Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September/October 2006, pages 7-9

Special Report

The Real Reason for Israel’s Wars on Gaza And Lebanon

By Rachelle Marshall

What Israel is doing in Gaza now has nothing to do with the captured soldier. I don’t think bridges, power stations or airports have anything to do with the soldier, or denying medicine, or bombarding one of the most densely populated areas by day and by night.—Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, quoted in The New York Times, July 18.

Is this the price we pay for aspiring to build our democratic institutions? Can the international community stand by while such callous retribution by the State of Israel be inflicted on us?—Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, July 19.

ISRAEL’S ASSAULT on Lebanon that began in July was not so much a war as a conflagration. Round-the-clock bombing and shelling by the Israeli air force continued day after day, causing hundreds of civilian deaths, and inflicting trauma and misery on hundreds of thousands more. Targets of the precision bombing included a U.N. observer post, Red Cross ambulances, roads, bridges, power systems and communication networks. Residents of neighborhoods under siege were bombed as they tried to flee. Others were buried under rubble when whole buildings collapsed and rescuers were unable to reach them. Trucks carrying medical and relief supplies were hit, and many of the sick and wounded died as hospitals ran out of generator fuel, antibiotics, even water and food.

Within days Israel turned Lebanon from a modern country that was still rebuilding from past Israeli invasions, into a place of desolation and death. And it did so with wholehearted help from the United States. When the Israelis began running out of munitions, the Bush administration rushed them a shipment of 5,000-pound laser-guided bombs designed to penetrate deep into the ground. The missiles would be dropped on their targets from American-made warplanes.

The European Union, the French government, and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan condemned Israel’s military operations as an “excessive use of force” that “cannot be justified.” Amnesty International accused Israel of “war crimes.” The United States alone gave a green light to Israel to continue its attacks. “I’m not sure at this juncture we’re going to step in and put up a stop sign,” White House spokesman Tony Snow said, as the number of dead rose and Lebanese corpses lay unburied in the ruins of their homes.

Israel halted its bombing of Beirut on July 24 only long enough to allow Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to arrive in a military helicopter and a 20-SUV convoy to meet with Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. After an angry Siniora told her that Israeli bombing had set Lebanon “back 50 years,” Rice promised $130 million in U.S. aid, but said Washington would not support a cease-fire until Hezbollah returned two captive Israeli soldiers and pulled back from the Lebanese border.

At a meeting of 15 foreign ministers in Rome two days later, Rice was virtually alone in insisting there could be no cease-fire until Hezbollah was made to retreat. The continuing bloodshed represented the birth pangs of “a new Middle East,” she said—as if the Lebanese were suffering so that President Bush could fulfill his hallucinatory vision. The conference’s failure to call for an immediate cease-fire prompted a deeply disappointed Siniora to ask, “Are we children of a lesser God? Is an Israeli teardrop worth more than a drop of Lebanese blood?”

The foreign ministers did endorse a plan for sending an international force to Lebanon’s border, but since such a force would in effect have to confront Hezbollah on Israel’s behalf, few countries will be willing to contribute to it. Meanwhile, Israel announced that it will reoccupy a strip of southern Lebanon, and history is certain to repeat itself.

Thanks to the collective amnesia that afflicts the West when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict, American and European officials blamed Hezbollah for the escalating violence. They cited Hezbollah’s capture of Israeli soldiers (who some reports said were inside Lebanon) but conveniently forgot that Israel had been holding Lebanese prisoners for years. They condemned Hezbollah for firing rockets at Israeli cities, but made no mention of Israel’s bombing of Gaza that had long preceded those attacks. As of July 28, 600 Lebanese civilians and 19 Israeli civilians had been killed. On July 27 alone, Israeli forces killed 23 Palestinians in Gaza.

The savaging of Lebanon and Gaza are only the most recent episodes in Israel’s 40-year-long battle to achieve three major objectives: to prevent the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, retain control of Syria’s Golan Heights, and secure a compliant government in neighboring Lebanon. To accomplish these goals the Israelis know they must first eliminate resistance forces such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

According to Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University, Israel began preparing for the war against Hezbollah in 2000, immediately after withdrawing its troops from southern Lebanon. “By 2004 the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks had been blocked out, and in the last year or two, it’s been simulated and rehearsed across the board,” he told Matthew Kalman of the San Francisco Chronicle. Kalman reported on July 21 that a senior Israeli army officer briefed U.S. and other diplomats more than a year ago on plans for the current operations.

Western leaders who approve of Israel’s actions also forget that both Hamas and Hezbollah were formed in response to Israel’s own actions. Israeli terrorism began as soon as Israel became a state, with the forced expulsion and dispossession of half a million Palestinians from their homes and the imposition of martial law on those who remained. Since capturing the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights in 1967, Israel has robbed the inhabitants of their land and water, imposed crippling restrictions on their economy, and subjected them to beating, torture, and detention without trial. Nearly 10,000 Palestinians are in prison.

The Palestinian Liberation Organization, headed by Yasser Arafat, was originally a resistance movement aimed at replacing Israel with a secular state in Palestine. The PLO carried out acts of terrorism designed to call attention to the Palestinians’ plight under occupation, but in doing so provoked greater retaliation from Israel. After the PLO set up camps in southern Lebanon during the 1970s, Israel repeatedly bombed Lebanese villages in an attempt to pressure the Lebanese to drive them out.

When that effort failed, Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon violated a year-long cease-fire with the PLO and in June 1982 launched a full-scale invasion of Lebanon that resulted in more than 20,000 civilian deaths. It was the humiliating and brutal treatment of Shi’i Lebanese by the invading Israelis, including the desecration of mosques and the imprisonment and torture of Lebanese men, that in the fall of 1982 led to the creation of Hezbollah—a resistance force determined to drive the Israelis out of Lebanon.

Creating Its Enemies

The purpose of Israel’s invasion was to destroy the PLO once and for all, and with it the organized voice of the Palestinians. Although Arafat had indicated from 1976 on—to President Jimmy Carter, and to U.S. and Israeli peace activists—that the PLO would accept a two-state solution to the conflict, the Israelis continued to shun him as a terrorist. During the first Palestinian uprising that began in 1987 the Israelis encouraged the growth of Hamas, an Islamic organization they hoped would act as a counterweight to the PLO.

 The second intifada began in September 2000 after Sharon marched with a thousand police onto Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque and Israeli troops fired on the unarmed Palestinians who came out to protest. When Sharon became prime minister the following January, he renewed the attempt he had made in 1982 to destroy Arafat and the PLO. In April 2002 he launched Operation Defensive Shield, sending troops and armor into the West Bank in an assault that demolished water and power systems, streets, public buildings, even libraries and clinics. Arafat himself was made a prisoner in the rubble of his Ramallah headquarters. Israel’s clear intent was to make it impossible for the Palestinian Authority to govern.

Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, fared little better, as first Sharon and then Olmert refused to accept him as a negotiating partner and insisted that Israel would pursue its own solution to the conflict: confining West Bank Palestinians inside a shrunken piece of territory and surrounding them with a giant wall. When Abbas proved ineffective and his Fatah party hopelessly corrupt, Hamas, with its network of social service agencies, nursery schools and clinics, was ready to take its place.

They did so in January, as a result of open and fair parliamentary elections. But instead of being praised for their exercise of democracy the Palestinians were ruthlessly punished. Israel immediately put Gaza under siege, barring passage of goods and people in and out and causing critical shortages of food and medicine. During the first half of this year dozens of factories in Gaza went out of business and $20 million worth of fruits and vegetables rotted in the fields or on trucks halted at border crossings. Europe and the United States, meanwhile, cut off all aid to the Palestinian Authority.

“Palestinians are the first occupied population to be placed under international sanctions,” PLO official Maen Rashid Areikat wrote to The New York Times on July 12. President Abbas accused Israel “not only of trying to collapse the Hamas government but trying to bring down the Palestinian Authority wholesale.” When militants retaliated against Israeli attacks by firing rockets into southern Israel, most of which fell harmlessly, Israel used tanks, helicopters and warships to fire some 300 rounds a day into Gaza. Hamas repeatedly asked for a cease-fire, but Israel refused.

This was the prelude to Hamas’ capture of Cpl. Gilad Shalit on June 25, and Hezbollah’s capture of two more soldiers in early July—Israel’s proclaimed justification for the intensified bombing of Gaza and the assault on Lebanon. Spokesmen for Hamas and Hezbollah said they had intended to trade the Israeli soldiers for Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners Israel has been holding for years, as was done in the past. But this time Israel saw an opportunity to destroy the two groups and strike a blow at Syria and Iran, which both Israel and the United States accuse of financing and orchestrating the opposition to Israel’s occupation.

“By crushing the Hamas regime Israel can accomplish a much greater strategic step, which could have a profound effect on the entire region,” pro-government journalist Roni Shaked wrote in Yediot Ahronot. Former Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh was more explicit. “If we complete this mission, it will be our first victory over Iran,” he said, “and will constitute an unmistakable message that we have no intention to shy away from Iran’s nuclear and terrorist threat.”

According to Israeli journalist Zev Chafets, the United States and Israel are allies in the fight against Islamic radicalism. “An Israeli victory in Lebanon wounds Hezbollah’s patrons, Syria and Iran, both of which threaten American troops and aspirations in Iraq,” Chafets wrote in a July 19 op-ed column for The New York Times. “It establishes Olmert as a major figure as he tries to set Israel’s permanent borders in accordance with American policy.”

In other words, the war in Lebanon serves both Israel’s territorial ambitions in occupied Palestine and the Bush administration’s imperialist goals in Iraq. “What we recognize is that the root cause of the problem is Hezbollah,” Bush said at the White House on July 19. At the G8 Summit in St. Petersburg a few days earlier he told British Prime Minister Tony Blair, “See, what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this s...and it’s all over.”

Such statements not only show stunning ignorance of the forces at work in the Middle East but indicate why the United States is powerless to act in the present crisis. By shunning as “terrorists” and “rogue states” all of the principal players except Israel, Bush has made it impossible for Washington to act as mediator in the conflict. Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group pointed out in the July 24 issue of Time magazine that the only solution to the Middle East problem is a comprehensive peace package that deals with the security and territorial concerns of all the parties involved. Since this can only be achieved through negotiations with all of the parties, Malley writes, Bush’s policy of refusing to talk with Syria, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah has “all the appeal of a moral principle and all the effectiveness of a tired harangue.”

The United States also is alienating traditional allies. Clayton Swisher of the Middle East Institute found growing disillusionment with the United States when he visited in Lebanon in early July. “Christians in Lebanon are trying to distance themselves from America and forging a Christian-Shi’i alliance,” he reported. In the violence-torn country Bush refers to as “free and democratic Iraq,” the normally divided 275-member parliament voted unanimously to urge the U.N. Security Council “to stop the Israeli criminal aggression.” Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki endorsed the statement when he visited Washington on July 25, prompting Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) to ask, “Which side is he on when it comes to the war on terror?” 

In attempting to eliminate Hamas and Hezbollah, the United States and Israel have aroused increasing anger in the Arab world and are undoubtedly creating more dangerous enemies. The Israelis with full U.S. support rejected Hamas’s offer of a longterm truce in exchange for a two-state solution, and meanwhile have continued to assassinate Hamas leaders. But if Hamas fails while Palestinian grievances go unresolved, groups with more extreme agendas are certain to take its place. Already a shadowy Palestinian organization called the Army of Islam has appeared on an al-Qaeda Web site calling for a religious war. It is the first Palestinian organization to emphasize a religious rather than nationalist agenda.

Moderate Arabs complain that by encouraging Israel to continue its onslaught against Lebanon the United States is helping religious extremists. Mohamad al-Habash, a member of Syria’s parliament and a Muslim cleric, said in an interview published in The New York Times on July 22, “The United States is creating more (Abu Musab) al-Zarqawis, more (Osama) bin Ladens in the Mideast every day.” Said another Syrian official: “It is unbelievable that the U.S. will say to Israel you have one more week to wipe out Hezbollah—can you imagine someone saying you have one more week to kill Americans? You can’t imagine the impact of this on the region.”

A bumper sticker reads, “We are making enemies faster than we can kill them,” and there is no question that Israel’s 40-year effort to subdue the Palestinians by force has led only to increasing violence. Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Gaza have undermined democratically elected authorities and made victims of entire populations. But they will not make Israel more secure. As long as there is an occupation there will be resistance. The Israelis can end it only by agreeing to negotiations based on Israel’s return to its pre-June 1967 borders—the only borders recognized as legal by the United Nations Security Council and by most of the nations of the world.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the Jewish International Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.

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