world regarding Hezbollah's strategy in this conflict. For Nasrallah, the "New Middle East" was the final indication that Israel's assault was premeditated (and part of a greater US plan) and that Hezbollah's victory would be the principal bullwark to thwarting the conspiracy of this "New Middle East".

He also revealed that Hezbollah had now received information that Israel had planned the assault on Lebanon and Hezbollah for September or October. Israel planned to roll a massive ground force across the borders, with a cover from the air, targeting Hezbollah leadership and roads and bridges, aiming to cripple the movement from responding. The element of surprise was key to the success of that military strategy. With the present conflict, Israel had proceeded with its plans, but without the element of surprise. And that is one of the reasons Hezbollah have the upper hand so far. And finally, he reiterated the "surprises" that Hezbollah had delivered to Israel thus far: the warship, hitting as far into Israeli territory as Tabariya and Haifa. He announced that Hezbollah was now ready to hit targets "beyond Haifa," at a time of their choosing. Did he mean Tel Aviv? Would he hit Tel Aviv? Was it his retaliation at Istael's psychological warfare?

This morning, Olmert's office announced they had heard Nasrallah's threat and would respond accordingly.

More on Being a Proud Arab

Saudi Arabia pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and more to help Lebanon in this tragic time. I wish the political class of this country had the spine and intelligence to reject this fortune or negotiate its political cost from the position of the empowered. Hezbollah is changing the terms, and unfortunately the cabinet of Fouad Siniora, as well as the Hariri movement, is still behaving in total subservience to Saudi Arabia, protecting Saudi hegemony in this country and the region.

The Jordanians sent us a plane load of emergency relief supplies. It just landed in our destroyed airport. The Israelis gave the Jordanian plane the security cover. Jordan and Kuwait are sending environmental experts to help us clean the sea from the oil and fuel spills that Israelis dumped. Did I mention this? Did I mention that after their warships retreated to a distance safe from Hezbollah's firepower, they spilled enough oil to cause an environmental disaster on our coastline? Did I mention that no one has been to fish and that the shores are now pitch black?

This said, I still cannot get over, or forgive the Saudi, Egyptian and Jordanian actions vis-a-vis the Israeli war on Lebanon. There was a chance to stand upright, to redress from the hunch of servility. For a moment, there was an opportunity to salvage dignity and turn the tables for good. They chose to cower, to protect US and Israeli interests and extend moral cover for Israel to destroy this country. The Arab League is complicit in the destruction of this country. Fawwaz Traboulsi said it time and time again on television stations - they have a myriad means at their disposal to shake Israel and the US, if only to impose red lines, to defend a notion of sovereignty. They could have withdrawn their ambassadors from Israel, they could have suspended the peace accords with Israel, they could have threatened a regional escalation during the Arab League meeting. Saudi Arabia could have used its hegemony over the oil market or its deposits in US banks. Instead, Amr Moussa opined that the Road Map for Peace was defunct. This is servile complicity.

Imagine how much they would have gained in the eyes of their societies and as regional actors had they simply stood in one line-up in the face of Israel. Obviously, it is hubris on my part to imagine these heads of states capable of any action beyond humiliating subservience. This is one of the meanings of defeat. The total relinquishing of agency and dignity.

The political culture that prevails in the Arab world has a very select cast of roles for officials (whether elected or not). At heart they are variations on three main roles: taxidermists, court-jesters and kitchen undercooks (the more accurate word is in French, marmitons ). They resurrect dead effigies, brandish defunct ideologies, they gesticulate and throw fits to soothe, distract, and deter, or they slice and dice, pick up the peels and clean up in the "big kitchen" of regional politics. This too is a face of defeat.

There has been much, much ink spilled on the impact of "defeat" on Arab societies, identity, political culture, etc. The other meaning of defeat is the inability to imagine political alternatives beyond the debilitating bi-polar pathology (and I use the metaphor with the psychic disorder in mind) of US/Israel vs. fundamentalist political Islam. These simply cannot be the two options for citizenship, identity, governance and political representation. (Perhaps it is impossible in Palestine because occupation is war, and war creates situations in extremes - and yet the Palestinians, Muslims and Christians did not cower from electing Hamas into government, in cognizance of the costs. And so far, that "third" option (obviously not Blair's "Third Way") is not yet clear or cogent.

In the present conflict, a secular egalitarian democrat such as I, has no real place for representation or maneuver. Neither have and my ilk and I succeeded in carving a space for ourselves. Nor have the prevailing forces (the two poles) agreed to making allocations for us. That is our defeat and our failure. In Lebanon, we are caught in the stampede and the cross-fire. As I noted in one of these siege notes, I am not a supporter of Hezbollah, but this has become a war with Israel. In the war with Israel, there is no force in the world that will have me stand side by side with the IDF or the Israeli state.

It was my foolhardy hope that the Lebanese front that emerged after the mass mobilization on March 14th would rehabilitate its nearly depleted political capital (depleted down to its most base and vulgar sectarian constituencies) and refuse to meet with Condoleezza Rice out of principle that the US and Israel are waging a war on one of the chief agents in Lebanon's political landscape. Instead, all these handsome men and women showed up at the US embassy, smiling, wearing their Sunday suits, aping the display of servility that the Idiot-Kings and Senile-Presidents-for-Life display at the Arab league meetings. She showed up at the embassy and enjoyed this band of court-jesters and taxidermists while the Depleted Uranium Smart Bombs were delivered from the US military base in Qatar to Israel.

Was I foolhardy to have once seen an opportunity for change when the March 14th mobilization swept the capital? Surely now, in light of this war. And you would think that by reading newspapers, this band of brothers (and sisters) would learn something. You would think that by watching what happened to their equivalent band of brothers in Fateh would inspire another behavior. To no avail. Look at the pathetic story of Mohammad Dahlan. Once a proud young man from Gaza, once a hero of the Palestinian resistance, once a prisoner in Israel's gaols, once a popular leader in the streets of Gaza. He was so corrupted by power, he became the US Foreign Secretary's Boy Toy. His street smarts became thuggery, his humble origins fed his appetite for cheap thrills - nice suits that he never hung well on his shoulders, fancy cars that he never had a chance to drive on decent roads, fine cuisine that he never knew how to order and first class tickets to capitals where he flew to surrender more and more and more servility. The story of Dahlan, although small and borderline insignificant, should be told to children.

Why do I single out Dahlan when so many others like him roam the unpaved roads of Palestine, because for a brief moment, I believed he was a man - a long time long ago that I can no longer recall.

In Lebanon: The Displaced, the Schizophrenia

Within Lebanon, the situation is different. The White House and Israel are hedging their bets on an internal rift. The most dangerous would be a Sunni-Shi'i divide. So far the country has been united, but warning signs are let out every day. The sectarian polarization is still cut grossly along the lines of the pro-Syrian and anti-Syrian camps; they cut across the conventional sectarian rifts that polarized the country during the civil war, and to some extent in the postwar. In every speech, Hassan Nasrallah has hailed and expressed gratitude for the fantastic popular support that has rallied around the resistance. The council for Sunni religious associations met yesterday, reiterating their support for the resistance and condemning the silence and cowardice of the Arab world.

It is compelling to see the hordes of volunteers tend to the displaced. There are two main organizations channeling emergency aid and resources to the NGOs tending to the displaced - the Hariri Foundation and the National Relief agency. The management of relocating and lodging the displaced has been less than ideal, and I am of the opinion that the government has not really galavanized its full abilities to face up to the crisis. The Ministry of Social Affairs, the Ministry of Health and other concerned public agencies are coordinating efforts to bring some order into the chaos. However, there is increasing critique that they are not marshalled as they were in the past.

True, the scale of displacement is harrowing and keeps increasing every day and the government has never had to contend with a challenge so tremendous. We now count 800,000 people who are displaced. Access to shelters, schools and other sites of relocation has been uneven. Problems have begun to emerge. I have made an effort to collect as many anecdotes as possible, to get an overall sense of the situation. So far, I have not been able to do so. The overwhelming question seems to be managing the distress and frustration of the displaced and the exhaustion of volunteers. The crisis seems to drag, and longer term solutions will have to be implemented because immediate emergency solutions are usually not sustainable over time.

The anecdotes tell of everyday heroes and everyday greed and sectarian prejudice. It's a mixed bag. Unanimously, however, they reveal that the work that Bahia Hariri, sister of slain former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, and parliamentarian from Sidon (the northernmost first city in south Lebanon), has been stellar. Using the arm of the Hariri Foundation in Sidon, she is housing 12,500 displaced from the south (mostly Shi'ites) and tending to all their needs. There are ironic anecdotes too, for example, schools in the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain el-Helweh have been opened to house Lebanese refugees.

The brunt of this war is felt unevenly in the country. The eastern suburbs of Beirut and significant areas in the mountains have been more or less spared from shelling and violence. Occasional Israeli air raids spread fear. The targeting of the broadcast tower for the major Lebanese television stations that claimed the life of an employee at the LBC (Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation) was a poignant reminder, but the astounding wretchedness inflicted on the south and the Beqa'a have not been inflicted elsewhere.

This is not atypical of Lebanon's exprience of its civil war and of the postwar occupation of south Lebanon. This dysynchrony in "experiencing" the Israeli assault translates sometimes to a schizophrenia. There are people sun-tanning, partying, taking it easy while others are displaced. This too is part of the political class's engagement in the war. They could inspire a different mindset.

In the Israeli invasion of 1982, I was in West Beirut. I was 13 years old. All my friends and classmates fled the siege of West Beirut. The political rifts were different then, but I remember that when I returned to school after the withdrawal of the Israeli forces that fall, I carried the burden of the trauma of the siege while my classmates had memories of fun and games of that summer spent in the mountains. While they recalled witnessing shells fall on Beirut from a distance, I recalled their sound as they exploded. I resented all the stories they told of that summer. They were all happy stories. I shut my ears when they recalled them. There are a set of songs that were popular then that I still cannot hear without feeling a pinch of anxiety in my stomach. It's the impact of that trauma. Part of the reason I cannot leave Beirut is that I don't want to become like them. It's like a pledge I made to myself. But this is happening again, on a smaller scale, because the shelling has reached beyond the southern suburbs of Beirut and the south.

These distances that separate the people of this country have to be bridged somehow. The "united" front has to find a more cogent gel. We have everything to win if we are able to meet that challenge. We have our country to win. If we remain hapless victims who beg, and who remain beholden to the "charity" of Arabs, we will never have full sovereignty. Hezbollah's victory can be articulated to become Lebanon's victory (this too might be naive folly on my part, but I need to believe this, at least for the next few days, so just humor me) - particularly now that the Syrians are making noises about plans to roll their rusted tanks and army of underfed and illiterate soldiers with its thuggish command back in the country.

I am so weary of the return of Syrian control over Lebanon. The Syrian people, all those pictured cursing the Lebanese for their arrogance and lack of gratitude, should protest against a re-entry of the Syrian military into Lebanon. And if the self-described "last fort of dignity of the Arabs" are inspired to fight Israel, they have the entire front of the Golan to do so. The Lebanese will not liberate the Golan, the Syrians will have to. You don't subcontract liberation. Moreover, Hezbollah has claimed time and time again that they are prepared for the long haul and don't need a bullet from any of the Arab states. This is another reason for the Lebanese political forces to band around the resistance and shield the country. We might have a chance to rebuild this country without owing a percentage of every contract to a thug from the Syrian junta, and that feels like humane relief.

I will end this siege note with another of the obsessions that taunt me. People caught under rubble. In describing the surreptitious commonplace horror of the civil war in a televised interview perhaps ten years ago, the famous Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury drew the following scene: While everyday life was taking place, traffic, transactions, just the mundane stuff of life, and as you walked passed buildings, you knew that in the underground of that commonplace building, there might be someone kidnapped, waiting to be traded or simply held in custody for money or whatever reasons militias kidnapped for. And you walked by that building.

I am haunted by the nameless and faceless caught under rubble. In the undergrounds of destroyed buildings or simply in the midst of its ravages. Awaiting to be given a proper burial.

(Rasha Salti is the Cinema East director at ArteEast, a New York-based non-profit organization established in 2003 to present contemporary Middle-Eastern artists to a wide audience in order to foster more complex understanding of the regionís arts and cultures and promote artistic excellence.)


7. Only Hizbullah can defend against an Israeli invasion
Attempts to impose an international force would risk destroying Lebanon's government and revive the danger of civil war
Jonathan Steele in Beirut

A rally of well-dressed middle-class ladies, perhaps 40 in all, protested outside the UN's offices here on Wednesday, calling for a ceasefire. Representing the Lebanese Council of Women, they handed out leaflets appealing to Kofi Annan to get something done.

They were fewer in number than the recent anti-war demonstrators in Tel Aviv, but more representative. While today's peaceniks in Israel are a lonely, though perhaps slowly growing, minority, the cry for a ceasefire is overwhelming in Lebanon. Why bother to demonstrate when the issue is so obvious?

So my strongest impression of the rally came from Lamia Osseiran, one of its organisers: "The Israelis are radicalising Lebanon, even liberal democrats like me. I took part in last year's demonstrations against Syria. I was a critic of Hizbullah. Now I cannot help but support Hizbullah's fighters who are defending our country." What about Hizbullah's rocket attacks on Haifa? "It's right," she replied. "It's not only Lebanese who should have to suffer. Are human rights available only to Israelis? You can't have winter and summer on the same roof."

Similar views can be heard from many Shias. They have closed ranks behind Hizbullah under the weight of Israeli bombing. Among Sunnis the mood is more complex. The port town of Sidon, south of Beirut, is 90% Sunni. Over the past week it has taken in 70,000 Shia refugees, most of them militant supporters of Hizbullah. They are eager to convince their new Sunni neighbours of the justice of the Hizbullah cause. Whether they have succeeded will not be known until the bombing stops, but every new day of Israel's air strikes on the south lessens the force of the argument that it is all Hizbullah's fault.

The stronghold of anti-Hizbullah feeling is in Lebanon's Christian areas. They have suffered little bombing, and many people argue that Hizbullah is reaping what it sowed. As Youssef Haddad, a young teacher at the American University of Beirut, put it: "If you want a war with Israel, you have to pay the price. I didn't take the decision to attack Israel."

Yet what counts most for now is not the popular reaction but what is happening inside the Lebanese government. Condoleezza Rice seems to have little understanding of the country's political forces. Last year's so-called cedar revolution, with its simplistic "people power" image and the election victory of anti-Syrian parties, apparently led Washington, and alarmingly Downing Street as well, to believe that Lebanon has a radically new and pro-western government.

In fact, Lebanon has a government of national unity in which Hizbullah has two ministers. Being anti-Syrian is not the same as being anti-Hizbullah, and the election winners from the March 14 movement, which developed after the car-bomb murder of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri, wisely recognised that the party is an authentic part of Lebanese society. It was better to have it in the government rather than outside.

Demonising Hizbullah as terrorists or Iranian and Syrian agents confuses the picture. Moreover, the only party that declined to take part in government, the Maronite Christians led by Michel Aoun, made a tactical alliance with Hizbullah. Since the Israeli attacks Aoun has been one of Hizbullah's most vocal defenders.

While accepting Hizbullah's political weight, no Lebanese politician believes that its military wing can be disarmed against its will. Their view has to be the starting point for any discussion of an international force for southern Lebanon, whether it is a beefed-up version of the current UN force, Unifil, or some sort of "coalition of the willing".

In one sense Israel created Hizbullah. Its occupation of Lebanon after 1982 turned a group of suicide bombers into a resistance movement like Europe's second world war partisans. Expecting foreigners to remove Hizbullah's weapons is a non-starter. Israel is taking heavy casualties in attempting it. How would other foreign occupiers have more success?

Earlier this year Lebanese parties were holding a "national dialogue" to work out, among other issues, how to strengthen the Lebanese army and find a different role for Hizbullah's guerrilla forces. "One option would be to absorb the militia into the Lebanese army and another would be to turn it into a national guard under government control," Michel Faroun, an MP from the March 14 movement, said last week.

The dialogue on Lebanon's defence strategy was only exploratory, since the government agreed that no decisions could be taken until Israel withdrew from the land known as Shebaa farms, occupied since 1967. The latest two weeks of Israeli attacks have reinforced Hizbullah's argument that it cannot disarm until the Lebanese army is stronger.

It is not a question of redeploying the Lebanese army in Hizbullah's place. Only Hizbullah knows the terrain well enough, and has sufficient experience and motivation to defend Lebanon against any future Israeli invasion.

The Lebanese government's position on the idea of an international force is not yet clear. Hizbullah and Amal, the other Shia party, insist that the prime minister, Fouad Siniora, only had a mandate in Rome on Wednesday to call for a ceasefire and a prisoner exchange. Although Siniora expressed support for strengthening Unifil, analysts assume he thought this position was safe as long as the mandate and mission are still to be agreed. If the idea took off he would have time to argue that it can only come in with the consent of Hizbullah and Amal.

Attempts to impose a force would risk destroying the Lebanese government and revive the danger of a civil war. Perhaps this is Israel's intention. It has shown great skill in exacerbating splits between Fatah and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, and may think of doing the same in Lebanon.

European governments should resist the idea. Jacques Chirac has rightly said a Nato force is out of the question since the alliance is seen as "the armed wing of the west". Even without this association, any force would risk being seen as Israel's instrument. Israel's plan seems to be either to use foreigners to do its work or, if that fails, to turn south Lebanon into a giant Rafah - the city in Gaza where it demolished hundreds of homes and created a free-fire zone in which anything that moved was shot.

What Lebanon needs, as Siniora said in Rome, is an immediate ceasefire and an Israeli withdrawal so that refugees can go home before any more destruction is wrought. The world should take its cue from that.

(j.steele@guardian.co.uk)


8. Do I see or do I remember?
Elias Khoury writes about the Israeli invasions of Lebanon (from London Review of Books)

It is the time for death in Lebanon. Anyone who has followed the country’s modern history might well be confused. In 2000 Lebanon’s resistance expelled the Israeli army from the land it had occupied in the south. A popular intifada expelled the Syrian army in 2005. How could a minor military operation undertaken by Hizbullah send Lebanon back to square one? We seem to be entering a labyrinth from which nobody can find the way out. The only certainty is that Lebanon is facing destruction, that the dream of restoring the country to independence is on hold.

In 1978 Israel devastated Lebanon and established a military cordon in order to protect its northern settlements from the PLO’s Katyusha rockets. The country became the site of a series of wars, invasions and retreats. Then in 1982 Israel, under the leadership of Menachem Begin, decided that a decisive victory was necessary. Armoured columns invaded Lebanon, and reached the outskirts of Beirut. The objective was to get the Palestinians out of the way and to end their hopes of creating an independent state. Yasir Arafat and his men were forced to leave Lebanon by sea and go into exile in Tunisia.

With the massacres in the camps of Sabra and Shatila, the Israelis visited new humiliations on the Arab world. They were convinced that the confrontation on their northern border was over, and that their armies had managed not only to end the threat against them, but also to subjugate the Palestinians and the Lebanese. It didn’t work out like that. Arafat moved to Ramallah, where he would become the first Palestinian leader after the nakba of 1948 to live until his last days in his homeland, and the Israeli army was forced to withdraw from Lebanon.

Why has the battle between Hizbullah and the Israeli army assumed such proportions now? The question is of course bound up with all the other questions surrounding the Palestine problem, and bound up too with the oil wealth in the Middle East that has become a curse.

Lebanon emerged as a distinct entity after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The state founded in Damascus by King Faisal I after the end of the First World War was supposed to include Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, but then Palestine became a British mandate, and the Zionist movement took over there. After the Second World War and the end of the French mandate in Syria and Lebanon, both countries became independent, but Syria seemed to lose its identity, unsure whether it should ally itself with Iraq or join a political union with Egypt. Then in 1963 there was a Baathist coup in Syria, and Hafiz Assad, an air-force officer, triumphed in the subsequent power struggle, becoming president in 1971. Assad extended his sphere of influence to Lebanon and turned it into a pivot of regional politics during the latter stage of the Cold War.

Lebanon was unaffected by the military revolutions in the Arab East after 1948. It was an oasis of cultural freedom in a region dominated by revolutionary military regimes. It was also the region’s weak spot, vulnerable to outside influence, since the religious diversity of its citizens meant that it was difficult for the state fully to control internal security or foreign policy. There were severe strains in the first years of independence, reaching a climax in 1958 with the surge in Arab nationalism which resulted from Nasser’s influence. A small-scale civil war that year ended in an Egyptian-American settlement after US marines landed in Lebanon.

Since 1978 Lebanon has been subjected to five Israeli invasions, each aimed at destroying rockets: in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and 2006. On each occasion the Israeli army fought only against semi-organised Palestinian and Lebanese militias. Did the Israelis score a victory in 1982? You couldn’t call it that, not after the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, nor could you call 1993 a victory, involving as it did the recognition of the PLO. After Israel’s 2000 withdrawal under fire, during which the inhabitants of northern Israel were required to live in shelters as rockets were launched by Hizbullah, that description seemed even less appropriate.

A war but not a war, because the aggressors did not acknowledge the existence of the other side, until the Palestinians agreed to what was tantamount to surrender at Oslo. But they did not in the end surrender, and Israel took advantage of the attacks of 9/11 to bring down the Palestinians’ more moderate leaders. This led to total chaos in occupied Gaza and the West Bank. The violence that has engulfed Lebanon today is part of this pattern. When Palestinians in Gaza succeeded in capturing one of Israel’s soldiers, Israel refused the logic of reciprocity. Instead it has plunged Gaza into a state of lethal anarchy. Israel refuses to exchange prisoners because it sees Hamas and Hizbullah as terrorists. The problem in Gaza and the West Bank is clear: Israel wants to create cages and ghettos for Palestinians. In Lebanon the situation is more complex.

The Israelis say they do not want to occupy Lebanon. This is also what the Americans say about Iraq. The issue, however, is not what they want but what they are doing. Can Israel tolerate religious and ethnic chaos on its borders? Is it performing a service to the United States by trying to weaken Hizbullah, Iran’s strongest ally in the region, prior to the opening up of the Iranian nuclear file? What is clear, beneath the drone of the missiles hurled at the southern suburbs of Beirut, is that Israel, realising it is incapable of destroying Hizbullah, has decided to destroy Lebanon. But the madness is not just Israeli. Much of the Arab world is following the road to self-destruction, via a fundamentalist ideology that, perhaps unwittingly, reflects the worldview of Bernard Lewis’s disciples, the neo-orientalists.

Lebanon is caught between Israel’s strategy and Syria’s. Israel, like the wolf in sheep’s clothing in Aesop’s fable, has taken on the role of the victim. But Israel also claims that its prey is not a sheep but a wolf, and it’s certainly true that Israel forces it to act like a wolf.

Syria’s strategy, fashioned by the late President Assad and used whenever his regime was under threat, can be understood by adapting the story of Abraham and Isaac. Syria needs a lamb to sacrifice instead of a son. If necessary, it will appear to protect the lamb, making the lamb seem to be wolf-like, even as it waits to be sacrificed.

Lebanon has been caught between these two strategies for thirty years. But now there are new actors on stage: the US and Iran. In the 1980s, the Americans encouraged Iraq to contain Iran by means of a crushing war, just as they gave Syria the task of imposing peace on Lebanon. The fear now is that the US has given Israel a green light to destroy Lebanon. The Iranians adopted sensible policies in Afghanistan and Iraq, and have been the sole beneficiaries of the turmoil of the American war. Iraq has more or less collapsed into their hands: with the withdrawal of the US and British armies it will become a civil war zone directed by Tehran. Afghanistan is permanently on the edge of an abyss. Iran exploits this by trying to destabilise America’s allies in the region. The way the United States and Iran behave on the battlefront in Lebanon will decide the fate not just of Lebanon, but of the whole of the Middle East.

It has been clear during the first days of the confrontation that Hizbullah has prepared for conflict in a manner that has aroused admiration in a region where wars with Israel have resulted only in frustration. It is clear that Hizbullah’s weapons are not only intended for the defence of Lebanon but are being held in reserve for a greater battle, a battle to defend Iranian nuclear weapons. Lebanon has to join the battle against Israel not because it wants to, not because there are still Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails, but because the only options Israel offers the Arab Middle East are to submit or to collaborate in the crushing of the Palestinians.

This is not to defend Hizbullah’s military strategy, or a Syrian vision that is based on exporting tension beyond its borders at the expense of the Lebanese and Palestinian people. An alternative strategy must emerge in the Arab world, before fundamentalism takes over everything, turning every Arab country into a site of battle and destruction. The last bastion of secular resistance, the PLO, has been destroyed. Perhaps Arafat made a mistake at Oslo, but a greater mistake was to allow the corruption of the Palestinian Authority, which meant that it was unable adequately to react to the rising tide of fundamentalism. A fresh vision based on justice, peace and democracy is needed. The problem is the influence of the Arab oil states, which are oligarchic both politically and culturally. Lebanon is today paying the price for their folly and impotence and their subordination to the United States.

I do not exonerate the Lebanese from responsibility for the horrors that are taking place. Building a democratic country is the duty of all Lebanese. The different religious groups have to find a way to unite in a political project. Factionalism and fear will make it impossible to confront the weapons that are destroying a country that has risen from the rubble only to find itself once again buried in rubble.

Before me I see the same images of death that I witnessed 24 years ago. The pictures themselves, the noise of invading aircraft in the skies of Beirut and all over Lebanon, are the same. Do I see or do I remember? When you are incapable of distinguishing between what is in front of you and what you remember, it becomes clear that history teaches nothing – and clear too that what the Israelis call war is not war but merely the first skirmishes of a war that has not yet begun. Woe to anyone who believes that this massacre is war. Since 1973, the Arab world has fought only on the sidelines.

The Israelis should take care not to deceive themselves and believe that they have achieved victory, because the nature of such non-wars is that they can be repeated over and over again.

(Elias Khoury is director and editor-in-chief of the culture supplement of the Beirut daily An-Nahar . His most recently translated novel is Gate of the Sun . His piece in this issue was translated by Peter Clark.)


9. Tide of Arab Opinion Turns to Support for Hezbollah
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

At the onset of the Lebanese crisis, Arab governments, starting with Saudi Arabia, slammed Hezbollah for recklessly provoking a war, providing what the United States and Israel took as a wink and a nod to continue the fight.

Now, with hundreds of Lebanese dead and Hezbollah holding out against the vaunted Israeli military for more than two weeks, the tide of public opinion across the Arab world is surging behind the organization, transforming the Shiite group’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, into a folk hero and forcing a change in official statements.

The Saudi royal family and King Abdullah II of Jordan , who were initially more worried about the rising power of Shiite Iran, Hezbollah’s main sponsor, are scrambling to distance themselves from Washington.

An outpouring of newspaper columns, cartoons, blogs and public poetry readings have showered praise on Hezbollah while attacking the United States and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for trumpeting American plans for a “new Middle East” that they say has led only to violence and repression.

Even Al Qaeda , run by violent Sunni Muslim extremists normally hostile to all Shiites, has gotten into the act, with its deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, releasing a taped message saying that through its fighting in Iraq, his organization was also trying to liberate Palestine.

Mouin Rabbani, a senior Middle East analyst in Amman, Jordan, with the International Crisis Group, said, “The Arab-Israeli conflict remains the most potent issue in this part of the world.”

Distinctive changes in tone are audible throughout the Sunni world. This week, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt emphasized his attempts to arrange a cease-fire to protect all sects in Lebanon , while the Jordanian king announced that his country was dispatching medical teams “for the victims of Israeli aggression.” Both countries have peace treaties with Israel.

The Saudi royal court has issued a dire warning that its 2002 peace plan — offering Israel full recognition by all Arab states in exchange for returning to the borders that predated the 1967 Arab-Israeli war — could well perish.

“If the peace option is rejected due to the Israeli arrogance,” it said, “then only the war option remains, and no one knows the repercussions befalling the region, including wars and conflict that will spare no one, including those whose military power is now tempting them to play with fire.”

The Saudis were putting the West on notice that they would not exert pressure on anyone in the Arab world until Washington did something to halt the destruction of Lebanon, Saudi commentators said.

American officials say that while the Arab leaders need to take a harder line publicly for domestic political reasons, what matters more is what they tell the United States in private, which the Americans still see as a wink and a nod.

There are evident concerns among Arab governments that a victory for Hezbollah — and it has already achieved something of a victory by holding out this long — would further nourish the Islamist tide engulfing the region and challenge their authority. Hence their first priority is to cool simmering public opinion.

But perhaps not since President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt made his emotional outpourings about Arab unity in the 1960’s, before the Arab defeat in the 1967 war, has the public been so electrified by a confrontation with Israel, played out repeatedly on satellite television stations with horrific images from Lebanon of wounded children and distraught women fleeing their homes.

Egypt’s opposition press has had a field day comparing Sheik Nasrallah to Nasser, while demonstrators waved pictures of both.

An editorial in the weekly Al Dustur by Ibrahim Issa, who faces a lengthy jail sentence for his previous criticism of President Mubarak, compared current Arab leaders to the medieval princes who let the Crusaders chip away at Muslim lands until they controlled them all.

After attending an intellectual rally in Cairo for Lebanon, the Egyptian poet Ahmed Fouad Negm wrote a column describing how he had watched a companion buy 20 posters of Sheik Nasrallah.

“People are praying for him as they walk in the street, because we were made to feel oppressed, weak and handicapped,” Mr. Negm said in an interview. “I asked the man who sweeps the street under my building what he thought, and he said: ‘Uncle Ahmed, he has awakened the dead man inside me! May God make him triumphant!’ ”

In Lebanon, Rasha Salti, a freelance writer, summarized the sense that Sheik Nasrallah differed from other Arab leaders.

“Since the war broke out, Hassan Nasrallah has displayed a persona, and public behavior also, to the exact opposite of Arab heads of states,” she wrote in an e-mail message posted on many blogs.

In comparison, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s brief visit to the region sparked widespread criticism of her cold demeanor and her choice of words, particularly a statement that the bloodshed represented the birth pangs of a “new Middle East.” That catchphrase was much used by Shimon Peres , the veteran Israeli leader who was a principal negotiator of the 1993 Oslo Accords, which ultimately failed to lead to the Palestinian state they envisaged.

A cartoon by Emad Hajjaj in Jordan labeled “The New Middle East” showed an Israeli tank sitting on a broken apartment house in the shape of the Arab world.

Fawaz al-Trabalsi, a columnist in the Lebanese daily As Safir, suggested that the real new thing in the Middle East was the ability of one group to challenge Israeli militarily.

Perhaps nothing underscored Hezbollah’s rising stock more than the sudden appearance of a tape from the Qaeda leadership attempting to grab some of the limelight.

Al Jazeera satellite television broadcast a tape from Mr. Zawahri (za-WAH-ri). Large panels behind him showed a picture of the exploding World Trade Center as well as portraits of two Egyptian Qaeda members, Muhammad Atef, a Qaeda commander who was killed by an American airstrike in Afghanistan, and Mohamed Atta , the lead hijacker on Sept. 11, 2001. He described the two as fighters for the Palestinians.

Mr. Zawahri tried to argue that the fight against American forces in Iraq paralleled what Hezbollah was doing, though he did not mention the organization by name.

“It is an advantage that Iraq is near Palestine,” he said. “Muslims should support its holy warriors until an Islamic emirate dedicated to jihad is established there, which could then transfer the jihad to the borders of Palestine.”

Mr. Zawahri also adopted some of the language of Hezbollah and Shiite Muslims in general. That was rather ironic, since previously in Iraq, Al Qaeda has labeled Shiites Muslim as infidels and claimed responsibility for some of the bloodier assaults on Shiite neighborhoods there.

But by taking on Israel, Hezbollah had instantly eclipsed Al Qaeda, analysts said. “Everyone will be asking, ‘Where is Al Qaeda now?’ ” said Adel al-Toraifi, a Saudi columnist and expert on Sunni extremists.

Mr. Rabbani of the International Crisis Group said Hezbollah’s ability to withstand the Israeli assault and to continue to lob missiles well into Israel exposed the weaknesses of Arab governments with far greater resources than Hezbollah.

“Public opinion says that if they are getting more on the battlefield than you are at the negotiating table, and you have so many more means at your disposal, then what the hell are you doing?” Mr. Rabbani said. “In comparison with the small embattled guerrilla movement, the Arab states seem to be standing idly by twiddling their thumbs.”

(Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting from Cairo for this article, and Suha Maayeh from Amman, Jordan.)

10. Jerusalem dispatch
The silent minority
Overwhelming public support for attacks on Hizbullah has muted Israeli protests against the war in Lebanon, reports Ian Black from Jerusalem (from the good old Guardian)

Condoleezza Rice hardly noticed the small demonstration outside the Jerusalem hotel, when she arrived from Beirut for her meeting with Ehud Olmert.

The US secretary of state probably didn't even hear the slogans as her cavalcade swept up to a side entrance under heavy security. "Go home Condi," they chanted. "War is terrorism with a bigger budget," read one neatly written placard. The handful of Israeli anti-war activists were almost outnumbered by policemen but their voices are in any case being drowned out by overwhelming public support for the fight against Hizbullah in Lebanon.

There is plenty of voluble criticism in this ever fractious country about the way the war is being conducted, but heavy losses in one fierce battle on Wednesday - nine soldiers killed - have hardened the national mood.

Last weekend, 2,500 demonstrators turned out in Tel Aviv, but many were Israeli Arabs and radical left-wingers far from the political mainstream. A smaller demonstration in Haifa on Tuesday had to be postponed because air raid sirens wailed to warn of incoming missiles and protesters scattered to the shelters. Overall there is no traction to the anti-war movement.

"The left has been completely marginalised," said the veteran leftist and peace activist Chaim Baram. "It's never been as bad. It is true that no sovereign state could stand rocket attacks like these. But they are only a nuisance and the response is disproportionate, destroying infrastructure and killing children. The difference of quantity is a difference of quality."

Plenty of doves and liberals worry too about the proportionality of Israel's offensive agsinst Lebanon, while acknowledging that Hizbullah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and his Iranian ally are dangerous and fanatical enemies. But there has been fierce condemnation of those who have spoken out forcefully against Ehud Olmert's government. Support from the US, happy to see Israel take on Tehran's militant protégé, as well as hurting Syria, has given the prime minister unusual freedom of manoeuvre.

"Screw them all," snarled one young Israeli who was watching the demonstrators as Ms Rice disappeared into the hotel. "Let's kill Nasrallah and then we can all go home." The contrast with the last war in Lebanon could hardly be greater. Back in 1982 Israel saw the biggest peace rallies in its history, with many thousands opposing Menachem Begin's "war of choice" and turning out in even larger numbers when Christian militiamen massacred Palestinians in Beirut, while Israeli troops stood by.

Protests have been muted because the Hizbullah raid that began this latest round on July 12 is seen as a deliberately provocative act of aggression by an extremist Islamist organisation that ignores Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon six years ago, as certified by the UN.

Israel does still occupy a small area called the Shebaa Farms, on the disputed border between Lebanon and Syria. But it has signalled it will evacuate the area as part of an overall settlement with Lebanon.

It is correct too, that Hizbullah's rockets are not an existential threat. But foreign observers would be wrong to underestimate the pressure on Olmert's untried coalition government because of worries about maintaining deterrence, difficulties with civilian morale in the north and the damage to the economy, at what should be the height of the tourist season.

Criticism of the scale and ferocity of Israel's response has been limited too because much of the left was already demoralised by the stagnation in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process since Ariel Sharon's unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the victory of the Islamist movement Hamas in the Palestinian elections.

Gaza has now been under siege for months, with violence reaching new heights since the abduction of a young soldier and heavy-handed Israeli attempts to stop the firing of Qassam rockets across the border. With attention now focused on Lebanon, over 100 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli raids in the last few days alone. But even those Israelis with clear-cut views about the Palestinian issues find themselves confused by the current conflict.

"I am a man of the left and I want peace, but this is a very strange war," said the Jerusalem academic Eli Shaltiel. "Hizbullah and (Iran's president) Ahmedinejad want to kill me just because I am a Jew. I despise them. On the other we are destroying half of Lebanon. Did we really have to turn 750,000 people into refugees? Maybe it could have been done otherwise?"

Zohara Antebi, the founder of a women's organisation that demanded Israel's pullout from Lebanon in 2000, is concerned about proportionality but not about the principle of hitting back.

"War is a tragedy," Ms Antebi said on one of the many TV chat shows where this crisis is being endlessly discussed. "I can only hope that this ends quickly. People on the right say I am unpatriotic because I want to pull back from the West Bank into our own borders. But we do have to be strong inside those borders." Israeli public opinion can be volatile in wartime, and a change of mood cannot be ruled out if the fighting goes on for much longer and there are more losses without a clear blow to Hizbullah.

"People know this is not going well," said the historian and Ha'aretz commentator Tom Segev. "Israelis like wars that we win." But Condi Rice is unlikely to find many more demonstrators waiting for her when she returns to Jerusalem over the weekend. US secretaries of state are used to encountering protests in Jerusalem. After the 1973 war Henry Kissinger was booed by Jewish settlers carrying black umbrellas - the reference was to Neville Chamberlain and Munich- to signal contempt for "appeasing" Israel's Arab enemies by pressure for withdrawals from conquered territory.

This time is different because - for the moment at least - America is cheering Israel on.


11. We're Being Set Up for Wider War in the Middle East -- by Paul Craig Roberts

The old adage, "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" does not apply to Americans, who have shown that they can be endlessly fooled.

Neoconservatives deceived Americans into an illegal attack and debilitating war in Iraq. American neoconservatives are closely allied with Israel's Likud Party. In the past, some neocons lost their security clearances because of "mishandling" of classified information. According to Insight magazine , "the Pentagon has banned security clearance to Americans with relatives in Israel. Government sources and attorneys said the Pentagon has sought and succeeded in removing security clearance from dozens of Americans, mostly Jews, who either lived, worked, or have relatives in Israel."

Despite questions of dual loyalties, neocons hold high positions in the Bush regime. Ten years ago these architects of American foreign and military policy spelled out how they would use deception to achieve "important Israeli strategic objectives" in the Middle East. First, they would focus "on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq." This would open the door for Israel to provoke attacks from Hezbollah. The attacks would let Israel gain American sympathy and permit Israel to seize the strategic initiative by "engaging Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon."

Today, this neoconservative plan is unfolding before our eyes. Israel has used the capture of two of its soldiers in Lebanon as an excuse for an all-out air and naval bombardment against Lebanese civilian targets. However, a number of commentators have pointed out that such a massive attack requires weeks if not months of preparation that could not be done overnight in response to the capture of the soldiers.

Regardless, in the first two days of the Israeli military attack on Lebanon more than a hundred civilians, including Canadians, have been killed by Israeli bombs (gifts from U.S. taxpayers). The Beirut International Airport has been repeatedly bombed, as have residential neighborhoods, roads, bridges, ports, and power stations.

Soldiers are a legitimate military target. Civilians, civilian neighborhoods, tourists, and international airports are not. Under the Nuremberg standard used to sentence Nazi war criminals to death, the Israeli government is clearly guilty of war crimes.

Meanwhile, the Israelis are committing identical war crimes in Gaza. Again Israel's excuse is the capture of an Israeli soldier. However, the distinguished Israeli professor Ran HaCohen said that the Israeli army "had been demanding a massive attack on Gaza long before the Israeli soldier was kidnapped."

By blocking UN Security Council action against Israel for its massacre of civilians in Gaza, the Bush regime has made itself complicit in these monstrous war crimes. Just as Germans who supported Hitler were deemed to be complicit in his war crimes, Americans who support Bush are complicit in Bush's war crimes.

Hezbollah is not the Lebanese government. It does not rule Lebanon. Hezbollah is the militia organization founded in 1982 in response to Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Hezbollah defeated the Israeli army and drove out the Israeli invaders six years ago.

According to the BBC, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said that the two Israeli soldiers "were captured to pressure Israel to release the thousands of Palestinian prisoners in its jails," especially the women and children.

The BBC also notes that although Hezbollah operates "from Lebanese territory and the militant group has two ministers in the Lebanese government, the central government is almost powerless to influence the militant group." (Note that the BBC applies the loaded word "militant" to Hezbollah but not to Israel.) Hezbollah, reports the BBC, "is also very popular in Lebanon and highly respected for its political activities, social services, and its military record against Israel."

The prime minister of Lebanon, who was installed with President Bush's approval when Syria, under Bush's pressure, recently withdrew its troops from Lebanon, has twice appealed to Bush to pressure Israel to stop its criminal attacks. Our great moral, democratic, Christian leader has twice rebuffed the appeal from the legal representative of the Lebanese people. Instead, Bush is willingly going along with the 1996 neocon script. Bush is laying the blame on Syria and Iran, exactly as the neocon script calls for him to do.

When Bush demands that Syria "stop Hezbollah attacks," he forgets that he was the one who forced Syria out of Lebanon (to enable Israel to attack Lebanon). If Americans were attentive, they would be ashamed to witness "their" president acting as an Israeli propagandist.

Fox "News," CNN, and the rest of the Bush propaganda ministry are echoing the lie that innocent Israel is under attack from the "terrorist states" of Syria and Iran through their surrogate, Hezbollah. Americans, who are sick of the Iraq occupation and want the troops home, are being fooled again and set up for wider war in the Middle East.

Evangelical "Christians" are part of the propaganda show. Three thousand of them, under the lead of the Rev. John C. Hagee, are heading to Washington for a "Washington/Israel summit" to demand, needlessly, that the neocon Bush regime show "stronger support for Israel."

It is difficult to see how Bush could show any stronger support without using the U.S. military to assist Israel in its attacks, which is, of course, what the "Christian" Rev. Hagee intends when he declares: "There's a new Hitler in the Middle East [he doesn't mean Bush or Olmert]. The only way he will be stopped will be by a preemptive military strike in Iran."

Present at Rev. Hagee's "Washington/Israel Summit" will be Israel's former Minister of Defense, Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya'alon, Israeli Ambassador Daniel Ayalon, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, Republican Senators Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, and Gary Bauer.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful lobby in Washington, expressed its thanks to Rev. Hagee for demonstrating "the depth and breadth of American support" for Israel. Recently, AIPAC has been under investigation as a suspected nest for Israeli spies.

David Brog, former chief of staff for Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, has gone to work for Rev. Hagee. Brog, who is Jewish, says he works for Hagee's evangelical enterprise because "we're bringing into a pro-Israel camp millions of Christians who love Israel and giving them a political voice. Israel's enemies are our enemies, and this group instinctively understands that." Brog goes on to say that Hagee's evangelicals understand that they are not supposed to talk about Jesus, only about saving Israel: "Christians who work with Jews in supporting Israel realize how sensitive we are in talking about Jesus. They realize it will interfere with what they are trying to do."

Gentle reader, is this an admission that evangelicals have set aside Jesus for war? Do these bloody-minded evangelicals really believe they will be wafted to Heaven for helping Israel involve the U.S. in more war? Have evangelicals forgotten that "an eye for an eye" is Old Testament? "Turn the other cheek" is New Testament.

On July 14, Reuters reported that alone among Christians, the "Vatican condemns Israel for attacks on Lebanon."

Whose delusion is the greatest – the evangelical "rapture" delusion, the neocon delusion about American power, or the Zionist delusion? The three together mean disaster for America, Israel, and the world.

One of the great evangelical/Zionist/neocon myths is that "tiny Israel" armed with 200 nuclear weapons is threatened by Muslim Middle Eastern countries. In actual fact, Egypt and Pakistan, which have the bulk of the Middle Eastern Muslim population, are ruled by American puppets. Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the oil emirates are totally dependent on U.S. protection and, thereby, are also under the American thumb. Iran is Persian, not Arab, and has no common borders with Israel. Hezbollah was created when Israel tried to seize Lebanon in 1982. Hamas is a Palestinian response to the atrocities Palestinians have suffered for a half century at Israel's hands.

Israel's land-stealing policy is the source of Middle Eastern instability. America is hated because American money and weapons are what enable Israel to steal Palestine from Palestinians.

As numerous Middle East experts have pointed out, what is decried as "Arab terrorism against Israel" is, in fact, the only tactic Muslims have for calling the world's attention to the plight of the Palestinians, about which Americans are generally ignorant.

It is absurd for Bush to condemn Syria for not behaving as an American puppet and for not fighting Israel's battles by taking on Hezbollah. Syria and Iran (and Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion) are the only Middle Eastern countries independent of American control. It is far beyond the boundaries of reason and morality to expect these two remaining independent countries to give up their independence in order to enable Israel to steal Palestine and southern Lebanon.

It is the refusal of Syria and Iran (and Saddam Hussein's Iraq) to stand with Israel against Palestine that has made them targets for American attack. Neocons have total control of U.S. foreign policy in the Bush regime, and they have morphed our strategic interests into Israel's.

As the neoconservative architects of Bush's wars revealed in 1996, their concern lies with Israeli strategic objectives.

12. Degrading Behavior
The Middle East and the Barbarism of War from the Air
By Tom Engelhardt (from Tomdispatch.com)

Barbarism seems an obvious enough category. Ordinarily in our world, the barbarians are them. They act in ways that seem unimaginably primitive and brutal to us. For instance, they kidnap or capture someone, American or Iraqi, and cut off his head. Now, isn't that the definition of barbaric? Who does that anymore? The eighth century, or maybe the word "medieval" -– anyway, some brutal past time -- comes to mind immediately, and to the mass mind of our media even faster.

Similarly, to jump a little closer to modernity, they strap grenades, plastic explosives, bombs of various ingenious sorts fashioned in home labs, with nails or other bits of sharp metal added in to create instant shrapnel meant to rend human flesh, to maim and kill. Then they approach a target -- an Israeli bus filled with civilians and perhaps some soldiers, a pizza parlor in Jerusalem, a gathering of Shiite or Sunni worshippers at or near a mosque in Iraq or Pakistan, or of unemployed potential police or army recruits in Ramadi or Baghdad, or of shoppers in an Iraqi market somewhere in that country, or perhaps a foreigner on the streets of Kabul and they blow themselves up. Or they arm backpacks or bags and step onto trains in London, Madrid, Mumbai, and set them off.

Or, to up the technology and modernity a bit, they wire a car to explode, put a jihadist in the driver's seat , and drive it into -- well, this is now common enough that you can pick your target. Or perhaps they audaciously hijack four just-fuelled jets filled with passengers and run two of them into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and another into a field in Pennsylvania. This is, of course, the very definition of barbaric.

Now, let's jump a step further into our age of technological destruction, becoming less face-to-face, more impersonal, without, in the end, changing things that much. They send rockets from southern Lebanon (or even cruder ones from the Gaza Strip) against Israeli towns and cities. These rockets can only vaguely be aimed. Some can be brought into the general vicinity of an inhabited area; others, more advanced, into specific urban neighborhoods many tens of miles away -- and then they detonate, killing whoever is in the vicinity, which normally means civilians just living their lives, even, in one recent Hezbollah volley aimed at Nazareth, two Israeli Arab children . In this process, thousands of Israelis have been temporarily driven from their homes.

In the case of rockets by the hundreds lofted into Israel by an armed, organized militia, meant to terrorize and harm civilian populations, these are undoubtedly war crimes . Above all, they represent a kind of barbarism that -- with the possible exception of some of those advanced Hezbollah rockets -- feels primitive to us. Despite the explosives, cars, planes, all so basic to our modern way of life, such acts still seem redolent of ancient, less civilized times when people did especially cruel things to each other face to face.

The Religion of Air Power

That's them . But what about us? On our we/they planet, most groups don't consider themselves barbarians. Nonetheless, we have largely achieved non-barbaric status in an interesting way -- by removing the most essential aspect of the American (and, right now, Israeli) way of war from the category of the barbaric. I'm talking, of course, about air power, about raining destruction down on the earth from the skies, and about the belief -- so common, so long-lasting, so deep-seated -- that bombing others, including civilian populations, is a "strategic" thing to do; that air power can, in relatively swift measure, break the "will" not just of the enemy, but of that enemy's society; and that such a way of war is the royal path to victory.

This set of beliefs was common to air-power advocates even before modern air war had been tested, and repeated unsuccessful attempts to put these convictions into practice have never really shaken -- not for long anyway – what is essentially a war-making religion. The result has been the development of the most barbaric style of warfare imaginable, one that has seldom succeeded in breaking any societal will, though it has destroyed innumerable bodies, lives, stretches of countryside, villages, towns, and cities.

Even today, we find Israeli military strategists saying things that could have been put in the mouths of their air-power-loving predecessors endless decades ago. The New York Times' Steven Erlanger , for instance, recently quoted an unnamed "senior Israeli commander" this way: "He predicted that Israel would stick largely to air power for now… ‘A ground maneuver won't solve the problem of the long-range missiles,' he said. ‘The problem is the will to launch. We have to break the will of Hezbollah…'" Don't hold your breath is the first lesson history teaches on this particular assessment of the powers of air war; the second is that, a decade from now, some other "senior commander" in some other country will be saying the same thing, word for word.

When it comes to brutality, the fact is that ancient times have gotten a bad rap. Nothing in history was more brutal than the last century's style of war-making -- than those two world wars with their air armadas, backed by the most advanced industrial systems on the planet. Powerful countries then bent every elbow, every brain, to support the destruction of other human beings en masse, not to speak of the Holocaust (which was assembly-line warfare in another form), and the various colonial and Cold War campaigns that went on in the Third World from the 1940s on; which, in places like Korea and Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, substituted the devastation of air power locally for a war between the two superpowers which might have employed the mightiest air weaponry of all to scour the Earth.

It may be that the human capacity for brutality, for barbarism, hasn't changed much since the eighth century, but the industrial revolution -- and in particular the rise of the airplane -- opened up new landscapes to brutality; while the view from behind the gun-sight, then the bomb-sight, and finally the missile-sight slowly widened until all of humanity was taken in. From the lofty, godlike vantage point of the strategic as well as the literal heavens, the military and the civilian began to blur on the ground. Soldiers and citizens, conscripts and refugees alike, became nothing but tiny, indistinguishable hordes of ants, or nothing at all but the structures that housed them, or even just concepts, indistinguishable one from the other.

One Plane, One Bomb

As far as anyone knows, the first bomb was dropped by hand over the Italian colony of Libya. According to Sven Lindqvist's A History of Bombing , one Lieutenant Giulio Cavotti "leaned out of his delicate monoplane and dropped the bomb -- a Danish Haasen hand grenade -- on the North African oasis Tagiura, near Tripoli. Several moments later, he attacked the oasis Ain Zara. Four bombs in total, each weighing two kilos, were dropped during this first air attack."

That was 1911 and the damage was minimal. Only thirty-four years later, vast armadas of B-17s and B-29s were taking off, up to a thousand planes at a time, to bomb Germany and Japan. In the case of Tokyo -- then constructed almost totally out of highly flammable materials -- a single raid carrying incendiary bombs and napalm that began just after midnight on March 10, 1945 proved capable of incinerating or killing at least 90,000 people, possibly many more, from such a height that the dead could not be seen (though the stench of burning flesh carried up to the planes). The first American planes to arrive over the city, wrote historian Michael Sherry in his book, The Rise of American Air Power , "carved out an X of flames across one of the world's most densely packed residential districts; followers fed and broadened it for some three hours thereafter."

What descended from the skies, as James Carroll puts it in his new book, House of War , was "1,665 tons of pure fire… the most efficient and deliberate act of arson in history. The consequent firestorm obliterated fifteen square miles, which included both residential and industrial areas. Fires raged for four days." It was the bonfire of bonfires and not a single American plane was shot down.

On August 6, 1945, all the power of that vast air armada was again reduced to a single plane, the Enola Gay , and a single bomb, "Little Boy," dropped near a single bridge in a single city, Hiroshima, which in a single moment of a sort never before experienced on the planet did what it had taken 300 B-29s and many hours to do to Tokyo. In those two cities -- as well as Dresden and other German and Japanese cities subjected to "strategic bombing" -- the dead (perhaps 900,000 in Japan and 600,000 in Germany) were invariably preponderantly civilian, and far too distant to be seen by plane crews often dropping their bomb loads in the dark of night, giving the scene below the look of Hell on Earth.

So 1911: one plane, one bomb. 1945: one plane, one bomb -- but this time at least 120,000 dead, possibly many more. Two bookmarks less than four decades apart on the first chapter of a history of the invention of a new kind of warfare, a new kind of barbarism that, by now, is the way we expect war to be made, a way that no longer strikes us as barbaric at all. This wasn't always the case.

The Shock of the New

When military air power was in its infancy and silent films still ruled the movie theaters, the first air-war films presented pilots as knights of the heavens, engaging in courageous, chivalric, one-on-one combat in the skies. As that image reflects, in the wake of the meat-grinder of trench warfare in World War I, the medieval actually seemed far less brutal, a time much preferable to those years in which young men had died by their hundreds of thousands, anonymously, from machine guns, artillery, poison gas, all the lovely inventions of industrial civilization, ground into the mud of no-man's-land, often without managing to move their lines or the enemy's more than a few hundred yards.

The image of chivalric knights in planes jousting in the skies slowly disappeared from American screens, as after the 1950s would, by and large, air power itself even as the war film went on (and on and on). It can last be found perhaps in the film Top Gun ; in old Peanuts comics in which Snoopy remains forever the Red Baron; and, of course, post- Star Wars , in the fantasy realm of outer space where Jedi Knights took up lethal sky-jousting in the late 1970s, X-wing fighter to X-wing fighter, and in zillions of video games to follow. In the meantime, the one-way air slaughter in South Vietnam would be largely left out of the burst of Vietnam films that would start hitting the screen from the late 1970s on.

In the real, off-screen world, that courtly medieval image of air power disappeared fast indeed. As World War II came ever closer and it became more apparent what air power was best at -- what would now be called "collateral damage" -- the shock set in. When civilians were first purposely targeted and bombed in the industrializing world rather than in colonies like Iraq, the act was initially widely condemned as inhuman by a startled world.

People were horrified when, during the Spanish Civil War in 1937, Hitler's Condor Legion and planes from fascist Italy repeatedly bombed the Basque town of Guernica, engulfing most of its buildings in a firestorm that killed hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians. If you want to get a sense of the power of that act to shock then, view Picasso's famous painting of protest done almost immediately in response. (When Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the UN in February 2003 to deliver his now infamous speech explaining what we supposedly knew about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, UN officials -- possibly at the request of the Bush administration -- covered over a tapestry of the painting that happened to be positioned where Powell would have to pass on his way to deliver his speech and where press comments would be offered afterwards.)

Later in 1937, as the Japanese began their campaign to conquer China, they bombed a number of Chinese cities. A single shot of a Chinese baby wailing amid the ruins, published in Life magazine, was enough to horrify Americans (even though the actual photo may have been doctored). Air power was then seen as nothing but a new kind of barbarism. According to historian Sherry, "In 1937 and 1938, [President Roosevelt] had the State Department condemn Japanese bombing of civilians in China as ‘barbarous' violations of the ‘elementary principles' of modern morality." Meanwhile, observers checking out what effect the bombing of civilians had on the "will" of society offered nothing but bad news to the strategists of air power. As Sherry writes:

"In the Saturday Evening Post , an American army officer observed that bombing had proven ‘disappointing to the theorists of peacetime.' When Franco's rebels bombed Madrid, ‘Did the Madrilenos sue for peace? No, they shook futile fists at the murderers in the sky and muttered, ‘Swine.' His conclusion: ‘Terrorism from the air has been tried and found wanting. Bombing, far from softening the civil will, hardens it.'"

Already similar things are being written about the Lebanese, though, in our media, terms like "barbarism" and "terrorism" are unlikely to be applied to Israel's war from the heavens. New York Times correspondent Sabrina Tavernise , for instance, reported the following from the site of a destroyed apartment building in the bomb-shocked southern Lebanese port of Tyre:

"Whatever the target, the result was an emotional outpouring in support of Hezbollah. Standing near a cluster of dangling electrical wires, a group of men began to chant. ‘By our blood and our soul, we'll fight for you, Nasrallah!' they said, referring to Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah. In a foggy double image, another small group chanted the same thing, as if answering, on the other side of the smoke."

World War II began with the German bombing of Warsaw. On September 9, 1939, according to Carroll, President Roosevelt "beseeched the war leaders on both sides to ‘under no circumstances undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations of unfortified cities.'" Then came, the terror-bombing of Rotterdam and Hitler's Blitz against England in which tens of thousands of British civilians died and many more were displaced, each event proving but another systemic shock to what was left of global opinion, another unimaginable act by the planet's reigning barbarians.

British civilians, of course, still retain a deserved reputation for the stiff-upper-lip-style bravery with which they comported themselves in the face of a merciless German air offensive against their cities that knew no bounds. No wills were broken there, nor would they be in Russia (where, in 1942, perhaps 40,000 were killed in German air attacks on the city of Stalingrad alone) -- any more than they would be in Germany by the far more massive Allied air offensive against the German population.

All of this, of course, came before it was clear that the United States could design and churn out planes faster, in greater numbers, and with more fire power than any country on the planet and then wield air power far more massively and brutally than anyone had previously been capable of doing. That was before the U.S. and Britain decided to fight fire with fire by blitz- and terror-bombing Germany and Japan. (The U.S. moved more slowly and awkwardly than the British from "precision bombing" against targets like factories producing military equipment or oil-storage depots -- campaigns that largely failed -- to "area bombing" that was simply meant to annihilate vast numbers of civilians and destroy cities. But move American strategists did.) That was before Dresden and Hiroshima; before Pyongyang, along with much of the Korean peninsula, was reduced to rubble from the air in the Korean War; before the Plaine des Jarres was bombed back to the Stone Age in Laos in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before the B-52s were sent against the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong in the terror-bombing of Christmas 1972 to wring concessions out of the North Vietnamese at the peace table in Paris; before the first President Bush ended the first Gulf War with a "turkey shoot" on the "highway of death" as Saddam Hussein's largely conscript military fled Kuwait City in whatever vehicles were at hand; before we bombed the rubble in Afghanistan into further rubble in 2001, and before we shock-and awed Baghdad in 2003.

Taking the Sting Out of Air War

Somewhere in this process, a new language to describe air war began to develop -- after, in the Vietnam era, the first "smart bombs" and "precision-guided weapons" came on line. From then on, air attacks would, for instance, be termed "surgical" and civilian casualties dismissed as but "collateral damage." All of this helped removed the sting of barbarity from the form of war we had chosen to make our own (unless, of course, you happened to be one of those "collateral" people under those "surgical" strikes). Just consider, for a moment, that, with the advent of the first Gulf War, air power -- as it was being applied -- essentially became entertainment, a Disney-style, son-et-lumière spectacular over Baghdad to be watched in real time on television by a population of non-combatants from thousands of miles away.

With that same war, the Pentagon started calling press briefings and screening nose-cone photography, essentially little Iraqi snuff films, in which you actually looked through the precision-guided bomb or missile-sights yourself, found your target, and followed that missile or smart bomb right down to its explosive impact. If you were lucky, the Pentagon even let you check out the after-mission damage assessments. These films were so nifty, so like the high-tech video-game experience just then coming into being, that they were used by the Pentagon as reputation enhancers. From then on, Pentagon officials not only described their air weaponry as "surgical" in its abilities, but showed you the "surgery" (just as the Israelis have been doing with their footage of "precision" attacks in Lebanon). What you didn't see, of course, was the "collateral damage" which, when the Iraqis put it on-screen, was promptly dismissed as so much propaganda.

And yet this new form of air war had managed to move far indeed from the image of the knightly joust, from the sense, in fact, of battle at all. In those years, except over the far north of Korea during the Korean War or over North Vietnam and some parts of South Vietnam, American pilots, unless in helicopters, went into action (as Israeli ones do today) knowing that the dangers to them were usually minimal -- or, as over that Iraqi highway of death nonexistent. War from the air was in the process of becoming a one-way street of destruction.

At an extreme, with the arrival of fleets of Hellfire-missile-armed unmanned Predator drones over Iraq, the "warrior" would suddenly find himself seven thousand miles away at Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas, delivering "precision" strikes that almost always, somehow, managed to kill collaterally. In such cases, war and screen war have indeed merged.

This kind of war has the allure, from a military point of view, of ever less casualties on one end in return for ever more on the other. It must also instill a feeling of bloodless, godlike control over those enemy "ants" (until, of course, things begin to go wrong, as they always do) as well as a sense that the world can truly be "remade" from the air, by remote control, and at a great remove. This has to be a powerful, even a transporting fantasy for strategists, however regularly it may be denied by history.

Despite the cleansed language of air war, and no matter how good the targeting intelligence or smart the bomb (neither of which can be counted on), civilians who make the mistake of simply being alive and going about their daily business die in profusion whenever war descends from the heavens. This is the deepest reality of war today.

Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon… [Fill in the Blank]

In fact, the process of removing air power from the ranks of the barbaric, of making it, if not glorious (as in those visually startling moments when Baghdad was shock-and-awed), then completely humdrum, and so of no note whatsoever, has been remarkably successful in our world. In fact, we have loosed our air power regularly on the countryside of Afghanistan, and especially on rebellious urban areas of Iraq in "targeted" and "precise" attacks on insurgent concentrations and "al-Qaeda safe houses" (as well as in more wholesale assaults on the old city of Najaf and on the city of Fallujah) largely without comment or criticism. In the process, significant parts of two cities in a country we occupied and supposedly "liberated," were reduced to rubble and everywhere, civilians, not to speak of whole wedding parties , were blown away without our media paying much attention at all.

Our various air campaigns -- our signature way of war -- have hardly been noticed, and almost never focused on, by the large numbers of journalists embedded with U.S. forces or in one way or another on-the-ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. Remember, we're talking here about the dropping of up to 2,000 pound bombs regularly, over years, often in urban areas. Just imagine, if you live in a reasonably densely populated area, what it might mean collaterally to have such bombs or missiles hit your block or neighborhood, no matter how "accurate" their aim.

Until Seymour Hersh wrote a piece from Washington last November for the New Yorker , entitled "Up in the Air," our reporters had, with rare exceptions, simply refused to look up; and despite a flurry of attention then, to this day, our continuing air campaigns are largely ignored. Yet here is an Air Force summary of just a single , nondescript day of operations in Iraq, one of hundreds and hundreds of such days, some far more intense, since we invaded that country: "In total, coalition aircraft flew 46 close-air support missions for Operation Iraqi Freedom. These missions included support to coalition troops, infrastructure protection, reconstruction activities and operations to deter and disrupt terrorist activities."

And here's the summary of the same day in Afghanistan: "In total, coalition aircraft flew 32 close-air support missions in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. These missions included support to coalition and Afghan troops, reconstruction activities and route patrols." Note that, in Afghanistan, as the situation has worsened militarily and politically, the old Vietnam-era B-52s , the carpet-bombers of that war, have been called back into action, again without significant attention here.

Now, with the fervent backing of the Bush administration, another country is being "remade" from the air -- in this case, Lebanon. With the highest-tech American precision-guided and bunker -busting bombs , the Israelis have been launching air strike after strike, thousands of them, in that country. They have hit an international airport, the nation's largest milk factories ; a major food factory; aid convoys; Red Cross ambulances; a UN observer post ; a power plant; apartment complexes ; villages because they house or support the enemy; branches of banks because they might facilitate Hezbollah finances; the telecommunications system because of the messages that might pass along it; highways because they might transport weapons to the enemy; bridges because they might be crossed by those transporting weapons; a lighthouse in Beirut harbor for reasons unknown; trucks because they might be transporting those weapons (though they might also be transporting vegetables); families who just happen to be jammed into cars or minivans fleeing at the urging of the attackers who have turned at least 20% of all Lebanese (and probably many more ) into refugees, while creating a " landscape of death " (in the phrase of the superb Washington Post reporter Anthony Shadid) in the southern part of the country. In this process, civilian casualties have mounted steadily -- assumedly far beyond the figure of just over 400 now regularly being cited in our press, because Lebanon has no way to search the rubble of its bombed buildings for the dead; nor, right now, the time and ability to do an accurate count of those who died more or less in the open.

And yet, of course, the "will" of the enemy is not broken and, among Israel's leaders and its citizens, frustration mounts; so threats of more and worse are made and worse weapons are brought into play; and wider targeting fields are opened up; and what might faintly pass for "precision bombing" is increasingly abandoned for the equivalent of "area bombing." And the full support system -- which is simply society -- for the movement in question becomes the "will" that must be broken; and in this process, what we call "collateral damage" is moved, by the essential barbaric logic of air power, front and center, directly into the crosshairs.

Already Israeli Prime Minister Olmert is "vowing" to use the " most severe measures " to end Hezbollah rocket attacks -- and in the context of the present air assault that is a frightening threat. All this because, as in Iraq, as elsewhere, air power has once again run up against another kind of power, a fierce people power (quite capable of its own barbarities) that, over the decades, the bomb and missile has proved frustratingly incapable of dismantling or wiping out. Already, as the Guardian's Ian Black points out, "The original objective of ‘breaking Hizbullah' has been quietly watered down to ‘weakening Hizbullah.'"

In such a war, with such an enemy, the normal statistics of military victory may add up only to defeat , a further frustration that only tends to ratchet the destruction higher over time. Adam Shatz put this well recently in the Nation when he wrote:

"[Hezbollah leader] Nasrallah is under no illusions that his small guerrilla movement can defeat the Israeli Army. But he can lose militarily and still score a political victory, particularly if the Israelis continue visiting suffering on Lebanon, whose government, as they well know, is powerless to control Hezbollah. Nasrallah, whom the Israelis attempted to assassinate on July 19 with a twenty-three-ton bomb attack on an alleged Hezbollah bunker, is doubtless aware that he may share the fate of his predecessor, Abbas Musawi, who was killed in an Israeli helicopter gunship attack in 1992. But Hezbollah outlived Musawi and grew exponentially, thanks in part to its followers' passion for martyrdom. To some, Nasrallah's raid may look like a death wish. But it is almost impossible to defeat someone who has no fear of death."

As the Israelis are rediscovering -- though, by now, you'd think that military planners with half a brain wouldn't have to destroy a country to do so -- that it is impossible to "surgically" separate a movement and its supporters from the air. When you try, you invariably do the opposite; fusing them ever more closely, while creating an even larger, ever angrier base for the movement whose essence is, in any case, never literal geography, never simply a set of villages or bunkers or military supplies to be taken and destroyed.

Degrading Behavior

Someday someone will take up the grim study of the cleansing language of air power. Every air war, it seems, now has its new words meant to take the sting out of its essential barbarism. In the case of the Israeli air assault on Lebanon, the term -- old in the military world but never before so widely adopted in such a commonplace way -- is "degrading," not as at Abu Ghraib, but as in "to impair in physical structure or function." It was once a technical military term; in this round of air war, however, it is being used to cover a range of sins.

Try Googling the term. It turns out to be almost literally everywhere. It can be found in just about any article on Israel's air war, used in this fashion: " CBS News senior White House correspondent Bill Plante reports that around the world the U.S.' opposition to a cease-fire is viewed as the U.S. giving Israel a ‘green-light' to degrade the military capability of Hezbollah." Or in a lead in a New York Times piece this way: "The outlines of an American-Israeli consensus began to emerge Tuesday in which Israel would continue to bombard Lebanon for about another week to degrade Hezbollah's capabilities, officials of the two countries said." Or more generally, as in a Washington Post piece, in this fashion: "In the administration's view, the new conflict is not just a crisis to be managed. It is also an opportunity to seriously degrade a big threat in the region, just as Bush believes he is doing in Iraq." Or as Henry A. Crumpton , the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism, wielded it: "It's not just about the missiles and launchers… [I]t's about the roads and transport, the ability to command and control. All that is being degraded. But it's going to take a long time. I don't believe this is going to be over in the next couple of days." Or as an Israeli general at a Washington think tank told the Washington Times : "Israel has taken it upon itself to degrade Hezbollah's military capabilities." Sometimes degradation of this sort can be quantified : "A senior Israeli official said Friday that the attacks to date had degraded Hezbollah's military strength by roughly half, but that the campaign could go on for two more weeks or longer." More often, it's a useful term exactly because it's wonderfully vague, quite resistant to quantification, the very opposite of "precision" in its ambiguity, and capable of taking some of the sting out of what is actually happening. It turns the barbarity of air war into something close to a natural process -- of, perhaps, erosion, of wearing down over time.

As air wars go, the one in Lebanon may seem strikingly directed against the civilian infrastructure and against society; in that, however, it is historically anything but unique. It might even be said that war from the air, since first launched in Europe's colonies early in the last century, has always been essentially directed against civilians. As in World War II, air power -- no matter its stated targets -- almost invariably turns out to be worst for civilians and, in the end, to be aimed at society itself. In that way, its damage is anything but "collateral," never truly "surgical," and never in its overall effect "precise." Even when it doesn't start that way, the frustration of not working as planned, of not breaking the "will," invariably leads, as with the Israelis, to ever wider, ever fiercer versions of the same, which, if allowed to proceed to their logical conclusion, will bring down not society's will, but society itself.

For the Lebanese prime minister what Israel has been doing to his country may be "barbaric destruction" ; but, in our world, air power has long been robbed of its barbarism (suicide air missions excepted). For us, air war involves dumb hits by smart bombs, collateral damage, and surgery that may do in the patient, but it's not barbaric. For that you need to personally cut off a head.

(Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, "a regular antidote to the mainstream media", is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture , a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, is now out in paperback.)