On a day when Israeli bombs and shells took the lives of at least 59 Lebanese and 14 Palestinians, the House and Senate prepared to pass overwhelmingly nearly identical resolutions that “recognize Israel’s longstanding commitment to minimizing civilian loss and welcome Israel’s continued efforts to prevent civilian casualties.” The resolutions contain not a hint of criticism of Israel, while making the most arrogant and threatening demands on the governments of Lebanon, Syria and Iran.
The thoroughly bi-partisan Congressional resolutions salute the Bush administration’s stance in the crisis. Together, Democrats and Republicans are signaling the Israeli rulers that they are unleashed, free to practice the greatest violence on the Arab people.
The breathtaking cynicism of the Congressional resolutions was underlined by yesterday’s war reports. The death toll
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Of the 59 killed on July 19, Lebanese hospital officials reported that 58 were civilians and one a Hezbollah fighter. Israel has been conducting an average of 300 aerial sorties (bombing runs) per day in Lebanon, targeting everything from high-rise apartment building and power plants, to bridges, roads and airports. Huge explosions, the biggest yet according to observers, resulted from the dropping of 23 tons of bombs in a heavily populated area of southern Beirut just after nightfall.
While the corporate media focuses heavily on U.S. citizens trying to escape the fighting in Lebanon, it pays little attention to the 500,000 Lebanese, 13 percent of the country’s total population, who have been forced to flee the Israeli bombing.
It’s hardly a secret that a key element of Israel’s strategy is to inflict maximum suffering on Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure and population as a whole. On the first day of the fighting, July 11, when Lebanese resistance forces captured two Israeli soldiers in a battle near the border, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert promised to make Israel’s response “very, very painful.”
Yesterday, Israeli army spokesman Capt. Jacob Dallal told the Associated Press that, “Israel hit a total of 1,000 targets in eight days, about 20 percent of them Hezbollah missile launching sites, missiles and command-and-control centers.” In other words, while Israel and the U.S. claim that this war is all about getting back two captured soldiers, the Israeli military itself admits that 80 percent of its bombing raids have hit non-military targets.
Collective punishment, that is, targeting the entire population for the acts of resistance fighters, was widely used by the Nazis in areas that they occupied in Europe from 1939-45. After World War II, it was labeled a crime against humanity under the Geneva Conventions. Yet collective punishment has been widely used by Israel in both Palestine and Lebanon for decades.
Thanks to its protection by the U.S. government, Israel is never forced to answer for its clear and blatant war crimes, crimes against humanity and other violations of international law. Similarly, U.S. leaders never are held accountable for their crimes, despite being responsible for numerous illegal wars and occupations.
Israel steps up attacks in Palestine
While most of the world’s attention has shifted to Lebanon in recent days, Israeli attacks on Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza have increased. A UN report released July 19 said that 100 Palestinians, 30 of them under the age of 18, have been killed since Israel’s Gaza offensive began on June 25.
Also on July 19, 14 more Palestinians were killed in the Mughazi refugee camp, Nablus—the largest city in the West Bank—and elsewhere. At least 80 others were wounded in Gaza.
At least five Israeli soldiers were wounded in Gaza, and an undisclosed number in Nablus. The large disparity between Israeli and Palestinian casualties is due to the huge gap in technology between the two sides. Israel, thanks to its close relationship with the U.S., has advanced fighter bombers, attack helicopters, tanks, unmanned drone aircraft and much more. Palestinians have rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and improvised explosives. Despite the enormous gap in weaponry, lightly armed Palestinian fighters have continued to resist Israeli incursions.
The great disparity in technology has emboldened the Israelis to attack Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza at will, to invade and destroy Palestinian public buildings, and to kill or imprison Palestinian leaders, including members of the Palestine Authority government, whenever they chose. All of this brings into sharp focus the truly colonial character of the relationship between Israel and the U.S. on the one side, and the Palestinian people on the other.
The problem for Israel, U.S. and regional puppet regimes
The leaders in Tel Aviv and Washington have been shocked by the military capacity of the Lebanese resistance forces under the Hezbollah’s leadership. On the first day of fighting, the Israeli army lost eight dead and two captured. Two Israeli tanks were destroyed when they attempted to enter southern Lebanon.
For the next week, the Israeli army did not try again to enter Lebanon. This was very unlike past invasions and
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The reason for holding back had nothing to do with “restraint” on Israel’s part, as shown by its wanton and destructive air raids all over Lebanon. It was fear of both the determination of the Lebanese fighters and their enhanced military capacity that has caused the Israeli commanders to hold back, at least until now.
But the Israeli and U.S. leaders cannot accomplish their real objective—which has little to do with freeing two Israeli soldiers—without a major Israeli ground invasion. The real aim is to destroy Hezbollah as a powerful force of resistance. The claims by Israeli commanders that they have eliminated a third to a half of Hezbollah’s rocket and missile capacity are widely regarded as wishful thinking.
In response to Israel’s bombing of Lebanon, Hezbollah has launched over 1,000 rockets into northern Israel. The toll has been far lower than in Lebanon or Gaza—29 Israelis killed (14 of them soldiers) and hundreds injured. Of great significance is the fact that cities far from the Lebanese border like Haifa and Tiberius were struck. This is unprecedented, at least since the 1973 war.
A massive Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon is one option that the war planners in the Pentagon and Israeli military headquarters are contemplating. Other options include attacks on Syria and Iran.
What both Washington and Tel Aviv would like to see is the destruction of all popular resistance movements in the region, from Iraq to Palestine to Lebanon, and regime change in Iran and Syria. This is a very tall order, especially in light of what has happened in Iraq since the U.S. invasion.
The aim is shared by the U.S.-dependent governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. In all three states, there is widening gap between the masses of workers and poor people and the ruling elites, who have grown very rich by accepting a subordinate role in the imperialist system.
All over the Arab world and the Middle East as a whole, the prestige of the Lebanese resistance, Hezbollah and its leader Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, has soared. This is viewed as a very ominous development by the repressive and unpopular governments in the region.
The polarization in the area has sharpened qualitatively in the past eight days. The polarization is both vertical—the alignment of states and movements in the region—and horizontal—class divisions.
The unfolding war in the Middle East is not confined to that region alone. It has become the center of the world struggle. It is this reality that makes the Aug. 12 mobilizations initiated by the National Council of Arab Americans, the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation and the ANSWER Coalition so critically important.
