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للإتصال
بنا

Report 51

Israeli invasion of
Lebanon
planned by neocons in June

July 22/23, 2006 --

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon was planned
between top Israeli officials and members of the Bush
administration.
On June 17 and 18, former Israeli Prime
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Likud Knesset member Natan
Sharansky met with Vice President Dick Cheney at the American
Enterprise Institute conference in Beaver Creek,
Colorado. There,
the impending Israeli invasions of both Gaza and Lebanon were
discussed. After receiving Cheney's full backing for the
invasion of Gaza and
Lebanon,
Netanyahu flew back to Israel and participated in a
special "Ex-Prime Ministers" meeting, in which he conveyed the
Bush administration's support for the carrying out of the
"Clean Break" policy -- the trashing of all past Middle East
peace accords, including Oslo. Present at the meeting,
in addition to Netanyahu, were current Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert and former Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres.
Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir is very old and suffers
from dementia and Ariel Sharon remains in a coma after a
series of strokes.
Lebanon and Gaza invasions planned last month in
Colorado meetings between
Netanyahu, Sharansky, and Cheney.
After the AEI meeting,
Sharansky, who has the ear of Bush, met with the Heritage
Foundation in Washington and then attended a June 29 seminar
at Philadelphia's Main Line Haverford School sponsored by the
Middle East Forum led by Daniel Pipes. Sharansky appeared with
Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum who this past Thursday was
beating the war drums against Syria, Iran, and
"Islamo-fascism" in a fiery speech at the National Press Club
attended by a cheering section composed of members of the
neocon Israel Project, on whose board Santorum serves along
with Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss and Virginia GOP Rep. Tom
Davis.
Our Washington
sources claim that the U.S.-supported invasions of Gaza and Lebanon and the impending
attacks on Syria and Iran represent the suspected
"event" predicted to take place prior to the November election
in the United States and
is an attempt to rally the American public around the
Bush-Cheney regime during a time of wider war.

Additional at following
URL:

Israeli invasion of Lebanon planned by
neocons in June:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=56539

حضارة الطائرات المقاتلة

عزمي
بشارة     الحياة     -
03/08/06//

الطائرة
القاذفة المقاتلة جوهر المدنية الحديثة وعلامتها الفارقة. إنها
نتاج اجتماع كل العلوم سوية وتحييد كل الأخلاق والقيم. إنها
اجتماع الليزر والميكرو اوبتكس والميكرو الكترونكس والهاي تيك
والايروديناميكس، والدقة والضبط والتحليق والتوجيه والتصويب
والتدمير. وهي صناعة نظيفة دقيقة. لا تصنع إلا في دول متطورة
جداً وفي شركات صناعية ضخمة، ويجتمع في تركيبها النساء والرجال
في مجتمع المساواة الحديث وبأجور مرتفعة. ولا تسلم قيادتها إلا
للأفراد المتميزين، إنها نتاج الفردية المطلقة والعمل الجماعي
الممأسس في آن. يجسد العاملون فيها مجتمع الانجازات، إنهم
النخبة، الممتازون، المتفوقون، المختارون، العرق الآري
الجديد.

وكما
في المجتمع الاستهلاكي يتم تغيير طرازها كل بضعة أعوام، أخذاً في
الاعتبار العرض والطلب والتطورات والاكتشافات والحفاظ على تفوقها
على الشعوب الأخرى.

***

تحول
الطائرة القاذفة المقاتلة الفعل غير الأخلاقي إلى فعل يحلق فيما
وراء الخير والشر. لا يرى الطيار الدم ولا يرى الحربة أو الرصاصة
وهي تخترق جسم ضحيتها. لا يتعفر بالتراب، ولا يتسخ بالدم، ولا
يزحف. لا يرى عيون الضحية. ولا يتجاوز وصية لا تقتل، فهو لا يقتل
بل يضغط على زر من بعيد. يسمع الضحايا أزيزا فقط، ولا يكاد دوي
الانفجار يصل الى مسامعهم حتى يرتج كل شيء ثم ينهار دفعة واحدة
دون أن يترنح. وربما تسبق الغيبوبة الشعور بالألم. كل الناس
عاجزون، كل الناس أطفال أمام الطائرة، لا يستطيع بالغ أن يحمي
ابنه من قاذفة مقاتلة. يحترق أطفال، أو يدفنون تحت الأنقاض،
وتنهار أبنية بصوت تخلعٍ وتداعٍ يختلط مع انخلاع الجسم الذي لا
يميز هل انهار هو أم ما حوله، وتصطدم حجارة وأخشاب بعظام الجسد
بقوة، وترتطم جسور حديدية بالجمجمة. يجري كل شيء في لمح البصر.
أما الفاعل في طائرته فيكون في هذه الأثناء قد رأى على شاشته
بؤرة يتصاعد منها الدخان وسحابة الغبار، وأبلغ قاعدته كلاماً غير
مفهوم عن مهمة نفذت، وبدأ حركة استدارة، نظيفا في قمرة القيادة،
حضاريا ما وراء الأخلاق. يهبط، ثم ينزل من الطائرة حاملاً خوذته
كأنه سائق دراجة نارية، يحتسي القهوة في القاعدة ويتبادل النكات
مع الطيارين والموظفات، ومع فنيي الصيانة الذين يجهزون الطائرة
لطلعة موت أخرى. ويعود إلى بيته مسترخيا، ويستمع في الطريق إلى
الموسيقى ويتمتع برفقة الأطفال، وربما يتكلم عن السياسة بهدوء،
وربما بعدم اكتراث وضجر. ربما كان يسارياً، أو يمينياً، متسامحاً
مع المثلية الجنسية أو غير متسامح، وربما يدعي أن أفكاره سلامية
حمائمية، أو صقرية حربجية. لا يوجد معيار كهذا لموافقته أن يكبس
على الزر. كل هذا يصبح كلاماً فارغاً في ديانة الطائرة
المقاتلة.

***

الطائرات
المقاتلة أصنام من آخر طراز:

بوينغ
15-i-F (ثندر، راعم، رعد): طائرة حربية معبودة جديدة
مزدوجة الوظيفة للهجوم والاعتراض (إسقاط)، بعيد المدى. وهي
الأفضل من نوعها في ميدان الشرق الأوسط القديم ومن أدوات تحويله
إلى جديد. بدأ استخدامها في كانون الثاني (يناير) 1998، وتشكل
رأس الحربة لسلاح الجو الإسرائيلي.

هي
نسخة محسنة عن صنم 15-E-F (سترايك إيغل)، والتي أنتجت خصيصاً لإسرائيل من
قبل العناية الاميركية في «معابد مكدونال دوغلاس» الأميركية،
المسماة اليوم «بوينغ». وبفضل قدرتها الهائلة من جهة الحمولة،
إلى جانب الأنظمة المتطورة، فإن ذلك يتيح لها تنفيذ هجمات في عمق
العدو وهي تحمل كميات كبيرة من الذخيرة، لمسافات بعيدة، على عمق
منخفض، طوال ساعات اليوم وفي جميع الظروف
الجوية.

النوع:
طائرة هجومية (مقاتلة) بمقعدين مزدوجين.

المقاييس:
طول الجناح 13.5 متر، طول الطائرة 19.43 متر، ارتفاعها 5.63
متر.

الأداء:
السرعة القصوى: 2.5 ماخ (سرعة الصوت) على ارتفاعات عالية، وعلى
ارتفاعات منخفضة تصل سرعتها إلى 1482 كيلومتراً في الساعة. المدى
الأقصى: 4450 كيلومتراً. وزنها بدون حمولة 14379 كيلوغراماً، مع
الحمولة يصل وزنها إلى 36750 كيلوغراماً.

لها
محركان « فراط أند وايتني F100-PW-229، بقوة دفع قصوى تصل إلى 29 ألف «ليبرا» لكل
محرك.

التسليح:
مدفع 20 ميللمتراً، 6 قصبات مثبتة على الجناح. صواريخ جو - جو من
نوع «بيتون3» و»بيتون 4»، «سايدويندر»، «سافارو» و»أمرام»،
صواريخ جو-أرض من أنواع مختلفة، وقنابل. وتصل حمولة الطائرة
القصوى إلى 11 طناً.

16-i-F(ستورم، سوفا، عاصفة):

طائرة
حربية متعددة المهمات.

تم
إنتاجها من قبل شركة «لوكهيد - مارتن»، وتحمل محرك «فراط أند
وايتني»، ومنظومة متطورة، تم تطويرها في إسرائيل بما يتلاءم مع
متطلبات سلاح الجو، من قبل الصناعات
الأمنية.

المقاييس:
طول الجناح 9.45 متر، مع الصواريخ 10 أمتار. الطول: 14.93 متر،
الإرتفاع: 5.10 متر.

الأداء:
تحليق على ارتفاعات عالية جدا بسرعة 2 ماخ (سرعة الصوت)، وعلى
ارتفاعات منخفضة بسرعة 1440 كيلومتراً في
الساعة.

الوزن:
بدون حمولة 10 أطنان، الوزن الأقصى 12.8 طن (مع الصواريخ وخزانات
وقود مليئة وقذائف في المدافع). وزن الإقلاع والهبوط الأقصى هو
23.5 طن، مع عتاد قابل للإنفصال يصل إلى 10.75
طن.

المحرك:
F100-PW-229 من شركة «فراط أند وايتني»، بسرعة دفع قصوى تصل
إلى 29100 ليبرا، وزن المحرك 1680 كيلوغراماً، ونسب الدفع إلى
الوزن تصل إلى 8:1.

الإنتاج:
شركة لوكهيد - مارتن

سنة
الاستخدام: 2004

التسليح:
الطائرة قادرة على حمل صواريخ جو - جو حرارية من إنتاج «رفائيل»
الإسرائيلية من نوع «بيتون4» و»بيتون 5»، وصواريخ جو - جو توجه
بالرادار من إنتاج العناية الأميركية من نوع «أمرام»، «فود
لايتيننغ» للاستطلاع والإطباق على الأهداف، و»فود لانترين»
للملاحة. قنابل من نوع «JDAM» و «SPICE» من إنتاج «رافائيل».

JDAM (مختصر Joint
Direct Attack Munition) وهي منظومة مثبتة في ذيل الطائرة، وظيفتها
تحويل القنابل التي ألقيت من الجو بشكل حر إلى دقيقة وموجهة
(قنابل ذكية).

•
من الممكن إطلاق هذه القنبلة في كل الأحوال الجوية وفي كل مجالات
الرؤية، ليلاً ونهاراً. في حين أن القنبلة الموجهة بالليزر بحاجة
إلى ظروف بيئية وأحوال جوية مريحة نسبياً (من دون غيوم أو
دخان).

•
قنابل JDAM هي من نوع «أطلق وانس»! أي أسقط القنبلة
وانساها!! مما يتيح للطائرة إطلاق عدة قنابل بسرعة خاطفة، بحيث
تتجه كل قنبلة بتوجيه ذاتي إلى هدف مختلف. أما قنابل الليزر، على
سبيل المثال، فتتطلب التأشير على الهدف بشكل متواصل. وهذا
التأشير يتم من قبل قوات برية أو من قبل طائرة تحلق في الجو.
قنابل JDAM ليست متعلقة بطائرة أو بقوة برية، لأنها موجهة
عن طريق الأقمار الصناعية GPS. سلاح الطيران الإسرائيلي هو الجيش الأول غير
الاميركي الذي امتلك هذه القنبلة.

أما
القنبلة الأكثر تطوراً، فهي قنبلة Spice من انتاج شركة «رفائيل» الإسرائيلية. توجه هذه
القنبلة بمساعدة الأقمار الصناعية وبطريقة «اليكترو - ضوئية» (أي
ملاءمة صورة الهدف للهدف الذي يبدو من «عين»
القنبلة).

***

تفتك
هذه الطائرات بالمدنيين، الفقراء منهم بشكل خاص، ممن لم يغادروا
مناطق سكناهم، كما تفتك بالجيوش النظامية، وقد أثبتت قدرة هائلة
على التدمير وتخريب الممتلكات والبنى التحتية. ولكنها لا تصيب
مقاتلي حرب العصابات الذين لا يؤمنون بقدرتها، ولا يحتمون بأبنية
من صنع الإنسان، بل بالطبيعة والتضاريس وثقوب
الأرض.

وتفتك
بالجيوش النظامية لأنها تعرف ثكناتها وقوافل دباباتها، ولكنها لا
تعرف أين يختبئ مقاتلو العصابات.

***

تنقسم
الشعوب بين من في حوزة دولهم طائرات أف 15 وأف 16، ومن ليس في
حوزتهم.

وينقسم
من لديهم طائرات كهذه، بين دول تملك الطائرات ودول تملكها
الطائرات.

أما
العرب فينقسمون بين من لا يملكون طائرات كهذه ومن تملكهم هذه
الطائرات. لا وجود في عصرنا لعرب
يملكونها.

***

الطائرات
في كل مكان. ترى ولا ترى. لا مفر من حممها، ولا مهرب من
صواريخها، ولا مخبأ من قذائفها. ثابتة في السماء ، ولكن صواريخها
تلحق بركاب سيارة فارة، بحافلة، بسيارة إسعاف، وقذائفها تخترق
الملاجئ والمخابئ وتصل إلى الأجسام الغضة. لا فرصة للحم البشري
أمام الصاروخ المنطلق نحوه من طائرة.

يقف
الجسم عارياً أمام طائرات تجوب السماء وتتداعى أمامها الصروح
الحجرية وينهار الإسمنت المسلح. المهم ألا تعرف أين

يختبئ الجسم البشري الذي تبحث عنه
لتقتله، أما إذا عرفت فكل ما يلزم هو أن يضغط الجسم العاري
القابع في داخلها على الزر ليتبع الصاروخ رائحتها أو نفسها
المكتوم كي لا يسمعها أو صوت حشرجة بكاء الأطفال المكبوت أو
المخنوق حنانا بعناق ودعاء الأمهات وقبلاتهن التي تمسد شعور
الأطفال في الأحضان. لا ترغب الامهات أن تعرض جثث أطفالهن بعد
الغارة، ولا أن يتغنى أحد بأشلائهم. كن يتمنين لو كانت لدى دولهن
مضادات للطائرات وملاجئ
آمنة.

***

دمرت
الطائرات بنت جبيل. بصقت ألسنة لهب وحمماً. سوت بنت جبيل بالأرض،
حرثتها بصواريخ، دكتها بقذائف من سمائها. كان هنالك شيوخ وأطفال
نسي طفل منهم اسمه من دوي الانفجارات واهتزاز كل ما كان ثابتا في
مخيلته، وارتجاج الجمجمة.

***

تدمر
الطائرات، ولكنها لا تحسم معركة ضد أصحاب حق. من اجل ذلك يضطر
أتباعها للقتال على الأرض. وإذا قاتل سكان هذه

الحضارة على الأرض، فإنهم يقتلون
ويبكون. وينتشر بينهم معتقد غريب أن من حقهم أن يَقتلوا، ولكن
ليس من حق أحد أن يقتل لهم جنودا، ولا حتى في حرب. وإذا قُتل لهم
جندي يصابون بصدمة. بعد أن يتلقى جنودها ضربة أو يجربون هزيمة
مذلة من قبل مقاتلين مظلومين يهزأون من تفوقهم، تنسحب إسرائيل
بخبث. تقوم الطائرات بتدمير الموقع بيتا كان أم قرية على من فيه.
تصرف جبان وانتقامي، ولكنه تصرف من يملك سلاح الجو. فالأخير
يمكِن من يملكه أن يكون ذليلا ضعيفا على الأرض مختالا معربدا في
السماء. إنهم على الأرض بشر كباقي البشر، هشون سريعو العطب كباقي
البشر. أما من السماء فبحماية طائراتهم يعربدون من دون أن تراهم
العين المجردة، أحياناً فقط يسمع صوت مرورهم. إنهم يستغلون هشاشة
من بقي على الأرض من دون طائرات، من يختبئ في ثقوب الأرض.
ينتقمون ليس فقط لمجرد أنهم يريدون، فالإرادة ليست امتيازا لهم،
بل لأن طائراتهم تمكنهم من
الانتقام.

***

القوة
التدميرية لطائراتهم تُشعرهم بالغرور، فيتعثرون بالحبل الذي تمده
لهم. متى تنقلب الصورة وتتحول القوة العاتية ضد العُزَل إلى
فضيحة؟ ثلاثون طفلا، خمسون طفلا! ثلاثون مع كاميرا، أكثر من
خمسين من دون كاميرا! ما هو بالضبط الحد الذي يطفح عنده الكيل؟
لا تنقل الكاميرات رائحة الجثث التي لم تستخرج من تحت
الأنقاض.

يصعب
تحديد اللحظة التي يتأثر عندها المسؤول العربي أو الغربي وهو
ينظر إلى الشاشة امام مشهد أي طفل أثر به أكثر من غيره! هل يغص
بما يأكل، هل يتوقف عن الكلام مشدوها، هل يتوقف عما كان يقوم به؟
ربما يهمس في أذنه مساعدوه أن الكيل قد طفح، وأن عليه الآن أن
يطالب بوقف إطلاق النار. هل يضرب كفا بكف من هول جرائم إسرائيل
أم من غباء إسرائيل التي ضيَعت فرصة؟

***

قامت
إسرائيل على استهداف المدنيين لتهجيرهم بعد مذابح منظمة اشتهرت
منها دير ياسين، ومثلها العشرات، وتشريدهم لتحل محلهم عام 1948،
كما استهدفت قرى بكاملها بعد ان شكت بخروج فدائيين لعمليات منها،
وهذا بموجب عقيدة عسكرية تشمل عنصرين: ردع المدنيين عن دعم
المقاومة، أي ردعهم عن موقف سياسي او اجتماعي معين، والانتقام
وتغذية روح الثأر لدى مواطنيها في عمليات انتقامية أسستها الوحدة
101 بقيادة شارون في بداية الخمسينات. كانوا يدخلون الى البيوت،
يفجرونها ويقتلون السكان. اشتهرت منها مذابح قبية ونحالين
والبريج في الخمسينات، وأخيراً، جباليا وبيت حانون والشجاعية وحي
القصبة في نابلس وجنين وغيرها. من اجل ذلك كان يلزم «سفاحون»، أو
كما كانوا يسمونهم «مقاتلين أسطوريين» ينفذون بالأيدي. أما
الطائرة فيكفيها للقيام بالمهمة شاب مدلل من أتباع دينها مُصر
على نمط حياة أميركي استهلاكي.

***

تستهدف
إسرائيل المدنيين في لبنان مباشرة في تجميع للتسلسل التاريخي في
لحظة قانوية قانية: أولا، عقابا لمن دعم المقاومة، وثانيا لتشريد
المدنيين الجنوبيين شمالا من أجل توتير العلاقات الطائفية في
لبنان، وثالثا، كي تغذي رغبة الانتقام البربرية. هذا استهداف
مدروس ومقرر سلفا، مقصود، عن سبق الإصرار والترصد. إسرائيل دولة
إرهابية. وتقر منطقها هذا دولة إرهابية أخرى يقودها جورج بوش،
رجل خطير وسادي وعنيف المزاج وحوله عصابة من منظري ودعاة إرهاب
الدولة المكيافيليين الباردي الأعصاب، الذين يعتقدون أن المدنيين
الذين لا تملك دولهم طائرات مقاتلة ولدوا غير محظوظين، وغير
مهيئين لصراع البقاء للأصلح، فإما أن يسيروا في ركب من يملك
الطائرات أو يموتون، وهم المسؤولون عن موتهم، لأنهم غير
واقعيين.

خطأ
واحد في هذا المنطق، يكفي وحده ليكون خطيئة لا تغتفر، ولعنة
تلاحق هذه الحضارة بتوجيه ذاتي، ولائحة اتهام تحاسب سماءها: كيف
يكون الأطفال غير واقعيين؟ كيف يتحملون مسؤولية
موتهم؟

***

يحرم
التغني بأشلاء الأطفال، ومن العار على من لا يقاوم أن يعرض جثثهم
باستعراضية. هؤلاء ليسوا مناضلين ولا مقاومين ولا أبطالا. ولا
ماتوا بدلا عمن لا يقاوم لتحقيق انجاز له. فقط لم يتمكنوا من
الفرار او الاختباء من وجه الطائرات، إنهم ضحايا حضارة الطائرات
المقاتلة المجرمة الهمجية البربرية. يجب أن يحاسَب من قتلهم، وأن
يقاوَم عدوانه.

كاتب
عربي

ندوة "مركز الحوار العربي في
واشنطن" عن

الإعلام
الأمريكي ودور اللوبي الإسرائيلي في الحرب على
لبنان

نظّم
مركز الحوار العربي في واشنطن ندوة لمناقشة أبعاد مساندة الإعلام
الأمريكي لإسرائيل في عدوانها على لبنان وتكاتف ذلك الإعلام مع
اللوبي الموالي لإسرائيل في الولايات المتحدة. تحدث في الندوة
المحلل السياسي والباحث الأكاديمي علاء بيومي مدير الشئون
العربية بمجلس العلاقات الأمريكية الإسلامية "كير"، مشيراً إلى
ما حدث عندما قام حزب الله بعملية أسر الجنديين الإسرائيليين حيث
سارعت المنظمات اليهودية الأمريكية الموالية لإسرائيل إلى إصدار
سيل من البيانات الصحفية لتصوير العملية على أنها تهديد لأمن
إسرائيل المحاطة ببحر من الأعداء، وسارعت اللجنة اليهودية
الأمريكية التي تقود اللوبي الموالي لإسرائيل بالاتصال بسفراء
عدد كبير من الدول في واشنطن لحشد تأييد تلك الدول لإسرائيل فيما
هرع مئات من النشطاء المتخصصين في الضغط السياسي إلى مقابلة
أعضاء الكونجرس  لتأمين موقف موحد يساند إسرائيل بلا حدود.
وسرعان ما تبارى أعضاء الكونجرس في إصدار البيانات الداعمة لموقف
إسرائيل والمبررة لعدوانها على لبنان، بل وصل الأمر بتأثير
اللوبي الإسرائيلي على الكونجرس إلى حد كتابة مسودة مشروع القرار
الذي مرره مجلس الشيوخ الأمريكي يوم 18 يوليو الماضي تأييداً
لإسرائيل.

وأضاف
علاء بيومي قائلاً: نظراً لإدراك اللوبي الإسرائيلي والمنظمات
اليهودية الأمريكية لأهمية التأثير المباشر على الرأي العام
الأوروبي، سارعت عصبة مكافحة التشويه اليهودية إلى شراء مساحات
لأربعة إعلانات ضخمة في صحيفة إنترناشيونال هيرالد تريبيون
الواسعة الانتشار في أوروبا روجت فيها الإيهام بان إسرائيل تدافع
عن نفسها ضد ما وصفته بإرهاب حزب الله. وعندما بدا أن إسرائيل
مستمرة في حرب واسعة النطاق على البنية التحتية اللبنانية وعلى
المدنيين بحجة تقويض قوة حزب الله سارعت شبكات التليفزيون
الأمريكية إلى إرسال مراسليها لمرافقة القوات الإسرائيلية ونقل
وجهات النظر العسكرية الإسرائيلية.

الترويج
لفكرة نهاية العالم

وفيما يشبه
التنسيق غير المسبوق بين قنوات تليفزيونية أمريكية متنافسة، خرجت
تلك القنوات في يوم واحد بتساؤل مريب: هل الحرب التي تخوضها
إسرائيل ضد "القوى الشريرة" التي يمثلها حزب الله هي مقدمة
لبداية نهاية العالم وتوطئة لانتصار الدولة العبرية على قوى الشر
تمهيدا لعودة السيد المسيح ليقيم على الأرض السلام لمدة ألف عام
قبل نهاية العالم، واستضافت تلك الشبكات عشرات من زعماء الكنيسة
الإيفانجيلية الذين يرون في تأييد إسرائيل ودعمها واجبا دينيا
على المسيحيين وشرعوا في حشد تأييد المسيحيين المتشددين في
أمريكا لصالح إسرائيل. ومن العجيب أنه وفقا لتلك النظرية الدينية
فإن من شأن عودة السيد المسيح ألا يبقى على وجه الأرض بعد تلك
الحرب مع القوى الشريرة إلا حوالى مائة وأربعين ألف يهودي يتعين
عليهم التحول إلى اعتناق الديانة المسيحية وإلا تعرضوا للقتل.
وعندما سألت إحدى تلك القنوات السفير الإسرائيلي في واشنطن دان
ايالون عن رأيه قال: "المهم في كل ذلك الجدل أنه يحشد المزيد من
التأييد لإسرائيل في الولايات المتحدة وهذا هو كل ما
يهمنا!"

وحدث ما
تمناه السفير فقد دعت منظمة "المسيحيين المتحدين من أجل إسرائيل"
أنصار إسرائيل من القيادات الدينية ومن أعضاء الكونجرس لحضور
مؤتمر حاشد لمناصرة الدولة اليهودية في 19 يوليو الماضي حضره
السفير الإسرائيلي ورئيس الحزب الجمهوري كين ماكميلان وثلاثة
آلاف وأربعمائة مدعو آخرين من شتى أنحاء الولايات المتحدة لإظهار
التعاطف والمساندة لإسرائيل في حربها ضد لبنان. وسرعان ما نجح
اللوبي الإسرائيلي والمنظمات اليهودية الأمريكية في شن حملات
لجمع التبرعات أظهرت صور الدمار الذي ألحقته صواريخ حزب الله
بمساكن ومتاجر المدنيين الإسرائيليين وتدفقت عشرات إن لم يكن
مئات الملايين من الدولارات لنصرة العدوان
الإسرائيلي.

وختم بيومي
قائلاً: لم تكن مفاجأة بطبيعة الحال أن تسعى مجلات المحافظين
الجدد مثل مجلة ويكلي ستاندارد إلى تصوير العدوان الإسرائيلي على
لبنان بأنه حرب أمريكية على الإرهاب الذي يقوم به حزب الله
بمساندة من إيران وسوريا، وبأنها مراحل أولية "للحرب العالمية
الثالثة" تقف فيها إسرائيل في موقع القاعدة المتقدمة للحضارة
الغربية في مواجهة التطرف الإسلامي.

التحيز
بالحذف والاختيار

وتحدث أيضاً
في ندوة "مركز الحوار العربي" الكاتب الصحفي عماد مكي مراسل
وكالة أنباء إنتر بريس الأمريكية والذي سبق له العمل في عدة صحف
أمريكية من بينها صحيفة نيويورك تايمز فقال إن ملكية معظم وسائل
الإعلام الأمريكية لعائلات يهودية متعاطفة مع إسرائيل هو أحد
الأسباب الرئيسية وراء تحيز الإعلام الأمريكي لإسرائيل كما أن
نفوذ اللوبي الموالي لإسرائيل في الولايات المتحدة يحد بشكل كبير
من فرص النقاش الموضوعي حول سياسات إسرائيل مما يسهم إلى حد بعيد
في تدني قدرة الأمريكيين على فهم حقائق الصراع العربي
الإسرائيلي، بالإضافة إلى جهل عدد كبير ممن يكتبون عن الشرق
الأوسط  بحقائق الوضع فيه، وتعمد مراسلي بعض وسائل الإعلام
الأمريكية في المنطقة  تشويه صورة المواقف العربية بسوء نية
مبيت. ومن الأسباب الأخرى التي عرضها عماد مكي هي أن باب العمل
الصحفي والإعلامي يغلق بقوة في وجه كل من يجسر على انتقاد
إسرائيل. ونقل عن رئيس مكتب واحدة من اكبر الصحف الأمريكية في
واشنطن قوله" لقد تعرضت للدغ المؤلم من اللوبي الإسرائيلي عدة
مرات بسبب ما كتبته بحيث لا يمكنني معاودة التجربة
نفسها".

وضرب الكاتب
عماد مكي مثالاً على التعاطف مع إسرائيل في الصحف الأمريكية
الكبرى بالكاتب الأمريكي توماس فريدمان الذي تفرد له بعض الصحف
العربية مساحات لنشر ترجمات لمقالاته، فقال: "إن توماس فريدمان
الذي فاز ثلاث مرات بجائزة بوليتزر الأمريكية للامتياز في
الكتابة الصحفية يحرص على إقامة علاقات ودية حميمة مع عدد كبير
من الكتاب والصحفيين والمفكرين في العالم العربي ويستمع باهتمام
شديد إلى آراء وتحليلات كل من يناصر القضايا العربية لمجرد
التفنن في إعمال فكره في دحض تلك الآراء والنيل منها!"

ومن
واقع خبرته مع صحيفة النيويورك تايمز، أكبر الصحف الأمريكية
وأكثرها توزيعا، التي تمتلكها وتديرها عائلة يهودية متعاطفة
تماما مع إسرائيل نقل الكاتب عماد مكي للحاضرين في مركز الحوار
العربي  عن رئيس التحرير آنذاك قوله:" في القضايا الشائكة
مثل الصراع العربي الإسرائيلي، إما تقرر هيئة التحرير سياسة خاصة
بالصحيفة، أو تستشهد بالسياسة الأمريكية المعلنة إزاء ذلك الصراع
بجوانبه المختلفة."

وفيما
يتعلق بتغطية وسائل الإعلام الأمريكية للحرب في لبنان لخص
المراسل الصحفي عماد مكي تقييمه لها بقوله:" إبحثوا عما لم تتطرق
إليه وسائل الإعلام الأمريكية في تلك التغطية وما تعمدت حذفه
وليس ما عرضته، وستلاحظون أنها لم تتحدث عن حجم الدمار الذي
ألحقه العدوان الإسرائيلي بالبنية التحتية المدنية اللبنانية ولم
تركز على استهداف الطائرات الإسرائيلية للمنازل والمدنيين ولم
تركز على حقيقة أن معظم خسائر إسرائيل في الأرواح كانت بين
العسكريين الإسرائيليين بينما كانت معظم خسائر اللبنانيين بين
المدنيين الأبرياء." وضرب الكاتب عماد مكي مثالا على التحيز
بالحذف فقال إن من تابع تغطية وسائل الإعلام الأمريكية للحرب في
لبنان اصبح من تكرار الحديث عن اسلحة حزب الله التي جاءت من
إيران عبر سوريا خبيرا بأنواع صواريخ الكاتيوشا والصواريخ الأطول
مدى من طرازي زلزال وخيبر لتصوير إسرائيل في وضع الضحية التي
تدافع عن نفسها، فيما أسدلت وسائل الإعلام الأمريكية ستائر
التعتيم الإعلامي على استخدام إسرائيل لأنواع محرمة من الأسلحة
مثل القنابل العنقودية وقذائف الفوسفور الأبيض الحارقة. وعن
تقييمه لفكرة مرافقة المراسلين الأمريكيين لوحدات القوات
الإسرائيلية أثناء هجومها على قرى الجنوب اللبناني كما فعلت شبكة
سي إن إن قال: " أن أقصى ما يمكن للمراسل عمله في هذه الحالة هو
أن يفقد توازنه في التقرير ويحاول تقديم وجهة النظر الإسرائيلية
وتصويرها على انه خبر متوازن!"

تقرير إعلامي من إعداد: محمد ماضي -
واشنطن

The Rise of
Hezbollah in "The New Middle
East"

"In
conclusion, an odd fact. The severest condemnation of Israel's

destruction of Lebanon that any Arab government handed out
came not
from Saudi Arabia, the Keeper of Islam's Holy
Places, nor from Egypt,
the largest and most powerful
country in the Arab world, but from the
U.S.-occupied Iraq
where the U.S.-confected Parliament passed a
unanimous
resolution of outrage against Israel's action and the
U.S.-
appointed Prime Minister openly joined Syrian and
Iranian demand for
an immediate ceasefire.  A sign of
the times yet to come?"

MER
- MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 13 August
2006:
The United Nations and the so-called "International Community"
have failed badly, again.  Weeks of tragic delays, the
destruction of much Lebanon with a
million plus homeless refugees, unaccoutable Israeli bombing
and killing of official and unarmed U.N. observer bases, Qana
massacre II and others.   But of course on matters
of war and peace the U.N. is in fact a creature of the major
states who created it, dominate it, and insist on controlling
it -- the U.S. of course by
far the superpower at the top.   The institution of
the Secretary-General is without independent power and weak,
as is the American-selected man who now holds the
position.  The institution of the Security Council is
hamstrung because the U.S. has a long record of
vetoing anything it does not desire, more vetos from the
U.S. than from all
the other countries combined over the years.  Moreover
this veto threat from Washington is continually
used to badger and warn, weakening and neutering U.N.
resolutions and actions even before they are taken, as has
just happened again with likely still more tragic results
ahead.

Journalists and experts around the world are not
nearly as taken in by the American, Israeli, and Jewish
propaganda onslaught which is so effective in stiffling both
understanding and criticism.    The powerful
'Jewish/Israel Lobby' does in fact have the Congress by the
balls; and much of the major corporate media cowering from the
pressures and threats.   The U.S. government and
the military-industrial complex also now have many ways to
spew forth their own propaganda greatly spinning and watering
down what comes from quasi-independent media.   And
overseas of course the U.S. not only has
the expanded CIA but now spends hundreds of millions yearly
funding many media organizations and on-the-take quasi-agents
in a worldwide 'information' war.

And yet just look at
opinion polls around the world when even ordinary people are
asked about the policies of the U.S. and Israel -- never
ever so dangerously off the charts.   Here is the
origin of the disgust, the hatred, and the desire for revenge
that is propelling so many to decide that they must themselves
find ways to fight, to defend, to revenge.   This
substantial cover story comes from India, from the
well-known magazine Frontline published by The
Hindu.

COVER
STORY

Empire
comes to Lebanon

AIJAZ
AHMAD

ISSAM
KOBEIS/REUTERS

LET
us begin with a supposedly "undisputed" fact:

The
official story, told first by the Israeli government and
automatically accepted by governments and media outlets across
the world, is that Hizbollah is a Muslim fundamentalist,
terrorist organisation which periodically lobs shells and
rockets into civilian population centres of northern Israel
and that, in its latest outrage on July 12, it attacked a
border military post inside Israeli territory, killing six
Israeli soldiers and capturing two. Having waited several
years for "the international community" and the Lebanese
government to disarm this "terrorist" organisation, Israel is
said to have been finally exasperated by this latest outrage
and, acting in self-defence, it decided to retaliate so as to
"break Hizbollah" for ever and ever, for the sake of the
security of its citizens.

This
official version raises some basic questions regarding the
character of Hizbollah itself, about the very incident that is
supposed to have "provoked" Israel beyond endurance, and
about the scope of Israel's
"retaliation".

The
background to the rise of Hizbollah is instructive, as is its
present role in Lebanese politics in general. There is a long
history of United
States and Israeli military interventions
in Lebanon, dating
back to the landing of U.S. Marines there in 1958 and
including major Israeli invasions in 1978 and 1982, which
predate the very formation of Hizbollah. It was in 1978 that
Israel first captured a large swath of territory in the
predominantly Shia region of southern Lebanon and held it as a
self-declared "security zone" until a Lebanese armed
resistance movement, led by Hizbollah, put an end to that
occupation, except for a mountainside at the point where the
borders of Israel and Syria meet with that of Lebanon, known
as Shebaa Farms, which Israel has continued to occupy and
which therefore continues to be a point of military contention
between the occupiers and the resistance.

Hizbollah
itself came into being some four years after the invasion of
1982, when Israel occupied about half of
Lebanon,
destroyed much of Beirut and oversaw the
infamous massacres of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila
camps on the outskirts of the city. In its formative phase,
Hizbollah drew many of its guerilla fighters from among the
relatives of those who had been killed during the Israeli
invasions and, throughout its history, it has been based
predominantly among the Shias who constitute roughly half the
population of Lebanon, the overwhelming majority in the south
and the bulk of the urban poor in Beirut itself. Until 2000,
it was devoted almost exclusively to fighting the Israeli
occupiers. After evicting the Israelis from virtually the
whole of southern Lebanon, it entered
into Lebanese politics as a party and now has 12 members in
Parliament and two in the Cabinet; there are other forces,
including wholly secular as well as non-Muslim forces, which
are allied with it in a parliamentary bloc. In fact, the list
of candidates for the alliance it led during the 2005
elections included five Christians, three Sunni Muslims and a
Druze alongside 14 Shia candidates.

Certain
facts stand out in sharp relief here. First, Hizbollah is
undoubtedly an Islamicist organisation but it arose not to
turn Lebanon into a
theocratic state; it arose as a resistance movement against
Israeli occupation. That its mass base is exclusively among
Shias reflects, in the first pace, the sectarian nature of the
Lebanese political chessboard, based as it is on the
constitutional arrangements devised by the French colonial
authority before its departure, in which every party, except
the Left parties, represents an ethnic and/or religious
grouping. Moreover, this mass base is owed also to the fact
that Shias were the vast majority who lived under Israeli
occupation and who inhabit the slums of Beirut.

Second,
perhaps the majority of the Lebanese look upon it as a
movement of anti-colonial resistance, so that the
U.S.-Israeli-British characterisation of it as "terrorist"
falls on deaf ears.

Third,
Hizbollah certainly arose as a guerilla force but, through an
evolution and expansion over two decades, it has become an
influential political party in Parliament and the Cabinet,
while it also maintains a militia which fights Israel over the
little sliver of Lebanese territory which is still occupied.
There is no history of Hizbollah ever committing violence
against a Lebanese citizen, and though a Christian militia,
known as the Southern Lebanon Army (SLA), fought alongside the
Israelis during 22 years of full-scale occupation of
Lebanon, Hizbollah
undertook no acts of revenge or retribution against that
client force after its Israeli masters had been forced to
withdraw. Most of the fire between Israel and Hizbollah is
exchanged not over northern Israel, as the global propaganda
machine would have us believe, but over the Shebaa Farms which
Israel occupies and which Lebanon considers its own (Syria
also claims that little patch of a mountainside).

As
for the incident of July 12 which is said to have "provoked"
Israel into attacking Lebanon, the primary fact is that Israel
holds in its prisons hundreds of Lebanese nationals, most of
whom it does not acknowledge and many of whom have been held
for well over a decade - not to speak of some 10,000
Palestinians who are currently held in Israeli prisons.
Hizbollah is always on the lookout to capture Israelis so that
it can then exchange them for some of Israel's Arab
prisoners. Such prisoner exchanges have happened in the past,
and the current Israeli claim that it does not exchange
prisoners is a straightforward lie.

As
for the incident of July 12 itself, when Hizbollah is supposed
to have attacked a military post inside Isreal, there is
reason to be sceptical.

IN
THE MOROCCAN capital of Rabat, a protest against
Israeli aggression.

The
initial report filed by Agence France-Presse (AFP) actually
said that "According to the Lebanese police force, the two
Israeli soldiers were captured in Lebanese territory, in the
area of Aitaa al-Chaab, near to the border with
Israel, where an
Israeli unit had penetrated in middle of morning."

The
Associated Press (AP) gave the same version on July 12: "The
militant group Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers during
clashes Wednesday across the border in southern
Lebanon,
prompting a swift reaction from Israel, which sent
ground forces into its neighbour to look for them. The forces
were trying to keep the soldiers' captors from moving them
deeper into Lebanon, Israeli
government officials said on condition of anonymity."

This
was also the account published in The Hindustan Times
the same day: "The Lebanese Shi'ite Hizbollah movement
announced on Wednesday that its guerillas have captured two
Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon.
`Implementing our promise to free Arab prisoners in Israeli
jails, our strugglers have captured two Israeli soldiers in
southern Lebanon,' a
statement by Hizbollah said. `The two soldiers have already
been moved to a safe place,' it added. The Lebanese police
said that the two soldiers were captured as they `infiltrated'
into the town of Aitaa al-Chaab inside the
Lebanese border."

This
line of reporting was completely suppressed after
Israel put
forward its claim that it was Hizbollah that had attacked its
territory, killed its soldiers and kidnapped two others, so
that it could claim to be attacking Lebanon in
retaliation. We do know that an Israeli tank got blown up in
Lebanese territory in the course of that incident. Israelis
claim that they had sent that tank to chase the Hizbollah
guerillas who had kidnapped Israeli soldiers. Hizbollah, by
contrast, claims that the tank was part of the Israeli
incursion into Lebanon, got blown
up by a landmine, and Israeli soldiers were taken prisoner
after a gun battle. Hizbollah's version seems more credible in
the light of the reports we have quoted above.

Israel "Retaliates"

Two
soldiers taken prisoner - on Israeli territory, let us grant
for arguments' sake.

Israel
responds by bombing three runways and fuel depots of Beirut
International Airport, all the country's 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, army bases, trucks, ambulances,
hospitals, schools, television transmitters, the whole of
southern Beirut, Sidon, Tyre, Baalbek, other towns, other
villages. Six hundred dead, thousands injured. Half a million
refugees in the first week. Eight hundred thousand by the end
of the second week. At the time of writing, on July 27, one
out of five Lebanese citizens has been rendered homeless. Tens
of billions of dollars of damage inflicted upon a tiny
country, one of the most beautiful and vibrant on this planet
of ours, which had only recently pulled itself out, gloriously
and with great aesthetic finesse, out of the devastations of a
civil war and foreign - Israeli! - occupation.
"Lebanon has been
put back 20 years," an Israeli general exults on television.
Precisely. Because Hizbollah took two prisoners and wanted to
exchange them for some Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails.

Tzipi
Livni, the glamorously dressed Israeli Vice-Prime Minister and
Minister of Foreign Affairs, sits in the glare of television
cameras and justifies the carnage in suave tones, invoking the
"axis of terror and hate created by Iran, Syria, Hizbollah and
Hamas that want to end any hope for peace". She says that the
best way to retrieve the two captured soldiers "is to destroy
totally the international airport of Beirut", so that they are not taken
out of Lebanon. "But they
can sneak them away in a car," her interlocutor says. "Oh,
indeed," says the Israeli Foreign Minister, "This is why we
also destroy all the roads in Lebanon leading out
of the country." And, one would suppose that a fifth of the
Lebanese population is rendered homeless so that Hizbollah has
no buildings left to hide those two soldiers; once all the
buildings are gone, the Israeli Army will then find those two
soldiers, just sitting somewhere out in the open, and bring
them home.

It
is difficult to say just when the planning for this war began.
We know that for well over a year now, senior military
officers have been giving a Power Point presentation, the
"Three-Week War," to their U.S. counterparts,
U.S. think-tanks
and pro-Israeli members of the U.S. Congress, selected
European diplomats and journalists, spelling out the plans for
what is now unfolding. We do not know who was behind the
assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime
Minister, in February 2005, but we do know that the
assassination was used by the U.S.-Israeli axis to obtain the
withdrawal of the Syrian forces from Lebanon (who had come
there initially on U.S. and Saudi Arabian promptings, to save
Lebanon from the secular Left) and to get the U.N. Security
Council to pass a resolution calling for the disarming of
Hizbollah.

But
who in Lebanon was going to be strong
enough to disarm Lebanon's most
popular political entity? Not the Lebanese government,
overwhelmingly inclined towards the U.S.-Saudi-Israeli axis
but too weak internally and also much too dependent on
Hizbollah itself. So, with the Syrians gone, Israel may itself
return, take care of Hizbollah, turn Lebanon into the kind of
Israeli protectorate that Jordan already is, and re-occupy
southern Lebanon, as in days of yore before Hizbollah threw
them out, and re-create there a "security zone" alongside
northern Israel, as Amir Peretz, the Labour Party chief and
the current Defence Minister of Israel, said a couple of days
ago - right up to the Litani river, some 32 km into Lebanese
territory, whose water resources Israel covets.

If
that were to come to pass, Israel would have achieved all
the aims it has been pursuing in Lebanon since the
invasions of 1978 and 1982. At that time, the Palestine
Liberation Organisation (PLO) had established its
headquarters, camps and institutions in Lebanon, after it had been
evicted out of Jordan in 1971, and getting the
PLO to leave Lebanon was a major aim, which
was realised after the blitzkrieg of 1982 when the
U.S.
brokered Yasser Arafat's departure to Tunis.
However, Syrian forces were already in Lebanon, invited
initially by that same Israeli-U.S.-Saudi axis.
Israel shot down
about a 100 Syrian airplanes during that invasion but the
Syrian ground troops remained, and a sort of truce came in
force. Syria would continue to occupy
its positions but it would also not directly challenge
Israel's
right to occupy southern Lebanon, while the government
in Beirut remained weak in
relation to both neighbouring - and occupying - powers.

Hizbollah
arose out of this crucible, with the single aim of throwing
out the Israelis, and therefore aligned itself with
Syria -
with converging interests but by no means a creature of
Syria, which
initially backed not Hizbollah but Amal, a much less militant
Shia organisation. Israel could in any case not
turn Lebanon into a
protectorate at that time, given the Syrian presence on
Lebanese territory and major Lebanese elite interests aligned
with it.

Since
its very inception in 1948, Israel is used to
capturing Arab territory and retaining it. The state was
created by an act of the U.N. and it immediately proceeded to
capture much more territory than it was granted; today's
Israel, which most governments of the world recognise,
includes that additional occupied territory. In the Six-Day
War of 1967, it captured the rest of Palestine and has refused
to vacate even an inch of it, despite all the heroic
resistance that the Palestinians have mounted; the
"disengagement" from Gaza has simply meant turning it all into
a mass prison and daily military attacks, which take dozens of
Palestinian lives each week. It also captured the Syrian
territory of the Golan
Heights and never returned it, despite all sorts
of Syrian overtures and offers. It returned the Sinai
peninsula to Egypt only when Egypt bent down on its knees,
recognised it, opened itself up to it, took itself out of any
Arab resistance to the Zionist design, and in effect became an
ally; after Israel launched its ongoing destruction of
Lebanon, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak denounced Hizbollah
and, pro forma, requested Israel for some restraint.

Hizbollah
has been thus far, in some 60 years of Israeli
settler-colonial enterprise, the only entity which has through
armed resistance forced the Israelis to relinquish any
territory that the Jewish state has ever captured. For that
unforgivable sin Hizbollah must be punished and destroyed, and
Israel's
original plan to turn Lebanon into a
dependency be implemented, just as brutally as it was
attempted in 1978 and 1982.

The
Present Context

The
historical moment now is auspicious for Israel, in terms of
the enormous shifts that have taken place in global politics.
Under the guise of the "war on terror", the
U.S. is
determined to undo whatever losses it had to incur in the days
of the Soviet Union-aligned Arab nationalist regimes, and
after the fall of the Shah in Iran. Within this
larger context, Israel can again make a bid to dominate
permanently the entire landmass from the Euphrates to the
Nile, and from the shores of the Red Sea to the Turkish border
- all the Arab lands, in short, which were once part of the
Ottoman Empire. Most of the key Arab governments - those of
Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and so on - have already
been secured for the U.S.-Israeli axis; Libya has been tamed and, with
the fall of Iraq, another major
adversary is gone. Britain is now fully a part of
the U.S.-Israeli axis, and aside from those two countries,
British Prime Minister Tony Blair was the only one defying the
global call for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon after what
Israel has wrought.

In
Germany, we
now have a government more closely aligned with the
U.S. than any since
the days of Chancellor Konrad Adenaur. French President
Jacques Chirac regrets that he distanced France from the U.S.
plan of action during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and he has
been trying to undo his sin ever since. France was therefore a partner
of the U.S.
in engineering the coup in Haiti that overthrew President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide and was again a key player in getting
the U.N. Security Council to pass a resolution demanding the
departure of Syrian troops from Lebanon and the
disarming of Hizbollah. Russia, China and India - strutting
like giants in Asia, acting like pygmies in international
affairs - issue prim little protests against the killing of
four U.N. personnel in Israeli shelling but keep their mouths
shut about a fifth of the Lebanese population being made
homeless in less than two weeks.

And
there is the historical moment within Israel itself. When
Ariel Sharon, as Defence Minister, invaded Lebanon in 1982,
20,000 Israelis demonstrated against it and hundreds of
serving soldiers and officers joined the protests, some
returning their medals won for bravery in previous wars. Now,
as the new invasion from the air unfolded, the anti-war
demonstration attracted barely 800. Even the pretence of a
two-party system no longer functions in Israel. If Sharon
ruled Israel as a leader of Likud with Labour in his coalition
and under his wing, the new government of Ehud Olmert, a
favourite of Sharon, has the Labour chief Amir Peretz, a
Sephardic Jew and the grand hope of the Zionist left, as his
Defence Minister, executing these policies of mass destruction
not just in Lebanon but also in Gaza. With the moral
sentiments of most of the population made coarse by decades of
occupying other people's lands and killing anyone who resists,
virtually the whole nation supports the atrocities in
Gaza and Lebanon. Ilan
Pappe, a distinguished Israeli historian and commentator,
estimates that some 80 per cent of the members of the Knesset
have been elected on what he calls "the race ticket". The
result is that the marginalised minority in
Israel which still
keeps alive in its hearts the sense of injustice toward
Palestinian victims and the spiritual vision of a different
kind of Judaism is condemned to intensities of a moral
loneliness which is difficult to imagine for an outsider.

With
the exception of parties dominated by the Arab citizens of
Israel, all others are agreed that there shall be no
withdrawal from all the territories that Israel occupied in
1967, no right of return given to Palestinians uprooted from
their homes by Israel's wars, and no equality of citizenship
between Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of Israel. Kadima, the
ruling party, fought the recent elections and won 29 seats on
a platform which promised that Israel would retain in
perpetuity all the major settlements established after the
conquest of the West Bank and
the bulk of the territories occupied in 1967. Avigdor
Lieberman's party, Israel Our Home, won 11 seats and comprises
one of the larger blocs in Parliament on the platform that
calls for denying to current Israeli citizens "the right to
live in the state on the grounds of religion and race" - a
clear promise that, if elected to form the government,
Lieberman would no longer allow Muslim and Christian Arab
citizens to reside in Israel.

According
to a poll published in March 2006 in Haaretz, Israel's most prestigious
newspaper, more than two-thirds of Israeli Jews stated that
they would not live in the same building with the Palestinian
citizens of Israel and 40 per
cent believed that "the state needs to support the emigration
of Arab citizens". With this kind of mentality rampant in the
nation, the Israeli state, a regional superpower whose
military might dwarfs all other states in the region, feels
free to kill and burn as much as it wishes.

"New
Middle East"

Behind
this historical moment there lies that vision of "the New
Middle East" that Condoleezza Rice now mentions in every
speech that she delivers on affairs of that region. Risen from
the corporate offices of Chevron and the petrodollar industry
in general, and serving these days as the U.S. Secretary of
State, she dismisses all the destruction of Lebanon over the
past two weeks as the "birth-pangs of the New Middle East". As
late as July 23 when a sixth of the Lebanese population had
been rendered homeless, she dismissed the idea of a ceasefire,
saying "we have to be certain that we are pushing forward to
the New Middle East, not going back to the old one", while
President George W. Bush has openly said that he will give
Israel all the time and latitude it requires to annihilate
Hizbollah. The phrase seems to have become something of a
mantra but one may well ask: what, precisely, is this
"New Middle East"?

A
large number of documents exist written by U.S. rightwing radicals - some
of them neoconservative - which spell out the project in great
detail, and many of these thinkers and doers of the far right,
such as Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, have divided their
time between occupying high places in the U.S. government and
working for high Israeli officials. The power of the "Israeli
lobby" has been much in the news recently because two
mainstream Professors from Harvard University and the University
of Chicago published a
lengthy article documenting that power. There is, in addition,
close cooperation between elite U.S. think-tanks
and their Israeli counterparts.

The
ensuing vision of the "New Middle East" has some key features.
In country after country, client regimes are to be imposed,
with the force of arms if necessary, on the model of
Afghanistan. In the
larger countries, such as Iran, violent overthrow of the
existing government is envisioned as a prelude to not only the
imposition of a client regime but also the break-up of the
country along ethnic and denominational lines, as is now
unfolding in Iraq; Saudi Arabia itself may be up for such a
break-up if the anti-monarchical insurgency cannot be
contained within existing political and territorial
parameters.

The
"rollback of Syria", a favourite phrase of
the neocons, has begun with the assassination of Hariri and
the forced withdrawal of Syrian forces from
Lebanon;
Hizbollah is seen as a strategic ally of Syria and its
destruction is sought on its own merits as well as in the
campaign for that "rollback". As the Iraqi insurgency spreads
in provinces adjoining the Syrian border, the urgency to
control Syria increases, and President Bashar al-Assad is
being told that he can save his skin, and save Syria from
invasion, if he cooperates with the U.S.-Israeli axis in Iraq
and Lebanon, and if he breaks his alliance with Iran. Part of
the demands on Syria is that it cooperate in
the construction of an oil pipeline from Kirkuk in Iraqi Kurdistan to
Israel,
through Syrian territory - this, while Israel continues to
occupy Syrian territory in the Golan.

The
U.S.-Israeli axis perceives two types of remaining
impediments. At the level of state formation, only the regimes
of Iran and
Syria
remain which are to any degree still independent, though both
have cooperated with the U.S., notably in
Iraq where
the U.S.-sponsored and Shia-dominated regime would have been
impossible without extensive collusion on the part of
Iran.
Syria has
likewise provided key information to the U.S. in its pursuit of the
Iraqi resistance and has even hosted the U.S. offshore
torture chambers. Yet, both have their own distinct national
interests which clash with those of the U.S. and Israel, and a
complicated game of coercion and concession is being played,
but with the aim of emasculating both, with "regime change"
and even invasion looming on the horizon.

The
more immediate threat is perceived to come from a variety of
non-state but armed actors, notably the Hizbollah in
Lebanon,
Hamas in Palestine and such
entities elsewhere as Muqtada al Sadr's militia, the Sadr
Brigade, in Iraq. Each of these
three "enemies" arose outside the authorised structures of the
nation-state formation, as militias and then as full-fledged
guerilla forces; each has eventually decided to participate in
the political process in their respective areas and even in
government formation. Hamas was actually elected to
governmental power; Hizbollah and Muqtada's forces also have
substantial presences in the current, newly erected political
structures of Lebanon and Iraq respectively.
However, each of them participates in rituals of the state in
pursuit of strategic advantage and each would be perfectly
content to withdraw into the arena of guerilla warfare if its
legitimate political aims are blocked in the political arena
and/or it comes under military siege.

Moreover,
each of them draws its main mass base from among the
slum-dwellers, the unemployed and the pauperised, the
proletarianised masses making a precarious living in the
so-called "informal economy", the direct victims of past
aggressions, relatives of the dead and the injured, the
wretched of the earth. They have been uprooted from their
traditional ways of life and religion serves for them as an
opiate for their wounds, as the soul of a soulless world, as
the encyclopaedic compendium of the knowledge of this world,
as promise of a better one. They are neither state
functionaries nor bourgeois, hence cannot be bribed into
submission. They must be annihilated.

These
armies of the poor are also seen by the U.S.-Israeli axis as
flanks for the Iranian and Syrian regimes, and since the
imperial imagination is incapable of seeing slum-dwellers as
being autonomous subjects of their own history they are
perceived as "agents" of the regimes which give them some
rudimentary weapons for their own reasons. That there are
practical relationships between Hizbollah and the Iranian and
Syrian regimes is undeniable, but what the U.S.-Israeli axis
does not comprehend is that there is a convergence of
interests and convictions, not a relationship of clientalism.
Nor can they perceive that the mass base of President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad and his Basij militia in Iran is exactly the same as
that of Hamas in Palestine and
Hizbollah in Lebanon: the
rejects of capital and empire. The U.S.-Israeli axis believes
that if the militias elsewhere can be beaten to pulp,
Iran will lose its
flanks and can then be dealt the final blow. All this is
expected to be in place over the next couple of years and
Olmert has said that he will declare Israel's "final"
borders sometime by 2010.

The
state of Israel is now close
to 60 years old and already the pre-eminent power in the
region, but it is also the only state in the world, and so
recognised by the world system, that has never revealed what
its borders are. The borders it had achieved for itself by
1967 are simply called "the Green Line", because it expects to
annex more territory from the Palestinian population that it
occupies as well as from its neighbours. Olmert's promise that
he will declare Israel's "final" borders in a few years is
premised on the belief that the U.S.-Israeli project for the
"New Middle East" shall have been realised by then, and those
"final" borders are likely to include not only the areas
within the "Green Line" but also much of the Palestinian West
Bank as well as parts of Syrian and Lebanese territories. That
is what Hamas and Hizbollah, with their little armies of the
poor and their rudimentary weapons, are up against. A new,
sanitised phrase seems to have become very fashionable over
the past few months to encapsulate this confrontation between
vast imperial armies and little bands of nationalist soldiers:
"asymmetrical warfare."

In
this "New Middle East", reduced to a patchwork of
ethno-religious entities, the whole history of oil
nationalisations shall be reversed, control over oil resources
of the region shall be transferred to the petrodollar
corporations of the core capitalist countries, primarily the
U.S. and Britain, and Israel's "energy security" shall be
guaranteed, as part of the Jewish state's national security.
Moreover, the water and land resources of Palestine shall come under permanent
Israeli control, and the water resources of
Lebanon may
also be partially diverted for use in Israel. Various
military arrangements are envisioned for the realisation of
this project.

The
U.S. itself
has taken the main responsibility for Iraq and Israel is doing the same in
Lebanon,
while the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) is already
embroiled in Afghanistan and is now being
slated for a very large role in Lebanon after
Israel has finished
off with Hizbollah, destroying much of the country in the
process. Britain is already in the
U.S.
pocket, Chirac has become extraordinarily belligerent on
issues of "terror" emanating from the Middle East (West Asia)
and North Africa, and, with Chancellor Angela Merkel of
Germany in toe,
there is now emerging a new definition of NATO's global
responsibilities. Its expansion "eastward" now means not only
in the direction of Russia but also towards
West Asia.

A
NATO-Israel protocol was signed in Brussels in November 2004 whereby closer
cooperation was envisaged and Israel was invited to
participate in military exercises and "anti-terror manoeuvres"
with NATO, along with some Arab countries such as
Egypt,
Jordan and
Algeria. Under this
aegis, joint exercises of U.S., Israeli and Turkish
forces did take place in the eastern Mediterranean, off the Syrian coast, in
January 2005. Similar exercises were held for
Israel with a
larger number of NATO countries the following month and have
since then become a regular feature. The premise of this
growing integration of Israel into NATO is that
Israel is under
threat from the same sources which pose a threat to NATO
countries - and, in deed, to their selected clients in the
Arab world itself.

Hizbollah
Plays the Spoiler

In
the fatefully consequential year of 1967, Israel fought a
swift war and not only destroyed the air forces of Egypt and
Syria but also captured the remaining Palestinian territories
as well as Syria's strategic Golan Heights and Egypt's vast
Sinai peninsula, placing its armour on the embankments of the
Suez Canal - all in a matter of six days. Subsequently, it
invaded Lebanon at will and
imposed upon the country whatever arrangements suited its
purposes. All through these years, it has killed, maimed,
kidnapped, imprisoned as many Palestinians as it wished, while
the loss of even a couple of Israeli lives in retaliation
became the reason for more bombings, killings, kidnappings and
so on. Thus it has been, and Israel's arrogance
of power is based on concrete historical experience.

The
notable feature of Israel's current onslaught against Lebanon
is that it began with the usual, made-for-television spectacle
of mass destruction of civilian populations and infrastructure
that has become the norm in recent years, reaching a
particularly high-pitched crescendo in the "Shock-&-Awe"
U.S. blitzkrieg against Baghdad in the opening days of that
invasion. Much of the Lebanese national infrastructure was
destroyed in a matter of days, as were the habitats of
hundreds of thousands people in southern Beirut and other
Lebanese cities; half a million refugees were generated in a
week in a country half the size of Uttaranchal and more
sparsely populated than it.

On
the ground, however, the supposedly invincible Israeli Army
simply could not move even half a kilometre without
casualties. Hizbollah had evidently mastered the
Vietminh-style art of laying landmines and building
underground bunkers and tunnels for guerillas to operate from.
From the skies, they destroyed cities and villages alike but,
on the ground, they had to fight fierce battles to capture
even single villages, inflicting but also taking casualties.
Used to being masters of the West Asian skies for half a
century, they could not intercept the ramshackle short-range
missiles of Hizbollah, which fell at the rate of hundred a
year on Israeli soil - for the first time in the history of
the imperious Jewish state.

During
its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Israel had shot
down over a 100 Syrian aircraft without losing one of its own
(U.S.-supplied, of course). Now, when Hizbollah could not even
imagine having an air force of any kind, Israel lost four Apache
helicopters and an F-16 jet - state-of-the-art
U.S.
hardware - during the first 10 days of its invasion: a
stunning first in the history of Israel's perpetual
assaults on Arab lands. As the Israeli attacks began, their
generals announced on television that they are going to
"eliminate" Hizbollah and Western newsprint was ablaze with
headlines saying that Bush had given Israel a week to do the
eliminating, knowing that pressure to impose a ceasefire shall
soon mount internationally. By the end of the second week,
Israeli ground forces had made no significant progress while
casualties were mounting beyond the endurance of the Israeli
population which is used to not only victories but also
victories without any significant casualties of their own;
only the others are supposed to die. Israel had amassed
troops on the Lebanese border with the assumption that
Hizbollah shall be rendered powerless soon enough and the
Israeli forces shall move quickly up to at least the Litani
river.

With
no significant progress on the ground and Israeli soldiers
dying each day, while the Israeli government itself starting
to talk not of "eliminating" Hizbollah but "weakening" it and
"pushing" it farther away from the Israeli border, there began
another kind of parade on Israeli television: retired high
military brass and "experts" coming forward to say that the
whole plan had been misconceived, that it needed re-thinking
and so on. The latest news, before this article goes to press,
is that Israel has "halted" its
much-awaited "ground assault" in Lebanon but has
called up three full divisions of reservists for active
military duty. Only the next few days will tell whether Israel
will play safe and hope that the U.S. will arrange for a NATO
force to occupy southern Lebanon on its behalf (with the
consent of the Lebanese government), or will undertake that
ground offensive later, with more massive forces.

When
Israelis began shelling an area in southern Lebanon which had
U.N. personnel in it, the U.N. Deputy Secretary-General
contacted them 10 times to request cessation of the
bombardment and an Irish military officer warned them six
times; despite all these requests and warnings, the bombing
continued and four U.N. personnel were killed in a direct hit.
By the time U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan arrived in Rome
to attend the G8 Summit (plus Arab emissaries) to discuss the
Lebanese situation, he was furious and demanded an immediate
ceasefire; the Americans had already vetoed his bid to have
his post as Secretary-General renewed, and they had dragged
his name in mud on the issue of his son's involvement in the
oil-for-food programme in Iraq, so he had nothing to lose. But
he was then joined by everyone demanding a ceasefire, so that
the U.S.
and Britain found
themselves isolated. The Israelis had had two weeks and they
had simply not delivered, and, defiant as ever, Bush simply
announced that he was going to give the Israelis as much time
as they needed to do whatever they have planned. The Rome meeting ended in a fiasco, the
so-called "international community" having made no decisions
except to leave the Lebanese to the mercies of
Israel.

Hence
the season of leaks. It is said that much is going on behind
the scenes. That there shall be a multinational force of
perhaps as many as 20,000 or 30,000, led by Turkey or Germany
or both, and involving contingents from a variety of
countries, including India, Pakistan and Egypt. That it will
start arriving in 60 days (plenty of time for
Israel to do as it
wishes) and the rest shall trickle in later. That its job
shall be not to "disarm" Hizbollah but to re-locate it far
away from the Israeli border. Whether that force shall be
"led" by the U.N., or "mandated" by it but "led" by another
country, or assembled and "led" by NATO is unclear, even in
these leaks.

None
of it can happen without simultaneous agreement of the Israeli
and the Lebanese governments, and the latter has no power to
agree to anything not acceptable to Hizbollah. If that fragile
government is forced to proceed without the consent of
Hizbollah, the government will fall and, with political vacuum
at home and Israelis pounding the country from the outside,
Lebanon may gradually return to a sectarian civil war, an
outcome that Israel shall greatly welcome because Hizbollah
then can be sucked into fighting that civil war and relieve
the pressure on Israel; Israel, in turn, can then start arming
yet another rightwing Maronite militia, as in the past.

The
catch in all this is that the situation within
Lebanon has changed
drastically over the past decade or more. Having been brought
up under the dark shadow of a civil war fought by a previous
generation and fuelled in part by the Israelis, the
new-generation Lebanese, who have seen their country go from
rubble to prosperity, have no stomach for another civil war.
There is undoubtedly a Far Right as well as a pro-Israeli
elite which would like to see Hizbollah wiped off the face of
the earth. But those forces no longer dominate Lebanese
society as they did in the past. Most Lebanese view Hizbollah
as a legitimate part of their national polity, and even its
enemies have no sense of a blood feud against it, since it has
never taken any Lebanese lives. As Azmi Bishara, the
distinguished Palestinian member of the Israeli Knesset, wrote
recently in the Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram, everything
now depends on Lebanese unity; if that goes, everything goes.

Click here to get the whole
file
Having come into Lebanon after being driven out of it
with the force of arms, Israel cannot now retreat from this
fight. Only the coming days shall show whether there is going
to be a long-drawn-out war of attrition or a massive land
assault; massive destruction through aerial bombings shall in
any case continue, since that kills the Lebanese with no risk
of Israeli casualties. Israel has claimed that Iranian arms
are being brought to Hizbollah through Syria and it has gone
to great lengths in a

.
asserting that it has carried out
forensic tests which show that some of the most lethal rockets
that have been fired by Hizbollah into Israel are of Syrian
manufacture. This alone can be used as a justification for
mounting an attack on Syria, or even Iran. Hence the
Syrian-Iranian Summit in Damascus which is going on even as I
write these lines.
Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are
behind us, possible invasions of Syria and Iran are perhaps
ahead of us, Lebanon is currently at the heart of

.
the Zionist-imperial offensive.
Meanwhile, a dozen or more keep getting killed in Palestine
every week, a hundred or more in Iraq every day. The bloodlust
of the imperium is unrelenting.
In conclusion, an odd
fact. The severest condemnation of Israel's destruction of
Lebanon that any Arab government handed out came not from
Saudi Arabia, the Keeper of Islam's Holy Places, nor from
Egypt, the largest and most powerful country in the Arab
world, but from the U.S.-occupied Iraq where the

.
the U.S.-confected Parliament passed a
unanimous resolution of outrage against Israel's action and
the U.S.-appointed Prime Minister openly joined Syrian and
Iranian demand for an immediate ceasefire. A sign of the times
yet to
come?
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060821fa_fact

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