Meanwhile, in poor Gaza, the Israelis are behaving badly

1. 'Gaza is a jail. Nobody is allowed to leave. We are all starving now'
By Patrick Cockburn in Gaza

Gaza is dying. The Israeli siege of the Palestinian enclave is so tight that its people are on the edge of starvation. Here on the shores of the Mediterranean a great tragedy is taking place that is being ignored because the world's attention has been diverted by wars in Lebanon and Iraq.

A whole society is being destroyed. There are 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in the most heavily populated area in the world. Israel has stopped all trade. It has even forbidden fishermen to go far from the shore so they wade into the surf to try vainly to catch fish with hand-thrown nets.

Many people are being killed by Israeli incursions that occur every day by land and air. A total of 262 people have been killed and 1,200 wounded, of whom 60 had arms or legs amputated, since 25 June, says Dr Juma al-Saqa, the director of the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City which is fast running out of medicine. Of these, 64 were children and 26 women. This bloody conflict in Gaza has so far received only a fraction of the attention given by the international media to the war in Lebanon.

It was on 25 June that the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was taken captive and two other soldiers were killed by Palestinian militants who used a tunnel to get out of the Gaza Strip. In the aftermath of this, writes Gideon Levy in the daily Haaretz, the Israeli army "has been rampaging through Gaza - there's no other word to describe it - killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately". Gaza has essentially been reoccupied since Israeli troops and tanks come and go at will. In the northern district of Shajhayeh they took over several houses last week and stayed five days. By the time they withdrew, 22 Palestinians had been killed, three houses were destroyed and groves of olive, citrus and almond trees had been bulldozed.

Fuad al-Tuba, the 61-year-old farmer who owned a farm here, said: "They even destroyed 22 of my bee-hives and killed four sheep." He pointed sadly to a field, its brown sandy earth churned up by tracks of bulldozers, where the stumps of trees and broken branches with wilting leaves lay in heaps. Near by a yellow car was standing on its nose in the middle of a heap of concrete blocks that had once been a small house.

His son Baher al-Tuba described how for five days Israeli soldiers confined him and his relatives to one room in his house where they survived by drinking water from a fish pond. "Snipers took up positions in the windows and shot at anybody who came near," he said. "They killed one of my neighbours called Fathi Abu Gumbuz who was 56 years old and just went out to get water."

Sometimes the Israeli army gives a warning before a house is destroyed. The sound that Palestinians most dread is an unknown voice on their cell phone saying they have half an hour to leave their home before it is hit by bombs or missiles. There is no appeal.

But it is not the Israeli incursions alone that are destroying Gaza and its people. In the understated prose of a World Bank report published last month, the West Bank and Gaza face "a year of unprecedented economic recession. Real incomes may contract by at least a third in 2006 and poverty to affect close to two thirds of the population." Poverty in this case means a per capita income of under $2 (£1.06) a day.

There are signs of desperation everywhere. Crime is increasing. People do anything to feed their families. Israeli troops entered the Gaza industrial zone to search for tunnels and kicked out the Palestinian police. When the Israelis withdrew they were replaced not by the police but by looters. On one day this week there were three donkey carts removing twisted scrap metal from the remains of factories that once employed thousands.

"It is the worst year for us since 1948 [when Palestinian refugees first poured into Gaza]," says Dr Maged Abu-Ramadan, a former ophthalmologist who is mayor of Gaza City. "Gaza is a jail. Neither people nor goods are allowed to leave it. People are already starving. They try to live on bread and falafel and a few tomatoes and cucumbers they grow themselves."

The few ways that Gazans had of making money have disappeared. Dr Abu-Ramadan says the Israelis "have destroyed 70 per cent of our orange groves in order to create security zones." Carnations and strawberries, two of Gaza's main exports, were thrown away or left to rot. An Israeli air strike destroyed the electric power station so 55 per cent of power was lost. Electricity supply is now becoming almost as intermittent as in Baghdad.

The Israeli assault over the past two months struck a society already hit by the withdrawal of EU subsidies after the election of Hamas as the Palestinian government in March. Israel is withholding taxes owed on goods entering Gaza. Under US pressure, Arab banks abroad will not transfer funds to the government.

Two thirds of people are unemployed and the remaining third who mostly work for the state are not being paid. Gaza is now by far the poorest region on the Mediterranean. Per capita annual income is $700, compared with $20,000 in Israel. Conditions are much worse than in Lebanon where Hizbollah liberally compensates war victims for loss of their houses. If Gaza did not have enough troubles this week there were protest strikes and marches by unpaid soldiers, police and security men. These were organised by Fatah, the movement of the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, which lost the election to Hamas in January. His supporters marched through the streets waving their Kalashnikovs in the air. "Abu Mazen you are brave," they shouted. "Save us from this disaster." Sour-looking Hamas gunmen kept a low profile during the demonstration but the two sides are not far from fighting it out in the streets.

The Israeli siege and the European boycott are a collective punishment of everybody in Gaza. The gunmen are unlikely to be deterred. In a bed in Shifa Hospital was a sturdy young man called Ala Hejairi with wounds to his neck, legs, chest and stomach. "I was laying an anti-tank mine last week in Shajhayeh when I was hit by fire from an Israeli drone," he said. "I will return to the resistance when I am better. Why should I worry? If I die I will die a martyr and go to paradise."

His father, Adel, said he was proud of what his son had done adding that three of his nephews were already martyrs. He supported the Hamas government: "Arab and Western countries want to destroy this government because it is the government of the resistance."

As the economy collapses there will be many more young men in Gaza willing to take Ala Hejairi's place. Untrained and ill-armed most will be killed. But the destruction of Gaza, now under way, will ensure that no peace is possible in the Middle East for generations to come.

The deadly toll

* After the kidnap of Cpl Gilad Shalit by Palestinians on 25 June, Israel launched a massive offensive and blockade of Gaza under the operation name Summer Rains.

* The Gaza Strip's 1.3 million inhabitants, 33 per cent of whom live in refugee camps, have been under attack for 74 days.

* More than 260 Palestinians, including 64 children and 26 women, have been killed since 25 June. One in five is a child. One Israeli soldier has been killed and 26 have been wounded.

* 1,200 Palestinians have been injured, including up to 60 amputations. A third of victims brought to hospital are children.

* Israeli warplanes have launched more than 250 raids on Gaza, hitting the two power stations and the foreign and Information ministries.

* At least 120 Palestinian structures including houses, workshops and greenhouses have been destroyed and 160 damaged by the Israelis.

* The UN has criticised Israel's bombing, which has caused an estimated $1.8bn in damage to the electricity grid and leaving more than a million people without regular access to drinking water.

* The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem says 76 Palestinians, including 19 children, were killed by Israeli forces in August alone. Evidence shows at least 53 per cent were not participating in hostilities.

* In the latest outbreak of violence, three Palestinians were killed yesterday when Israeli troops raided a West Bank town in search of a wanted militant. Two of those killed were unarmed, according to witnesses.


2. The Crisis in Palestine (from Lenin’s Tomb, http://leninology.blogspot.com)

There has been some brief attention to th suffering being inflicted on Gaza in the media. The UN is issuing warnings of a humanitarian disaster. Gaza has some time been a vast, open-air prison, and Patrick Cockburn of the Independent has described some of the effects of the recent crackdown. There is now a general strike across Palestine by workers who have not had their wages, largely on account of the EU blockade and Israel's ongoing destruction of the Palestinian economy.

Underlying this is a huge problem for any two-states solution, aside from the obvious problem that Israel would sooner destroy the Palestinians than allow a two-state settlement ever to emerge. An article by ILO economist Phillipe Egger in the most recent edition of the International Labour Review outlines the problem. The dimensions of the economic crisis being inflicted on Palestine are as follows: average per capita income has dropped by a third since 1999; unemployment consistently averages at 27% (certainly an underestimate); the number of people living below the poverty line increased from 20% in 1999 to 50% in 2003. The Palestinian economy is now much smaller than it was in 1994, and its economic contraction is actually worse than that experienced by the US during the Great Depression. The proximate cause has been Israel's imposition of tight restrictions on the movement of labour and goods in and out of Palestine. The number of Palestinians working in Israel was cut in half between 2000 and 2002. The new policy is symbolised by the 'separation wall', which not only grabbed huge portions of land while leaving the militarised Zionist settlements intact but also blocked the formal and informal economic connections across the border. These are the measures that produced such dependency on international aid.

However, the broader issue that as a result of Israeli policy, Palestine was already largely dependent on the heavily subsidised Israeli economy. The economics of Oslo involved allowing Israel easy access to this cheap supply of Palestinian labour which in the short run allowed measurable Palestinian growth. In the long run, however, such dependency is not only a result of political domination, but is sustainable, especially given the expected growth in the Palestinian labour market. No independent state is viable without an independent economy, but Israel's incursions into the West Bank, its uprooting of farmland, destruction of hothouses, its crackdowns on aid, trade and labour have all ensured that nothing of the kind could develop in Palestine. Israel cannot, for reasons explained elsewhere, tolerate a truly independent Palestinian state. Hence the attempts at frustrating political unity in Palestine. They, like the 'international community' that has been happily starving Palestinians, will only accept a pliant, discontiguous set of bantustans under a corruptible pro-Israeli leadership.

In the meantime, the policy is one of enforced starvation, immiseration and the occasional bout of state terror.


3. "I'm a Leftist, But ... "
The Liberals' War on Lebanon
By URI AVNERY

Ionce saw a nice sketch in a political cabaret: on the stage several people were speaking in unconnected sentences, all of which ended with the word "but". For example: "Some of my best friends are Jews, but", "I have nothing against blacks, but", "I really detest racism, but"

During the recent war, I frequently heard similar phrases: "I am a leftist, but" These words were invariably - but invariably! - followed by a rightist statement.

It seems that we have a whole community of "leftists-but", who propose the annihilation of entire Lebanese villages, the turning of Lebanon into a heap of ruins, the destruction over the heads of its inhabitants of any building where Hassan Nasrallah may (or may not) be staying. And, while we are at it, also to wipe Gaza from the face of the earth.

Encountering such sentences on TV, on the radio and in the papers, I am sometimes tempted to pray: Dear God, give me honest to goodness fascists instead of these leftists-but.

* * *

WHILE ANALYZING the Second Lebanon War, it is impossible to ignore the role played by the Leftists, with or without quotation marks, during the fighting.

The day before yesterday I saw on TV an interview with the playwright Joshua Sobol, a likeable person known as a regular leftist. He explained that this war has brought us important benefits, and sang the praises of the Minister of Defense, Amir Peretz.

Sobol is not alone. When the government started this war, an impressive line-up of writers supported it. Amos Oz, A.B.Yehoshua and David Grossman, who regularly appear as a political trio, were united again in their support of the government and used all their considerable verbal talents to justify the war. They were not satisfied with that: some days after the beginning of the war, the three published a joint ad in the papers, expressing their enthusiastic backing for the operation.

Their support was not purely passive. Amos Oz, a writer with considerable literary prestige throughout the world, wrote an article in favor of the war, which appeared in several respected foreign newspapers. I wouldn't be surprised if "somebody" helped to distribute it. His two comrades, too, were active in propagating the war, together with a long row of writers like Yoram Kaniuk, assorted artists and intellectuals, real or imagined. All of them volunteered for the propaganda reserves without waiting to be drafted.

I doubt that the war would have attained its monstrous dimensions without the massive support of Leftists-but, which made it possible to form a "wall to wall consensus ", ignoring the protest of the consistent peace camp. This consensus carried away the Meretz party, whose guru Amos Oz is, and Peace Now, in whose mass rallies Amos Oz used to be the main speaker (when they were still able to stage mass rallies).

Some people are now pretending that this group was really against the war. To whit: some days before the end they published a second tripartite ad, this time calling for its termination. At the same time, Meretz and Peace Now also changed course. But not one of them apologized or showed remorse for their prior support for the killing and devastation. Their new position was: the war was indeed very good, but now the time has come to put an end to it.

* * *

WHAT IS the logic of this position?

The government decided on the attack in apparent response to the action of Hizbullah, which captured two Israeli soldiers on the Israeli side of the border and proposed exchanging them for Lebanese prisoners held in Israel. In this action, several comrades of the captured soldiers were killed, and some more soldiers died when their tank hit a mine while pursuing the captors on the Lebanese side of the border.

The Israeli public reacted, of course, with fury and cries for revenge. But one would have expected intellectuals, and especially "leftist" ones, to keep a cool head, even - and perhaps especially - during times of emotional upheaval. In similar circumstances, even Ariel Sharon avoided extreme reactions and agreed to exchange prisoners.

Those who did not possess the courage for that ("oz" in Hebrew means strength and courage), or those who really believed that the Hizbullah action must be met with a strong reaction, could have justified a limited military reprisal. On that day it was legitimate to join those who demanded such a reasonable reaction. But already after 48 hours, it was clear that the reaction was not proportional but massive. It was not designed to "send a message" to Hizbullah and all the Lebanese people that such a provocation would not go unpunished. It had quite different aims.

On the second or third day of the war, it was already quite clear to any thinking person - and don't intellectuals pride themselves on being just that? - that this was a real war, which went far beyond the problem of the two captured soldiers. The systematic bombardment of the Lebanese infrastructure bore witness to the fact that it was prepared well in advance and that its aim was the annihilation of Hizbullah and the changing of the political realities in Lebanon. For that it was enough to listen to the declarations of Olmert, Peretz and Halutz.

* * *

THAT WAS the real test of the intellectuals. One can forgive them for their first reaction. One can say that they were carried away, as happens to people at the beginning of a war. One can say that they did not understand the context (a terrible accusation, when thrown in the face of intellectuals). But from the third day on, such justifications and excuses do not stand up anymore.

The army chiefs did not hide the horrible devastation they were causing in Lebanon - on the contrary, they boasted about it. It was clear that appalling suffering was being caused to hundreds of thousands, that civilians were being killed in large numbers, that many, many people were losing all their possessions in the villages and towns that were being systematically destroyed. At the same time, great suffering was caused to the population of Northern Israel.

How could writers with a conscience, and even more so "leftists" with a humane outlook, keep quiet while these atrocities were being committed? How could they go on serving the propaganda machine of the war?

True, the writers could not know that already on the sixth day of the war the army chiefs had told the government that all achievable aims of the war had by now been achieved, and that nothing more could be attained (such as the return of the prisoners, the restoration of the army's deterring power, the disarming of Hizbullah etc.) In other words, that even from a purely military point of view, there was no point continuing the horror, which nevertheless went on for another 27 days and nights. But if any protest from the famous writers, even a faint one, had been heard, it could have induced the political and military leaders to think again. But there was no such protest.

When the writers did wake up after all, in the 5th (fifth!) week of the war, and called for its termination, it was too late. There was no need for them anymore. The cumbersome machinery of the UN was already engaged in achieving the cessation of hostilities.

One tragic event was the death in combat of David Grossman's son, Uri, in those last hours of the war.

* * *

WHAT CAUSED the "Left-but" to behave like that?

One can find superficial reasons. It is very hard for leftists to rise up against a government in which the Labor party plays an important role. That was also true in 2000, when the Labor leader, Ehud Barak, wrecked the Camp David summit and returned with the fatal slogan: "We have no partner! There is no one to talk with!"

But that was not true in the First Lebanon War, in 1982, when the Likud was in power. Because even then the "Left-but", under the leadership of Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, did support the war. During the siege of Beirut, Rabin was the guest of Sharon, and, standing on the ruins, proposed cutting off the supply of water and medicines to the population of the besieged Western part of the city (where I was meeting with Yasser Arafat at the same time). Only after the third week of the war, did Peace Now join the protest against it.

After the Sabra and Shatila massacre, Peace Now called for the protest rally on which its reputation has rested since - the rally with the fabled 400 thousand protesters. That was its brightest spot and the beginning of its eclipse. Because, in order to assure the dimensions of the demonstration, Peace Now made a pact - not with the devil, but with hypocrisy. In return for the help of the Labor Party, they invited Peres and Rabin to be the main speakers - in spite of the fact that on the eve of the war, the two had met with Menachem Begin and publicly requested him to invade Lebanon.

* * *

BUT THERE are more profound causes for the behavior of the "Left-but" in times of war.

From the beginning of the Jewish Labor Movement in the country, the Left has suffered from an internal contradiction: it was both socialist and nationalist. Of the two components, nationalism was by far the more important. Therefore, membership in the trade union organization (Histadrut) was based on a strictly national classification: not a single Arab was allowed to become a member in the body whose official name was "The General Organization of the Hebrew Workers in Eretz-Israel". Only years after the foundation of the State of Israel were Arabs allowed to join.

One of the most important tasks of the Histadrut was to prevent by all means, including violence, the employment of Arabs in Jewish working places. For that, blood was shed.

That is true also for the most glorious of socialist creations: the kibbutz. No Arab was ever allowed to become a member. That was no accident: the kibbutzim saw themselves not only as a realization of a socialist dream, but also as fortresses in the Jewish struggle for the country. The creation of a new kibbutz, like Hanita on the Lebanese border in 1938, was celebrated as a national victory.

The most leftist part of the kibbutz movement, Hashomer Hatsa'ir, (the basis of the late Mapam party, now Meretz) had an official slogan: "For Zionism, Socialism and the Brotherhood of Peoples". The order was not accidental, either: it expressed the real priorities. Hashomer Hatsa'ir did indeed adore Stalin, "the sun of the peoples", until his death, but its main creations were the settlements, generally on land bought from rich absentee landowners, after the Fellahin, who had tended them for generations, had been evicted. After the founding of Israel, the Hashomer Hatza'ir kibbutzim were settled on the lands of the refugees and lands expropriated from the Arab citizens of Israel proper. The kibbutz Bar'am is sitting on the land of the village Bir'am, from which the Arab inhabitants were evicted after the end of the fighting in 1948. Much Zionism, very little Brotherhood of Peoples.

In every real test, this internal contradiction of the "Zionist Left" (as they like to call themselves) becomes obvious. That is the root of the split personality of the "Left-but".

When the guns are roaring and the flag goes up the pole, the "Left-but" stands at attention and salutes.

(Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is one of the writers featured in The Other Israel: Voices of Dissent and Refusal . He is also a contributor to The Politics of Anti-Semitism, published by CounterPunch/AK Press.)


4. Region in the remaking
A new Middle East seems to be shaping on four fronts, seemingly at the cost of Arab capitals
By Dina Ezzat (from Al-Ahram Weekly Online)

This week, international troops were deployed in South Lebanon as a buffer between the fighters of Hizbullah and the Israeli army in accordance with UN Security Council resolution 1701. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said that by next week some 5,000 troops could be stationed across the south.

Meanwhile, under UN Security Council resolution 1706, Sudan is obliged to accept international peacekeepers that will enforce peace between Sudanese government forces and armed opposition groups in Sudan's westernmost war-torn province of Darfur.

"We believe that we have to win the Khartoum government over," said Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul-Gheit. Annan, at a joint press conference with Abul-Gheit in Alexandria Tuesday, was less tender. If Sudan chooses not to cooperate, he said, "it will have to answer to the international community," hinting that it might face sanctions.

During a recent regional tour, Annan said that the UN would continue its efforts along with leading European players to find a settlement to the Iranian nuclear standoff. In an early sign of willingness to cooperate with the international community on regional concerns, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this week offered a visiting Annan confirmation that Tehran will support the implementation of resolution 1701 that brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon after a five-week war.

With so much diplomatic movement, hopes are that positive momentum can be grasped and some of the regions' lasting conflicts addressed. On 21 September, according to Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa, Arab countries are going to participate in a Security Council meeting at the ministerial level to argue the need for direct intervention by the Council -- along with other traditional key players, especially the US -- to promote a "new peace process" that could lead to a settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict within a reasonable time span.

Indeed, during his Middle East tour that included Beirut, Jerusalem, Amman, Damascus, Tehran, Doha, Jedda, Alexandria and Ankara, Annan and all of his hosts made statements indicating that all regional problems will now be handled primarily through the UN Security Council, rather than by regional capitals and organisations. For example, in a statement to the press made in Alexandria Annan announced that would be "only" within the framework of UN efforts, and through a special facilitator that he would soon appoint, that a prisoner swap will be clinched and the Israeli blockade on Lebanon lifted.

For their part, Arab foreign ministers meeting at the Cairo headquarters of the Arab League yesterday focused on four main issues: formulating a collective Arab position to propose to the Security Council as the basis for new Arab-Israeli negotiations; encouraging the commitment of all Arab parties, including Syria, to the implementation of resolution 1701; encouraging the Sudanese government to cooperate with resolution 1706; and examining the impact of recent developments vis-à- vis the Iranian issue and ongoing violence in Iraq on security and stability in the Gulf.

Speaking to the press on the fringe of their meetings and in joint press conferences with Annan, Arab foreign ministers seemed willing to accept that the ability of Arab capitals to influence regional developments has declined and that it may now be possible for them to impact regional affairs only through engaging in international forums. The rationale for international management of Middle East problems was echoed when Iraqi Foreign Minister Houchair Zibari insisted that all realistic approaches towards the crisis in Iraq will have to take into consideration the crucial role that US troops play in Iraq, and that the continued presence of these troops, for a while, is essential prospects of stability.

Off the record, Arab diplomats admit to learning two key lessons from the Lebanon war: that Arabs are too weak and too divided to be able to force Israel or any international player to consider Arab interests; and that there are unmistakable signs of a different regional order appearing that Arabs need to play within or be from now on irrelevant. The new regional order, they say, will necessarily include an acceptance of the growing influence of the three non-Arab Middle East countries -- Israel, Iran and Turkey -- each of which appears to have a bigger say in regional affairs than Arab countries do collectively.

Diplomats argue that within this new regional order there will be little room for political manoeuvres. The power game from now on will be rather clear-cut. Syria this week, Annan told reporters, agreed to increase the number of guards on its border with Lebanon and to "take all necessary measures" to curb the flow of arms to Hizbullah as stipulated in resolution 1701. For this declared commitment, Syria was offered a promise from Annan that it will be rescued from isolation.

Iran, too, is playing along. According to statements made by Annan following talks in Tehran, Iranian positions were "helpful". Curbing support to Hizbullah in return for Israel's commitment to the fragile truce and exercising influence of over Shia militants in Iraq in return for lesser constraints on its nuclear research programme, seems to be Tehran's way forward.

The growing acceptance of a period of change on the side of all players surely prompted Annan to report a successful mission and to indicate a true opportunity for "peace and security in the Middle East." Meanwhile, the final shape of a future Middle East, European sources indicate, is likely to be drawn through an international conference that the EU and the Arab League both support despite Israeli opposition and US reluctance.

If in the new Middle East international involvement is paramount, Arab countries will have to give up on plans to take fate into their own hands. However, Arab diplomats are assuring observers that Arab states will benefit. Mentioned is the potential restoration of most Arab territories annexed by Israel during the 1967 war, the end of threats of economic sanctions, and perhaps constructive development aid, especially in the case of Palestine. The important thing, proffered Hesham Youssef, chief of cabinet of the Arab League secretary general, is for Arabs to prevent the reoccurrence of the mishandling of Middle East issues by international powers that led to recurrent regional tribulations.


5. Lessons from Lebanon: Rethinking national liberation movements
The key question in drawing any enduring lesson from Lebanon in the aftermath of July 2006 Israeli savagery is how do we read the phenomenon called Hizbullah
By Hamid Dabashi (from Al-Ahram Weekly Online)

Lebanon has always been the postcard picture of what is fundamentally wrong and what is potentially hopeful about the Arab and the Muslim world in general--its divisive and factious politics oscillating fatefully between destructive sectarianism and thriving cosmopolitanism, and the year 2005 brought this historic paradox to perfect realization--a year that brought both grief and solidarity to Lebanon, both outspoken demands for freedom and democracy and heavy prices paid for those ideals. In February 2005, Prime Minister Rafik Al-Hariri was killed by a car bomb in Beirut. The assassination of Hariri, admired by the business community and the middle class Lebanese, while severely criticized by the progressive left, ignited both pro- and anti-Syrian sentiments and resulted in the resignation of Prime Minister Omar Karami's cabinet. By March 2005, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese joined pro- and anti-Syrian rallies in Beirut. By the following month, in April 2005, Karami resigned as Prime Minister, having failed to form a government, and yielding to the moderate pro-Syrian MP Najib Mikati.

Pressure on Syria to withdraw its forces from Lebanon was now intensified, and finally Bashar Al-Assad yielded to the collective will of the Lebanese--endorsed by the UN, and abused by the US and France--and ended the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. This was not to be the end of the Lebanese woes. In June 2005, the prominent journalist Samir Qassir, severely critical of the Syrian presence in Lebanon, but curiously silent on other forms of military occupations in the region, was assassinated. His death was a major trauma in Lebanese consciousness. Posters and even an oversize statue of Samir Qassir sprang all over Beirut, and his diehard followers pushed for a UN investigation and punishment of those responsible for his murder.

What was now dubbed a Cedar Revolution by the US neocons and a Gucci Revolution by the progressive Lebanese left was fully underway. Middle class Lebanese bourgeoisie was now fully in line with a pro-American, pro-French, anti-Hizbullah, and anti-Palestinian (and thus effectively pro-Israeli) disposition. Under these circumstances an anti-Syrian alliance, led by Rafik Al-Hariri's son, Saad Al-Hariri, won control of the Lebanese parliament. The new parliament elected the major Hariri ally, Fouad Siniora, as Prime Minister. But the political circumstances in Lebanon were still purgatorial. George Hawi, an anti-Syrian former leader of the Lebanese Communist Party, was killed by a car bomb. But despite all these turmoil, by July 2005, the Lebanese Prime Minister Siniora met with Syria's President Assad, working towards a new, bilateral, relationship. By September of that year, four pro-Syrian generals were charged over the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, and before the year ended, a prominent anti-Syrian MP and journalist, Gibran Tueni, was assassinated. Who ever was behind these assassinations, what ever one might think of the pro- and anti-Syrian sentiments among various Lebanese factions, a fragile parliamentary democracy seemed to have held Lebanon together not just despite its factious politics but in fact paradoxically because of it.

BY THE TIME Israel launched its savage attack on every inch of the Lebanese territory, with the occasional exception of the heavily Christian sections of Lebanon that were ethnically cleansed during the Lebanese Civil War, in mid-July 2006, there were every reason to believe that Lebanon was on its way to survive its historic woes--with civility, grace, and hope--leave behind and forgive the previous barbarisms of its Zionist neighbour, and the vicious civil war that it had deliberately instigated and fueled with evident and conniving treachery. There was hope for Lebanon in the aftermath of the "Israeli" withdrawal from its southern territories. The invasion and occupation had happened and ended in disgrace. The civil war had exhausted all internecine factionalism and Lebanon was still intact--in body and soul.

The Syrians had packed and left. The Gucci revolutionaries had demonstrated in their hundreds of thousands in March against Syria and made their presence felt, as had the poor and the disenfranchised of Lebanon, the Shias in particular--that they too were a force to contend with. There seemed to be a fair balance of classes and interests, a fairly representative coalition from across the political divide. The bizarre combination of pro-American, Francophone, bourgeoisie, (not even hiding their Sri Lankan maids), were met and matched by the wretched of the Lebanese earth, the poor Shias, the disenfranchised Palestinians, and an array of temporary slaves heralding from Syria, Iraq, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and all across the world.

The road and the struggle ahead of the Lebanese seemed to sustain a proactive economy and a thriving political culture. Whatever the late Prime Minister Hariri did or did not do, and how ever he did or did not do, downtown Beirut looked and exuded an emerging confidence--shops were full of goods and customers, fruits and vegetables were in full abundance, cultural activities, TV programs, the rambunctious press, the university campuses, the art scenes, the money that Ford and other American and European foundations were investing in the Lebanese creative imagination--all indicated that there was not just hope but a trust in what was happening--and what was happening was good, promising, beautiful, hopeful. Between the enterprising bourgeoisie (and their colorful SUV's) and the accumulated suffering of the labour class a difference was evident, a struggle was in process, of which history is made, political parties are formed, ideological formations take place--and in the midst of that a people are named, a nation of common sentiments collected, a country is called home. You could tell by the number of native Lebanese living outside their country but going back for their summer holidays, the money and gifts they brought back to their families, and those members of the same family who were leading a happy and satisfying life inside Lebanon, that Lebanon was collecting itself and once again calling itself a homeland.

ALL INDICATIONS came together in the summer of 2006 that there was hope for Lebanon. Syria was out, Hizbullah was part of the government, religious factions were regrouping, Gucci revolutionaries were adamant, the white-washed bourgeoisie were visibly invisible, the progressive left was challenging the complicitous anti-Syrian, pro-American air of the older generation of Lebanese intellectuals--so all was well. Lebanon could have been a contender as a model of ecumenical tolerance, ideological diversity, political pluralism, societal syncretism. The walk on the Corniche between Rawda Restaurant and Gamal Abdel-Nasser's monument in Beirut had as many veiled women as women in their bikinis, songs of Abdel-Halim Hafez and Fairouz out loud, nargilas at full blast, huge TV screens on which people were watching the Algerian-French striker Zinedine Zidane headbutting the Italian defender Marco Materazzi. Lebanon was no hotbed of religious fanaticism--neither a Jewish state, nor an Islamic Republic, nor indeed a Christian colony of the American empire was evident in the graceful but valanced countenance of Lebanon.

If this sounds a bit too innocent a reading of Lebanon before the savages descended upon it, then it is precisely that innocence that Israel is hell-bound to murder.

A QUICK LOOK at the vicious savagery with which Israel invaded Lebanon, particularly at the bombing pattern of the Israeli air force, navy, and army that commenced on 12 July 2006 and continued apace despite a global call for ceasefire--every country in the world except the US, the UK, and Israel itself--indicates that the Israeli invasion was (1) long in preparation, (2) nation-wide and by no means limited to Hizbullah targets; and (3) intended, on the Rumsfeldian model of "shock and awe," to cripple the Lebanese national sovereignty, polity, society, and economy for yet another generation. As verified by world press and confirmed by Amnesty International, Israel mounted "more than7,000 air force attacks and 2,500 naval bombardments particularly concentrated on civilian areas . . . . The majority of the 1,183 Lebanese deaths were non-combatants, and about a third were reportedly children" (Financial Times, 23 August 2006).

The savage invasion of Lebanon was of course not limited to these civilian casualties (an Israeli trademark in Palestine) and included the other Zionist pastime of forcing more than a million people to flee their homes and create a refugee crisis in Lebanon. While "destroying thousands of home in mainly Shia Muslim parts of the country," Amnesty International reports, the Israeli military blew up some 80 bridges around the country. "Amnesty also criticized attacks on fuel and water storage sites with no obvious military value" (Financial Times, 23 August 2006). The extent of this vicious savagery becomes evident even more in the way the Jewish state went after the economic infrastructure of Lebanon. "Israel's air force," Financial Times reports, has directed its sophisticated arsenal of precision weapons at the fabric of Lebanon's economy. At least 45 large factories have been hit by Israeli air strikes according to a list compiled by Lebanese businessmen. On the list are factories for furniture, medical products, textiles, paper and a milk plant. Proctor and Gamble warehouse in Beirut was bombed, with damage to $20m of stock. In total, 95 percent of industry has ground to a halt, according to the Association of Lebanese Industrialists. Those companies not directly targeted have been halted by the Israeli blockade . . . . Until fighting broke out last month, Lebanon's economy was on track for its best year in more than a decade. Exports were up over one hundred percent on 2005 and tourism was booming. "Israel is taking advantage of the war to destroy what it can of the infrastructure as well as the basic sectors of economy," said Adnan Kassar, president of the Lebanese Economic Organisation grouping the country's business associations. "They want to destroy everything--even pick-up trucks loaded with potatoes or watermelons. People on motorcycle have been killed like birds" (William Wallis, "Industrialists Count Cost of Bombing," Financial Times 5-6 August 2006).

As far north as Tripoli and Halba and their surroundings, the easternmost regions of Baalbek, virtually all the major and minor ports of Lebanon up and down the Mediterranean coast, from Tripoli down to Beirut and then to Tyre, with anything south of Sidon, Jezzine, and down to Nabatiyeh, and Hasbaiya, effectively the shooting gallery of the Israeli army, navy, and their air force, there remains little doubt as to what exactly the Jewish state was up to. With hundreds of murdered civilians, more than a million refuges, the deliberate murder of the UN observers, the equally intentional massacre of women and children in Qana in southern Lebanon, which according to Amnesty International are "deliberate war crimes" (Financial Times 23 August 2006), and a cold-blooded criminal ability to cheat and lie that it has agreed to a temporary ceasefire (to investigate the Qana massacre) and then immediately ignoring it, the sadistic intensity of this particular Israeli invasion of Lebanon surpasses all the records of the racist settlement with a criminal record of savagery unsurpassed in recent and rarely matched in human history. The enormity of this Israeli crime against humanity, however, must not blind us to trying to see through the barbarism as to what the Jewish state, with the full and flaunted support of its patron Christian imperial godfather, is up to.

ON THE EVIDENCE of the facts on the ground, the death and destruction and the rubble and ruin that this wild European beast has left behind in Lebanon, it is quite evident that the purpose of this latest criminal atrocity was to destroy the very possibility of any kind of cosmopolitan culture in Lebanon. The failed launch of "Israel" as a mini empire, modeling itself clumsily on the pattern of the neocon artist in Washington DC (as AIPAC tries to prove to Washington that it can be useful in Bush's war on "terrorism"), has an evident agenda far beyond Palestine and Lebanon--and the fact that it has miserably failed to achieve it must not blind us to the projected agenda that this mutated stage of Zionism is projecting. The mutation of the Zionist settlement into a mini-empire wannabe means that all the positive and hopeful developments in both Palestine and Lebanon, that both Hamas and Hizbullah were now part and parcel of a more embracing political process, were in fact inimical to the Israeli imperial aping of the US in the region. In that respect, all the hogwash of European and American so-called liberals that the Israeli response to Hizbullah was "disproportionate" is sheer nonsense. Israeli's war crimes in Lebanon were perfectly proportionate to what it wanted to do--to bomb Lebanon back to sectarian warfare, to reduce the cosmopolitan character of Lebanon to Muslims and Christians fighting against each other in order to make the Jewish state look normal and at home in the neighbourhood. That Israel miserably failed to achieve that malicious objective speaks volumes both to the medieval tribalism that is at the heart of the Jewish state and the cosmopolitan character of the Lebanese national resistance.

THE KEY QUESTION in drawing any enduring lesson from Lebanon in the aftermath of July 2006 Israeli savagery is how do we read the phenomenon called Hizbullah. Not just in the heartland of US neocons, Washington DC, where Hizbullah is synonymous with terrorism, but even more pointedly amongst the supposedly more progressive European observers there is a palpable unease, a bit of a bafflement, and a conspicuous hesitation to identify with the Lebanese national resistance to the military adventurism of the mini-empire. In practically every dispatch he has sent from the war-torn Lebanon, and as the Lebanese of all walks of life were putting up a heroic resistance against the predatory killing machine called "Israel," the veteran British journalist Robert Fisk did not lose a single opportunity to vilify Hizbullah and squarely blame it for the commencement of the war, at times in a language identical with the right wing of the Israeli Likudnicks, the US neocons, put together with the erstwhile Phalangists, unabashedly equating "Hizbollah atrocities" with "Israeli atrocities" (Independent, 11 August 2006), insisting that "it was Hizbollah which provoked this latest war," and warning that by invading Lebanon, Israelis "are legitimizing Hizbollah, . . . a rag-tag army of guerillas" (Independent, 5 August 2006)--as if this "rag-tag army" lacked such legitimacy before it represented and defended the dignity of an equally "rag-tag" multitude of poor and disenfranchised Lebanese masses.

From the neocon operations in the US to Robert Fisk, the phenomenon of the Lebanese Hizbullah has been the chief focal point of the propaganda machinery on behalf of Israel--all behaving as if this thing they call "Hizbullah" fell off from the sky on the innocent Lebanese, preventing them to live in peace and prosperity with their splendidly democratic, peaceful, and generous southern neighbour. But aren't the Hizbullah fighters, and the mass of Lebanese they represent, Lebanese too? In all such dismissive assessments of Hizbullah, there has been a misplaced concreteness, a pervasive surrogate confusion, as to what exactly this Hizbullah thing is. Hizbullah is not a band of Martians who have landed in Lebanon. Hizbullah in Lebanon is what Hamas is in Palestine, and what the Mahdi's Army is in Iraq--the political manifestation of the historically denied and politically repressed subaltern components of three national liberation movements.

Too much emphasis on Hizbullah, Hamas, and the Mahdi's Army as three political organizations confuses a subaltern political reality (the poor and the disenfranchised in Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq) with its accidental organizational manifestation. Israel can kill Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon and Khaled Mashaal in Palestine, as the US might Muqtada Sadr in Iraq, tomorrow (if they only could) and ten more Nasrallahs and Mashaals and Muqtada Sadrs will emerge from the Dahiya neighbourhood in Beirut and from Gaza in Palestine and from Najaf in Iraq. Hizbullah and Hamas and Mahdi's Army are three accidental expressions of three essential and deeply rooted political and demographic realities. The poor of the southern Lebanon (who happen to be Shias) have historically been denied their fair share in Lebanese politics; as have the poor and the disenfranchised among the Palestinians (who happen to be Muslims), and the poor and the disenfranchised among the Iraqis (who too happen to be Shias). Hizbullah, Hamas, and Mahdi's Army are not manufactured banalities and militant adventurers like al-Qaeda, created and crafted by the US-Pakistan-Saudi alliance to fight the Russians and prevent the spread of the Iranian Islamic revolution eastward. Hizbullah, Hamas, and Mahdi's Army are grassroots movements--the shame of the national liberation movements in Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq that had historically failed to include the most disenfranchised subaltern communities in their emancipatory projects.

As for Hizbullah specifically in Lebanon, the second that the Israeli savages dropped the very first bomb on their Lebanese targets, Hizbullah sublated from a factious Shia guerilla movement into an army of national liberation. This fundamental fact, missed miserably as much by the illiterate US and Israeli neocons as by the so-called European left, rests on the miasmatic disposition of all national liberation movements, all guerrilla organizations that fade in and out of their national and subaltern dispositions. From Vietnam to Africa to Latin America, the history of all national liberation movements testify to this fact--they can degenerate into violent malignancies or else sublate into emancipatory national liberation movements, all depending on the circumstances of their historical unfolding, and nothing can help a guerrilla operation assume national leadership than a savage military invasion by a colonial or imperial power--the Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in Cambodia as opposed to Ho Chi Minh's revolutionary army in Vietnam are prime examples here.

Consider the fact that half way through the Israeli savagery in Lebanon, in an interview with Jon Snow of the British television station, Channel 4, on 3 August 2006, the Lebanese Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, a Hariri ally, stated clearly and categorically that Hizbullah's demands for the condition of its disarming itself--namely, the return of the Lebanese freedom fighters incarcerated in the Israeli prisons, the return of the Shebaa farms, and the map of the minefields Israel has left behind after its withdrawal from Southern Lebanon in 2000--were indeed his own government's terms for a comprehensive treaty with the Jewish state.

The Zionist propaganda machinery commenced this war by insisting that Hizbullah had miscalculated the Israeli response, that it did not know what savagery the Jewish state would unleash on an entire nation. As always such propaganda clichés take the historical fact and by simply turning it around thinks it suppressed. It was Israel that miscalculated its military capability and made a global fool out of itself by trying to catch the butterfly of Hizbullah on the graceful face of Lebanon--destroying an entire country in the futile hope of catching and killing that butterfly. At the end, Israel "liberated" Lebanon exactly the same way that its Christian imperial sponsor, the US, was liberating Iraq and Afghanistan--except neither Hamas is Taliban, nor Hizbullah is Saddam Hussein.

There is a fundamental difference here--a difference not between the identical savageries of the US in Afghanistan and Iraq and Israel in Palestine and Lebanon, but between the natures of the enemy they purport to fight. Both Saddam Hussein and Taliban were the handmade creatures of the US, while Hizbullah and Hamas are grassroots national liberation movements integral (but not definitive) to Palestine and Lebanon. The US manufacturing of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein in Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively and by way of curtailing the political appeal of the initial stages of the Iranian revolution of 1979, had corrupted the miasmatic nature of two legitimate national liberation movements into a senseless, pointless, and globalised violence called al-Qaeda that in its senseless pursuit of spectacular violence mirrors and reflects the vacuous disposition of the US empire, while the Israeli savagery against Palestinian and Lebanese will make Hamas and Hizbullah even more integral to their respective national liberation movements.

The US and Israel and their European and Arab allies are thus dead wrong that Syria and Iran are the main culprits and the principal villains and those who have in fact instigated Hamas and Hizbullah to act. There is no doubt that Syria would love to come back and occupy Lebanon and the Islamic Republic would be only too happy to clone itself and see an Islamic republic in Lebanon or even in Palestine. But Syria is a corrupt, degenerate, and impotent bureaucracy hardly capable of holding its own illegitimate reign together; while the Islamic Republic is an equally bankrupt, incompetent, and degenerate regime hardly capable of saving its own skin should push come to shove, except through medieval measures of repression, torture, human rights violations, gender apartheid, and scores of other criminal activities. Assimilating the Lebanese Hizbullah and the Palestinian Hamas to the corrupt and corrupting Syrian and Iranian model is in fact a self-fulfilling prophecy for the US and Israel (USrael would in fact be the proper name for this twin tower of calamity let loose upon the world), who wish nothing more than cloning their own Jewish and Christian fanaticism in their Islamic versions.

The real struggle, the real resistance, and thus the battlefield of the exemplary national liberation movements are currently neither in Iraq, nor in the Islamic Republic, nor in Afghanistan--one degenerated into sectarian violence, to the US neocons heart's desire, the other in the tight grips of a medieval theocracy, and the last having collapsed back to a narcotic stronghold for drug dealers, highway bandits, and US- and UK-sponsored mercenary private contractors. The real battlefield is now in Lebanon and in Palestine, in Beirut and in Gaza. For here is where two grassroots Islamist movements have had to come to terms with the multifaceted and cosmopolitan fact and disposition of the national liberation movement of which they are but one component.

The lead role here is with Palestine, and in particular in the historic signatures of Marwan Barghouti, the leader of Fatah in the West Bank, Sheik Abdel-Khaliq Al-Natshe, a Hamas leader, as well as the signatures of the leaders of Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine on the so-called "Prison Accord." The formation of a cross-section of Palestinian national liberation movement is unprecedented in its history. By virtue of this document, Hamas has achieved something far more important than an implicit recognition of a colonial settlement on Palestinian homeland. With this document, Hamas has joined the formation of a historical balance between all the factions and forces integral to the national liberation of Palestine--and as such has learned the art of political compromise for a larger and more significant goal.

The condition in Lebanon were not half as ready and were just in the embryonic stage and a contingent process of fermentation when the Israelis made the monumental stupidity of invading Lebanon hoping to destroy Hizbullah. This was not a mere military folly, for a conventional army cannot defeat a guerrilla operation fighting to defend its homeland. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in July-August 2006, and particularly in the enormity of death and destruction it rained on civilians, instantly turned Hizbullah from an erstwhile Shia guerilla operation into the chief organ of a national resistance. Israel has always been a gargantuan military with a colonial state apparatus built around it. But this time around it committed the monumental stupidity of thinking that with military thuggery it can impose its will on the region--not just in Palestine and Lebanon, but through the evident logic of USrael, the degeneration of two state apparatus into one imperial design, in Iraq and Afghanistan and by design in Iran and Syria. They cannot. The USrael has just expedited the sublation of Hizbullah into a national resistance in Lebanon--and as such a model of syncretic and cosmopolitan revolutionary uprising in the region.

IN THE REALM of political possibilities there is of course nothing impossible. Is there thus the danger that the Lebanese Hizbullah might degenerate into an Iranian Hizbullah and opt thoroughly to Islamise the Lebanese national liberation movement and work towards the creation of an Islamic Republic of Lebanon (the way that the Khomeini Islamists did early in the course of the 1979 Revolution)--or, extending the same argument, could Hamas equally Islamise the Palestinian national liberation movement and degenerate into demanding and exacting an Islamic Republic of Palestine, or, just to complete the regional picture, is it possible that the Mahdi's Army do the same and demand and exact an Islamic Republic of Iraq?

Nothing will make Israel and its US supporters happier than such a nightmare, and they will do anything in their power to achieve precisely that--the self-fulfilling prophecy of degenerating syncretic and cosmopolitan national liberation movements into tyrannical religious fanaticism that ipso facto justify the existence of a Jewish state in their vicinity. The Israeli treachery has already started conniving for such an eventuality in Lebanon by sending its commandos to fight the Hizbullah fighters while dressed in Lebanese army uniforms. But one fundamental fact articulated in three diverse settings speaks against such a possibility and promises the creation of three pluralist and cosmopolitan political cultures that would be the identical nightmare of the Jewish state, the Islamic republic, and their Christian imperial arbiter. That single abiding fact is the demographic disposition of Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq.

In Lebanon and in Iraq the Shias are a slight majority with a significant minority complex, and in Palestine Hamas is but one of four major political factions. With a historical draw of luck for Lebanon and the entire region, Hizbullah has to (has to, not that it might or should or could--it simply has to) share power and contend with the Sunnis, the Christians, and the Druze with almost exactly the same logic that in Iraq, the Shias have to share power and contend with the Sunnis and the Kurds, and in Palestine Hamas has to share power and contend with Fatah, the Islamic Jihad, the PFLP and DFLP.

In this respect, the Islamists in Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq are exactly the opposite of the Islamists in the Islamic Republic of Iran where the Shias constitute the overwhelming majority of the population. The fortunate demographic diversity of Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq works much to the advantage of a pluralistic society and a cosmopolitan political culture. Whereas in the Islamic Republic the 95% plus Shia population projects the false assumption that the society at large is an "Islamic" society--a false assumption that both the Islamic Republic and even its so-called opposition among the reformists corroborate and put to a brutal political use to destroy and dismantle the cosmopolitan Iranian political culture that certainly includes the Islamists but is by no means limited to it. This sectarian reading of the regional politics is only pertinent if we think of these nations in terms of their sectarian breakdown and religious disposition and disregard the long and arduous history of their national liberation movements. In Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and even Iran, the Islamists have had to garb their religious sentiments in blatantly nationalist terms--and thus the emancipatory power of national liberation movements that still mobilizes these nations to rise up against all colonial and imperial designs against their sovereignty.

THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT lesson from the latest military thuggery of Israel in Lebanon is the fact that the Jewish state wants to see the region in its own traumatized image: Jewish tribalism running amuck, for in effect the legitimacy of the Jewish state is entirely contingent not just on one but preferably on a multitude of Islamic republics in the region, so that with the Christian empire that presides over them all and the Hindu fundamentalism that lurks in its background the European Zionist colonial settlement finds itself in a natural habitat and is thus ipso facto legitimized--and so that with a Jewish state, a Christian empire, an Islamic republic, and a Hindu fundamentalism the whole world can go to hell in a hand-basket.

To defeat Israel in terms emancipatory not just to the entirety of the region but in terms that in fact includes the six million plus inhabitants of Israel itself, and thus liberates them from the claws of their own tribal fanaticism, nothing can be more effective than generating and sustaining a multitude of pluralist civil societies and cosmopolitan political cultures in which grassroots Islamist movements like Hamas and Hizbullah will always be integral but never definitive.


6. Quote

"Israel can kill Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon and Khaled Mashaal in Palestine, as the US might Muqtada Sadr in Iraq, tomorrow (if they only could) and 10 more Nasrallahs and Mashaals and Muqtada Sadrs will emerge from the Dahiya neighbourhood in Beirut and from Gaza in Palestine and from Najaf in Iraq."