Rumours floating

Rumours are surfacing of plans for another ‘massive Israeli attack’ on Lebanon – leaked first a few days ago by a French military source after a meeting in France between top Israeli, French and US military brass. Hizbullah has been busy lately reinforcing its positions, and talked about spring 2010 as the projected date (owing to the soil being too soft in winter for the Merkava tanks to drive on). Now the rumour has been restated by Nahar’s Washington correspondent: ‘Khalil Flaihan said international military authorities have warned Lebanon that Israel plans to launch a massive attack targeting Hizbullah positions. It said Israel is also likely to “widen its aggression to include large areas of Lebanon” under the pretext that Hizbullah continues to receive “heavy and sophisticated weapons” via Syria. Diplomatic sources in Beirut did not rule out the possibility that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could raise the issue of the seized ship alledgedly carrying weapons for Hizbullah and the explosions that took place in Khirbit Selim and Teir Felsay as well as the Katyusha firing from the southern town of Houla. The sources pointed out that Natanyahu would exploit these incidents to accuse Hizbullah of breaching Resolution 1701 “posing a real threat to Israel’s security and that its armed forces are ready for any emergency.”‘ But hey, not to worry: ‘They said the U.S. and French presidents, however, are unlikely to approve any new Israeli offensive against Lebanon.’ Meanwhile Lebanese civilians continue to get injured and killed by the cluster bombs left behind after the last Israeli massacre.

Meanwhile, the unexpected has happened – a tentative Lebanese government has been formed – although already there is a possibility that some ministers, unhappy with the less than prestigious and/or lucrative portfolio assigned to them, will not show up for the official first picture opportunity…

The truth

‘On Monday 12 October, Prime Minister Netanyahu opened the Knesset’s winter session by blasting the Goldstone Report that accuses Israel of committing war crimes and vowing that he would never allow Israelis be tried for them. But that was not his main message. It was an appeal, delivered I thought with a measure of desperation, to the “Palestinian leadership”, presumably the leadership of “President” Abbas and his Fatah cronies, leaders who are regarded by very many if not most Palestinians as American-and-Israeli stooges at best and traitors at worst. Netanyahu again called on this leadership to agree to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, saying this was, and remains, the key to peace. And he went on and on and on about it. “For 62 years the Palestinians have been saying ‘No’ to the Jewish state. I am once again calling upon our Palestinian neighbours – say ‘Yes’ to the Jewish state. Without recognition of the Israel as the state of the Jews we shall not be able to attain peace… Such recognition is a step which requires courage and the Palestinian leadership should tell its people the truth – that without this recognition there can be no peace… There is no alternative to Palestinian leaders showing courage by recognising the Jewish state. This has been and remains the true key to peace.”
As Ha’aretz noted in its report, Netanyahu’s demand for Palestinian acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state is for him “a way on ensuring recognition of Israel’s right to exist as opposed to merely recognising Israel” (my emphasis). This, as Ha’aretz added, is the recognition which Netanyahu and many other Israelis see as the real core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the name of pragmatism, willingness to “merely to recognise” Israel – meaning to accept and live in peace with an Israel inside its pre-June ‘67 borders – has long been the formal Palestinian and all-Arab position. Why does it stop short of recognising Israel’s “right to exist”, and why, really, does it matter so much to Zionism that Palestinians recognise this right?

The answer is in the following. According to history as written by the winner, Zionism, Israel was given its birth certificate and thus legitimacy by the UN Partition Resolution of 29 November 1947. This is propaganda nonsense.

* In the first place the UN without the consent of the majority of the people of Palestine did not have the right to decide to partition Palestine or assign any part of its territory to a minority of alien immigrants in order for them to establish a state of their own.
* Despite that, by the narrowest of margins, and only after a rigged vote, the UN General Assembly did pass a resolution to partition Palestine and create two states, one Arab, one Jewish, with Jerusalem not part of either. But the General Assembly resolution was only a proposal – meaning that it could have no effect, would not become policy, unless approved by the Security Council.
* The truth is that the General Assembly’s partition proposal never went to the Security Council for consideration. Why not? Because the U.S. knew that, if approved, it could only be implemented by force given the extent of Arab and other Muslim opposition to it; and President Truman was not prepared to use force to partition Palestine.
* So the partition plan was vitiated (became invalid) and the question of what the hell to do about Palestine – after Britain had made a mess of it and walked away, effectively surrendering to Zionist terrorism – was taken back to the General Assembly for more discussion. The option favoured and proposed by the U.S. was temporary UN Trusteeship. It was while the General Assembly was debating what do that Israel unilaterally declared itself to be in existence – actually in defiance of the will of the organised international community, including the Truman administration.

The truth of the time was that the Zionist state, which came into being mainly as a consequence of pre-planned ethnic cleansing, had no right to exist and, more to the point, could have no right to exist UNLESS … Unless it was recognised and legitimized by those who were dispossessed of their land and their rights during the creation of the Zionist state. In international law only the Palestinians could give Israel the legitimacy it craved. And that legitimacy was the only thing the Zionists could not and cannot take from the Palestinians by force. No wonder Prime Minister Netanyahu is more than a little concerned on this account.’
Israel’s leaders have always known the truth summarised above. It’s time for the rest of the world to know it.’

(Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent who covered wars and conflicts wherever they were taking place in the world and specialized in the Middle East. Author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews: The False Messiah (Zionism, the Real Enemy of the Jews). He blogs on www.alanhart.net)

QED

“You are leading the forces in the field,” the army chief told cadets. “The IDF permanently stands in one of two situations: war or preparation for war. We must continue to prepare for war; otherwise there is no justification for the existence of the IDF.”

Foreign interference? What foreign interference?

Al-Akhbar today reports: ‘During the past two days, US Ambassador Michele Sison visited several pro-government leaders and directly voiced the displeasure of the Obama administration with what she referred to as “submission to the other party’s will.” Sison said that “she genuinely fails to understand what kind of agreement is sought by Hariri with Hezbollah and General Aoun” and that she “is not in favor of such agreements if it means meeting Hezbollah’s and Aoun’s demands, nor does she even support a settlement that would ultimately be at the expense of the US administration’s Christian allies.”

As-Safir today reports: ‘US Ambassador Michele Sison conveyed to some Lebanese officials the US opposition to King Abdullah’s visit to Damascus, saying that the visit “is useless” and that Syria “has offered us nothing (in Iraq) so that we reward it for free.” Sison also said that Washington, which is against the 15-10-5 formula both during the first and second attempt to form the government, advises the prime minister-designate and the March 14 forces not to accept this [power-distribution] equation. Some of the March 14 Christian leaders were responsive to Sison’s advice. However, MP Walid Jumblatt rejected the instigation against King Abdullah’s visit to Damascus and stressed the importance of abiding by the 15-10-5 formula. Jumblat warned that any other [power-sharing] equation would be “tantamount to suicide,” saying: “I will not take part in any government that is not formed according to the 15-10-5 formula.”’

These interventions clearly prove that nothing has changed in US policy in the Middle East with Obama’s presidency, not even the heavy-handed dictating of that policy to local actors – whose obedience will of course not get them any protection against the US’s really important ally’s next attack – as at least Walid Junblatt has leaned by now.

Btw, these translated summaries are taken from the daily press round-up of the otherwise fairly useless Nowhariri website, which can hardly be accused of anti-American leanings…

Mother of sparks is back…

The Lebanese Arabic-language daily As-Safir has again – as two years ago, read my blog post about it here – published a frontpage article (unsigned) about US plans to set up military bases (in this case an airbase) in Lebanon. Practically, the plan is to revive the never-finished civil war-era Pierre Gemayyel airport in Hamat, a village in the Batroun district between Byblos and Tripoli. I have been there to see it, and today it is a severely deteriorated strip of concrete with some concrete sheds evidently used by junkies as well as housing a few bored Lebanese army conscripts and used primarily as a racing track by local youths. The idea is to have an airport which is not situated in areas ‘under the influence of the Shia sect’. As-Safir claims the issue is currently being discussed at the highest echelons of the Lebanese Armed Forces and pushed aggressively by various high-placed civilian and miltary US players, including general David Petraeus. Unfortunately, the article quotes only anonymous sources and ‘followers of the file’, in addition to ‘eye witensses in Hamat’ (and one Junblatt quote dating from early 2005). Unsubstantiated as the story might appear to be, it does keep cropping up at regular intervals (only last year, during the May clashes, there was talk about reviving it when Beirut’s airport was temporarily closed by Hizbullah) and holds an obvious importance if only for the reactions it would elicit among the US’s many opponents in the country. After all, it would imply using Lebanon as a base for operations in the entire region, which is the one disaster the country’s feuding warlords have managed to avoid so far. So here is a (rather shoddy and basic) translation I made of the entire article, which was published last Monday, September 28th, 2009.

‘A Lebanese or US airbase in Hamat? Washington insists and its military team is scouting the area…while the army leadership is taking (it) into (serious) consideration’

Unsigned front page article, cont. on p. 16

‘The Americans once again prove that Lebanon will not be contracted out to anyone (but them), nor will it be left to the Lebanese, and the Americans themselves will decide on its business. Once again, the Americans give tangible proof that they bet on Lebanon being, one way or the other, (their playing) field not just for their politics and its complicated calculations, but even for their military and strategic projects for the whole of the Middle East. Why this conclusion, which to some might seem rash, or an exaggeration which the case doesn’t merit?

Oh right, the government…

… totally forgot about that. For those among you (and me) who gave up trying to follow the endless bickering and cowtowing between the nation’s politicians since the June elections, the invaluable Elias Muhanna (aka Qifa Nabki) provides a handy concise update in the National. Not forgetting to include his usual lucid analysis: ‘In Lebanon, where political power is distributed between different religious groups, the ideal of consensual government is seen by many as an essential ingredient to maintaining a modicum of inter-communal harmony. Indeed, as the oft-repeated formula goes, conflicts should have “no victor, no vanquished” – so as to prevent the domination of one sect over the others. However, to conflate communal coexistence with consensual politics (and, by extension, with unity governments) entails three dubious assumptions: first, that sectarian communities are discrete entities whose interests are fully represented by political parties; second, that the practice of politics is nothing more than a zero-sum competition between these sectarian communities over the resources of the state; and third, that the best way to ensure that one sect is not allotted more than its fair share of spoils is to give every sect the ability to throw a spanner into the works. It is to assume, in other words, that political affiliations and sectarian identities are one and the same thing, which has the inevitable effect of further legitimising sectarianism as a dominant feature of Lebanese political life. To put it another way, interpreting coexistence to mean “consensual decision-making in government” mandates that national politics should be nothing more than a meeting of tribal elders, who gather periodically to brainstorm about how to divide the harvest and keep the peace. Sharing power with your political rivals may be a nice idea in theory, but it is almost impossible to achieve in practice without regular breakdowns and severe inefficiencies. The claim that such a scheme prevents sectarian strife and violence by giving all political players a place at the table is simplistic and naive. As we have witnessed over the past four years in Lebanon, power-sharing governments, based as they are on an unrealistic ideal of consensual decision-making, are highly vulnerable to paralysis. This is the case because they provide no pathways for forward progress under the likely scenario that disagreements between political players arise. The only option is to agree; otherwise, the system collapses. The dynamics of such an arrangement virtually demand that the main business of government is the prevention of state failure. Rather than attending to real problems facing the country – like the crippling national debt and the sagging infrastructure – the cabinet inevitably becomes the arena for petty infighting masquerading as consensual co-existence. And while it is commonplace for Lebanese politicians to argue that unity governments help to immunise Lebanon against foreign interference in its domestic affairs, in fact, it is the very fluidity of the Lebanese system that makes it so susceptible to manipulation.’

The coming invasion… of Israel

I have been arguing for a while now (although not on the blog) that the next logical step for Hizbullah, in case of a new Israeli attack, would be to invade the north of Israel. This would mean the end of the Anglo-American colonial project in Palestine. The psychological effect on the Israelis of  actually losing land,  for the first time since 1948, would be devastating enough to induce an already demoralised settler population to flee in droves on the first plane, boat or bicycle available. All the Hizb would need to do is take a strip of 10 kilometers or so in the north and resettle the (armed) Palestinian refugees of Lebanon there, in addition to the Palestinians still living there. Now it seems the Israeli military are for the first time publicly recognising this option too – and decrying their utter lack of preparedness for this scenario. Al-Akhbar reports: ‘وبناءً على ذلك يشدّد الضابط على أن «الحرب المقبلة ستكون على شاكلة هجوم متشابك على الحدود، في داخل إسرائيل ومن الجو».

ودرس الضابط التهديدات الصادرة عن الأمين العام لحزب الله، حسن نصر الله، وتوصّل إلى أن «العدو سيجتاح في الحرب المقبلة شمال إسرائيل، وتحديداً منطقة الجليل، بواسطة الآلاف من المجموعات التي تتكوّن كلّ منها من أربعة إلى خمسة مقاتلين، مدرّبين جيداً ويحملون أسلحة رشّاشة متوسطة، وصواريخ مضادة للدروع، إضافةً إلى قنّاصات وأسلحة خفيفة»، مشيراً إلى أنه «فور دخول هذه المجموعات إلى إسرائيل، سيحظون بمساعدة من البنية التحتية التي سيوفّرها السكان العرب»، في إشارة إلى فلسطينيي أراضي عام 1948.’
ويؤكد الضابط الإسرائيلي أنه «ليس لدى الجيش الإسرائيلي ردّ على سيناريو مشابه، حتى الآن، وليس قادراً على منع هذه المجموعات من دخول إسرائيل.. بل إن تفوق سلاح الجو لم يعد قاطعاً، وعدد المطارات قليل، وتقع جميعها اليوم في مدى الصواريخ»، مشدّداً على أن «سلاح الجو الجبار محبوس في جسد قزم».’

Let me translate that for you: ‘Elaborating on this subject, the [Israeli] officer stresses that: “the coming war will take the form of an interwoven attack on the border, on the interior of Israel and from the air”. The officer has studied the threats made by Hizbullah’s secretary general Hasan Nasrallah and concludes that “in the coming war, the enemy will sweep the north of Israel, threatening the Galilee using thousands of groups consisting each of four to five well-trained fighters carrying medium-size assault rifles, anti-tank missiles, sniper rifles and light weapons”. He points out that inside Israel these groups will benefit from the support of the [existing Israeli] infrastructure handed over to them by the Arab population, ass he refers to the Palestinians in the land of 1948. The Israeli officer affirms that the IDF has at present no response to such a scenario and would be unable to prevent these groups from entering Israel… Moreover, the superiority of the IAF will not be decisive, as the number of airports is limited and all of them have now come within the range of [Hizbullah's] missiles”. He refers to the IAF as “a giant trapped in the body of a dwarf”.’

Why Israel is bad for jews pt.7

I have just read the excellent study ‘Non-jewish Zionism: its roots in western history’ by Regina S. Sharif (Zed Press, London 1983), in which she traces the origins of zionism to a bunch of rather anti-semitic English and American protestant puritans in the 18th and 19th centuries. Remember how protestantism was all about reading the bible for yourself, in your own language, instead of relying on corrupt authoritarian catholic clergymen babbling in latin? Unfortunately, when protestants talk about the bible, they refer mainly to the old testament. They also tend to literal interpretations of the text (not unlike salafi sunnis). Some saw the fulfillment of the prophecy in the bible which has the jews returning to Israel – and converting to christianity, incidentally – just before the last judgment, as a felicitous approach to solving the ‘problem’ of the jews in their own countries (i.e. they wanted them out).It was essentially a non-jewish idea and it is only after Hitler’s holocaust that zionism really found support on a large scale among the jews themselves. Or did it? But why take the word of mere goyim like Regina and me for it, read for yourself why many of the jews themselves dislike and oppose Israel (and remember, the majority of global jewry has never gone to live there even when it still looked like it had a future). The following is found on the website of Neturei Karta, a vocal orthodox jewish anti-zionist organisation in the US:
‘The Zionists claim that they are the saviors of Israel, but this is refuted by twelve things:
FIRST — If one contemplates the two thousand years of our exile, take any hundred years even the hardest, one will not find as much suffering, bloodshed, and catastrophes for the People of Israel [as] in the period of the Zionists, and it is known that most of the suffering of this century was caused by the Zionists, as our Rabbis warned us would be the case.
SECOND — It is openly stated in books written by the founders of Zionism that the means by which they planned to establish a state was by instigating anti-Semitism, and undermining the security of the Jews in all the lands of the world, until they would be forced to flee to their state. And thus they did – They intentionally infuriated the German people and fanned the flames of Nazi hatred, and they helped the Nazis, with trickery and deceit, to take whole Jewish communities off to the concentration camps, and the Zionists themselves admit this. (See the books ‘Perfidy’, ‘Min Hameitzor’, etc.). The Zionists continue to practice this strategy today. They incite anti-Semitism and then they present themselves as the “saviors”. Here are two replies given by Leaders of the Zionists during World War II, when they were asked for money to help ransom Jews from the Nazis. Greenbaum said “One cow in Palestine is worth more than all the Jews in Poland.” (G-d forbid). Weitzman said, “The most important part of the Jewish people is already in the land (of Israel) and those who are left, are unimportant” (May we be spared).
THIRD — We see that most of world Jewry lives in security and under good physical conditions, and have no desire to go live in the Zionist State. Whereas many people have left the Zionist State to live under better conditions in other lands.
FOURTH — The Zionists make a great deal of propaganda to induce people to immigrate to their state. If their state is so beneficial why do they have to make so much propaganda.
FIFTH — Because nobody wants the Zionists to “save” them. The only way they can get immigrants is by promising poor people material benefits, and even then very few people respond.

Why Israel is bad for jews pt. 5

You may see Bostrom’s article in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet on the IDF ‘harvesting’ Palestinian organs  as a golden present for Israel to cry ‘blood libel’ and ‘antisemitism’ over, or alternatively you could consider Israel’s strenuous and wholescale denial of the article as a proof that there must be at least some truth to it. Regardless, it has generated a healthy debate aboout an issue which has consistently gone unreported and hence uninvestigated. This is what the ever clearheaded and well-informed Jonathan Cook has to say about it: ‘(…), when Israeli politicians are able to cry “blood libel” or “anti-semitism” when they are criticised, damaging the reputations of those they accuse, what incentive do they have to initiate inquiries that may harm them or the institutions they oversee? What reason do they have to be honest when they can bludgeon a critic into silence, at no cost to themselves? This is the meaning of the phrase “Power corrupts”, and Israeli politicians and soldiers, as well as at least one pathologist, demonstrably have far too much power — most especially over Palestinians under occupation.’

Alison Weir cites the way even Israeli citizens get treated in Israel’s hospitals: ‘Israel’s very first, historic heart transplant used a heart removed from a living patient without consent or consulting his family. In December 1968 a man named Avraham Sadegat (…) died two days after a stroke, even though his family had been told he was “doing well.” After initially refusing to release his body, the Israeli hospital where he was being treated finally turned the man’s body over to his family. They discovered that his upper body was wrapped in bandages; an odd situation, they felt, for someone who had suffered a stroke. When they removed the bandages, they discovered that the chest cavity was stuffed with bandages, and the heart was missing. During this time, the headline-making Israeli heart transplant had occurred. After their initial shock, the man’s wife and brother began to put the two events together and demanded answers. The hospital at first denied that Sadegat’s heart had been used in the headline-making transplant, but the family raised a media storm and eventually applied to three cabinet ministers. Finally, weeks later and after the family had signed a document promising not to sue, the hospital admitted that Sadagat’s heart had been used. The hospital explained that it had abided by Israeli law, which allowed organs to be harvested without the family’s consent. (The United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime includes the extraction of organs in its definition of human exploitation.) Indications that the removal of Sadagat’s heart was the actual cause of death went unaddressed. (…) “Half of the kidneys transplanted to Israelis since the beginning of the 2000s have been bought illegally from Turkey, Eastern Europe or Latin America. Israeli health authorities have full knowledge of this business but do nothing to stop it. At a conference in 2003 it was shown that Israel is the only western country with a medical profession that doesn’t condemn the illegal organ trade. The country takes no legal measures against doctors participating in the illegal business – on the contrary, chief medical officers of Israel’s big hospitals are involved in most of the illegal transplants, according to Dagens Nyheter (December 5, 2003).”’

Perceptions and realities

‘How ironic that many Lebanese gay men, including myself, actually feel more comfortable in places like Damascus or Amman and go there often in order to escape the Beiruti agitation. There might be no Kylie Minogue nights there, but on the other hand there is a lot less snobbery and less fuss about homosexuality. My friend Ali recently went to Jordan to be wedded to his boyfriend by a Muslim cleric and then spent his honeymoon in Damascus. The advantage of such trips also comes in finding an anonymity one is denied at home.But even Amman seems to have its “globalised” gay crowd. Watching Ugly Betty and wearing D&G is what gay culture is about, these people seem to say, along with the NYT article and many gay men across the global village. I can still remember how discovering Steven, the gay character in Dynasty, during my childhood in the 1980s, opened a whole new perspective for me. It is another matter altogether to equate this mass consumption with gay culture, or even with gay rights advocacy. Just as Beirut’s old neighbourhoods are being gentrified, its “superb architecture” (sic) being torn down to make way for soulless, surveillance-camera-equipped skyscrapers, its local gay culture is facing the challenge of McDonaldisation. How long before writers start describing Beirut as a new Bangkok – rather than a Provincetown? Will sex tourism advance its population’s gay rights or social wellbeing? In the meantime, Beirut is certainly turning back into the playground of multinational companies, regional interests and greedy entrepreneurs.’

This, by the way, is only the second reference I ever heard to Sunni sheikhs performing gay marriages – the other case reportedly occurred some years ago in Kuwait, where a sheikh married two women – but only because one of them was actually born as a man and had undergone a sex change: as his birth certificate asserted he was a man, however, the sheikh saw no legal problem there.

As-Safir, a Lebanese nespaper, publishes an opinion poll (links to article in Arabic) by al-Sharika ad-Duwaliyya li-l-Mu3allamat which dismisses the usual dominant view that pictures Lebanon as a country divided between an anti-Syrian/Iranian (and thus pro-US/Israeli) ‘majority’ and a pro-Syrian/Iranian (and ergo anti-US/Israeli) ‘opposition’. In fact, the results show that a solid 93.9% of the Lebanese continue to see Israel as enemy nr. 1 (ranging from 89% of the Maronite christians to 98% of the Druze), followed by the US at 64.8%. Asked about friendly and protective countries, Syria (72.3%) and Iran (68.6%) were only surpassed by Qatar (86.8%) – a marked change from the same company’s poll of june 2008, in which Syria and Iran only scored 46.5% and 40% respectively. The US, on the other hand, slid in popularity from 37.3% to 26.5%, and Saudi Arabia (despite virtually single-handedly holding up the Lebanese sex tourism industry) from 60.6% to 53%. As for the biggest current threat to Lebanon’s security, Hizbullah’s weapons were considered so by a smashing 5.5%, while Israel is seen thus by 48.2% of the Lebanese. Which leaves us with the burning question: if 6.1% of the Lebanese do not see Israel as a threat to their country, but only 5.5% (presumably covering the same respondents) see Hizbullah as a threat to Lebanon, than what on earth is going on in the minds of the 0.6% that is left? And who are they? The cannabis exporters? The Israeli spy network? The error margin? So many questions…