Israel/Lebanon Bits & Pieces
Post
Amos Oz, July 19, Even Israel's peaceniks back war against Hezbollah, (No Source Found).
Globe, July 19, Marcus Gee, Why we must stand with Israel, (Source).
Globe, July 19, John Ibbitson, Struggling to find a sense of proportion, (Source).
Globe, July 19, Jane Taber, PM insists he's onside with allies on Hezbollah, (Source).
Globe, July 20, Editorial, Harper is right on the Mideast ..., (Source).
Spiegel, July 19, Middle East Crisis, Israel Sends Ground Troops into Lebanon, (Source).
Globe, July 21, Rick Salutin, Lebanon, Israel and obscenity, (Source).
Amos Oz, July 19, Even Israel's peaceniks back war against Hezbollah, (Back).
Many times in the past, the Israeli peace movement criticized Israeli military operations. Not this time. This time, the battle is not over Israeli expansion and colonization. There is no Lebanese territory occupied by israel.
There are no territorial claims from either side.
Last Wednesday, Hezbollah launched a vicious, unprovoked attack into Israeli territory. This was actually also an attack on the authority and integrity of the elected Lebanese government, as Hezbollah, by attacking Israel, also hijacked the prerogative of the Lebanese government to control its own territory and to make decisions on war and peace.
The Israeli peace movement objects to the occupation and colonization of the West Bank. It objected to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 because this invasion was aimed at distracting world attention from the Palestinian problem.
This time, Israel is not invading Lebanon. It is defending itself from a daily harassment and bombardment of dozens of our towns and villages by trying to smash Hezbollah wherever it lurks.
The Israeli peace movement should support Israel's attempt at self-defence, pure and simple, as long as this operation targets mostly Hezbollah and spares, as much as possible, the lives of Lebanese civilians (not always an easy task, as Hezbollah missile launchers are too often using Lebanese civilians as human sandbags). Hezbollah's missiles are supplied by Iran and Syria, both sworn enemies of all peace initiatives in the Middle East.
There can be no moral equation between Hezbollah and Israel. Hezbollah is targeting Israeli civilians wherever they are, while Israel is targeting mostly Hezbollah.
The dark shadows of Iran, Syria, and fanatic Islam are hovering over the smoking towns and villages on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanese border.
These dark shadows are, at the same time, suppressing Lebanese civil society, which had just recently liberated itself, through a heroic struggle, from a long-lasting Syrian colonization.
The real battle raging these days is not at all between Beirut and Haifa but between a coalition of peace-seeking nations - Israel and lebanon and Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia - on the one hand and fanatic Islan, fuelled by Iran and Syria on the other.
If, as we all hope, Israeli hawks and doves alike, Hezbollah is going to be defeated soon, both Israel and Lebanon will be the winners. Moreover, a defeat of a militant Islamist terror organization may dramatically enhance the chances for peace in the region.
Israeli novelist Amos Oz is a founder of peace Now.
Globe, July 19, Marcus Gee, Why we must stand with Israel, (Back).
Communiqués from the Group of Eight are not known for their piercing analyses of world events. Somehow, though, this year's G8 leaders managed to state a central truth about the latest Middle East conflict. It results, they said, "from efforts by extremist forces to destabilize the region and to frustrate the aspirations of the Palestinian, Israeli and Lebanese people for democracy and peace."
The extremist forces were not named, but everyone knows who the G8 was talking about. Syria and Iran, through their proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, are trying to seize control of events in the Middle East by taking on the despised "Zionist enemy" and, by doing so, to strengthen their hand in their struggle with the United States and its allies.
This is a feat of geopolitical jujitsu. Until recently, both Syria and Iran were on the defensive. Syria was forced to withdraw its troops from Lebanon after the democratic, nationalist upheaval there that followed the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri last year. Damascus is also under pressure from Washington for letting insurgents sneak into Iraq and for giving safe haven to Hamas and another Palestinian extremist group, Islamic Jihad.
Iran, of course, faces pressure from the U.S. and the European powers to give up its pursuit of nuclear weapons. It is no accident that the Hezbollah attack on Israel comes just as the Americans and their allies are pressing attempts to sanction Tehran over its defiance of the United Nations in its pursuit of nuclear technology. By making war by proxy against Israel, Iran takes attention away from the issue and puts on the mantle of heroic resistance to the "cancerous tumour" (as Iran's supreme leader charmingly put it) called Israel.
It's all part of a larger game to spread the militant creed throughout the region. British Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke last weekend of an "arc of extremism" in the Middle East. In Iraq, Shia Iran is asserting its power through the Shia religious parties that have become Iraq's most powerful political force. In Lebanon, Iran is backing Hezbollah, sending Revolutionary Guards to train its fighters to fire Iranian-supplied rockets at Israeli civilians. In Palestinian politics, Iran is thought to be backing Khaled Meshaal, the Hamas political leader who is held responsible for the abduction of Corporal Gilad Shalit on Israel's frontier with Gaza. That act opened the first front in the proxy war against Israel. Hezbollah opened the second.
It is not just the G8 and the Israelis who see the dark forces behind this dispute. Conservative Arab countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have (cautiously) denounced Hezbollah for what the Saudis call its "irresponsible adventurism." Jordan's King Abdullah II, echoing Mr. Blair, warns of a "Shiite arc" sweeping from Iran through Iraq to Lebanon.
The leading role of Iran and its militant proxies make this Middle East conflict different from those that have gone before. When Israel was up against Iraq, Egypt, Syria and Jordan, the old anti-Zionist axis, there was at least a hope that the conflict could be defused by settling the Palestinian issue, trading occupied Palestinian land for Arab recognition of Israel.
What chance is there that Iran, which wants Israel wiped off the map, would go for that? Notice that both recent attacks on Israel have come from land that Israel has already handed over: southern Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza last year. The message from the militant powers could not be clearer: Go ahead, give us back our land. We will still attack and we will keep attacking till you are finished. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah calls Palestine an "occupied land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River" -- a span that includes all of Israel.
Now that the extremists have hijacked the dispute with Israel, it is futile to rattle on, as outside powers used to do, about the "peace process" and the "road map" and "land for peace." As much as Palestinians deserve a country of their own, these are useless antiques in today's struggle. What the world needs to do is recognize the new reality and stand with Israel as it combats this remorseless enemy -- a threat not just to the Jewish state but to the whole democratic world.
Globe, July 19, John Ibbitson, Struggling to find a sense of proportion, (Back).
PARIS -- Yesterday, Stephen Harper walked among the dead of Vimy Ridge, the stone tablets of the unknown marked: "A Soldier of the Great War," "A Soldier of the Great War," "A Soldier of the Great War," one after the other, row on row.
Perhaps he hoped to draw an Afghanistan connection, to remind Canadians that we have lost our own in wars overseas before. But that message was probably lost.
The news is of other deaths, of Canadians trapped in Lebanon, of a government struggling to evacuate thousands of citizens from the war zone.
All of it -- Vimy, Lebanon, Afghanistan -- leaves us searching for a sense of proportion.
The G8 summit, and the Conservative government's hopes for smoothly introducing its Prime Minister to the world stage, were torpedoed by the kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers and the massive reprisals that Israel visited on Gaza and Lebanon.
Mr. Harper said he considered that response "measured" -- that is, proportionate. But then eight Canadians visiting Lebanon were killed by Israeli fire, and suddenly those remarks seemed very much out of proportion.
Mr. Harper clearly recognized this. Confronting, for the fifth day in a row, questions about the wisdom of this Conservative government's strong pro-Israeli stand, the Prime Minister finally managed a balance that had thus far eluded him.
The Canadian deaths in Lebanon were a tragedy, Mr. Harper acknowledged at a news conference with French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, "but it's only an example of a greater tragedy, the tragedy of people killed in Lebanon, people killed in Israel, people killed in Gaza."
This cycle of blood began with Hamas and Hezbollah, but it will end, he said, only when all sides come to the table. One might call that a measured response.
Canadians, of course, have been focusing on the deaths of their own, out of all proportion to the greater bloodshed, because that is what people do.
We find ourselves disturbed by the individual violent deaths of soldiers or civilians. Every Canadian combat death in Afghanistan gets front-page treatment because those deaths are rare, because we consider them tragic and because they stoke political controversy. The Canadian deaths in Lebanon are of the same kind.
If those deaths start to become commonplace, then their names will be reduced to agate, while we focus on the greater tragedy: the mess we have gotten ourselves into.
So where is the proportion in all of this? There is none. A Conservative Prime Minister's bold decision to realign foreign policy in favour of the United States, the Anglosphere and Israel got smacked upside the head when violence in the region escalated beyond all anticipation.
Suddenly, with the Prime Minister overseas and exposed, that foreign policy was severely tested. A government that planned to talk about energy security instead found itself struggling to organize an enormous evacuation of citizens, and to answer the critics who seem to think it should all have been done yesterday.
A visit to France, despite all the smiles and salutes, became just that much tenser, because Canada and France are at opposite poles in their perspectives on the Middle East. And thoughtful Conservatives wonder what this political crisis is doing to their prospects in Quebec, whose citizens are the most pro-Palestinian in the country.
In other words, the politics of death in the Middle East have created a political controversy in Canada beyond what anyone expected.
All sense of proportion has been lost.
Proportion, however, can be recaptured. More than 3,500 Canadian soldiers died on Vimy Ridge, a number that will (pray God) eclipse the combined Canadian combat and civilian war dead for decades.
But Laureen Harper wanted to visit a particular grave, that of a great-uncle, killed at Arras. As children and veterans watched silently, she knelt before his stone and wept, her husband holding her.
The Prime Minister's wife wept for a distant relative she never knew, but whose loss she feels nonetheless. That is something intensely human, and completely in proportion.
Globe, July 19, Jane Taber, PM insists he's onside with allies on Hezbollah, (Back).
Harper meets with France's de Villepin, says that only 'nuances' divide them
With reports from Gloria Galloway in Ottawa and Canadian Press
PARIS -- Prime Minister Stephen Harper acknowledged yesterday that his comments defending Israel and blaming Hezbollah for the deepening crisis in the Middle East are more forceful than those of some of Canada's allies, but said all the major world powers agree the violence can end only through a negotiated settlement.
"I think the position we're stating -- we may be stating it somewhat differently and forcefully," Mr. Harper told reporters after meeting with French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. "There are nuances between our countries."
Mr. Harper, who has refused to budge from last week's comments that Israel's actions have been "measured," encouraged Hezbollah to come to the negotiating table.
"Hezbollah's objective is violence," he said, arguing the group believes "that through violence it can bring about the destruction of Israel."
"Violence will not bring about the destruction of Israel," he said. "Violence will only bring about more violence and inevitably the result of the violence will be the death primarily of innocent people."
But Mr. de Villepin, who had just returned from a one-day visit to Lebanon, said the suffering of the Lebanese people is "immense." French President Jacques Chirac also made an impassioned defence of Lebanon in his wrap-up news conference at the Group of Eight summit he and Mr. Harper attended in St. Petersburg, Russia, over the weekend.
Mr. Harper also played down the idea of sending a peacekeeping force to Lebanon, which was included in a G8 statement, saying that would be premature.
"The statement said several things that have to take place to bring about a ceasefire and for the ability to keep peace," he said. "And we're not very close to that possibility at the moment."
Liberal Leader Bill Graham said the Conservative government's strong defence of Israel threatens Canada's credibility as an arbitrator in world crisis. The former foreign minister said Canada's past practice has been to take a more nuanced approach to such complex situations, allowing it to be an intermediary capable of defusing international incidents.
"Mr. Harper is proud of the fact he wasn't nuanced about this," Mr. Graham said. "Nuance has kept us in a position where we could help. Lose the nuance and you lose your capacity to act and help others. If you abuse that position, we lose our position to work with moderates."
Mr. Graham urged the government to act "with caution, with reason, with recognition that we are [an] ally of Israel," but said the future of Lebanon must also be considered.
"The total destabilization of the Lebanese government by attacks on infrastructure and civilians that are not directly related to being responsible for the violence is something that will in the end create a spiral of violence, which will in the end make things more difficult," he said at a news conference in Vancouver.
NDP Leader Jack Layton called on Canada to join a United Nations peacekeeping effort, but said that may be difficult given what he also called the abandonment of Canada's traditional neutrality.
Mr. Harper arrived in France yesterday from Russia and first stopped at Vimy Ridge to visit the Canadian National Vimy Memorial.
"I visited Vimy because we are proud of the Canadians who contributed to the liberation of France during both wars, particularly during World War I," he said. "The efforts of our soldiers who fought for justice and liberty are being repeated today in Afghanistan, where troops from both our countries are engaged in a battle to secure security, justice and liberty."
Today, he is scheduled to meet with Mr. Chirac.
Globe, July 20, Editorial, Harper is right on the Mideast ..., (Back).
Stephen Harper could have taken the safe route. When fighting broke out in the Middle East, it would have been easy to stick with the usual Canadian formula: denouncing the violence on both sides, calling for a ceasefire, proposing peace talks. Prime ministers down the decades have done precisely that, tiptoeing between the usual American support of Israel and the usual Arab denunciation.
Instead, Mr. Harper did something unusual and refreshing: He said what he thought. He didn't denounce the violence on both sides; he denounced Hezbollah violence and said Israel had a right to defend itself. He didn't say there should be a ceasefire; he said Hezbollah was primarily responsible for starting the fighting and must be primarily responsible for ending it. He didn't call for peace talks; he called on Hezbollah to return kidnapped Israeli soldiers and stop attacking Israeli civilians.
Mr. Harper's opponents in Parliament find this shocking. NDP Leader Jack Layton says he has ruined Canada's reputation for diplomatic neutrality. The Liberals' Bill Graham attacks him for lacking "nuance." Well, diplomacy and nuance have their place, but shouldn't Canada also be able to call a spade a spade? Isn't that part of the repertoire of a middle power?
What we're seeing in the Middle East is not an ordinary "cycle of violence," with each side equally to blame. It started with an unprovoked attack across a recognized international border. When Hezbollah killed eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two more, then rained missiles on Israeli civilians, it was not fending off an Israeli attack or resisting Israeli occupation. Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon six years ago. This was a deliberate act of aggression by extremists sworn to destroy the state of Israel. Israel had every right to respond.
That response has been violent and sweeping. More than 300 people have been killed, 245 of them in Lebanon. Mr. Harper is not blind to the cost. He has urged "Israel and others to minimize civilian damage." He should keep saying that, and with more feeling. His reaction to the death of eight Canadians in Lebanon was underwhelming. Has he thought to phone the mourning family in Montreal? For all his powers of logic, the Prime Minister sometimes fails on the empathy side.
But he is right not to fall into the trap of saying that because Israel's bombs are killing civilians, it is just as much to blame as Hezbollah. There is a world of difference between those who deliberately kill to make mischief and those who kill in response. When an Israeli air strike gone wrong killed those eight Canadians, Israel issued a heartfelt apology. When Hezbollah rockets kill Israeli innocents, its supporters hand out sweets.
This is not always an easy distinction to talk about when civilians are being killed all around. To his credit, Mr. Harper insists on making it. No one would be dying on either side without Hezbollah and its twisted belief "that through violence it can bring about the destruction of Israel." But violence, he said, "will only bring about more violence and inevitably the result of the violence will be the death primarily of innocent people." That is the real cycle here. Those, like the Israelis, who defend themselves against unprovoked attacks are not perpetuating the violence. The instigators alone are to blame for that.
That is the important point Mr. Harper was trying to make when he broke from the pack to support Israel so forcefully in the current conflict. It may not have been the safe thing to say, but it was the right one.
Spiegel, July 19, 2006, Middle East Crisis, Israel Sends Ground Troops into Lebanon, (Back).
Israel pushed ahead with its military campaign in Lebanon against Hezbollah militants on Wednesday, bombing targets in Beirut and sending a small contingent of ground troops across its northern border. Casualties on both sides continue to mount.
Early on Wednesday an unidentified number of Israeli soldiers had crossed into Lebanon, in what the military said was a small-scale operation to search for tunnels and weapons. But the Israeli forces have not ruled out a large ground invasion to support their campaign against Islamic militant group Hezbollah.
The Associated Press reported 245 people killed in Lebanon and 25 in Israel since fighting broke out July 12 between Israeli forces and Hezbollah guerrillas following the Shiite extremist group's capture of two Israeli soldiers.
Israeli military officials said that small numbers of soldiers have been crossing the border for several days in an attempt to root out Hezbollah positions. "They are limited, very exact attacks," an army spokesman said.
According to the AP, Hezbollah's Al Manar television reported the militants had "repelled" an advance by an Israeli unit at Labbouneh near the coastal border town of Naqoura. And last week, Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah said his fighters were hoping for a ground offensive that would allow them to engage Israeli forces.
"Any ground invasion will be good news for the resistance because it will bring us closer to victory and humiliating the Israeli enemy," Nasrallah said.
Air strikes continue
Meanwhile, Israeli air strikes continued to take their toll on both Hezbollah and the Lebanese civilian population. Explosions reverberated across Beirut overnight and early Wednesday as bombing targeted the capital's southern districts, which are a Hezbollah stronghold.
A family of five was killed in a missile attack in the southern town of Nabatiyeh, police and hospital officials said after Israel attacked an office belonging to Hezbollah. And air strikes also destroyed 15 houses in the village of Srifa, near the southern city of Tyre. The village leader said 25 to 30 people were believed to have been in the structures.
Israel said Wednesday that its air campaign had destroyed "about 50 percent" of Hezbollah's arsenal. The militants have bombarded northern Israeli towns with rockets, killing 13 civilians in the past eight days. "It will take us time to destroy what is left," Brigadier General Alon Friedman, a senior army commander, told Israeli Army Radio.
Israeli leaders also said Wednesday that it was not planning to widen the conflict by targeting Hezbollah's main sponsors, Iran and Syria, during the current fighting. "We will leave Iran to the world community and Syria as well," Vice Premier Shimon Peres said. "It's very important to understand that we are not instilling world order."
The United States said on Tuesday it would not back growing calls amongst the international community for a quick cease-fire to end Israel's campaign in Lebanon. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she would instead focus on building diplomatic support for what she called a cease-fire of "lasting value" that apparently would lead to the Lebanese Army taking control of the southern part of the country in order to neutralize Hezbollah.
US President George W. Bush has placed blame for the most recent escalation on Syria and Iran, which both have considerable influence on Hezbollah. "Syria's trying to get back into Lebanon, it looks like, seems to me," said Bush. "The world must deal with Hezbollah, with Syria and to continue to isolate Iran."
Syria was forced to withdraw its troops from Lebanon last year amid UN pressure and there has been speculation that Iran might have stoked the latest outbreak of violence in the Middle East in an attempt deflect attention from its dispute with the international community over its controversial nuclear program.
Globe, July 21, Rick Salutin, Lebanon, Israel and obscenity, (Back).
Theses on Lebanon:
1. It is obscene for our government to expend effort rescuing Canadians from a war zone while refusing to call for a ceasefire and working to achieve it. The same conditions threaten Lebanese civilians as menace ours. They are as human and as innocent as our own citizens, and we owe them a moral duty. If evacuation is urgently needed, then so is a ceasefire.
2. It is obscene to demolish infrastructure such as power plants, roads, bridges or airports merely because they are used by those you are fighting. Infrastructure of that sort is the skeleton of civilized life, used by everyone. Why not bomb orchards, supermarkets and cows? Terrorists use them, too.
3. An Israeli journalist told Peter Mansbridge that Israel wants to "solve" the Hezbollah problem for good and counts on the U.S. to let it do so. But, as is often acknowledged in Israel, the real aim is not a solution. It is to buy some time by destroying or degrading the other side for a while. That is all. So, in 1982, Israel occupied Lebanon to solve the presence of the PLO. The PLO left and, shortly after, Hezbollah was created. By 2000, Hezbollah had driven Israel out. Now, at most, Israel will buy more time and something new will arise. Similarly in Gaza. Israel helped create Hamas in the 1980s to undermine the PLO. Eventually, Hamas drove it from Gaza. Now, if it destroys Hamas, something will eventually replace it.
4. Shimon Peres looked more ashen than usual, answering Larry King's question on the violence of Israel's response to Hezbollah, with, "Then why did they start it?" He seemed exhausted more than convinced, as if he has said this too often. There is no single answer to who started it. The answer will vary with the assumptions in the question. All philosophy students know that. But for an answer that can lead to a better question, try Israeli columnist Gideon Levy, in Haaretz, who said the occupation started it, and all the odious unjustifiable violence on all sides flows from there because "there is no violence worse than the violence of the occupier, using force on an entire nation." Surely he was writing as a Jew, not just as a journalist.
5. George Bush revealed himself over an open mike when he said: "See, the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing that shit, and it's over." To him, nothing counts except the true agenda (versus the public rhetoric) of those with power, especially state power. Now, doubtless, Iran and Syria have their agendas for Hezbollah, and Hezbollah's leaders have their own. But there is also a role played by the feelings of ordinary people, especially their sense of solidarity with their beleaguered brethren, as Arabs and Muslims tend to feel for Palestinians. It is the same sense that leads Jews elsewhere to identify with and support Israel. Without that force, it is hard to imagine Hezbollah acting as it did.
6. Stephen Harper has behaved ideologically, in this sense: When the outbreak began, he reacted according to his ideological preconceptions about the Mideast; he supported Israel as being provoked and measured. When a Canadian family died under Israeli fire, he did not allow that event to modify anything in his response. He did not ask what they did to merit their fate, nor what measured objective their deaths served. Reality was irrelevant.
7. What matters now in the Mideast is not who is right, or why they feel right. What matters is who has the might to impose their notion of right. The bloody individual carnage inflicted by Israel's foes has never been commensurate with the vast damage inflicted by Israel on Palestinian and Lebanese society over generations. Spiderman may think that with great power goes great responsibility. But it is hard to imagine anyone who, like Israel, feels deeply menaced and morally justified, not using the power they have. In that case, great responsibility falls on those who endow them with that power, particularly the U.S. It is criminal to create a huge imbalance of power in a fragile situation. It is criminally negligent to then stand back and refuse to seriously try to moderate its use. But that is where I began.
(Back)
Globe, July 19, Marcus Gee, Why we must stand with Israel, (Source).
Globe, July 19, John Ibbitson, Struggling to find a sense of proportion, (Source).
Globe, July 19, Jane Taber, PM insists he's onside with allies on Hezbollah, (Source).
Globe, July 20, Editorial, Harper is right on the Mideast ..., (Source).
Spiegel, July 19, Middle East Crisis, Israel Sends Ground Troops into Lebanon, (Source).
Globe, July 21, Rick Salutin, Lebanon, Israel and obscenity, (Source).
Amos Oz, July 19, Even Israel's peaceniks back war against Hezbollah, (Back).
Many times in the past, the Israeli peace movement criticized Israeli military operations. Not this time. This time, the battle is not over Israeli expansion and colonization. There is no Lebanese territory occupied by israel.
There are no territorial claims from either side.
Last Wednesday, Hezbollah launched a vicious, unprovoked attack into Israeli territory. This was actually also an attack on the authority and integrity of the elected Lebanese government, as Hezbollah, by attacking Israel, also hijacked the prerogative of the Lebanese government to control its own territory and to make decisions on war and peace.
The Israeli peace movement objects to the occupation and colonization of the West Bank. It objected to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 because this invasion was aimed at distracting world attention from the Palestinian problem.
This time, Israel is not invading Lebanon. It is defending itself from a daily harassment and bombardment of dozens of our towns and villages by trying to smash Hezbollah wherever it lurks.
The Israeli peace movement should support Israel's attempt at self-defence, pure and simple, as long as this operation targets mostly Hezbollah and spares, as much as possible, the lives of Lebanese civilians (not always an easy task, as Hezbollah missile launchers are too often using Lebanese civilians as human sandbags). Hezbollah's missiles are supplied by Iran and Syria, both sworn enemies of all peace initiatives in the Middle East.
There can be no moral equation between Hezbollah and Israel. Hezbollah is targeting Israeli civilians wherever they are, while Israel is targeting mostly Hezbollah.
The dark shadows of Iran, Syria, and fanatic Islam are hovering over the smoking towns and villages on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanese border.
These dark shadows are, at the same time, suppressing Lebanese civil society, which had just recently liberated itself, through a heroic struggle, from a long-lasting Syrian colonization.
The real battle raging these days is not at all between Beirut and Haifa but between a coalition of peace-seeking nations - Israel and lebanon and Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia - on the one hand and fanatic Islan, fuelled by Iran and Syria on the other.
If, as we all hope, Israeli hawks and doves alike, Hezbollah is going to be defeated soon, both Israel and Lebanon will be the winners. Moreover, a defeat of a militant Islamist terror organization may dramatically enhance the chances for peace in the region.
Israeli novelist Amos Oz is a founder of peace Now.
Globe, July 19, Marcus Gee, Why we must stand with Israel, (Back).
Communiqués from the Group of Eight are not known for their piercing analyses of world events. Somehow, though, this year's G8 leaders managed to state a central truth about the latest Middle East conflict. It results, they said, "from efforts by extremist forces to destabilize the region and to frustrate the aspirations of the Palestinian, Israeli and Lebanese people for democracy and peace."
The extremist forces were not named, but everyone knows who the G8 was talking about. Syria and Iran, through their proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, are trying to seize control of events in the Middle East by taking on the despised "Zionist enemy" and, by doing so, to strengthen their hand in their struggle with the United States and its allies.
This is a feat of geopolitical jujitsu. Until recently, both Syria and Iran were on the defensive. Syria was forced to withdraw its troops from Lebanon after the democratic, nationalist upheaval there that followed the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri last year. Damascus is also under pressure from Washington for letting insurgents sneak into Iraq and for giving safe haven to Hamas and another Palestinian extremist group, Islamic Jihad.
Iran, of course, faces pressure from the U.S. and the European powers to give up its pursuit of nuclear weapons. It is no accident that the Hezbollah attack on Israel comes just as the Americans and their allies are pressing attempts to sanction Tehran over its defiance of the United Nations in its pursuit of nuclear technology. By making war by proxy against Israel, Iran takes attention away from the issue and puts on the mantle of heroic resistance to the "cancerous tumour" (as Iran's supreme leader charmingly put it) called Israel.
It's all part of a larger game to spread the militant creed throughout the region. British Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke last weekend of an "arc of extremism" in the Middle East. In Iraq, Shia Iran is asserting its power through the Shia religious parties that have become Iraq's most powerful political force. In Lebanon, Iran is backing Hezbollah, sending Revolutionary Guards to train its fighters to fire Iranian-supplied rockets at Israeli civilians. In Palestinian politics, Iran is thought to be backing Khaled Meshaal, the Hamas political leader who is held responsible for the abduction of Corporal Gilad Shalit on Israel's frontier with Gaza. That act opened the first front in the proxy war against Israel. Hezbollah opened the second.
It is not just the G8 and the Israelis who see the dark forces behind this dispute. Conservative Arab countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have (cautiously) denounced Hezbollah for what the Saudis call its "irresponsible adventurism." Jordan's King Abdullah II, echoing Mr. Blair, warns of a "Shiite arc" sweeping from Iran through Iraq to Lebanon.
The leading role of Iran and its militant proxies make this Middle East conflict different from those that have gone before. When Israel was up against Iraq, Egypt, Syria and Jordan, the old anti-Zionist axis, there was at least a hope that the conflict could be defused by settling the Palestinian issue, trading occupied Palestinian land for Arab recognition of Israel.
What chance is there that Iran, which wants Israel wiped off the map, would go for that? Notice that both recent attacks on Israel have come from land that Israel has already handed over: southern Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza last year. The message from the militant powers could not be clearer: Go ahead, give us back our land. We will still attack and we will keep attacking till you are finished. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah calls Palestine an "occupied land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River" -- a span that includes all of Israel.
Now that the extremists have hijacked the dispute with Israel, it is futile to rattle on, as outside powers used to do, about the "peace process" and the "road map" and "land for peace." As much as Palestinians deserve a country of their own, these are useless antiques in today's struggle. What the world needs to do is recognize the new reality and stand with Israel as it combats this remorseless enemy -- a threat not just to the Jewish state but to the whole democratic world.
Globe, July 19, John Ibbitson, Struggling to find a sense of proportion, (Back).
PARIS -- Yesterday, Stephen Harper walked among the dead of Vimy Ridge, the stone tablets of the unknown marked: "A Soldier of the Great War," "A Soldier of the Great War," "A Soldier of the Great War," one after the other, row on row.
Perhaps he hoped to draw an Afghanistan connection, to remind Canadians that we have lost our own in wars overseas before. But that message was probably lost.
The news is of other deaths, of Canadians trapped in Lebanon, of a government struggling to evacuate thousands of citizens from the war zone.
All of it -- Vimy, Lebanon, Afghanistan -- leaves us searching for a sense of proportion.
The G8 summit, and the Conservative government's hopes for smoothly introducing its Prime Minister to the world stage, were torpedoed by the kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers and the massive reprisals that Israel visited on Gaza and Lebanon.
Mr. Harper said he considered that response "measured" -- that is, proportionate. But then eight Canadians visiting Lebanon were killed by Israeli fire, and suddenly those remarks seemed very much out of proportion.
Mr. Harper clearly recognized this. Confronting, for the fifth day in a row, questions about the wisdom of this Conservative government's strong pro-Israeli stand, the Prime Minister finally managed a balance that had thus far eluded him.
The Canadian deaths in Lebanon were a tragedy, Mr. Harper acknowledged at a news conference with French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, "but it's only an example of a greater tragedy, the tragedy of people killed in Lebanon, people killed in Israel, people killed in Gaza."
This cycle of blood began with Hamas and Hezbollah, but it will end, he said, only when all sides come to the table. One might call that a measured response.
Canadians, of course, have been focusing on the deaths of their own, out of all proportion to the greater bloodshed, because that is what people do.
We find ourselves disturbed by the individual violent deaths of soldiers or civilians. Every Canadian combat death in Afghanistan gets front-page treatment because those deaths are rare, because we consider them tragic and because they stoke political controversy. The Canadian deaths in Lebanon are of the same kind.
If those deaths start to become commonplace, then their names will be reduced to agate, while we focus on the greater tragedy: the mess we have gotten ourselves into.
So where is the proportion in all of this? There is none. A Conservative Prime Minister's bold decision to realign foreign policy in favour of the United States, the Anglosphere and Israel got smacked upside the head when violence in the region escalated beyond all anticipation.
Suddenly, with the Prime Minister overseas and exposed, that foreign policy was severely tested. A government that planned to talk about energy security instead found itself struggling to organize an enormous evacuation of citizens, and to answer the critics who seem to think it should all have been done yesterday.
A visit to France, despite all the smiles and salutes, became just that much tenser, because Canada and France are at opposite poles in their perspectives on the Middle East. And thoughtful Conservatives wonder what this political crisis is doing to their prospects in Quebec, whose citizens are the most pro-Palestinian in the country.
In other words, the politics of death in the Middle East have created a political controversy in Canada beyond what anyone expected.
All sense of proportion has been lost.
Proportion, however, can be recaptured. More than 3,500 Canadian soldiers died on Vimy Ridge, a number that will (pray God) eclipse the combined Canadian combat and civilian war dead for decades.
But Laureen Harper wanted to visit a particular grave, that of a great-uncle, killed at Arras. As children and veterans watched silently, she knelt before his stone and wept, her husband holding her.
The Prime Minister's wife wept for a distant relative she never knew, but whose loss she feels nonetheless. That is something intensely human, and completely in proportion.
Globe, July 19, Jane Taber, PM insists he's onside with allies on Hezbollah, (Back).
Harper meets with France's de Villepin, says that only 'nuances' divide them
With reports from Gloria Galloway in Ottawa and Canadian Press
PARIS -- Prime Minister Stephen Harper acknowledged yesterday that his comments defending Israel and blaming Hezbollah for the deepening crisis in the Middle East are more forceful than those of some of Canada's allies, but said all the major world powers agree the violence can end only through a negotiated settlement.
"I think the position we're stating -- we may be stating it somewhat differently and forcefully," Mr. Harper told reporters after meeting with French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. "There are nuances between our countries."
Mr. Harper, who has refused to budge from last week's comments that Israel's actions have been "measured," encouraged Hezbollah to come to the negotiating table.
"Hezbollah's objective is violence," he said, arguing the group believes "that through violence it can bring about the destruction of Israel."
"Violence will not bring about the destruction of Israel," he said. "Violence will only bring about more violence and inevitably the result of the violence will be the death primarily of innocent people."
But Mr. de Villepin, who had just returned from a one-day visit to Lebanon, said the suffering of the Lebanese people is "immense." French President Jacques Chirac also made an impassioned defence of Lebanon in his wrap-up news conference at the Group of Eight summit he and Mr. Harper attended in St. Petersburg, Russia, over the weekend.
Mr. Harper also played down the idea of sending a peacekeeping force to Lebanon, which was included in a G8 statement, saying that would be premature.
"The statement said several things that have to take place to bring about a ceasefire and for the ability to keep peace," he said. "And we're not very close to that possibility at the moment."
Liberal Leader Bill Graham said the Conservative government's strong defence of Israel threatens Canada's credibility as an arbitrator in world crisis. The former foreign minister said Canada's past practice has been to take a more nuanced approach to such complex situations, allowing it to be an intermediary capable of defusing international incidents.
"Mr. Harper is proud of the fact he wasn't nuanced about this," Mr. Graham said. "Nuance has kept us in a position where we could help. Lose the nuance and you lose your capacity to act and help others. If you abuse that position, we lose our position to work with moderates."
Mr. Graham urged the government to act "with caution, with reason, with recognition that we are [an] ally of Israel," but said the future of Lebanon must also be considered.
"The total destabilization of the Lebanese government by attacks on infrastructure and civilians that are not directly related to being responsible for the violence is something that will in the end create a spiral of violence, which will in the end make things more difficult," he said at a news conference in Vancouver.
NDP Leader Jack Layton called on Canada to join a United Nations peacekeeping effort, but said that may be difficult given what he also called the abandonment of Canada's traditional neutrality.
Mr. Harper arrived in France yesterday from Russia and first stopped at Vimy Ridge to visit the Canadian National Vimy Memorial.
"I visited Vimy because we are proud of the Canadians who contributed to the liberation of France during both wars, particularly during World War I," he said. "The efforts of our soldiers who fought for justice and liberty are being repeated today in Afghanistan, where troops from both our countries are engaged in a battle to secure security, justice and liberty."
Today, he is scheduled to meet with Mr. Chirac.
Globe, July 20, Editorial, Harper is right on the Mideast ..., (Back).
Stephen Harper could have taken the safe route. When fighting broke out in the Middle East, it would have been easy to stick with the usual Canadian formula: denouncing the violence on both sides, calling for a ceasefire, proposing peace talks. Prime ministers down the decades have done precisely that, tiptoeing between the usual American support of Israel and the usual Arab denunciation.
Instead, Mr. Harper did something unusual and refreshing: He said what he thought. He didn't denounce the violence on both sides; he denounced Hezbollah violence and said Israel had a right to defend itself. He didn't say there should be a ceasefire; he said Hezbollah was primarily responsible for starting the fighting and must be primarily responsible for ending it. He didn't call for peace talks; he called on Hezbollah to return kidnapped Israeli soldiers and stop attacking Israeli civilians.
Mr. Harper's opponents in Parliament find this shocking. NDP Leader Jack Layton says he has ruined Canada's reputation for diplomatic neutrality. The Liberals' Bill Graham attacks him for lacking "nuance." Well, diplomacy and nuance have their place, but shouldn't Canada also be able to call a spade a spade? Isn't that part of the repertoire of a middle power?
What we're seeing in the Middle East is not an ordinary "cycle of violence," with each side equally to blame. It started with an unprovoked attack across a recognized international border. When Hezbollah killed eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two more, then rained missiles on Israeli civilians, it was not fending off an Israeli attack or resisting Israeli occupation. Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon six years ago. This was a deliberate act of aggression by extremists sworn to destroy the state of Israel. Israel had every right to respond.
That response has been violent and sweeping. More than 300 people have been killed, 245 of them in Lebanon. Mr. Harper is not blind to the cost. He has urged "Israel and others to minimize civilian damage." He should keep saying that, and with more feeling. His reaction to the death of eight Canadians in Lebanon was underwhelming. Has he thought to phone the mourning family in Montreal? For all his powers of logic, the Prime Minister sometimes fails on the empathy side.
But he is right not to fall into the trap of saying that because Israel's bombs are killing civilians, it is just as much to blame as Hezbollah. There is a world of difference between those who deliberately kill to make mischief and those who kill in response. When an Israeli air strike gone wrong killed those eight Canadians, Israel issued a heartfelt apology. When Hezbollah rockets kill Israeli innocents, its supporters hand out sweets.
This is not always an easy distinction to talk about when civilians are being killed all around. To his credit, Mr. Harper insists on making it. No one would be dying on either side without Hezbollah and its twisted belief "that through violence it can bring about the destruction of Israel." But violence, he said, "will only bring about more violence and inevitably the result of the violence will be the death primarily of innocent people." That is the real cycle here. Those, like the Israelis, who defend themselves against unprovoked attacks are not perpetuating the violence. The instigators alone are to blame for that.
That is the important point Mr. Harper was trying to make when he broke from the pack to support Israel so forcefully in the current conflict. It may not have been the safe thing to say, but it was the right one.
Spiegel, July 19, 2006, Middle East Crisis, Israel Sends Ground Troops into Lebanon, (Back).
Israel pushed ahead with its military campaign in Lebanon against Hezbollah militants on Wednesday, bombing targets in Beirut and sending a small contingent of ground troops across its northern border. Casualties on both sides continue to mount.
Early on Wednesday an unidentified number of Israeli soldiers had crossed into Lebanon, in what the military said was a small-scale operation to search for tunnels and weapons. But the Israeli forces have not ruled out a large ground invasion to support their campaign against Islamic militant group Hezbollah.
The Associated Press reported 245 people killed in Lebanon and 25 in Israel since fighting broke out July 12 between Israeli forces and Hezbollah guerrillas following the Shiite extremist group's capture of two Israeli soldiers.
Israeli military officials said that small numbers of soldiers have been crossing the border for several days in an attempt to root out Hezbollah positions. "They are limited, very exact attacks," an army spokesman said.
According to the AP, Hezbollah's Al Manar television reported the militants had "repelled" an advance by an Israeli unit at Labbouneh near the coastal border town of Naqoura. And last week, Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah said his fighters were hoping for a ground offensive that would allow them to engage Israeli forces.
"Any ground invasion will be good news for the resistance because it will bring us closer to victory and humiliating the Israeli enemy," Nasrallah said.
Air strikes continue
Meanwhile, Israeli air strikes continued to take their toll on both Hezbollah and the Lebanese civilian population. Explosions reverberated across Beirut overnight and early Wednesday as bombing targeted the capital's southern districts, which are a Hezbollah stronghold.
A family of five was killed in a missile attack in the southern town of Nabatiyeh, police and hospital officials said after Israel attacked an office belonging to Hezbollah. And air strikes also destroyed 15 houses in the village of Srifa, near the southern city of Tyre. The village leader said 25 to 30 people were believed to have been in the structures.
Israel said Wednesday that its air campaign had destroyed "about 50 percent" of Hezbollah's arsenal. The militants have bombarded northern Israeli towns with rockets, killing 13 civilians in the past eight days. "It will take us time to destroy what is left," Brigadier General Alon Friedman, a senior army commander, told Israeli Army Radio.
Israeli leaders also said Wednesday that it was not planning to widen the conflict by targeting Hezbollah's main sponsors, Iran and Syria, during the current fighting. "We will leave Iran to the world community and Syria as well," Vice Premier Shimon Peres said. "It's very important to understand that we are not instilling world order."
The United States said on Tuesday it would not back growing calls amongst the international community for a quick cease-fire to end Israel's campaign in Lebanon. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she would instead focus on building diplomatic support for what she called a cease-fire of "lasting value" that apparently would lead to the Lebanese Army taking control of the southern part of the country in order to neutralize Hezbollah.
US President George W. Bush has placed blame for the most recent escalation on Syria and Iran, which both have considerable influence on Hezbollah. "Syria's trying to get back into Lebanon, it looks like, seems to me," said Bush. "The world must deal with Hezbollah, with Syria and to continue to isolate Iran."
Syria was forced to withdraw its troops from Lebanon last year amid UN pressure and there has been speculation that Iran might have stoked the latest outbreak of violence in the Middle East in an attempt deflect attention from its dispute with the international community over its controversial nuclear program.
Globe, July 21, Rick Salutin, Lebanon, Israel and obscenity, (Back).
Theses on Lebanon:
1. It is obscene for our government to expend effort rescuing Canadians from a war zone while refusing to call for a ceasefire and working to achieve it. The same conditions threaten Lebanese civilians as menace ours. They are as human and as innocent as our own citizens, and we owe them a moral duty. If evacuation is urgently needed, then so is a ceasefire.
2. It is obscene to demolish infrastructure such as power plants, roads, bridges or airports merely because they are used by those you are fighting. Infrastructure of that sort is the skeleton of civilized life, used by everyone. Why not bomb orchards, supermarkets and cows? Terrorists use them, too.
3. An Israeli journalist told Peter Mansbridge that Israel wants to "solve" the Hezbollah problem for good and counts on the U.S. to let it do so. But, as is often acknowledged in Israel, the real aim is not a solution. It is to buy some time by destroying or degrading the other side for a while. That is all. So, in 1982, Israel occupied Lebanon to solve the presence of the PLO. The PLO left and, shortly after, Hezbollah was created. By 2000, Hezbollah had driven Israel out. Now, at most, Israel will buy more time and something new will arise. Similarly in Gaza. Israel helped create Hamas in the 1980s to undermine the PLO. Eventually, Hamas drove it from Gaza. Now, if it destroys Hamas, something will eventually replace it.
4. Shimon Peres looked more ashen than usual, answering Larry King's question on the violence of Israel's response to Hezbollah, with, "Then why did they start it?" He seemed exhausted more than convinced, as if he has said this too often. There is no single answer to who started it. The answer will vary with the assumptions in the question. All philosophy students know that. But for an answer that can lead to a better question, try Israeli columnist Gideon Levy, in Haaretz, who said the occupation started it, and all the odious unjustifiable violence on all sides flows from there because "there is no violence worse than the violence of the occupier, using force on an entire nation." Surely he was writing as a Jew, not just as a journalist.
5. George Bush revealed himself over an open mike when he said: "See, the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing that shit, and it's over." To him, nothing counts except the true agenda (versus the public rhetoric) of those with power, especially state power. Now, doubtless, Iran and Syria have their agendas for Hezbollah, and Hezbollah's leaders have their own. But there is also a role played by the feelings of ordinary people, especially their sense of solidarity with their beleaguered brethren, as Arabs and Muslims tend to feel for Palestinians. It is the same sense that leads Jews elsewhere to identify with and support Israel. Without that force, it is hard to imagine Hezbollah acting as it did.
6. Stephen Harper has behaved ideologically, in this sense: When the outbreak began, he reacted according to his ideological preconceptions about the Mideast; he supported Israel as being provoked and measured. When a Canadian family died under Israeli fire, he did not allow that event to modify anything in his response. He did not ask what they did to merit their fate, nor what measured objective their deaths served. Reality was irrelevant.
7. What matters now in the Mideast is not who is right, or why they feel right. What matters is who has the might to impose their notion of right. The bloody individual carnage inflicted by Israel's foes has never been commensurate with the vast damage inflicted by Israel on Palestinian and Lebanese society over generations. Spiderman may think that with great power goes great responsibility. But it is hard to imagine anyone who, like Israel, feels deeply menaced and morally justified, not using the power they have. In that case, great responsibility falls on those who endow them with that power, particularly the U.S. It is criminal to create a huge imbalance of power in a fragile situation. It is criminally negligent to then stand back and refuse to seriously try to moderate its use. But that is where I began.
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