Fwd: [DEBATE] : Hizbullah’s attacks stem from Israeli incursions into Lebanon
Christian Science Monitor - August 1, 2006
Hizbullah’s attacks stem from Israeli incursions into Lebanon By Anders Strindberg
NEW YORK – As pundits and policymakers scramble to explain events in
Lebanon, their conclusions are virtually unanimous: Hizbullah created
this crisis. Israel is defending itself. The underlying problem is
Arab extremism.
Sadly, this is pure analytical nonsense. Hizbullah’s capture of two
Israeli soldiers on July 12 was a direct result of Israel’s silent
but unrelenting aggression against Lebanon, which in turn is part of
a six-decades long Arab-Israeli conflict.
Since its withdrawal of occupation forces from southern Lebanon in
May 2000, Israel has violated the United Nations-monitored “blue
line” on an almost daily basis, according to UN reports. Hizbullah’s
military doctrine, articulated in the early 1990s, states that it
will fire Katyusha rockets into Israel only in response to Israeli
attacks on Lebanese civilians or Hizbullah’s leadership; this indeed
has been the pattern.
In the process of its violations, Israel has terrorized the general
population, destroyed private property, and killed numerous
civilians. This past February, for instance, 15-year-old shepherd
Yusuf Rahil was killed by unprovoked Israeli cross-border fire as he
tended his flock in southern Lebanon. Israel has assassinated its
enemies in the streets of Lebanese cities and continues to occupy
Lebanon’s Shebaa Farms area, while refusing to hand over the maps of
mine fields that continue to kill and cripple civilians in southern
Lebanon more than six years after the war supposedly ended. What
peace did Hizbullah shatter?
Hizbullah’s capture of the soldiers took place in the context of this
ongoing conflict, which in turn is fundamentally shaped by realities
in the Palestinian territories. To the vexation of Israel and its
allies, Hizbullah - easily the most popular political movement in the
Middle East - unflinchingly stands with the Palestinians.
Since June 25, when Palestinian fighters captured one Israeli soldier
and demanded a prisoner exchange, Israel has killed more than 140
Palestinians. Like the Lebanese situation, that flare-up was detached
from its wider context and was said to be “manufactured” by the
enemies of Israel; more nonsense proffered in order to distract from
the apparently unthinkable reality that it is the manner in which
Israel was created, and the ideological premises that have sustained
it for almost 60 years, that are the core of the entire Arab-Israeli
conflict.
Once the Arabs had rejected the UN’s right to give away their land
and to force them to pay the price for European pogroms and the
Holocaust, the creation of Israel in 1948 was made possible only by
ethnic cleansing and annexation. This is historical fact and has been
documented by Israeli historians, such as Benny Morris. Yet Israel
continues to contend that it had nothing to do with the Palestinian
exodus, and consequently has no moral duty to offer redress.
For six decades the Palestinian refugees have been refused their
right to return home because they are of the wrong race. “Israel must
remain a Jewish state,” is an almost sacral mantra across the Western
political spectrum. It means, in practice, that Israel is accorded
the right to be an ethnocracy at the expense of the refugees and
their descendants, now close to 5 million.
Is it not understandable that Israel’s ethnic preoccupation
profoundly offends not only Palestinians, but many of their Arab
brethren? Yet rather than demanding that Israel acknowledge its
foundational wrongs as a first step toward equality and coexistence,
the Western world blithely insists that each and all must recognize
Israel’s right to exist at the Palestinians’ expense.
Western discourse seems unable to accommodate a serious, as opposed
to cosmetic concern for Palestinians’ rights and liberties: The
Palestinians are the Indians who refuse to live on the reservation;
the Negroes who refuse to sit in the back of the bus.
By what moral right does anyone tell them to be realistic and get
over themselves? That it is too much of a hassle to right the wrongs
committed against them? That the front of the bus must remain
ethnically pure? When they refuse to recognize their occupier and
embrace their racial inferiority, when desperation and frustration
causes them to turn to violence, and when neighbors and allies come
to their aid - some for reasons of power politics, others out of
idealism - we are astonished that they are all such fanatics and
extremists.
The fundamental obstacle to understanding the Arab-Israeli conflict
is that we have given up on asking what is right and wrong, instead
asking what is “practical” and “realistic.” Yet reality is that
Israel is a profoundly racist state, the existence of which is
buttressed by a seemingly endless succession of punitive measures,
assassinations, and wars against its victims and their allies.
A realistic understanding of the conflict, therefore, is one that
recognizes that the crux is not in this or that incident or policy,
but in Israel’s foundational and persistent refusal to recognize the
humanity of its Palestinian victims. Neither Hizbullah nor Hamas are
driven by a desire to “wipe out Jews,” as is so often claimed, but by
a fundamental sense of injustice that they will not allow to be
forgotten.
These groups will continue to enjoy popular legitimacy because they
fulfill the need for someone - anyone - to stand up for Arab rights.
Israel cannot destroy this need by bombing power grids or rocket
ramps. If Israel, like its former political ally South Africa, has
the capacity to come to terms with principles of democracy and human
rights and accept egalitarian multiracial coexistence within a single
state for Jews and Arabs, then the foundation for resentment and
resistance will have been removed. If Israel cannot bring itself to
do so, then it will continue to be the vortex of regional violence.
Anders Strindberg, formerly a visiting professor at Damascus
University, Syria, is a consultant on Middle East politics working
with European government and law-enforcement agencies. He has also
covered Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories as a
journalist since the late 1990s, primarily for European publications.