Anjalisa — Israel responded to an unprovoked attack by Hizbullah, right? Wrong
Topic(s): Palestine / Israel | Comments Off on Anjalisa — Israel responded to an unprovoked attack by Hizbullah, right? WrongIsrael responded to an unprovoked attack by Hizbullah, right? Wrong
The assault on Lebanon was premeditated – the soldiers’ capture simply
provided the excuse. It was also unnecessary
George Monbiot
Tuesday August 8, 2006
The Guardian
Whatever we think of Israel’s assault on Lebanon, all of us seem to
agree about one fact: that it was a response, however
disproportionate, to an unprovoked attack by Hizbullah. I repeated
this “fact” in my last column, when I wrote that “Hizbullah fired the
first shots”. This being so, the Israeli government’s supporters ask
peaceniks like me, what would you have done? It’s an important
question. But its premise, I have now discovered, is flawed.
Since Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000, there
have been hundreds of violations of the “blue line” between the two
countries. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil)
reports that Israeli aircraft crossed the line “on an almost daily
basis” between 2001 and 2003, and “persistently” until 2006. These
incursions “caused great concern to the civilian population,
particularly low-altitude flights that break the sound barrier over
populated areas”. On some occasions, Hizbullah tried to shoot them
down with anti-aircraft guns.
In October 2000, the Israel Defence Forces shot at unarmed Palestinian
demonstrators on the border, killing three and wounding 20. In
response, Hizbullah crossed the line and kidnapped three Israeli
soldiers. On several occasions, Hizbullah fired missiles and mortar
rounds at IDF positions, and the IDF responded with heavy artillery
and sometimes aerial bombardment. Incidents like this killed three
Israelis and three Lebanese in 2003; one Israeli soldier and two
Hizbullah fighters in 2005; and two Lebanese people and three Israeli
soldiers in February 2006. Rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel
several times in 2004, 2005 and 2006, on some occasions by Hizbullah.
But, the UN records, “none of the incidents resulted in a military
escalation”.
On May 26 this year, two officials of Islamic Jihad – Nidal and
Mahmoud Majzoub – were killed by a car bomb in the Lebanese city of
Sidon. This was widely assumed in Lebanon and Israel to be the work of
Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. In June, a man named Mahmoud
Rafeh confessed to the killings and admitted that he had been working
for Mossad since 1994. Militants in southern Lebanon responded, on the
day of the bombing, by launching eight rockets into Israel. One
soldier was lightly wounded. There was a major bust-up on the border,
during which one member of Hizbullah was killed and several wounded,
and one Israeli soldier wounded. But while the border region “remained
tense and volatile”, Unifil says it was “generally quiet” until July 12.
There has been a heated debate on the internet about whether the two
Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hizbullah that day were captured in
Israel or in Lebanon, but it now seems pretty clear that they were
seized in Israel. This is what the UN says, and even Hizbullah seems
to have forgotten that they were supposed to have been found sneaking
around the outskirts of the Lebanese village of Aita al-Shaab. Now it
simply states that “the Islamic resistance captured two Israeli
soldiers at the border with occupied Palestine”. Three other Israeli
soldiers were killed by the militants. There is also some dispute
about when, on July 12, Hizbullah first fired its rockets; but Unifil
makes it clear that the firing took place at the same time as the raid
– 9am. Its purpose seems to have been to create a diversion. No one
was hit.
But there is no serious debate about why the two soldiers were
captured: Hizbullah was seeking to exchange them for the 15 prisoners
of war taken by the Israelis during the occupation of Lebanon and (in
breach of article 118 of the third Geneva convention) never released.
It seems clear that if Israel had handed over the prisoners, it would
– without the spillage of any more blood – have retrieved its men and
reduced the likelihood of further kidnappings. But the Israeli
government refused to negotiate. Instead – well, we all know what
happened instead. Almost 1,000 Lebanese and 33 Israeli civilians have
been killed so far, and a million Lebanese displaced from their homes.
On July 12, in other words, Hizbullah fired the first shots. But that
act of aggression was simply one instance in a long sequence of small
incursions and attacks over the past six years by both sides. So why
was the Israeli response so different from all that preceded it? The
answer is that it was not a reaction to the events of that day. The
assault had been planned for months.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that “more than a year ago, a
senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on
an off-the-record basis, to US and other diplomats, journalists and
thinktanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in
revealing detail”. The attack, he said, would last for three weeks. It
would begin with bombing and culminate in a ground invasion. Gerald
Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University, told
the paper that “of all of Israel’s wars since 1948, this was the one
for which Israel was most prepared … By 2004, the military campaign
scheduled to last about three weeks that we’re seeing now had already
been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it’s been simulated and
rehearsed across the board”.
A “senior Israeli official” told the Washington Post that the raid by
Hizbullah provided Israel with a “unique moment” for wiping out the
organisation. The New Statesman’s editor, John Kampfner, says he was
told by more than one official source that the US government knew in
advance of Israel’s intention to take military action in Lebanon. The
Bush administration told the British government.
Israel’s assault, then, was premeditated: it was simply waiting for an
appropriate excuse. It was also unnecessary. It is true that Hizbullah
had been building up munitions close to the border, as its current
rocket attacks show. But so had Israel. Just as Israel could assert
that it was seeking to deter incursions by Hizbullah, Hizbullah could
claim – also with justification – that it was trying to deter
incursions by Israel. The Lebanese army is certainly incapable of
doing so. Yes, Hizbullah should have been pulled back from the Israeli
border by the Lebanese government and disarmed. Yes, the raid and the
rocket attack on July 12 were unjustified, stupid and provocative,
like just about everything that has taken place around the border for
the past six years. But the suggestion that Hizbullah could launch an
invasion of Israel or that it constitutes an existential threat to the
state is preposterous. Since the occupation ended, all its acts of war
have been minor ones, and nearly all of them reactive.
So it is not hard to answer the question of what we would have done.
First, stop recruiting enemies, by withdrawing from the occupied
territories in Palestine and Syria. Second, stop provoking the armed
groups in Lebanon with violations of the blue line – in particular the
persistent flights across the border. Third, release the prisoners of
war who remain unlawfully incarcerated in Israel. Fourth, continue to
defend the border, while maintaining the diplomatic pressure on
Lebanon to disarm Hizbullah (as anyone can see, this would be much
more feasible if the occupations were to end). Here then is my
challenge to the supporters of the Israeli government: do you dare to
contend that this programme would have caused more death and
destruction than the current adventure has done?