[nasional_list] [ppiindia] Hezbollah, the United States and the Context Behind Israel's Offensive on Lebanon
- From: A Nizami <nizaminz@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: sabili <sabili@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, padhang-mbulan <padhang-mbulan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, lisi <lisi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, ppiindia@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2006 20:31:39 -0700 (PDT)
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Hezbollah, the United States and the Context Behind
Israel's Offensive on Lebanon
As Israeli warplanes continue to bomb Lebanon and
Hezbollah fires rockets into northern Israel we get
context on the crisis with two analysts: As'ad
AbuKhalil, a Lebanese professor of political science
at California State University and Chris Hedges, a
senior fellow at The Nation Institute and the former
Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times.
Lecture date: 07/17/06 Democracy Now!
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AMY GOODMAN: As we continue our discussion about
what?s happening in Lebanon, we turn to Chris Hedges,
journalist and author, foreign correspondent for the
New York Times for many years, but now currently
senior fellow at the Nation Institute. War Is a Force
Which Gives Us Meaning is one of his books. We have
also heard that the U.S. embassy in Beirut has just
been evacuated, in addition to the news of Israeli
ground troops moving into Southern Lebanon and an
Israeli plane being shot down, a fighter jet, by
Hezbollah. Chris Hedges, your response.
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, this is the culmination of
essentially five years of refusal by the Bush
administration to do anything to keep alive the peace
process. And what we see now is the result of that. We
have left extremists on all wings -- Palestinian,
Lebanese and Israeli -- to dictate the language by
which the conflicts are set, and that language is a
language of violence. There is no other language now.
And unless there is a force that steps in to try and
moderate this self-immolation on the part of all of
these extremist groups, the Middle East is going to
spin into a death spiral, which could have disastrous
consequences, not only for Lebanese, for Israelis, for
Palestinians, but ultimately for us, as well.
You know, every day the conflict is ratcheted up on
the part of Israel, with the news that you just read
about ground troops going in, and there are fears
that, you know, because Hezbollah is such an illusive
target -- it?s not a conventional force -- because
these sort of wild strikes and large numbers of
killings, I think, are ultimately ineffective, because
the weaponry that Hezbollah is now deploying is
weaponry that they have not deployed in the past -- I
mean, the downing of an F-16, the sinking of an
Israeli gun boat, the dropping of rockets on Haifa,
and we hear rumors that they may have weaponry that
can reach as far as the outskirts of Tel Aviv, there
is a kind of -- you know, we have opened a kind of
Pandora's box, which always happens in war. And now
we?re just hanging on by the tail.
AMY GOODMAN: As?ad AbuKhalil, a professor at
California [State University], Stanislaus, visiting at
UC Berkeley, you?ve just returned from Lebanon. Did
you see any of this coming?
AS?AD ABUKHALIL: Well, yes, I have returned from
Lebanon only a week ago or less, and I have met and
interviewed a whole number of people, including the
leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. And I must
confess to you that, no, there was nothing in the air
about what was coming, and that is because these
events were not planted in Lebanon and did not
originate inside the country, but outside. I must
begin by dissenting by the comments of Chris Hedges,
and this is one of the frustrating things watching
these events here in the United States, and I don't
want to talk anything about the U.S. government or
about the mainstream media. I want to talk about
progressives and their stances, people like The Nation
magazine's editorial, about the words of Chris Hedges
this morning.
He talks about the death of the peace process. No, no,
no. This is not because the peace process was not
ongoing. This is the peace process, Mr. Hedges. This
is part of what the United States has been doing since
the beginning of the so-called peace process, to
subcontract the subjugation of the Arabs and all those
who defend against Israeli occupation in the area. I
mean, he speaks about the spiral of violence,
extremists on both sides. All this language is always
intended to camouflage and hide and disguise the
aggressor, the nature of the aggressor.
Let me put the context for this audience here, because
a lot of people have been analyzing this conflict in
terms of an outside conspiracy. On the right, you have
people like George W. Bush, among others, blaming it
all on Iran. On the left, you have people like Robert
Fisk, who believe this is all about a Syrian
conspiracy. Yet the truth resides in an article
yesterday by Robin Wright in the Washington Post. If
there is a conspiracy in all of this, it is an
American, Israeli, Saudi conspiracy that has been in
planning for years in order to disarm Hezbollah as
part of the 1559 United Nations Security Council
resolution, and we are seeing the implementation of
that resolution by force.
But we have to remind the audience about something:
how Israel propaganda doesn't get updated. In 1982, I
barely survived an Israeli invasion of the country.
Back then, the Israelis were saying, ?We are not
against Lebanon. We just want to expel the PLO out of
Lebanon.? Now, they are saying the same, with one
difference: Hezbollah is the Lebanese population here.
I am from South Lebanon. I tell you that the entire
population of South Lebanon stands behind Hezbollah,
whether you like it or not. My 14-year-old nephew has
been raised by secular leftists, like my family is,
and yet he is now a passionate, enthusiastic supporter
of Hezbollah. So when Israel said they want to drive
them away from South Lebanon, what are they going to
do? We?re talking about extermination of them?
And for people who talk about the beginning of this in
the arrest and capture of these two Israeli occupation
soldiers, we have to remember Israel has not been
sitting idly by. Israel has been violating Lebanese
sovereignty for the last several years, long after its
so-called partial withdrawal from South Lebanon in May
of 2000. Israel violates Lebanese earth space. They
kidnap shepherds and fishermen from the area where I
come from, which is Tyre, at will. Some of these
fishermen never come, some of them are killed. Plus,
there are demands that all the Lebanese have,
including the release of Lebanese prisoners held in
Israeli jail, the fact that Israel has refused over
the last several years all pressures and demands to
give Lebanon, through the United Nations, a list of
the 400,000 land mines that Israel has planted during
its occupation in that region.
And when people on the left, like the editorial of The
Nation magazine this week, an awful editorial, when
they speak about -- as if this is about the ideology
of Hezbollah. No, when we leftists speak about what?s
going on, it is not out of sympathy for the ideology
of Hezbollah. First of all, Israel is not launching a
war on the ideology of Hezbollah. It is launching a
war, as Rania put it very eloquently, on the whole
civilian population of Lebanon. This is exactly what
we are talking about.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Chris Hedges.
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, I certainly did not mean to imply
in any way that, you know, there we should ascribe
equal amounts of moral blame to each side. Israel is
clearly to blame here, both in terms of what is
happening in Gaza and what is now happening in
Lebanon. On the other hand, this has been a long
process of severe repression in Gaza and the West
Bank, a kind of Africanization of the Palestinian
people, reducing them to subsistence level. Gaza has
become virtually a giant walled prison for 1.1 million
Palestinians, and that kind of abuse, that kind of
repression, in the absence of international
condemnation and in the absence of any attempt on the
part of the United States to intervene and create a
more humane situation for the Palestinian, breeds
extremism. It breeds an extremist response. And these
groups attempt to give back to the oppressor, albeit
on a much smaller scale, what the oppressor has been
meting out to them for years and years and years.
And so, while I sympathize with the argument that was
just made, I do believe that this unchecked response
on the part of Israel has fueled a movement where we
now have two apocalyptic groups on either side
essentially speaking in the language of violence, with
large numbers of innocent people caught in the middle.
And this is a tragedy that I think was a long time
coming. I certainly do blame -- I lay the fault of
this at the feet of the Israelis.
And just as I think that Israel had a large hand in
creating Hezbollah after the invasion of Lebanon, it
had a very large hand in creating Hamas. When I first
went to Gaza in 1988, Hamas was a very marginal force.
Fatah had almost complete control of the sympathy of
the populace and certainly the power structure.
So, while I don't in any way want to let Israel off
the hook, I think what we have done, and essentially
by our negligence, is -- and by standing aside -- and
I?m speaking, of course, of the United States -- is
empowered these extremist forces, and we now have a
kind of Ahab-like self-immolation that is taking place
in the Middle East, and there seems to be no outside
power, certainly not coming from the Bush
administration or Washington, willing to step in and
speak with any kind of reason or sanity.
AMY GOODMAN: The issue of the U.S. opposing a
ceasefire in Lebanon.
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, this is exactly the point that I?m
trying to make. You know, they have essentially washed
their hands and refused -- I mean, Washington is
probably the one force that can step in -- and not
always successfully, as we?ve seen in the past -- and
bring some kind of restraint to Olmert's hand, but
Washington's refusal to do that thrusts us in an
incredibly dangerous environment, where there is no
one to stay the hand of the Israeli government. There
are no checks, there are no restraints. We don't know
how far they?re going to go.
I mean, there are rumors or fears that, of course,
they may actually make attacks against Syria. They
buzzed -- you know, Israeli warplanes have sort of
done flyovers of the house of the Syrian president,
and when you listen to the rhetoric out of Jerusalem,
it is all about stopping -- I?m not saying that the
rhetoric is why they?re in Lebanon, but the rhetoric
is about the weapon shipments that they claim are
coming from Syria and Iran into Hezbollah, and that?s
why they say that they are carrying out these massive
air strikes and massive attacks against Lebanon.
And, you know, I think we have to be clear that this
has to fail. Hezbollah is not a conventional military
force. There is no infrastructure to destroy to speak
of. Their rockets are -- the rockets that they fire
are in caches and wooden crates lying all over
Southern Lebanon. They may be able to target them
after they?re fired, but we?re not fighting a
conventional war. Israel is trying to fight a
conventional war, but I think it?s doomed, and as the
attacks continue and if there are more waves of rocket
attacks -- and we think they have about 12,000, they
have probably fired about 1,000 -- I mean, if these
things keep coming and Israel, in their frustration,
is allowed to continue to accelerate the aggression,
who knows where it will go?
AMY GOODMAN: As?ad AbuKhalil, Hezbollah is saying free
Lebanese prisoners in exchange for the capture of the
Israeli soldiers. Who are these prisoners?
AS?AD ABUKHALIL: Well, I mean, there are at least
three prisoners that we know of. The longest serving
one is a Lebanese Druze, in fact, who in the 1970s
joined a Palestinian organization, because he was,
like many Lebanese at the time, enthusiastic in
lending out support for the Palestinians. The brother
of this one, Samir Quntar, is now head of a movement
that tries to bring attention to the plight of his
brother. He is not a member of Hezbollah. He is a
leftist, and I met him in the last trip. And his cause
is well known all around Lebanon.
But it is not only about that. I mean, this is why so
many people like me in the Arab world level charges of
racism at many in the West, including on the left,
because they seem to subscribe to the terminology, as
I think your guest does, of the prevailing governments
of the West, in terms of having more weight given to
the frustration, to the so-called anguish of Israeli
soldiers, than to the suffering of the civilian
populations in Gaza and in Lebanon. When we speak
about these two Israeli soldiers -- and I will not
name them because I?m afraid of giving credence to the
propaganda of Israel, by which all those Israeli human
lives are more valuable than Arab human lives -- we
should speak also about the entire nations that are
held in captivity, whether it?s in Gaza or whether
it?s in Lebanon today.
I don't think Israel has an intention of launching any
ground troops into Lebanon, because they prefer to
just bomb the hell out of Lebanon from there, and they
are cutting all these bridges and roads so that, I
think, rules out any possibility of invasion. And
notice many people, in fact, including you, Amy, this
morning, I?m afraid, you used the word ?entrance,?
about whether Israel will enter Lebanon. I mean,
countries invade other countries, they don't enter. I
mean, when Hitler went to Poland, he invaded Poland,
he did not enter it. So we have to be careful about
the language we use lest it lends propaganda credence
to the aggressor.
I also want to say, so, for the Lebanese, there are
the issues of the 10,000 Palestinian prisoners held
without trial by Israel, the fact that Israel refused
to release those prisoners -- and I must say as
somebody who studies the various political movements
of the region, Hassan Nasrallah, five months ago, gave
a speech and he warned, he said, ?If those prisoners
are not released, we will try to get an Israeli
soldier.? I mean, he made it very clear. And if
anybody believes that Israel spontaneously improvised
an invasion and bombing of the country that we are
witnessing today is somebody who absolutely doesn't
know anything about the nature of policymaking inside
Israel.
So at this point, any language, it seems to me, that
speaks about the so-called cycle of violence, like the
Department of State terminology and so on, is losing
an opportunity to point the finger at the party that
is doing much of the violence and much of the killing,
the one that is committing this aggression. The United
States is not sitting idly by. The United States is
not washing its hand. Its hands are dipped in the
blood of the civilians of Lebanon. The United States
is supporting wholeheartedly what?s going on. The
footage of the children being killed in Tyre, the
massacre in Marwahin, in the name of the U.S.
government and many in the U.S. media, is justified
self-defense.
These will have long scars. People are going to exact
revenge. I mean, I know that in America we always
think that Israel is the only one that is entitled to
take revenge. I can guarantee you -- I mean, Chris
Hedges at least admitted that Hezbollah was born
within the womb, so to speak, of the Israeli invasion
of 1982. It didn't exist prior to that. I guarantee
you a new organization is going to be born out of the
agony of the Lebanese population, and they will
certainly exact revenge, against Israel, against
America and against all those who supported this
aggression, and when that occurs, the American
population, as always, and the media will say in
innocence and wonder yet again, ?Why do they hate us?
What have we done to them??
AMY GOODMAN: Professor As?ad AbuKhalil, what about the
response of the Arab countries?
AS?AD ABUKHALIL: I mean, I think that there no doubt
Arab countries are in cahoots in this particular
conspiracy. There was a meeting of Arab foreign
ministers in Cairo two days ago, and the minutes were
leaked to the Arabic press, including to As-Safir,
among others, and there was a clear intention. The
Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Kuwaitis, as well as
the Saudis, primarily the Saudis, are participating in
this campaign in order to disarm and weaken Hezbollah.
What they don't know, however, is this is going to
have reverberations that is going to affect their own
stability.
Just yesterday, a group of Saudi dissidents,
intellectuals from inside the country, may of whom are
Shiite, released a strong denunciation of the policies
of the Saudi government. Inside Egypt yesterday, a
large group of the most well known Egyptian writers,
intellectuals, leftists, released another statement
denunciating the position of the Egyptian government,
and there were demonstrations in Jordan about that.
So, of course, they are part of the conspiracy that I
speak of. The Arab governments are working
side-by-side with the United States and with the
Israelis. As far as the U.S. is concerned, and the
United Nations, of course, we have too much respect
for the audience to speak about these entities as if
they are independent operators on the world stage.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Chris Hedges, your last comment.
CHRIS HEDGES: Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, I
share his frustration with Washington. On the other
hand, this is the world that we live in. And a
Washington that I think has always been partisan
towards Israel, it?s been one of the frustrations for
those of us who have spent as long as I have in the
Arab world, is not a perfect scenario. On the other
hand, a disengaged Washington, one that makes no
attempt at all to restrain anything Israel does, that
never questions this rightwing government in Israel,
that never offers any kind of -- or proposes any kind
of restraint is worse.
So, you know, it?s not a choice between what?s moral
and immoral, it?s a choice between what?s immoral and
what?s more immoral, sadly. And I think this
disengagement on the part of the Bush administration,
while I certainly share many of the criticisms of
previous administrations, in terms of how their
favoritism towards Israel, their partisanship, their
failure to understand the Palestinians, I think we
have entered a new area where the Bush administration
has washed their hands, essentially giving Israel the
green light to do anything they want, and I think the
situation is much worse, and all we have to do is look
at our television screens to see that.
AMY GOODMAN: There's a repeated charge that the
weapons clearly -- the support clearly comes from Iran
and, they say, Syria. Is this clear? Have you seen
evidence presented?
CHRIS HEDGES: There is no hard evidence. I mean, you
know, you have the shell casings. But let's not
forget, Amy, that as bombs are being rained all over
Lebanon, those weapons were made in American cities
and have American markings on them, and this was
something that was always made clear to me after
attacks that I witnessed by the Israeli -- by Apache
helicopters and F-16s in Gaza. I think that one of the
things we have to remember is that Hezbollah, when
matched against the might of the Israeli army, is a
marginal, is virtually a nonentity, that they may be
able to drop a few Katyusha rockets on Haifa, but they
certainly -- to somehow equate the firepower of
Hezbollah with the -- you know, it?s sort of equating
a howitzer and an AK-47. There just is no match.
So, yes, there probably is support, from all we can
tell, from both -- well, from Iran and certainly
through Syria, in terms of a transit point. But trying
to deal with Hezbollah as a conventional force and
trying to bomb and occupy or destroy Lebanon as a
response for the capture of these Israeli soldiers --
and let me make just one final point, this isn't the
first time that Israeli soldiers have been captured.
We?ve had a long and painful negotiations over
kidnapped Lebanese, and Israeli has made cross-border
incursions into Lebanon to capture Lebanese for years
and years and years. That?s something well known to
Lebanese and probably not as well known to other
people.
But we had, just as in January of 2004, Israel freed
436 Arab prisoners and released the bodies of 59
Lebanese for burial in return for an Israeli spy and
the bodies of three Israeli soldiers. So these kinds
of negotiations over captured or kidnapped Israelis
are something that we have seen in the past, and that
is, of course, a more appropriate way to deal with
what happened.
AMY GOODMAN: Then why are they saying no to Hamas and
to Hezbollah this time, saying we will we will not
negotiate, when it?s known that Israel has negotiated
for prisoners in the past?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, you know, that is for, I suppose,
public consumption. I mean, I think even when they
make these swaps, they would often make these
statements that they don't make negotiations, and then
they do negotiate. I mean, one sets down a public
precedent, and then what happens behind the scene, as
certainly those of us who have worked in the Middle
East know well, is often very different.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with
us. Chris Hedges, former New York Times foreign
correspondent, he is the author of the book, War Is a
Force Which Gives Us Meaning, as well as other books,
also is a Nation Institute fellow. And As?ad AbuKhalil
is a professor of political science at California
State University, visiting professor at UC Berkeley.
His blog is the ?Angry Arab News Service? at
angryarab.blogspot.com.
To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire
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article nor is Information Clearing House endorsed or
sponsored by the originator.)
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