ZNet | Israel/Palestine
Lebanon between Truth and Justice
by Khatchig Mouradian; July 24, 2006
I’m for truth, no matter who tells it.
I’m for justice, no matter who it’s for or against.
Malcolm X
On July 12 2006, fighters from the armed wing of the Lebanese political
party Hizbollah launched a cross-border attack on Israel killing and
injuring a number of Israeli soldiers and capturing two. The operation was
dubbed `True Promise’; months ago, Hizbollah had promised in public to
capture Israeli soldiers to exchange them with Lebanese prisoners
languishing in Israeli jails, some for more than 25 years.
The very day the soldiers were captured, Sayyed Hassan Nasralla, the
secretary-general of Hizbollah, declared that there was no intention on his
part to start a full-scale confrontation, and that the only way to free the
Israeli soldiers was through indirect negotiations leading to an exchange.
Israel, however, immediately launched a wide-scale military campaign, dubbed
`Just Reward,’ to free the two soldiers. Hizbollah first retaliated by
shelling military positions in Israel’s north and, eventually, as the
Israeli Army started bombing Lebanese infrastructure and targeting
civilians, Hizbollah started shelling civilian targets as well.
Israel has thus far `justly rewarded’ the three runways and fuel depots of
Beirut International Airport, all its seaports, most highways and roads
connecting various parts of the country as well as those leading to Syria,
tens of bridges in Lebanon’s south and east, factories, trucks, ambulances,
TV transmission installations, thousands of buildings and houses. More than
360 civilians have been, again, `justly rewarded’ by getting slaughtered,
and more than a thousand received lesser `rewards’ by being sent to
hospitals and some 700 thousand (an estimated 15 percent of the country’s
population) have been `rewarded’ with refugee status. President Bush said
that Israel had the right to defend itself and, to date, the US has blocked
all attempts by the international community to put a ceasefire in place.
Hizbollah, in turn, has tried to impose what the Arab media and experts are
calling a `balance of terror’ by bombing northern Israel –most notably the
port city of Haifa– and causing a number of deaths and injuries among
Israeli soldiers and civilians.
While United Nations relief coordinator Jan Egeland was saying that Lebanon
was suffering a `major’ humanitarian crisis and that Israel was violating
`international humanitarian law,’ the US Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice, heading to the region on July 23, did not seem to be in a rush. `We
have to be certain that we are pushing forward to the new Middle East, not
going back to the old one,’ she said.
What started as an operation to liberate the 2 Israeli soldiers (if one is
naïve enough to believe that) is now a US supported war to forge a `new
Middle East.’ If this renovation is anything in the same breath as the
`Greater Middle-East’ plans that are being implemented from Afghanistan to
Iraq to the Palestinian territories, then Lebanon has just started to walk
down the long road that the Bush administration sees as that of freedom,
democracy, and security, and, if the country is lucky enough, three years
from now, it will be as free, democratic and safe as, say, Iraq and
Afghanistan are today.
What needs to be done? Attempts to wipe out, or even defeat Hizbollah, are
in all probability doomed to fail. With the degree of `pinpoint accuracy’
the Israeli army is displaying, the entire Lebanese people will be cleansed
much before the rooting out of Hizbollah.
Implementing UN Security Council resolution 1559 and disarming Hizbollah by
force are doomed to fail as well. Whether the US administration, the West in
general, some `moderate’ Arab states, and even many in Lebanon like it or
not, Hizbollah has a broad grassroots support not only among the Shiites,
the largest minority in Lebanon, but also among some Christian, Druze, and
Sunni Muslim political circles, who are extremely angry at Washington’s
overall pro-Israeli bias, and at the fact that the Bush administration is
ignoring the UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, which were
declared to be at the core of the international initiative launched in
Madrid in 1991.
Any initiative to solve the immediate crisis in Lebanon must involve an
exchange of prisoners between Lebanon and Israel (and probably in the
Palestinian territories as well), Israel’s handing down of the maps of
landmines that the Israeli army had planted in southern Lebanon before its
withdrawal in 2000, and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Shebaa farms–
which, according to the Lebanese government and Hizbollah, is Lebanese soil.
Even after all that, it is an illusion to believe that a comprehensive and
lasting solution can be achieved without finding a true and just solution to
the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Khatchig Mouradian is a Lebanese-Armenian writer, translator, and
journalist. He is an editor of the daily newspaper Aztag, published in
Beirut. He can be contacted at [email protected]