The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

— George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair, 1903-1950)

For anyone in two minds about what is really going on in Syria, and whether President Assad, hailed a decade ago as “A Modern Day Attaturk”, has become the latest megalomaniacal despot to whose people a US-led posse of nations must deliver “freedom” with weapons of mass, home, people, nation and livelihood destruction, here is a salutary tale from modern history.

Have the more recent saber-rattlings against Syria* been based on US-UK government papers only discovered in 2003, and since air-brushed (or erroneously omitted) from even BBC timelines on that country?

In late 2003, the year of the Iraq invasion, Matthew Jones, a Reader in International History at London’s Royal Holloway College, discovered “frighteningly frank” documents — 1957 plans between then UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and then President Dwight Eisenhower endorsing: “a CIA-MI6 plan to stage fake border incidents as an excuse for an invasion (of Syria) by Syria’s pro-western neighbours.”

At the heart of the plan was the assassination of the perceived power behind then President Shukri al-Quwatli. Those targeted were Abd al-Hamid Sarraj, Head of Military Intelligence; Afif al-Bizri, Chief of Syrian General Staff: and Khalid Bakdash, who headed the Syrian Communist Party.

The document was drawn up in Washington in September of 1957:

In order to facilitate the action of liberative (sic) forces, reduce the capabilities of the regime to organize and direct its military actions … to bring about the desired results in the shortest possible time, a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals.

Their removal should be accomplished early in the course of the uprising and intervention, and in the light of circumstances existing at the time.

In light of President Assad’s current allegations of foreign forces, interventions and cross-border incursions, this document contains some fascinating, salutary phrases:

Once a political decision has been reached to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria, CIA is prepared, and SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup de main (sic) incidents within Syria, working through contacts with individuals.

Incidents should not be concentrated in Damascus … care should be taken to avoid causing key leaders of the Syrian regime to take additional personal protection measures.

Further, a “necessary degree of fear … frontier incidents and (staged) border clashes”, would “provide a pretext for intervention” by Iraq and Jordan – then still under British mandate.

Syria was to be “made to appear as sponsor of plots, sabotage and violence directed against neighbouring governments … the CIA and SIS should use … capabilitites in both psychological and action fields to augment tension.”

Incursions into Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon would involve “sabotage, national conspiracies, and various strong arms activities”, were, advised the document, to be blamed on Damascus.

In late December 2011 an opposition “Syria National Council” was announced, to “liberate the country”.  Representatives met with Hilary Clinton. There now seems to be a US – endorsed “Syrian Revolutionary Council.”

The Eisenhower-Macmillan plan was for funding of the “Free Syria Committee” and “arming of political factions with paramilitary or other actionist capabilities”, within Syria.

CIA-MI6 planned fomenting internal uprisings and replacing the Ba’ath Communist-leaning government with a Western, user-friendly one. Expecting this to be met by public hostility, they planned to “probably need to rely first on repressive measures and arbitrary exercise of power.”

The document was signed off in both London and Washington. It was, wrote Macmillan in his diary, “a most formidable report” — a report which was “withheld even from British Chiefs of Staff …”

Washington and Whitehall had become concerned at Syria’s increasingly pro-Soviet, rather than pro-Western sympathies, and the Ba’ath (Pan Arab) and Communist party alliance, also largely allied within the Syrian army.

However, even political concerns were trumped by Syria then controlling a main pipeline from the Western bonanza of Iraq’s oil fields in those pre-Saddam Hussein days.

Briefly put, in 1957 Syria allied with Moscow (which included an agreement for military and economic aid) also recognized China – and then as now, the then Soviet Union warned the West against intervening in Syria.

Syria is unchanged as an independent minded country, and the loyalties remain. It broadly continues to be the cradle of the Pan Arab ideal of Ba’athism, standing alone since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

In 1957, this independent mindedness caused Loy Henderson, a Senior State Department official, to say that “the present regime in Syria had to go …”

Ultimately, the plan was not used since British mandate or not, neighbouring countries refused to play. However, the project overtly bears striking similarity to the reality of events over the last decade in Syria – and the region.

In a near 1957 re-run, Britain’s Foreign Minister, William Hague has said President Assad “will feel emboldened” by the UN Russia-China vote in Syria’s favour.

Hilary (“We came, we saw, he died”) Clinton, has called for “friends of a democratic Syria”, to unite and rally against the Assad government:

“We need to work together to send them a clear message: you cannot hold back the future at the point of a gun”, said the woman filmed purportedly watching the extrajudicial, illegal assassination of who may be, or may be not, Osma Bin Laden and others –but certainly people were murdered by US illegal invaders at the point of lots of guns.

Supremely ironically, she was speaking in Munich (5 February) historically “the birth place of the Nazi party.”

The Russia-China veto at the UN on actions against Syria has been condemned by the US, varyingly as “disgusting”, ‘shameful”, “deplorable”, “a travesty.”

Eye opening is the list of US vetoes to be found here. Jaw dropping double standards can only be wondered at (again.).

Perhaps the bottom line is that in 1957, Iraq’s oil was at the top of the agenda, of which Syria held an important key. Today, it is Iran’s, and as Michel Chossudovsky notes so succinctly: “The road to Tehran is through Damascus.”

*  2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2011, 2012.

This essay analyzes the changing contemporary context of imperial domination, especially the demise of longstanding client regimes.  It then examines the previous significant ties between western imperial powers and Islamist movements and regimes and the basis of ‘historical collaboration’.

The third part of the paper will outline the political circumstances in which the imperial powers embrace “moderate” Islamists in government and utilize “armed fundamentalists” in opposition to secular regimes.  We will critically analyze how “moderate” Islam is defined by the Western imperialist powers.  Is this a tactical or strategic alliance?  What are the political “trade-offs”?  What do imperialism’s neo-liberal clients and their new ‘moderate’ Muslim allies have in common and how do they differ?

In conclusion, we will evaluate the viability of this alliance and its capacity to contain and deflect the popular democratic movements and repress the burgeoning class and national struggles, especially in regard to the ‘obstacles’ posed by the Israel-US-Zionist ties and the continued IMF policies which promise to worsen the crises in the Muslim countries.

The Transition from Neo-Liberal Client Rulers to Power-Sharing with Moderate Islamists

The key motivation in Washington’s and the European imperial troika’s (England, France and Germany) embrace of what their press and officialdom hail as “moderate” Islamist parties has been the collapse or weakening of their long-term client rulers.  Faced with the ouster of Mubarak, in Egypt, Ali in Tunisia and Saleh in Yemen, mass protests in Morocco and Algeria, the US-EU turned to conservative Muslim leaders who were willing to work within the existing state institutional framework (including the army and state police), uphold the capitalist order and align with the empire against anti-imperial movements and states.  In Egypt, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) (the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood), in Tunisia the Renaissance Party, in Morocco the Justice and Development Party have all indicated their willingness to serve as reliable partners in blocking the pro-democracy movements that challenge the socio-economic status quo and the long-standing military-imperial linkages.

The Islamist collaborators are called “moderate and respectable” because they agree to participate in elections within the boundaries of the established political and economic order; they have dropped any criticism of imperial and colonial treaties and trade agreements signed by the previous client regions – including ones which collaborate with Israel’s colonization of Palestine.

Equally important “moderate” means supporting imperial wars against nationalist and secular Arab republics, such as Syria and Libya, and isolating and/or repressing class based trade unions and secular-left parties.

“Moderate” Islamists have become the Empire’s ‘contraceptive of choice’ against any chance the massive Arab peoples’ revolt might give birth to substantive egalitarian social changes and bring those brutal pro-western officials, responsible for so many crimes against humanity, to justice.

The West and their client officials in the military and police have agreed to a kind of “power-sharing’ with the moderate/respectable (read ‘reactionary’) Islamist parties.  The Islamists would be responsible for imposing orthodox economic policies and re-establishing ‘order’ (i.e. bolstering the existing one) in partnership with pro-multinational bank economists and pro US-EU generals and security officials.  In exchange the Islamists could take certain ministries, appoint their members, finance electoral clientele among the poor and push their ‘moderate’ religious, social and cultural agenda.  Basically, the elected Islamists would replace the old corrupt dictatorial regimes in running the state and signing off on more free trade agreements with the EU.  Their role would keep the leftists, nationalists and populists out of power and from gaining mass support.  Their job would substitute spiritual solace and “inner worth” via Islam in place of redistributing land, income and power from the elite, including the foreign multi-nationals to the peasants, workers, unemployed and exploited low-paid employees.

Why the Empire Arms Fundamentalist Anti-Secular Muslims

While the US and EU have backed respectable “moderate Islam” in heading off a popular upheaval of the young and unemployed, in other contexts they have enlisted violent, fundamentalist Islamic terrorists to overthrow secular independent anti-imperialists regimes – like Libya, Syria — just as they had done earlier in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia.  The US, Qatar and the European troika financed and armed Libyan fundamentalist militias and then engaged in a murderous eight months air and sea assault to ensure their client’s ‘victory’ over the secular Gaddafi regime.  Fresh from NATO’s success, the US, the European ‘Troika’ and Turkey, with the backing of the League of Arab collaborator princes and emirs, have financed a violent Muslim Brotherhood insurrection in Syria, intent on destroying the nationalist economy and modern secular state.

The US and EU have openly unleashed their fundamentalists allies in order to destroy independent adversaries in the name of “democracy” and ‘humanitarian intervention’, a laughable claim in light of decade long colonial wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan.  All target regimes have one crime in common:  Using their national resources to develop modern secular states – independent of imperial dictates.

NATO  implements its campaigns through conservative ‘moderate’ or armed fundamentalist Islamist movements depending on the specific needs, circumstances and range of options in any given target nation.  With the fall of  pro-Empire ‘secular dictatorships’ in Egypt and Tunisia, pliable conservative Islamist leaders are the fall back “lesser evil”.  When the opportunity to overthrow an independent secular or nationalist regime arises, armed and violent fundamentalist mercenaries become the political vehicle of choice.

As with European empires in the past, the modern Western imperial countries have relied on retrograde religious parties and leaders to collaborate and serve their economic and military interests and to provide mercenaries for imperial armies to savage any anti-imperialist social revolutionaries.  In that sense US and European rulers are neither ‘pro nor anti’ Islam, it all depends on their national and class position.  Islamists who collaborate with Empire are “moderate” allies and if they attack an anti-imperialist regime, they become ‘freedom fighters’.  On the other hand, they become “terrorists” or “fundamentalists” when they oppose imperial occupation, pillage or colonial settlements.

Contemporary History of Islamist-Imperial Collaboration

The historical record of western imperial expansion reveals many instances of collaboration and co-optation as well as conflict with Islamist regimes, movements and parties.  In the early 1960’s the CIA backed a brutal military coup against the secular Indonesian nationalist regime of Sukarno, and encouraged their puppet dictator General Suharto to unleash Muslim militia in a veritable “holy war” exterminating nearly one million leftist trade unionists, school teachers, students, farmers, communists or suspected sympathizers and their family members.  The horrific ‘Jakarta Option’ became a model for CIA operations elsewhere.  In Yugoslavia the US and Europe promoted and financed fundamentalists Muslims in Bosnia, importing mujahedeen who would later form part of Al Qaeda, and then backed the Kosovo Liberation Army, a known terrorist organization, in order to completely break-up and ethnically ‘cleanse’ a modern secular multi-national state – going so far as to have Americans and NATO bomb Belgrade for the first time since the Nazis in the Second World War.

During President Carter’s administration, the CIA joined with Saudi Arabia’s ruling royalty, providing billions of dollars in arms and military supplies to Afghan Muslim fundamentalists in their brutal but successful Jihad overthrowing a modern, secular nationalist regime backed by the USSR.  The murderous fate of school teachers and educated women in the aftermath was quickly covered up.

Needless to say, wherever US imperialism faces leftists or secular, modernizing anti-imperialist regimes, Washington turns to retrograde Islamic leaders willing and able to destroy the progressive regime in return for imperialist support.  Such coalitions are built mainly around fundamentalist and moderate Islamist opposition to secular, class-based politics allied with the Empire’s hostility to any anti-imperialist challenge to its domination.

The same ‘coalition’ of Islamists and the Empire has been glaringly obvious during the NATO assault on Libya and continues against Syria:  The Muslims provide the shock troops on the ground; NATO provides the aerial bombing, funds, arms, sanctions, embargoes and propaganda.

These Islamist-Imperialist coalitions are usually temporary, based on a common secular or nationalist enemy and not on any common strategic interest.  After the defeat of a secular anti-imperialist regime, militant Muslims may find themselves attacked by the colonial neo-liberal regime most favored by the imperial west.  This happened in Afghanistan and elsewhere after the overseas Islamist fighters (Afghan Arabs) returned to their own neo-colonized, collaborating home countries, like Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Egypt and elsewhere.

Contemporary History of Islamist-Imperial Conflict

The relation between Islamist regimes and imperialism is complex, changing and  full of examples of bloody conflict.

The US backed the “modernizing” free market dictatorship of the Shah in Iran, overthrowing the nationalist Mosaddegh regime. They provided arms and intelligence for the Savak, the Shah’s monstrous secret police as it hunted down and murdered tens of thousands of nationalist-Islamists and leftist resistance fighters and critics in Iran and abroad.  The rise to power of the fundamentalist-anti-imperialist Khomeini regime fueled US armed attacks and provoked retaliatory moves:  Iran backed and financed anti-colonial Islamist groups in Lebanon (Hezbollah), Palestine (Hamas) and Iraq (the Shia parties).

Subsequent to 9/11 the US invaded and overthrew the Islamist Taliban regime, re-colonized the country, establishing a puppet regime under US-European auspices.  The Taliban and allied Islamist and nationalist resistance fighters organized and established a mass guerrilla army which has engaged in a decade long war with armed support from Pakistani Islamist forces responding to US military incursions.

In Palestine, Washington, under the overweening control of Israel’s Zionist fifth column, has armed and financed Israel’s war against the popularly elected Palestinian Islamist Hamas government in Gaza.  Washington’s total commitment to the Jewish state and its colonial expansion and usurpation of Palestinian (Muslim and Christian) lands and property in Jerusalem and elsewhere reflects the profound and pervasive influence of the Zionist power configuration throughout the US political system .They secure 90% votes in Congress, pledges of allegiance from the White House, and senior appointments in Treasury, State Department and the Pentagon.

What determines whether the US Empire will have a collaborative or conflict-ridden relation with Islam depends on the specific political context.  The US allies with Islamists when faced with nationalist, leftist and secular democratic regimes and movements, especially where their optimal choice, a military-neo-liberal alternative is relatively weak.  However, faced with a nationalist, anti-colonial Islamist regime (as is the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran), Washington will side with pro-western liberals, dissident Muslim clerics, pliable tribal chiefs, separatist ethnic minorities and pro-Western generals.

The key to US-Islamist relations from the White House perspective is based on the Islamists’ attitude toward empire, class politics, NATO and the “free market” (private foreign investment).

Today’s ‘moderate’ Islamist parties in Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Morocco (and elsewhere), which have offered their support to NATO and its wars against Libya and Syria, uphold ‘private property’ (i.e. foreign and imperialist client control of key industries) and repress independent working class and anti-imperialist parties.  They are the Empire’s “new partners” in the pillage of the resource-rich Middle East and North Africa.

The US-brokered counter-revolutionary alliance among moderate Islamists, the previous military rulers and Washington is fraught with tensions.  The military demands total impunity and a continuation of its economic privileges; this includes a veto on any legislation addressing the previous regime’s brutal crimes against its own people.  On the other hand, the Islamist parties uphold their electoral victories and demand majority rule.  Washington insists the alliance adhere to its policy toward Israel and abandon their support for the Palestinian national struggle.  As these tensions and conflicts deepen, the alliance could collapse ushering in a new phase of conflict and instability.

Emblematic of “moderate Islamist” collaboration with US-EU imperialism is the role of Qatar, home to the ‘respectable’ Arabic media giant, Al-Jazeera, and the demagogic Qatari “spiritual guide” Sheik Youssef  al-Qaradawi.  Sheik Youssef quotes the Koran and Islamic moral principles in defense of NATO’s 8-month aerial bombing of Libya, which killed over 50,000 pro-regime Libyans (themselves Muslims).  He calls for armed imperial intervention in Syria to overthrow the secular Assad regime, a position he shares comfortably with the state of Israel. He urges the “moderate Islamists” in Egypt and Tunisia to cease any criticism of the existing economic order, ( see “Spiritual guide steers Arabs to moderation”, Financial Times, December 9, 2011 – p5).  In a word, this respectable Muslim cleric is NATO’s perfect Koran-quoting “moderate Islamist” partner – a dream come true.

The Strategic Utility of “Moderate” Islamist Parties

Islamist parties are approached by the Empire’s policy elites only when they have a mass following and can therefore weaken any popular, nationalist insurgency.  Mass-based Islamist parties serve the empire by providing “legitimacy”, by winning elections and by giving a veneer of respectability to the pro-imperial military and police apparatus retained in place from the overthrown client state dictatorships.

The Islamist parties compete at the “grass roots” with the leftists.  They build up a clientele of supporters among the poor in the countryside and urban slums through organized charity and basic social services administered at the mosques and humanitarian religious foundations.  Because they reject class struggle and are intensely hostile to the left (with its secular, pro-feminist and working-class agenda), they have been ‘half-tolerated’ by the dictatorship, while the leftist activists are routinely murdered.  Subsequently, with the overthrow of the dictatorship, the Islamists emerge intact with the strongest national organizational network as the country’s ‘natural leaders’ from the religious-bazaar merchant political elite.  Their leaders offer to serve the empire and its traditional native military collaborators in exchange for a ‘slice of power’, especially over morality, culture, religion and households (women); in other words, the “micro-society”.

For their part, they offer to marginalize and undermine the left, anti-imperialist secular democrats in the streets.  In the face of mass popular rebellion calling into question the imperial order, a ‘moderate’ Islamist-imperial partnership is a ‘heavenly deal’ praised in Washington, Paris or London (as well as Riyadh and Tel Aviv).

Conclusion:  How Viable is the Imperial-Islamic Coalition?

Those who thought that the spontaneous pro-democracy movements spelled the end of the imperial order left out the role of organized “moderate” Islamist electoral parties as able collaborators of Empire.  The brutally repressed mass mobilization of unemployed youth was no match for the well-funded grass roots community organization of the moderate Islamists.  This is especially true when politics shifted from the street to the ballot box, a process that the Islamist parties facilitated.  In the absence of a mass revolutionary party seeking state power, the existing military-police state was able to work around the mass protesters and put together a power sharing agreement at least in the short-run.

In the November 2011 elections, the radical Egyptian Islamist party, Nour, gathered one-quarter of the vote in Cairo and Alexandria.  Their showing was even higher among the urban poor districts, which promises even greater support among poor rural constituencies in the coming elections. Essentially a Salafist Islamist party, Nour, unlike the Muslim Brotherhood, combined denunciations of class abuses and elite corruption with mass appeals to a return to a mythic harmonious life.  They used effective grass roots organizing around basic services in order to gain a greater proportion of the working class vote than all the leftist parties combined.  Nour’s message of “class retribution against the …abuses of Egypt’s elite fueled Nour’s new found popularity”, (Financial Times, December 10, 2011 p6).

Despite the successes of the Islamist-Imperial partnership, the world economic crises and especially the growing unemployment and misery in the Arab countries will make it difficult for the ‘respectable moderate’ Islamists to stabilize their societies. They are inextricably constrained by their alliances to function within the confines of the ‘orthodox neo-liberal framework’ imposed by the Empire.  For that reason, the “moderate” Islamists will try to co-opt some secular liberals, social democrats and even a few leftists as ‘minority partners’, so that they won’t be held solely responsible for dashing the expectations of the poor in their countries.

The fact of the matter is that the pro-imperial Islamist parties have absolutely no answer to the current crises:  Charities delivered from the mosque during the dictatorship won them mass support; now more austerity programs imposed from their ministerial posts will certainly alienate and infuriate their mass base.  What will follow depends on who is best organized:  Liberals are limited to media campaigns and tied to economic orthodoxy; the leftists have to advance from protest movements in the downtown squares to organized political units operating in popular neighborhoods, workplaces, markets, villages and slums.  Otherwise radical fundamentalist, like the Salafists, will exploit the people’s outrage with moderate Islamist betrayals and promote their own version of a closed clerical society, opposing the West while repressing the Left.

The US and EU may have ‘temporarily’ avoided revolution by accommodating electoral reforms and adapting to alliances with “moderate” Islamists, but their ongoing military interventions and their own growing economic crisis will  simply postpone a more decisive conflict in the near future.

Oh, well!  Time to move on, folks.  Nothing to see here. Now there is an oil man, who spent many years in the United States, shoed in as “interim Prime Minister” in Libya.  It’s time to go a-toppling again.

Don’t mention the dead, distraught, destroyed, the mass graves and mass murders by NATO and their ethnic cleansers at ground level,  tutored by their Special Services. There’s oil to pump, rebuilding contracts to be divvied out, a bit of looting – and near certainly no accounting for all of Libya’s frozen assets, being minimally returned in dribs and drabs. Remember Iraq’s missing billions? Another day, another precedent, another grand theft.

And that well worn propaganda hand book, battered, dog eared, but trusty, is back.

It has, in fact,  been leafed back to over twenty years ago — to August 1990, to be exact. Then Kuwaiti babies had been torn from their incubators, thrown to the hospital floor and left to die by Iraqi soldiers, said a “nurse” claiming to work in Kuwait – backed by Amnesty International.  It was entirely untrue, but it was arguably the tipping point, justification for the coming 42 day bombardment and the first ruination of Iraq, which was “Operation Desert Storm.” ¹

In August of this year, it was alleged that babies in Syria were left to die in their incubators after President Bashar al-Assad had the electricity turned off. Pictures showed pathetic little souls, inexplicably blood smeared – and huddled.

However, some meticulous digging by Ali Abunima throws up many questions. Certainly the doctored picture was earlier in an Egyptian publication, showing overcrowded conditions in the country’s paediatric units – the babies in that one were pink and healthy, nevertheless.

As the fog of disinformation again obscures much, it is worth remembering that President Assad trained as a doctor, worked as one for some years, then did further post-graduate training, qualifying as an opthamologist at London’s prestigious St Mary’s Teaching Hospital group. He had planned medicine as a career, which was cut short when his brother, Bassel, designated his father’s heir, was killed in a car crash in Damascus in 1994.

Accusations of targeting babies towards a man who had devoted years to studying medicine should surely at least be questioned. Further, in an atmosphere of unrest, it would hardly win over the dissenters.

On  October 25, Amnesty produced a 36 page Report largely taken from media outlets and non-attributed videos, “documenting” gruesome abuses in Syria’s hospitals, including a variation on babies ripped from incubators, “… at least one unconscious patient having his ventilator removed …”before being taken away, an unnamed “health worker” had said.

Four days after the Report was published Amnesty had organized a demonstration in London: “No more Blood – No more Fear”, which rallied outside the Syrian Embassy.

Chris Doyle, Director of the Council for Arab British Understanding told demonstrators that “Even donkeys have become targets of the Syrian army” and that water had been cut off because the government claimed it had been polluted by halucigens. The cynic might think that had all the validity of claims Colonel Quaddafi gave Viagra to his troops — and Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

However, Doyle shone one light, demanding that “human rights organizations” be allowed into the country. If they have relied on second hand sources for their Report, has it any more validity than Kuwait’s incubator babies?

Franklin Lamb thinks not and has produced a detailed piece as to why, from seemingly unrestricted, recent, first hand experience in Syrian hospitals. He also has telephone numbers of medical practitioners wishing to invite Amnesty researchers to see for themselves.

Syria, it seems, is in the regime change frame. Today, it has been revealed by a “a senior diplomat … and a former UN investigator”, who, of course, “both spoke on condition of anonymity”, that Syria has a previously unknown nuclear power plant.

“Suspicions” are that Syria worked with Abdul Qadeer Khan, “father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, to acquire nuclear weapons technology.”

The buildings “closely” resemble those of Libya’s when they were trying to build nuclear weapons. However, before you head for the fall-out shelter or reach for a 2,000 lb. bunker buster:

The complex, in the city of Hasakah, now appears to be a cotton-spinning plant, and investigators have found no sign it was ever used for nuclear production.

Israel, of course, bombed a “suspected” nuclear plant in 2007, legality, as ever, redundant.

Syria is also currently being accused of laying mines along the Lebanese border to prevent insurgents crossing it. Perhaps it is, who knows? If so, a way to discourage might be to put out a hand of friendship. If threatened sufficiently, most might resort to protective measures.

It is surely coincidence that the unrest and the focus on Syria began shortly after the arrival of the first US Ambassador to the country since 2005.

Ambassador Robert Ford, arrived in Damascus on January 16 this year. By January 31, there was a call for a “Day of Rage” on  February 4. As Michel Chossudovsy has pointed out the Ambassador has an interesting CV — diplomacy possibly not being one of his towering strengths. He is currently temporarily withdrawn, having been pelted with tomatoes.

Syria has been under embargo since 2004. The US has frozen all the country’s assets. Yet Syria opened its borders to two million Iraqi refugees after the 2003 invasion, with no recompense. Libya had one hundred thousand. The displaced keep fleeing and dying, the region lives in constant fear as to who is the next target.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International Director Kate Allen, cites Syrian diplomats as representatives of “repression and injustice.”

Perhaps we need to look a little closer to our Western home for that.

Incidentally, October 31, the day Libya was declared liberated and NATO’s “mission” over, was the anniversary of the US, UK and France’s bombing of Egypt in 1956 to force the re-opening of the Suez Canal. On the same day in 1968, Lyndon B. Johnson announced the cessation of the bombardment of North Vietnam.

Unending decades of lies dressed as liberation and asset grabs as tyrants who terrorize.

1. John R. MacArthur, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, November 1993, Chapter 2.

The war in Libya is just the start of a new cycle of external military adventurism inside Africa. The U.S. now wants more military bases inside Africa. France has also announced that it has the right to militarily intervene anywhere in Africa where there are French citizens and its interests are at risk. NATO is also fortifying its positions in the Red Sea and off the coast of Somalia.

As disarray and turmoil are once again uprooting Africa with external intervention, Israel sits silently in the background. Tel Aviv has actually been deeply involved in the new cycle of turmoil, which is tied to its Yinon Plan to reconfigure its strategic surrounding. This reconfiguration process is based on a well established technique of creating sectarian divisions which eventually will effectively neutralize target states or result in their dissolution.

Many of the problems afflicting the contemporary areas of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Southwest Asia, South Asia, East Asia, Africa, and Latin America are actually the result of the deliberate triggering of regional tensions by external powers. Sectarian division, ethno-linguistic tension, religious differences, and internal violence have been traditionally exploited by the United States, Britain, and France in various parts of the globe. Iraq, Sudan, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia are merely a few recent examples of this strategy of “divide and conquer” being used to bring nations to their knees.

The Upheavals of Central-Eastern Europe and the Project for a “New Middle East”

The Middle East, in some regards, is a striking parallel to the Balkans and Central-Eastern Europe during the years leading up to the First World War. In the wake of the First World War, the borders of the multi-ethnic states in the Balkans and Central-Eastern Europe were redrawn and reconfigured by external powers, in alliance with local opposition forces. Since the First World War until the post-Cold War period the Balkans and Central-Eastern Europe have continued to experience a period of upheaval, violence and conflict that has continously divided the region.

For years, there have been advocates calling for a “New Middle East” with redrawn boundaries in this region of the world where Europe, Southwest Asia, and North Africa meet. These advocates mostly sit in the capitals of Washington, London, Paris, and Tel Aviv. They envisage a region shaped around homogenous ethno-religious states. The formation of these states would signify the destruction of the larger existing countries of the region. The transition would be towards the formation of smaller Kuwait-like or Bahrain-like states, which could easily be managed and manipulated by the U.S., Britain, France, Israel, and their allies.

The Manipulation of the First “Arab Spring” during World War I

The plans for reconfiguring the Middle East started several years before the First World War. It was during the First World War, however, that the manifestation of these colonial designs could visibly be seen with the “Great Arab Revolt” against the Ottoman Empire.

Despite the fact that the British, French, and Italians were colonial powers which had prevented the Arabs from enjoying any freedom in countries like Algeria, Libya, Egypt, and Sudan, these colonial powers managed to portray themselves as the friends and allies of Arab liberation.

During the “Great Arab Revolt” the British and the French actually used the Arabs as foot soldiers against the Ottomans to further their own geo-political schemes. The secret Sykes–Picot Agreement between London and Paris is a case in point. France and Britain merely managed to use and manipulate the Arabs by selling them the idea of Arab liberation from the so-called “repression” of the Ottomans.

In reality, the Ottoman Empire was a multi-ethnic empire. It gave local and cultural autonomy to all its peoples, but was manipulated into the direction of becoming a Turkish entity. Even the Armenian Genocide that would ensue in Ottoman Anatolia has to be analyzed in the same context as the contemporary targeting of Christians in Iraq as part of a sectarian scheme unleashed by external actors to divide the Ottoman Empire, Anatolia, and the citizens of the Ottoman Empire.

After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, it was London and Paris which denied freedom to the Arabs, while sowing the seeds of discord amongst the Arab peoples. Local corrupt Arab leaders were also partners in the project and many of them were all too happy to become clients of Britain and France. In the same sense, the “Arab Spring” is being manipulated today. The U.S., Britain, France, and others are now working with the help of corrupt Arab leaders and figures to restructure the Arab World and Africa.

The Yinon Plan

The Yinon Plan, which is a continuation of British stratagem in the Middle East, is an Israeli strategic plan to ensure Israeli superiority. It insists and stipulates that Israel must reconfigure its geo-political environment through the balkanization of the Middle Eastern and Arab states into smaller and weaker states.

Israeli strategists viewed Iraq as their biggest strategic challenge from an Arab state. This is why Iraq was outlined as the centerpiece to the balkanization of the Middle East and the Arab World. In Iraq, on the basis of the concepts of the Yinon Plan, Israeli strategists have called for the division of Iraq into a Kurdish state and two Arab states, one for Shiite Muslims and the other for Sunni Muslims. The first step towards establishing this was a war between Iraq and Iran, which the Yinon Plan discusses.

The Atlantic, in 2008, and the U.S. military’s Armed Forces Journal, in 2006, both published widely circulated maps that closely followed the outline of the Yinon Plan. Aside from a divided Iraq, which the Biden Plan also calls for, the Yinon Plan calls for a divided Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria. The partitioning of Iran, Turkey, Somalia, and Pakistan also all fall into line with these views. The Yinon Plan also calls for dissolution in North Africa and forecasts as starting from Egypt and then spilling over into Sudan, Libya, and the rest of the region.

This map was prepared by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters and published in the Armed Forces Journal, June 2006. Map © Ralph Peters 2006. Click for larger image.

The Eradication of the Christian Communities of the Middle East

It is no coincidence that Egyptian Christians were attacked at the same time as the South Sudan Referendum and before the crisis in Libya. Nor is it a coincidence that Iraqi Christians, one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, have been forced into exile, leaving their ancestral homelands in Iraq. Coinciding with the exodus of Iraqi Christians, which occurred under the watchful eyes of U.S. and British military forces, the neighbourhoods in Baghdad became sectarian as Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims were forced by violence and death squads to form sectarian enclaves. This is all tied to the Yinon Plan and the reconfiguration of the region as part of a broader objective.

In Iran, the Israelis have been trying in vain to get the Iranian Jewish community to leave. Iran’s Jewish population is actually the second largest in the Middle East and arguably the oldest undisturbed Jewish community in the world. Iranian Jews view themselves as Iranians who are tied to Iran as their homeland, just like Muslim and Christian Iranians, and for them the concept that they need to relocate to Israel because they are Jewish is ridiculous.

In Lebanon, Israel has been working to exacerbate sectarian tensions between the various Christian and Muslim factions as well as the Druze. Lebanon is a springboard into Syria and the division of Lebanon into several states is also seen as a means to balkanizing Syria into several smaller sectarian Arab states. The objectives of the Yinon Plan are to divide Lebanon and Syria into several states on the basis of religious and sectarian identities for Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, Christians, and the Druze. There could also be objectives for a Christian exodus in Syria too.

The new head of the Maronite Catholic Syriac Church of Antioch, the largest of the autonomous Eastern Catholic Churches, has expressed his fears about a purging of Arab Christians in the Levant and Middle East. Patriarch Mar Beshara Boutros Al-Rahi and many other Christian leaders in Lebanon and Syria are afraid of a Muslim Brotherhood takeover in Syria. Like Iraq, mysterious groups are now attacking the Christian communities in Syria. The leaders of the Christian Eastern Orthodox Church, including the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, have also all publicly expressed their grave concerns. Aside from the Christian Arabs, these fears are also shared by the Assyrian and Armenian communities, which are mostly Christian.

Sheikh Al-Rahi was recently in Paris where he met President Nicolas Sarkozy. It is reported that the Maronite Patriarch and Sarkozy had disagreements about Syria, which prompted Sarkozy to say that the Syrian regime will collapse. Patriarch Al-Rahi’s position was that Syria should be left alone and allowed to reform. The Maronite Patriarch also told Sarkozy that Israel needed to be dealt with as a threat if France legitimately wanted Hezbollah to disarm.

Because of his position in France, Al-Rahi was instantly thanked by the Christian and Muslim religious leaders of the Syrian Arab Republic who visited him in Lebanon. Hezbollah and its political allies in Lebanon, which includes most the Christian parliamentarians in the Lebanese Parliament, also lauded the Maronite Patriarch who later went on a tour to South Lebanon.

Sheikh Al-Rahi is now being politically attacked by the Hariri-led March 14 Alliance, because of his stance on Hezbollah and his refusal to support the toppling of the Syrian regime. A conference of Christian figures is actually being planned by Hariri to oppose Patriarch Al-Rahi and the stance of the Maronite Church. Since Al-Rahi announced his position, the Tahrir Party, which is active in both Lebanon and Syria, has also started targeting him with criticism. It has also been reported that high-ranking U.S. officials have also cancelled their meetings with the Maronite Patriarch as a sign of their displeasure about his positions on Hezbollah and Syria.

The Hariri-led March 14 Alliance in Lebanon, which has always been a popular minority (even when it was a parliamentary majority), has been working hand-in-hand with the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the groups using violence and terrorism in Syria. The Muslim Brotherhood and other so-called Salafist groups from Syria have been coordinating and holding secret talks with Hariri and the Christian political parties in the March 14 Alliance. This is why Hariri and his allies have turned on Cardinal Al-Rahi. It was also Hariri and the March 14 Alliance that brought Fatah Al-Islam into Lebanon and have now helped some of its members escape to go and fight in Syria.

A Christian exodus is being planned for the Middle East by Washington, Tel Aviv, and Brussels. It is now being reported that Sheikh Al-Rahi was told in Paris by President Nicolas Sarkozy that the Christian communities of the Levant and Middle East can resettle in the European Union. This is no gracious offer. It is a slap in the face by the same powers that have deliberately created the conditions to eradicate the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East. The aim appears to be the resettling of the Christian communities outside of the region so as to delineate the Arab nations along the lines of being exclusively Muslim nations. This falls into accordance with the Yinon Plan.

Re-Dividing Africa: The Yinon Plan is very Much Alive and at Work…

In the same context as the sectarian divisions in the Middle East, the Israelis have outlined plans to reconfigure Africa. The Yinon Plan seeks to delineate Africa on the basis of three facets:

(1) ethno-linguistics;
(2) skin-colour;
(3) religion.

It seeks to draw dividing lines in Africa between a so-called “Black Africa” and a supposedly “non-Black” North Africa. This is part of a scheme to create a schism in Africa between what are assumed to be “Arabs” and so-called “Blacks.”

An attempt to separate the merging point of an Arab and African identity is underway.

This objective is why the ridiculous identity of an “African South Sudan” and an “Arab North Sudan” have been nurtured and promoted. This is also why black-skinned Libyans have been targeted in a campaign to “colour cleanse” Libya. The Arab identity in North Africa is being de-linked from its African identity. Simultaneously there is an attempt to eradicate the large populations of “black-skinned Arabs” so that there is a clear delineation between “Black Africa” and a new “non-Black” North Africa, which will be turned into a fighting ground between the remaining “non-Black” Berbers and Arabs.

In the same context, tensions are being fomented between Muslims and Christians in Africa, in such places as Sudan and Nigeria, to further create lines and fracture points. The fuelling of these divisions on the basis of skin-colour, religion, ethnicity, and language is intended to fuel disassociation and disunity in Africa. This is all part of a broader African strategy of cutting North Africa off from the rest of the African continent.

Israel and the African Continent

The Israelis have been quietly involved on the African continent for years. In Western Sahara, which is occupied by Morocco, the Israelis helped build a separation security wall like the one in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. In Sudan, Tel Aviv has armed separatist movements and insurgents. In South Africa, the Israelis supported the Apartheid regime and its occupation of Namibia. In 2009, the Israeli Foreign Ministry outlined that Africa would be the renewed focus of Tel Aviv.

Israel’s two main objectives in Africa are to impose the Yinon Plan, in league with its own interests, and to assist Washington in becoming the hegemon of Africa. In this regard, the Israelis also pushed for the creation of AFRICOM in this regard. The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS) is one example.

Washington has outsourced intelligence work in Africa to Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is effectively involved as one of the parties in a broader war not just “inside” Africa, but “over” Africa. In this war, Tel Aviv is working alongside Washington and the E.U. against China and its allies, which includes Iran.

Tehran is working alongside Beijing in a similar manner as Tel Aviv is with Washington. Iran is helping the Chinese in Africa through Iranian connections and ties. These ties also include Tehran’s ties to private Lebanese and Syrian business interests in Africa. Thus, within the broader rivalry between Washington and Beijing, an Israeli-Iranian rivalry has also unfolded within Africa.¹ Sudan is Africa’s third largest weapons producer, as a result of Iranian support in weapons manufacturing. Meanwhile, while Iran provides military assistance to Khartoum, which includes several military cooperation agreements, Israel is involved in various actions directed against the Sudanese.¹

Israel and Libya

Libya had been considered as “a spoiler” which undermined the interests of the former colonial powers in Africa. In this regard, Libya had taken on some hefty pan-African development plans intended to industrialize Africa and transform Africa into an integrated and assertive political entity. These initiatives conflicted with the interests of the external powers competing with one another in Africa, but it was especially unacceptable to Washington and the major E.U. countries. In this regard, Libya had to be crippled and neutralized as an entity supportive of African progress and pan-African unity.

The role of Israel and the Israeli lobby was fundamental in opening the door to NATO’s military intervention in Libya. According to Israeli sources, it was U.N. Watch that actually orchestrated the events in Geneva to remove Libya from the U.N. Human Rights Council and to ask the U.N. Security Council to intervene.² U.N. Watch is formally affiliated with the American Jewish Committee (AJC), which has influence in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy and is part of the Israeli lobby in the United States. The International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH), which helped launch the unverified claims about 6,000 people being slaughtered by Gaddafi, is also tied to the Israeli lobby in France.

Tel Aviv had been in contact simultaneously with both the Transitional Council and the Libyan government in Tripoli. Mossad agents were also in Tripoli, one of which was a former station manager. At about the same time, French members of the Israeli lobby were visiting Benghazi. In a case of irony, the Transitional Council would claim that Colonel Qaddafi was working with Israel, while it made pledges to recognize Israel to president Sarkozy’s special envoy Bernard-Henri Lévy who would then convey the message to Israeli leaders.³ A similar pattern (to that of Israel’s links to the Transitional Council) had also developed at an earlier stage in South Sudan, which was armed by Israel.

Despite the Transitional Council’s position on Israel, its followers still tried to demonize Gaddafi by claiming he was secretly Jewish. Not only was this untrue, but it was also bigoted. These accusations were intended to be a form of character assassination that equated being a Jew as something negative.

In reality, Israel and NATO are in the same camp. Israel is a de facto member of NATO. Had Gaddafi been conniving with Israel while the Transitional Council was working with NATO, this would mean that both sides were actually being played as fools against one another.

Preparing the Chessboard for the “Clash of Civilizations”

It is at this point that all the pieces have to be put together and the dots have to be connected.

The chessboard is being staged for a “Clash of Civilizations” and all the chess pieces are being put into place.

The Arab World is in the process of being cordoned off and sharp delineation lines are being created. These lines of delineation are replacing the seamless lines of transition between different ethno-linguistic, skin-colour, and religious groups.

Under this scheme, there can no longer be a melding transition between societies and countries. This is why the Christians in the Middle East and North Africa, such as the Copts, are being targeted. This also why black-skinned Arabs and black-skinned Berbers, as well as other North African population groups which are black-skinned, are facing genocide in North Africa.

What is being staged is the creation of an exclusively “Muslim Middle East” area (excluding Israel) that will be in turmoil over Shiite-Sunni fighting. A similar scenario is being staged for a “non-Black North Africa” area which will be characterized by a confrontation between Arabs and Berber. At the same time, under the “Clash of Civilizations” model, the Middle East and North Africa are slated to simultaneously be in conflict with the so-called “West” and “Black Africa.”

This is why both Nicolas Sarzoky, in France, and David Cameron, in Britain, made back-to-back declarations during the start of the conflict in Libya that multiculturalism is dead in their respective Western European societies.⁴

Real multiculturalism threatens the legitimacy of the NATO war agenda. It also constitutes an obstacle to the implementation of the “Clash of Civilizations” which constitutes the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. In this regard, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. National Security Advisor, explains why multiculturalism is a threat to Washington and its allies: “[A]s America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues [e.g., war with the Arab World, China, Iran, or Russia and the former Soviet Union], except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat. Such a consensus generally existed throughout World War II and even during the Cold War [and exists now because of the 'Global War on Terror'].”⁵

Brzezinski’s next sentence is the qualifier of why populations would oppose or support wars: “[The consensus] was rooted, however, not only in deeply shared democratic values, which the public sensed were being threatened, but also in a cultural and ethnic affinity for the predominantly European victims of hostile totalitarianisms.”⁵

Risking being redundant, it has to be mentioned again that it is precisely with the intention of breaking these cultural affinities between the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region and the so-called “Western World” and sub-Saharan Africa that Christians and black-skinned peoples are being targeted.

Ethnocentrism and Ideology: Justifying Today’s “Just Wars”

In the past, the colonial powers of Western Europe would indoctrinate their people. Their objective was to acquire popular support for colonial conquest. This took the form of spreading Christianity and promoting Christian values with the support of armed merchants and colonial armies.

At the same time, racist ideologies were put forth. The people whose lands were colonized were portrayed as “sub-human,” inferior, or soulless. Finally, the “White Man’s burden” of taking on a mission of civilizing the so-called “uncivilized peoples of the world” was used. This cohesive ideological framework was used to portray colonialism as a “just cause.” The latter in turn was used to provide legitimacy to the waging of “just wars” as a means to conquering and “civilizing” foreign lands.

Today, the imperialist design of the United States, Britain, France, and Germany have not changed. What has changed is the pretext and justification for waging their neo-colonial wars of conquest. During the colonial period, the narratives and justifications for waging war were accepted by public opinion in the colonizing countries, such as Britain and France. Today’s “just wars” and “just causes” are now being conducted under the banners of women’s rights, human rights, humanitarianism, and democracy.

1. The Economist, “Israel and Iran in Africa: A search for allies in a hostile world,” February 4, 2011.
2. Tova Lazaroff, “70 rights groups call on UN to condemn Tripoli,” Jerusalem Post, February 22, 2011.
3. Radio France Internationale, “Libyan rebels will recognise Israel, Bernard-Henri Lévy tells Netanyahu,” June 2, 2011.
4. Robert Marquand, “Why Europe is turning away from multiculturalism,” Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 2011.
5. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books October 1997), p. 211.

Aggression Rights

It is, of course, well established that the United States has aggression rights, and that international law applies only to others, although clients like Israel also have such exemptions by virtue of their clienthood, tail-wagging-dog capabilities, and power of their protector.²  U.S. aggression rights were made perfectly clear with the U.S. attack, invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, which was as clear a violation of  the UN Charter as Saddam’s invasion-occupation of Kuwait in 1990. In the latter instance, the UN rushed to condemn Saddam on the very same day his tanks and troops rolled into Kuwait, and that great law-enforcer, the United States, rushed to oust him by massive force.

On the other hand, when Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006, this was merely a case of tolerable “birth-pangs of a new Middle East” (Condoleezza Rice), so that when the UN came into the picture it was more to protect poor little Israel from future pea-shoots from Lebanon than to protect Lebanon from current and future attack and invasion by a state that had already aggressed against it twice.  Even more interesting was the invasion of Rwanda by elements of the Uganda army in October 1990, just two months after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. Here, as in Lebanon, the invading forces were supported by the United States, so the UN imposed no impediment or penalty, and in various other ways aided the invading party and facilitated a genocidal process that followed later in the 1990s (and extended into the Democratic Republic of  the Congo).

Assassination Rights

Assassination rights follow in the same manner, flowing from military and economic power, arrogance, self-righteousness, and client status. As of this moment (early September, 2011), it is not clear whether Moammar Gadaffi is dead or alive—or, if alive, will long survive—but it has been openly acknowledged that the United States and its NATO allies have more than once bombed Gadaffi’s compound in Tripoli in an effort to kill him, the first incident occurring as early as March 20, the second day of the war.  This is by no means the first time that the enlightened West has tried to assassinate Gadaffi.  The British and French both tried, and the United States made an earlier effort in 1986 when it bombed Gadaffi’s residence in Tripoli, missing him but killing his baby daughter and many nearby civilians.

Assassination of civilians violates numerous international  prohibitions of such killing beyond military necessity; and it violates a stream of U.S. executive orders that declare, for example, that “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination” (F.O. 12333, 1981 [Reagan]). This is regularly ignored by U.S. leaders, hence by the media and by any potential-theoretical national or international law enforcement bodies.

The rationales for ignoring law and executive orders can be funny.  We can go after Gadaffi because he is “commander-in-chief” of the Libyan armed forces, hence a military target.  (Obama would, of course, be a legitimate military target for the Taliban, or Libyan armed forces, as I’m sure the editors of the New York Times would agree.)  One exposition of assassination law notes that “it seems fairly obvious that eliminating Gadaffi will go far toward bringing attacks on civilians to an end.”³  This might be especially true if his elimination would have ended NATO attacks on Libyan civilians, which, along with those of the NATO-supported insurgents, seem to have far exceeded those of Gadaffi and his forces.

Bringing a war to a quicker end has long been a rationalization for attacking civilians. During the bombing war against Yugoslavia in 1999 the stepped up attacks on Serbian civilian structures and civilian occupants was explicitly designed to force a quicker surrender; and the bombing of the Belgrade state broadcasting station (16 killed) was explained on the ground that the station served up state propaganda and was therefore a quasi-military target whose destruction would hasten an end to the war.  Then, of course, U.S. wars are always a matter of self-defense, against the threat of weapons of mass destruction and mushroom clouds rising over New York harbor, or some other threat to the pitiful giant. So assassination prohibitions never come into play—for us.

Israel‘s Assassination Rights

Or for our pitiful little client in the Middle East, which is a kind of pioneer in “targeted assassinations” and “preventive strikes.”  Israel has been killing Palestinians in extra-judicial actions for many years, both in the occupied territories and in Israel itself. The Palestine Centre for Human Rights estimates 604 targeted killings of Palestinians between September 2000 and March 2011, plus another 256 “collateral damage” bystanders killed. B’Tselem estimates 228 executions carried out by the Israel Defense Force (IDF) between September 2000 and October 2006, plus 154 non-targeted civilians. This, of course, just scratches the surface of the forms of violence carried out by the Israeli state and its settlers against the untermenschen who stand in the way. The IDF uses only rubber bullets in Israeli protests, but live ammunition in dealing with the Palestinians. The assassination programs are built on the foundation that Israel is confronted with “terrorists,” who can be dealt with summarily. That the dispossessing IDF is the operative body of a system of wholesale terrorism that daily violates international law is unrecognized not only in Israel but throughout the Free World.  Similarly, the Israeli wars of aggression in Lebanon and the genocidal war on Gaza in 2009 do not elicit sanctions or war crimes tribunals or discredit the Israeli state or leadership. Its right to aggress and assassinate remains intact.

In 2006 the Israeli assassination program received the imprimatur of the Israeli Supreme Court, which found that the assassinations of “terrorists” who had not been tried in any court of law were legal.  “We cannot determine in advance that all targeted killings are contrary to international law,” the court ruled.  “At the same time, it is not possible that all such liquidations are in line with international law.”  But the court did make it illegal to carry out an assassination attack where more than one sure victim was unidentified and was possibly an innocent.⁴   Of course, the non-innocence of the properly liquidated targets had not been determined in a court of law, but this extra-judicial decision-making, which flies in the face of  international law, was acceptable to the court. The court also required that if feasible the terrorists should be arrested rather than simply assassinated.  Of course, if the target resisted their arrest killing them would be acceptable, and assassinating them where an arrest was not practicable was also acceptable.

This was a de facto “license to kill,” that would only put the killing establishment to some minor pains to keep the record clean and lawful.  “Targeted Assassinations—a License to kill” was, in fact, the title of an article published in Haaretz on November 27, 2008 by Uri Blau, using some IDF internal documents that described well how the Israeli Supreme Court’s assassination-approving decision would only slightly inconvenience the IDF’s assassination program. Blau shows that the Israeli military regularly carried out assassination operations, planned in advance as targeted killings, under the guise of planned arrests.  Blau cites evidence that top Israeli officers approved in advance the killing of Palestinians defined as “wanted.” This has been a scandal in Israel, with the alleged leaker of documents (Anat Kam, a then 23-your-old former IDF soldier) under arrest and Blau a refugee in England fearful of returning to Israel.  Needless to say Blau’s “License to kill” and  its findings have not been widely disseminated in the Free Press, nor has the freedom of speech scandal gotten much attention.

The United States: From Assassination Rights to Global Free-Fire-Zone Rights

Of course, with its vastly greater capacity to kill on a global scale, the U.S. “license” far surpasses client Israel’s. And, despite its serious domestic problems and resource scarcity for its civil society needs, the U.S. permanent war establishment is upping-the-ante in pursuing its villain choices across the globe.  The Nation‘s Jeremy Scahill testified before the House Judiciary Committee in December 2010 that the U.S. Special Operations Forces and Central Intelligence Agency have steadily expanded their ongoing “shadow wars” around the world, conducting missions in 60 countries during the Bush administration, and as many as 75 under Obama’s.  As Scahill added, the Obama “administration has taken the Bush era doctrine that the ‘world is a battlefield’ and run with it.”

Based on press reports dating back to June 17, 2004, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (U.K.) estimated that by the end of August 2011, between 2,309 and 2,880 persons had been killed in the U.S. “Covert Drone War” in Pakistan, with air strikes by these remote-controlled aerial killers under Obama outnumbering Bush’s 243 to 52.   These researchers found the reported civilian death-toll to be between 392 and 783—though the actual civilian toll is likely far greater, as the press reports which form the basis of this research tend to repeat the U.S. and Pakistani government line that every strike kills “militants,” and only in exceptional cases are civilian fatalities acknowledged in the reports.⁵

A photographic exhibit in London last summer by the Pakistani Noor Behram, titled Gaming in Waziristan, detailed the wreckage caused by the U.S. drone war.  Behram’s theme, in his own words, is “that far more civilians are being injured and killed than the Americans and Pakistanis admit.”  As he told the Guardian’s Peter Beaumont: “For every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe they get one militant.  I don’t go to count how many Taliban are killed. I go to count how many children, women, innocent people, are killed.”⁶

A lawsuit filed in Islamabad against the retired C.I.A. lawyer John A Rizzo on behalf of two surviving family members of drone attacks accuses him of having played a role in determining targets for the attacks, and thus deciding who should die.  This and similar evidence in other U.S. free-fire zones such as Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere (Libya, for example, until the overthrow of the Gadaffi government in late August), stands in dramatic contrast with the reassuring words of White House’s Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Adviser John Brennan, who said in answer to a question on June 29 that the “types of operations that the U.S. has been involved in in the counterterrorism realm—nearly for the past year, there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop.”  During the same speech, Brennan previewed the United States’ strategy in its Global War On Terror for the years ahead.  Unsurprisingly, remote-controlled drones and U.S. Special Forces Operations moving in-and-out of different countries against which no official U.S. declaration of war has ever been made were featured prominently.⁷

Brennan was, of course, lying about the sure-sightedness of this method of kill, and six weeks later, the New York Times helped him get-off-the-hook when he “adjusted the wording of his earlier comment on civilian casualties,” no longer saying that “there hasn’t been a single collateral death” in the past year, but that “American officials could not confirm any such deaths.”  In an amazing gloss on the argument over drones, Georgetown University Pakistan expert C. Christine Fair also told the Times: “This is the least indiscriminate, least inhumane tool we have.”⁸

Given the monumental scale of the violence and of the death and the destruction caused by U.S. military attacks against multiple countries around the world (formally or informally, in uniform or by hired-hands), the reported deaths in Pakistan to date are indeed relatively small, when compared to the deaths of 1 to 2 million Iraqis caused by the United States and its allies from August 1990 to the present.  But perhaps the most important point to note is the institutionalization, growth, and normalization of the work of the U.S. military machine. The CIA has grown in size and especially in its killing activities, featuring its drone war management, which Gareth Porter contends is unstoppable because of bureaucratic imperatives and power.⁹   It is, in the words of one CIA official, “one hell of a killing machine,” but it is probably exceeded in its death-dealing by the semi-secret Joint Special Operations Command, which “has killed even more of America’s enemies in the decade since the 9/11 attacks.” ¹⁰

These, along with the Pentagon, have made the entire globe a free-fire zone in which people are assassinated without trial at U.S. discretion. NATO has been integrated into this process, expanded greatly since the break-up of the Soviet Union, whose alleged threat was the rationale for building NATO, and with NATO now stressing “out of area” operations that gear well with the U.S. “projection of power.” It was noted recently in a reflection on 9/11 that America’s wars have greatly increased rather than decreased since the demise of the Soviet Union and the ending of that supposed threat to international peace and security.¹¹   But that seeming paradox rested on the belief that it was the Soviets who needed to be contained, rather than the United States and its allies. The latter still do.  And as during the Vietnam war where U.S. policy—free-fire zones, chemical warfare, massive killings of civilians in napalm and bombing raids—created a steady stream of recruits to keep fighting the aggressor, so today the U.S. (and Israeli) killing machine continues to produce recruits and resistance to its “out of area” advances. As this is a permanent self-fulfilling enemy- and war-generating process, it is ominous and may be an Armageddon March.

•  Article first appeared in Z Magazine, October 2011

1. “638 tries to kill Castro,” Guardian, August 3, 2006
2. Herman, “Aggression Rights,” Z Magazine, February, 2004
3. “Assassination under International & Domestic Law,” on the IntLawGrrls website, May 2, 2011
4. “Israeli court backs targeted killings,” BBC News, December 14, 2006
5. Chris Woods, “Drone War Exposed,” and David Pegg, “Drone Statistics Visualized,” Bureau of Investigative Journalism, August 10, 2011
6. US drone in Pakistan claiming many civilian victims, says campaigner,” July 17, 2011
7. “U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy; Ensuring Al-Qaida’s Demise,” Johns Hopkins University, Washington, D.C., June 29, 2011
8. Scott Shane, “C.I.A. Is Disputed On Civilian Toll In Drone Strikes,” August 12, 2011
9. “CIA’s Push for Drone War Driven by Internal Needs,”, IPS News, September 5, 2011
10. Dana Priest and William Arkin, “’Top Secret America’: A look at the military’s Joint Special Operations Command,” Washington Post, September 2, 2011
11. Greg Jaffe, “On a war footing, set in concrete,” Washington Post, September 5, 2011

A lot of people felt genuine sorrow for Obama as he went through the motions of giving his speech at the General Assembly. He would pause, wait for applause and not hear the clap of a solitary pair of hands. The assembled delegates endured the president’s entire speech and only applauded politely when the farce was over and he stepped down from the podium. After the speech, the president groveled over to a pre-arranged press conference with Netanyahu and the supreme Israeli leader duly anointed him with a “badge of honor.”

Everybody — and I mean everybody — understood exactly what Obama was doing – he was capitulating to the Israeli Lobby to bolster his re-election campaign. It’s not easy to raise a billion bucks and the big Jewish donors had sent a clear message to the White House. They wanted to buy the American veto and the president was obviously willing to sell it.

Two days later, the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas brought down the house with a moving speech calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state. The contrast between the performance of Obama and Abbas was a rare spectacle. Abbas has been called a lot of things but no one has ever mistaken him for a charismatic leader. And there he was bringing tears to the eyes of millions around the world with an eloquent plea for justice for his down-trodden people.

There was something else in Abbas’s message – a lot of truth. I challenge anybody to fact check Abbas’s description of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. Obama is perfectly aware of the accuracy of Abbas’s depiction of the daily humiliations and privations visited on the Palestinians by their tormentors.    For one thing, POTUS gets daily CIA briefings. Unlike Bush, he reads books and newspapers and, as a lawyer, he is quite familiar with international human rights conventions.

Now, let’s go back to Obama’s disgraceful performance before the United Nations Assembly. Obama didn’t just sell Netanyahu the American veto, he deployed brigades of State Department ambassadors to arm twist members of the United Nations Security Council, including France, Great Britain and other NATO allies. What favors were promised? What price was paid? How much respect did he lose? How much American dignity and prestige was squandered to appease Netanyahu?

Obama didn’t stop there. He adopted the Likud’s narrative of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – the mythology of a ‘peace loving’ Israel surrounded by ‘hostile war mongering Arabs.’ Is that so? I think the British and French could enlighten the president on the 1956 Suez war and how they teamed up with Israel to attack Egypt. It was an American president, Eisenhower, who intervened to end the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt. Look it up.

How about the six-day war which started with an Israeli attack and resulted in the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem, Sinai and the Golan Heights? The Israelis claimed it was a ‘pre-emptive’ strike and then immediately proceeded to annex Jerusalem and build settlements in the West Bank, the Golan Heights, Gaza and Sinai with the explicit aim of changing the demographics of the region. It was a blatant land grab. The inhabitants of these exclusive Jewish settlements are not there for ‘security’ reasons – they believe God wanted them to ‘redeem’ the land from the Palestinian ‘squatters’ who just happen to be the indigenous people of the Holy Land. The irony is that the Palestinians are the only nation on earth that can establish a definitive link to the ancient people of the Holy Land – including the ancient Israelites.

And let’s not forget the 1973 war. It was fought on occupied Arab land. Egypt and Syria had every legal right to recover the lands stolen from them in 1967 by any means necessary. These were internationally recognized sovereign Egyptian and Syrian territories under belligerent Israeli occupation.

I imagine Obama was old enough to process the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. If he can’t recollect the details, he should Google “Sabra and Shatilla” and order up some old footage of the siege of Beirut. Even Reagan was outraged and that alone should give Obama a clue about who has been in on the attack for the last 63 years.

I’m sure the state department can give Obama casualty statistics on the 2006 war in Lebanon and the 2008 invasion of Gaza. They can also confirm that no Arab Army has ever breached the 1949 Armistice line. Since the end of the 1948 war, no Israeli city has ever been bombed by an Arab air force and, in the last 38 years, no hostile military actions have taken place on Israel’s border with Egypt, Syria or Jordan. The Israelis preferred to pick on the weakest and most fragile Arab country in the region – Lebanon.

Which takes us back to 1948 which actually started in 1947 with the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian towns and villages. Contrary to Zionist mythology, the Arab armies did not intervene until hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had been unceremoniously evicted from their homes and the battles they fought were largely confined to the areas allocated to the Palestinian state by the 1947 Palestinian partition plan. That’s the verifiable historic record that has been confirmed by dozens of Israeli academics and historians; everything else is Likudnik mythology. Consult the work of Israel Shahak for a complete list of the Palestinian villages and towns that were obliterated from the face of the map.

I’m not even going to go into the Israeli Lobby’s role in marketing the WMD scam and ensnaring Americans in the Iraq war or how they used their substantial influence in Washington to back up their favorite Arab dictator, Mubarak.

To coin a phrase, Israelis are the most dangerous people in a dangerous neighborhood. A tally of the amount of damage they have inflicted on the Palestinian people and other Arabs over the last six decades helps explain Arab hostility to their belligerent neighbor. In what was perhaps his most inflammatory remark, Obama vilified Arabs by claiming that the conflict was a result of Arabs teaching irrational hatred to their children. Anyone vaguely familiar with the roots of the conflict can explain to the president that Arab grievances are a natural result of their memories of the sons and daughters that were murdered, imprisoned, dispossessed and humiliated by the so-called Israeli ‘Defense’ Forces.   But Obama doesn’t need any explanations; he knew that already. He was just sending a coded signal to Netanyahu’s lobby that he had capitulated to all their demands.

The bottom line is that Israeli security issue is a bogus issue. It’s the Palestinians and Arabs who need security guarantees and American commitments to restrain a nuclear armed Israel from invading their lands and dispossessing their people.

Of course, Obama knew he was lying about the history of the conflict and so did every other knowledgeable delegate in the audience. Fortunately, these diplomats don’t get their information from FOX, CNN or the New York Times. They are very well versed in the historic roots of the conflict. In fact, there are professionals at the State Department who could very easily have fact-checked Obama’s Likudnik narrative and saved the President from making a sorry spectacle of himself. I suspect some of them tried but were overruled – by Obama and Netanyahu.

Why would Obama stoop to lie to a bunch of delegates who were too sophisticated to believe a word he was saying?  Because he wasn’t lying to them – he was talking to Americans – Jewish Americans. He was swearing allegiance to Netanyahu to raise cold cash for his second presidential campaign. What he really sold out was American national interests and that ought to be a crime.

Obama challenged the 193 nations of the General Assembly to “face the truth” and then proceeded to deliver a diatribe of half-truths and outright lies. You want the truth? The president can’t face the truth because the truth would strain his campaign finances.

Several members of an Al-Qaeda cell confessed in 2006 to having carried out the crime, but later recanted their confessions, claiming they were tortured.However, the transcript of one of the interrogations, which was published by a Beirut newspaper in 2007, shows that the testimony was being provided without coercion and that it suggested that Al-Qaeda had indeed ordered the assassination.But the United Nations International Independent Investigation Commission (UNIIIC) was determined to pin the crime either on Syria or its Lebanese ally Hizbollah and refused to pursue the Al-Qaeda angle.

Detlev Mehlis, the first head of UNIIIC, was convinced from the beginning that Syrian military intelligence and its Lebanese allies had carried out the bombing and went to extraordinary lengths to link Ahmed Abu Adas, who had appeared in a videotape claiming responsibility for the assassination for a previously unknown group, to Syrian intelligence.

Violating the general rule that investigators do not reveal specific witness testimony outside an actual courtroom, Mehlis described testimony from “a number of sources, confidential and otherwise”, which he said “pointed to Abu Adas being used by Syria and Lebanese authorities as scapegoat for the crimes….”

Mehlis cited one witness who claimed to have seen Adas in the hallway outside the office of the director of Syrian intelligence in December 20O4, and another who said Adas had been forced by the head of Syrian military intelligence to record the video in Damascus 15 days before the assassination and was then put in a Syrian prison.

Mehlis quoted a third witness, Zouheir Saddiq, as saying that Adas had changed his mind about carrying out the assassination on behalf of Syrian intelligence “at the last minute” and had been killed by the Syrians and his body put in the vehicle carrying the bomb.

The Mehlis effort to fit the Adas video into his narrative of Syrian responsibility for the killing of Hariri began to fall apart when the four “false witnesses” who had implicated Syrian and Lebanese intelligence in the assassination, including Saddiq, were discredited as fabricators.

Meanwhile a major potential break in the case occurred when Lebanese authorities arrested 11 members of an Al-Qaeda terrorist cell in late December 2005 and early January 2006.

The members of the cell quickly confessed to interrogators that they had planned and carried out the assassination of Hariri, The Daily Star reported June 6, 2008.

Obviously based in large part on the interrogation of the cell members, the Lebanese government wrote an internal report in 2006 saying that, at one point after the assassination, Ahmed Abu Adas had been living in the same apartment in Beirut as the “emir” of the Al-Qaeda cell, Sheik Rashid.

The full text of the report was leaked to Al Hayat, which published it April 7, 2007.

The report said Rashid, whose real name was Hassan Muhammad Nab’a, had pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1999 and later to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq.

Rashid had also been involved in the “Dinniyeh Group” which launched an armed attempt to create an Islamic mini-state in northern Lebanon in 2000, only to be crushed by 13,000 Lebanese troops.

The members of the Al-Qaeda cell later retracted their confessions when they were tried by military courts in summer 2008 for “plotting to commit terrorist acts on Lebanese soil”, claiming that the confessions had been extracted under torture.

But the Al-Qaeda cell members were being held by the Ministry of Interior, whose top officials had a political interest in suppressing the information obtained from them. The full transcript of the interrogation of one of the members of the cell was leaked to the Beirut daily Al Akhbar in October 2007 by an official who was unhappy with the ministry’s opposition to doing anything with the confessions.

The transcript shows that the testimony of at least one of the members contained information that could only have been known by someone who had been informed of details of the plot.

The testimony came from Faisal Akhbar, a Syrian carrying a Saudi passport who freely admitted being part of the Al-Qaeda cell. He testified that Khaled Taha, a figure the U.N. commission later admitted was closely associated with Adas, had told him in early January 2005 that an order had been issued for the assassination of Hariri, and that he was to go to Syria to help Adas make a video on the group’s taking responsibility for the assassination.

Akhbar recalled that Sheikh Rashid had told him in Syria immediately after the assassination that it had been done because Hariri had signed the orders for the execution of Al-Qaeda militants in Lebanon in 2004. Akbar also said he was told around February 3, 2005 that a team of Lebanese Al-Qaeda had been carrying out surveillance of Hariri since mid-January.

Akhbar also told interrogators some details that were clearly untrue, including the assertion that Abu Adas had actually died in the suicide mission. That was the idea that the cell had promoted in a note attached to the videotape Adas made.

When challenged on that point, Akhbar immediately admitted that a youth from Saudi Arabia, who had been sent by Al-Qaeda, had been the suicide bomber. He acknowledged that Rashid had told him that, if detained, he was to inform the security services that he knew nothing about the subject of Abu Adas, and that he was to warn the other members of the cell to do likewise.

But the interrogator employed a trick question to establish whether Akhbar had actual knowledge of the assassination plot or not. He gave the Al-Qaeda cadre a list of 11 phone numbers, four of which were fake numbers, and asked him if he remembered which ones were used in the preparations for the assassination.

Akhbar immediately corrected the interrogator, saying there had only been seven numbers used in the preparations for the assassination, including the five members of the surveillance team. That response corresponded with the information the investigation had already obtained, and which had not been reported in the news media.

The response of UNIIIC, under its new chief, Belgian Serge Brammertz, to the unfolding of an entirely different narrative surrounding the assassination was to shift the focus away from the question of who were the actual perpetrators of the bombing.

In his March 2006 report, Brammertz said the “priority” of UNIIIC “is being given not to the team that carried out the assassination but to those who ‘enabled’ the crime”.

And Brammertz had still not abandoned the story originally planted by the false witnesses in 2005 that the role of Adas in making the videotape had been manipulated by Syrian intelligence.

In his June 2006 report, Brammertz said the Commission continued to “entertain the idea” that whoever detonated the bomb may have been “coerced into doing so”. And in the September 2006 report, he suggested that Adas may have been coerced into delivering the videotape, just as Mehlis had suggested in 2005.

Despite the official Lebanese government report confirming it, Brammertz never publicly acknowledged that Adas was deeply involved with an Al-Qaeda cell, much less that its members had confessed to the killing of Hariri.

Daniel Bellemare, the prosecutor for the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, similarly chose not to pursue that evidence, which directly contradicts the assertion in his indictment that it was a Hizbollah operative – not Al-Qaeda – who had convinced Adas to make the videotape.

The evidence depends on a convoluted theory involving what the indictment calls “co-location” of personal mobile phones associated with five distinct networks said to be somehow connected with the plot to murder Hariri.

The indictment, originally filed June 10, says that, if there are “many instances” in which a phone is “active at the same location, on the same date, and within the same time frame as other phones”, but the phones do not contact each other, then it is “reasonable to conclude from these instances that one person is using multiple phones together”.

Based on that assumption the indictment asserts that “a person can ultimately be identified by co-location to be the user of a network phone.”

On that reasoning, one of the four accused, Salim Jamil Ayyash, is said to have participated in a “red” network of phones that was activated on January 5, 2005, only contacted each other, and ceased operations two minutes before the blast that killed Hariri. The “red” network is presumed to have been used by those who carried out surveillance as well as prepared the logistics for the bombing.

But Ayyash is also linked by “co-location” to a “green” network that had been initiated in October 2004 and ceased to operate one hour before the attack, and a “blue” network that was active between September 2004 and September 2005. The only basis for linking either of those two sets of mobile phones to the assassination appears to be the claim of frequent “co-location” of Ayyash’s personal cell phone with one of the phones in those networks and one red phone.

But the idea that “co-location” of phones is evidence of a single owner is a logical fallacy. It ignores the statistical reality that a multitude of mobile phones would have been frequently co-located with any given phone carrying out surveillance on Hariri in Beirut over an hour or more on the same day during the weeks before the assassination.

In the area of Beirut from the parliament to the St. George Hotel, known as Beirut Central District, where the “red” network is said to have been active in carrying out its surveillance of Hariri, there are 11 base stations for mobile phones, each of which had a range varying from 300 metres to 1,250 metres, according to Riad Bahsoun, a prominent expert on Lebanon’s telecom system. Bahsoun estimates that, within the range of each of those cell towers, between 20,000 and 50,000 cell phones were operating during a typical working day.

Given that number of mobile phones operating within a relatively small area, a large number of phones would obviously have registered in the cell tower area and in the same general time frame – especially if defined as an hour or more, as appears to be the case – as at least one of the red network phones on many occasions.

The indictment does not state how many times one of Ayyash’s personal phones was allegedly “co-located” with a “red” network phone.

To prove that Ayyash was in charge of the team using the red phones, the indictment provides an extraordinarily detailed account of Ayyash’s alleged use of red, green and blue phones on seven days during the period between January 11 and February 14, the day of the assassination.

But according to that information, during the final nine days on which the red network was active in surveillance of Hariri, including the day of the bombing itself, Ayyash was in phone contact with the red and blue networks on only three days – a pattern that appears inconsistent with the role of coordinating the entire plot attributed to him.

The most senior Hizbollah figure indicted, Mustafa Amine Badreddine, is accused of involvement only because he is said to have had 59 phone contacts with Ayyash during the January 5-February14 period. But those phone contacts are attributed to the two Hizbollah figures solely on the basis of co-location of their personal mobile phones with two phones in the “green” network on an unspecified number of occasions – not from direct evidence that they talked on those occasions.

Evidence from the U.N. commission investigating the Hariri assassination suggests that investigators did not stumble upon the alleged connections between the four Hizbollah figures and the different phone networks but used the link analysis software to find indirect links between phones identified as belonging to Hizbollah and the “red phones”.

In his third report, dated Sep. 26, 2006, then Commissioner Serge Brammertz said his team was using communications traffic analysis for “proactive and speculative” studies.

Brammertz referred in his next report in December 2006 to the pursuit of an “alternative hypothesis” that the motive for killing Hariri was a “combination of political and sectarian factors”. That language indicates that the “proactive and speculative” use of link analysis was to test the hypothesis that Shi’a Hizbollah was behind the bombing.

This is not the first time that communications link analysis has been used to link telephones associated with a specific group or entity to other phones presumed to be part of a major bombing plot.

In the investigation of the Buenos Aires terror bombing of a Jewish community centre in 1994, the Argentine intelligence service SIDE used analysis of phone records to link the Iranian cultural attaché, Mohsen Rabbani, to the bombing, according to the former head of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Office on Hizbollah, James Bernazzani.

Bernazzani, who was sent by the White House in early 1997 to assist SIDE in the bombing investigation, told this reporter in a November 2006 interview that SIDE had argued that a series of telephone calls made between July1 and July 18, 1994 to a mobile phone in the Brazilian border city of Foz de Iguazu must have been made by the “operational group” for the bombing.

SIDE had further argued that a call allegedly made on a mobile phone belonging to Rabbani to the same number showed that he was linked the bombing plot.

Bernazzani called that use of link analysis by SIDE “speculative” – the same word that Brammertz used to describe the U.N. investigation’s employment of the same tool. Such speculative use of link analysis “can be very dangerous”, Bernazzani said. “Using that kind of analysis, you could link my telephone to [Osama] bin Laden’s.”

Listening to Syrian presidential advisor, Dr Buthaina Shaaban – one of the most eloquent politicians in the Arab world – one would get the impression that a self-assured reform campaign is indeed underway in Syria. Her words also suggest while some of the protesters’ demands are legitimate, the crisis has been largely manufactured abroad and is being implemented at home by armed gangs bent on wrecking havoc. The aim of the protests, as often suggested by officials, is only to undermine Syria’s leadership in the region and the Arab world at large.

Indeed, Syria has championed, at least verbally, the cause of Arab resistance. It has hosted Palestinian resistance factions that refused to toe the US-Israeli line. Although these factions don’t use Damascus as a starting point for any form of violent resistance against Israel, they do enjoy a fairly free platform to communicate their ideas. Israel, which seeks to destroy all forms of Palestinian resistance, is infuriated by this freedom.

Syria has also supported the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah, which succeeded in driving Israel out of Lebanon in 2000, and torpedoed Israel’s efforts at gaining political and military grounds in Lebanon in 2006.

This narrative can also demonstrate the viability of its logic through palpable evidence of open or covert attempts at targeting Syria, undermining its leadership of the so-called rejectionist front. The front, which refused to cede to US-Israeli hegemony in the region, had already shrunk significantly following the invasion of Iraq, the surrender of Libya to Western diktats, and the sidelining of Sudan.

More, the Israeli government had been genuinely frustrated when the US failed to target Syria during its regime change frenzy following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. After all, Israel’s faithful neoconservative friends – Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser – had made ‘containing Syria’ a paramount objective in their 1996 policy paper. Entitled ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’, the document was written to help Benjamin Netanyahu in his efforts to suppress his regional foes. It stated that, “given the nature of the regime in Damascus, it is both natural and moral that Israel abandon the slogan ‘comprehensive peace’ and move to contain Syria, drawing attention to its weapons of mass destruction program, and rejecting ‘land for peace’ deals on the Golan Heights”.

Syria has also fallen in the range of US-Israeli fire on more than one occasion. The so-called Operation Orchard was an Israeli airstrike with a US green light. It targeted an alleged nuclear reactor in Deir ez-Zor region in September 2007 and an American airborne assault against a peaceful Syrian village in October 2008, killing and wounding Syrian civilians.

Although the official Syrian narrative claims that these events alone should justify the army’s harsh crackdown on pro-democracy protests, the rationale is challenged by a history of regime hypocrisy, doublespeak, brutality and real, albeit understated willingness to accommodate Western pressures and diktats.

The Israel occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights in June 1967 didn’t simply affect regional power dynamics, it also ushered the rise of a new political mood in Damascus. It was Hafez al-Assad, the father of the current president, Bashar, who took full advantage of the shifting mood by overthrowing president Nur al-Din al-Atasi. The new narrative was a triumphant one, not aimed merely at recapturing Syrian and other occupied Arab territories from Israel, but also positioning al-Assad’s Ba’ath regime as the leader of the new Arab front. Although the 1973 war failed to liberate the Golan of its invaders, leading to the ‘disengagement agreement’ with Israel in May 1974, the official language remained as fiery and revolutionary as ever. Oddly, for nearly four decades, Syria’s involvement in the conflict remained largely theoretical, and resistance persisted only via smaller Lebanese and Palestinian groups.

It seemed that Syria wanted to be involved in the region only so much as to remain a visible player, but not to the extent of having to face violent repercussions. It was an act of political mastery, one that Hafez crafted in the course of three decades and which Bashar cleverly applied for nearly eleven years. In essence, however, Syria remained hostage to familial considerations, one-party rule and the sectarian classifications initiated by colonial France in 1922.

True, Syria was and will remain a target for Western pressures. But what needs to be realized is that these pressures are motivated by specific policies concerning Israel, and not with regards to a family-centered dictatorship that openly murders innocent civilians in cold blood. In fact, there are many similarities in the pattern of behavior applied by the Syrian army and the Israeli army. Reports of causalities in Syria’s uprising cite over 1,600 dead, 2,000 wounded (Al Jazeera, July 27) and nearly 3,000 disappearances (CNN, July 28). Unfortunately this violence is not new, and is hardy compelled by fear of international conspiracy to undermine the al-Ba’ath regime. The 1982 Hama uprising was crushed with equal if not greater violence, where the dead were estimated between 10,000 and 40,000.

The Syrian regime is deliberately mixing up regional and national narratives, and it is still exploiting the decades-old political discourse to explain its inhumane treatment of Syrians. Civilians continue to endure the wrath of a single family, backed by a single political party. But there is only one way to read the future of Syria. The Syrian people deserve a new dawn of freedom, equality, social justice, free from empty slogans, self-serving elites and corrupt criminals. Syria and its courageous people deserve better. Much better.

“Once the billionaire PM Rafik Hariri moves inside Beirut, everybody takes note of it. His limousine is equipped with a device able to foil any assassination attempt via booby-trapped car. Mobile phones are disrupted in the area near the convoy, … Whenever he leaves his house, his guards carry out car patrols in the streets for camouflage.”

This was extracted from an entire file submitted by the founder of the American Committee for Free Lebanon — Ziad Abd al-Nour — in cooperation with Ghazi Kambel, who edited the file within a bulletin of Middle East intelligence in 2001.

“The report was very interesting in terms of the information contained and the political position of the editor,” the German forensic expert Jürgen Cain Külbel stated in commenting on the report.

Zionist Organization

Jürgen Cain Külbel

In an exclusive interview with Al-Manar Website, the German expert said “the report is of the American Committee for Free Lebanon, and was issued years before Harriri’s assassination. The committee is close to Neoconservatives and maintains good relations with the Jewish and Christian pressure chambers, while coordinating its political activities in accordance with the policy of the Zionist Likud party via the Jewish institute for National Security Affairs.”

“In addition to that, there is a strong relationship between the committee, the Orthodox Union, AIPAC and the Christian Coalition, where many observers consider Abd al-Nour’s committee as an Israeli warlike organization that works against Lebanon and Syria. It is an “Israeli structure with a Lebanese mask,” he added.

This committee had posted on its website photos of Lebanese political figures as targets to be hit after being accused of being Syrian agents in Lebanon. Those figures included Nabih Berri, Emile Lahoud, Walid Junblat, Rafik Hariri and others. The interesting is that among those photos there is one of Elias Hobaiqa crossed in red lines, signifying that he had been eliminated,” Külbel noted.

Made in Israel

As for the information mentioned in the report, the German expert said “it is well known that Hariri’s convoy was equipped with one of the latest jamming Israeli device, produced by Netline Communications, which work as mobile phones and other devices jammers within a radius of 500 meters, to prevent a murder attempt by a car bomb or radio-oriented bombs.”

Külbel made a link between the report and the analysis of the journalist Menhaj Qodwa — specialized in politics — in which he wrote:

“Days will reveal the true killers of Hariri. However, the means of assassination — although Hariri had the safer jamming devices at all — indicates that the operation was orchestrated by people who know how to disrupt the jammers.”

The German forensic expert expressed beliefs that the information about the jamming device is very important, which formed the starting point in his research process as a journalist and expert specialized in crimes science. “this information was the incentive to make an interview with the Israeli producer, for he is the only one who knows how to dismantle the security system of the device.”

Referring to his book, Hariri’s Assassination: Hidden Proofs published in May 2006, Külbel said: “Prior to the completion of writing this book, an expert who lives in Switzerland informed me that Hariri had made up his mind some day to buy jamming devices from Israel, while refusing to buy them from Switzerland.”

The expert also said that “the producer — who also works for the Mossad — knows how his jamming devices work and how to disrupt them.”

Answering a question on the possibility that Hariri could bring the device directly from the Israelis, the German expert said that “Hariri could buy it from any other country, even though it was made in Israel.”

“Mehlis knew all these information, and I have no idea why he deliberately hide them,” Külbel added sarcastically.

PART II: ‘Secret fighters’ related to the ‘Guardians of the Cedars’ and the Lebanese Forces, and their association with the Unit 504?

New facts are revealed. The German forensic expert who affirmed the Israeli nationality of the jamming device producer, which Hariri had bought, continues to unfold other proofs.

In the exclusive interview with Al-Manar Website, Jürgen Cain Külbel revealed some information which the international investigation had ignored deliberately, “or inadvertently,” he said with a sarcastic laugh.

“The explosion extent and its impacts show the logistic and tactical strategic level of the crime planners and perpetrators. This kind of crime cannot be carried out overnight, for it requires tactical and material preparations, well-trained and reliable elements, in addition to the close monitoring of the victim to track his movements,” he noted.

“I conducted investigations and made interviews with many personalities that talked about connections of the Israeli Mossad with some Lebanese parties which have a history of assassinations and eliminations carried out against their political rivals during and after the Lebanese civil war,” Külbel told Al-Manar Website.

“Yet, investigators had ignored this information, just like they ignored the data and proofs held by Hezbollah and revealed by the Secretary General Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah,” Külbel added.

Unit ‘504’

In his interview, Külbel pointed out to the Unit ‘504’, for which he devoted a full chapter in his book.

“Unit 504 was formed by the Israeli military intelligence. It is considered a mini-Mossad apparatus specialized in recruiting informers in Arab countries. During the period of Israeli occupation of Lebanon, (which lasted 18 years) this unit had managed a large network of collaborators in Lebanon and was responsible for the leadership of Lebanon South Army. It was re-formed after the year 2000, where members are proud that all matters of crime, from espionage to murder, are their specialty,” he wrote in Hariri Murder.

The German expert mentioned in his book as well words of an American-Israeli right-wing extremist Murray Cal about those recruited within this unit, saying “they are well-prepared to guerilla warfare, murder, infiltration and using of the latest methods in the preparation of car bombs.”

Guardians of Cedars, Lebanese Forces

Citing his own sources, Külbel noted in the interview that members of the ‘Unit 504’ had traveled to Cyprus to prepare to infiltrate into many Lebanese regions.

“Those sources informed me that plans prepared by Etienne Saqr – leader of the Guardians of the Cedars – aimed at renewing cells amongst the Christian youth, and that some kind of mobilization was carried out by the Lebanese Forces within ranks. There are security reports which revealed that Ghassan Touma – one of Lebanese Forces commanders – had left the United States to Cyprus, in order to launch mobilizing communications in Lebanon,” the forensic expert noted.

Later in the interview, Külbel quoted the manager of “Lebanese Foundation for Peace” Naji Najjar as saying to an Israeli newspaper about close relations connecting Lebanese Union in Exile – opponent to Syria – with the Lebanese opposition at home.

The forensic expert cited what Najjar had said to confirm that members of Lebanon South Army and the Lebanese Forces who were in exile, are working for the Unit 504.

Külbel pointed out that the massive attacks and explosions took place after Hariri’s assassination should be involved in investigations for being carried out – in the first place – in the areas of Christian residential.

Suspicious Call

“If we look closely, we’ll find out that not only means and capabilities weren’t at the disposal of the Syrian intelligence and the Lebanese security apparatus, but they were also not available for the Israeli Mossad. Yet, assassination was committed in cooperation with other agents, like the ‘secret fighters’ of the Guardians of the Cedars or the Lebanese Forces, for instance. This decisively shows a high criminal capacity at that time, which is still available,” Külbel went on to say.

This point of view is prompted by the fact that return to Lebanon was banned for many of those parties’ members, for being condemned to commit war crimes or to cooperate with the enemy.

“Thus, those people were interested in creating a completely new political regime in Lebanon. For this reason they established what was known by’ Lebanese Resistance in Exile’,” Külbel believed.

“In addition to that, there is another point to which attention should be paid: the Shin-Beit – responsible for internal security in Israel – which attached to its ranks a special unit of the South Lebanon Army, because its members speak an Arabic similar to the Palestinian dialect,” Külbel continued.

“One can remind here the alien dialect of the unknown caller who called Al-Jazeera news network after Hariri’s murder. Ghassan Ben Jeddo – the then director of Al-Jazeera Bureau of Beirut – stated then that the caller was speaking bad Arabic. He was Arabic-speaking of foreign accent,” Külbel concluded.

PART III: Similarities between Hobeika’s murder and Hariri’s assassination

Jürgen Cain Külbel deals with new facts, reveals new evidence in the investigation, silenced evidence.

In the exclusive interview with Al-Manar Website, the German forensic expert discussed the hypothesis that Syrian intelligence service — in cooperation with the pro-Syrian Lebanese intelligence — had planned for the crime and its execution.

He unfolded another chapter of the evidence related to the “same signatures” that were left after the murder of both Hobeika and Hariri. This chapter has been also blacked out by the international investigation.

Pointing out the impossibility of excluding any hypothesis regarding the apparatus behind Hariri assassination, Jürgen Cain Külbel considered the hypothesis that Syrian intelligence had carried out this operation ‘possible’. “Yet, if we adopt it, this means the capacity of those apparatus is high enough, so it can mislead intelligence apparatus, like the CIA and the Mossad. This approach is non-sense due to the tremendous technology material capabilities of major intelligence services in satellites and others, which the Syrian intelligence lacks and cannot even dream of them,” Külbel said.

Same Signatures

The German expert noted “it is necessary to start from the fact that the assassination of Hariri and Hobeika were carried out by professionals who have the high technical skill unavailable for any other intelligence or mafia apparatus.” Here, we mention again the jamming tech device, the technology which is only available for Israelis and Swiss experts.

“On the day when Hobeika was assassinated, three booby-trapped cars were waiting for the green line, i.e. three teams were charged of parking their cars in different places to ensure the explosion,” Külbel added.

The expert stressed Hobeika’s murder on Jan 24, 2002 had the same signatures of Hariri’s assassination three years later.

He believed that perpetrators could paralyze “the strict security measures and technical means adopted by each of the two victims.”

In the interview, Külbel mentioned that Hobeika had owned an insurance company, “thus he knew all what related to security matters.” Hariri had also built his own fixed security network around himself. “Perpetrators could overcome those two barriers, and I think they were aware of them before the assassination time,” Külbel added.

Israel decides, LF execute

The German expert expressed beliefs the impossibility of ignoring the common between assassinating Hobeika and Hariri in terms of the explosive materials, noting it is normal to state the explosives of February 14 were more powerful than those of January 24.

Külbel went on to say that both operations were carried out by remote control, where the street in which Hobeika was targeted had been closed due to construction works until shortly before the time of assassination, just like the case of Hariri.

Külbel also drew attention to that some parties – which were not known before – had declared responsibility for the operations, i.e. Abu Ades in Hariri’s case and ‘Lebanese for Free and Independent Lebanon in Hobeika murder.

“Immediately after assassinating Hobeika, fingers were pointed at Israel, starting from the then Lebanese president Emile Lahoud, to the then PM Rafik Hariri, and even Marwan Hamade who declared that Israel had no desire to keep any witness of its crimes,” Külbel said.

“Israel was the first suspect in this crime, as well as the Lebanese Forces — particularly its radical wing — because a pro-Geagea group made in 1991 an attempt to assassinate Hobeika. Lebanese authorities also revealed in 1998 a conspiracy of former LF intelligence agents who were seeking for eliminating Hobeika, Ghazi Kanaan and Elias El-Murr,” Külbel continued.

He clearly stated that it is really possible to accuse former LF members of killing Hobeika, because they were afraid of him to declassify their roles. “Investigations indicated this fact through decisive evidence.”

Moreover, it is noteworthy to mention that the words of Jürgen Cain Külbel bring to mind what the American journalist Wayne Madsen had revealed in his interview with the Russian Television (RT). Madison said that the USA Vice President was running criminal cells aiming at eliminating certain figures in Lebanon and Afghanistan, mainly Elie Hobeika and Rafik Hariri. It is known about the USA that it sponsors Israel.

Wayne Madsen Video:

Political manoeuvring also thrives on more subtle timing, as for example in the case of the notorious indictments of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.   Widely announced as imminent in December 2010, they somehow found themselves on the backburner when the Arab uprisings claimed every corner of Middle East news coverage.  Some six months later, on the heels of the formation of a Lebanese government non-hostile to the targeted Hezbollah—in the very hours between finalising the government’s policy statement  and its being subject to a parliamentary vote of confidence—only then were the indictments set into motion.  Bored of battling the credibility of Arab protests, international media eagerly shifted to the new sensational headlines.

Particularly when it comes to the Zionist project, the Western Israeli Alliance has often banked on timing—on distraction and exploitation.   Five years ago, for instance, Israeli forces repeated the pretext-invasions of 1978 and 1982.  Five years ago, Israeli forces renewed their aggressive campaigns of 1978 and 1982.  With the full backing of their Western allies, five years ago Israeli forces again attacked Lebanon.

The pretext for the lethal aggression was the military capture of two Israeli soldiers on the 12th of July 2006.  But as the report by the AP Jerusalem Bureau Chief declared on the second day of bombardment, such a ‘Crisis allows Israel to pursue strategic goals/Analysis: Kidnappings give Israel excuse to neutralize Hamas, Hezbollah’.  This early assessment astutely foretold the post-war testimony of then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who would boldly concede his designs.

The political manoeuvring had been going on for years.  Perhaps anxious to convince the Israeli Inquiry that the aggression had not been a knee-jerk reaction, Olmert testified before the Winograd Commission that his decision to launch a broad military operation was made as early as March 2006, four months before the soldiers’ capture.  Olmert stated that his predecessor, Ariel Sharon, had already been making preliminary plans, including a list of targets in Lebanon.  Olmert further stated that he had held several meetings (in January, March, April, May and July 2006) on potential military action against Lebanon.

Olmert testified these meetings concluded that Israel’s goal in a military operation would be the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1559, which they believed would eliminate Hezbollah’s resistance capability.  Olmert stated that he was informed in May 2006 by National Security Council head Giora Eiland and by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak that the Lebanese government would agree to implement Resolution 1559 in return for an Israeli withdrawal from Sheba Farms.¹

With thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians held as prisoners in Israel, detentions and negotiations for mutual release had been standard fare in the region—a reality Olmert alluded to in his testimony.  Following the high profile capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit on 25 June 2006 (by Palestinian forces who wanted Palestinian women and children prisoners released by Israel in exchange for the safe return of Shalit), Olmert testified that ‘he was certain there would be a similar attempt to kidnap soldiers on the Lebanese border.  He ordered the IDF to prevent this’.

So the powerful Israeli military was meant to be on high alert.  They were allegedly warned and ready.  Yet on 12 July—a mere 17 days later—they somehow failed to prevent the capture that ever since has been labelled the justification for the war.  A timely pretext it would seem.

Such a practical assessment of political strategy was in fact pronounced by the Winograd Commission when it concluded the July War had been, after all, a ‘serious missed opportunity’.  Israeli policy, it stated, had wavered between two main options:

The first was a short, painful, strong and unexpected blow on Hezbollah, primarily through standoff fire-power.  The second option was to bring about a significant change of the reality in the South of Lebanon with a large ground operation, including a temporary occupation of the South of Lebanon and ‘cleaning’ it of Hezbollah military infrastructure.

Despite the damage and the deaths they had inflicted, the Israeli forces had failed to meet their true objective, that of renewed occupation of South Lebanon.

The prompt accusation of Hezbollah’s actions being the casus belli in July 2006 settled into a general public acceptance of blame both within and beyond Lebanon.  Such is the magic of timed political manoeuvring.  The public listened nervously, for example, as The New York Times cried out the typical news:

With two more soldiers captured today, Israel launched a major military offensive on a second front, sending armored forces into southern Lebanon in response to a brazen border raid by the militant group. [emphasis added]

By the time the Winograd Commission revealed its final report in January 2008, the international public had already well digested the message that Israel had had no choice but to attack Lebanon.   The public then merely grimaced at the reminder of Israel’s failure to destroy Hezbollah.   The New York Times captured their plaintive reaction:

When its 2006 war against Hezbollah ended after six weeks, Israel was aghast.  An operation meant to cripple the Shiite militia and end its dominance of southern Lebanon had ended with the group if anything stronger.

The final Winograd report explained away any seeming weakness in Israel by faulting those political and military elites who had grown complacent in Israel’s ‘position of social, political and military strength’, whose passive belligerence had dulled their fighting edge.  And so the international public seemed undisturbed that the Winograd Commission, in possession of Olmert’s testimony of premeditation, acknowledged that Israel had, in fact, been orchestrating the situation:

Overall, we regard the 2nd Lebanon war as a serious missed opportunity.  Israel initiated a long war, which ended without its clear military victory.  A semi-military organization of a few thousand men resisted, for a few weeks, the strongest army in the Middle East…. Israel did not use its military force well and effectively, despite the fact that it was a limited war initiated by Israel itself.  [emphasis added]

Israel did not need to go to war; Israel chose to go to war.  Even if we acknowledge that the soldiers’ capture brought to light a problem that had to be dealt with—namely the prisoner issue—there were alternatives to war.

Rather than admit the unjust nature of holding thousands of political prisoners, however, Israel chose to try to extinguish any resistance to their continued detention.  Israel masked its fury by pointing indignantly to its prey.  The politics of power relies on the manipulation of perception.  It is high time we looked at an objective reality.

1. Clearly substantiated by reports in April/May 2006 on Lebanese PM Siniora’s visits with US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair on this issue: see for instance http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4919120.stm and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4984062.stm

Declaring the Muslim people ‘savage’ is, of course, just a school-yard taunt from Islamaphobe Pamela Geller, who gleefully takes credit for the advertisement.  Had her rant been limited to her own blog, we might easily dismiss it.  The problem lies in its acceptance into mainstream discourse.  The Post may be tabloid journalism, but its paper edition remains the seventh most popular paper in America.  And this sort of crude advertisement for a political cause panders to a public comfortable with the mind-set of ‘don’t bore me with the details’.

But the details are critical if we are to consider a conflict that has taken thousands of lives.  How can we, for instance, reconcile the concept of ‘civilized’ with the reality of shooting unarmed protesters?  The advertisement asks us to accept Israel as ‘civilized’; yet as these very words were first read, Israeli soldiers were shooting into a crowd of Syrian-Palestinians, killing 24 and injuring another 350.

Even if we were to set aside troublesome issues of borderlines and occupation zones, lethal violence hardly qualifies as a civilized response to what was unmistakeably only a symbolic demonstration.  It had been loudly announced in advance.  Had the protesters indeed posed a physical threat, then they might have been easily overpowered and arrested by the Israeli military on hand.  But that would have been a sensible—a civilized—means of containing the situation.

The deadly violence chosen by the Israeli forces on the 5th of June mirrors the same used just three weeks prior, during the Nakba demonstrations.  And these echo hundreds and hundreds of instances when Israeli forces have brazenly attempted to destroy anything and anyone deemed inconvenient.  Perhaps the most egregious example, though, happened 29 years ago during the first week of June 1982.

In a defiant escalation of the Zionist occupation of Southern Lebanon in place since March 1978, the Israeli government and military flagrantly snubbed the ruling of the United Nations.  Using brute force, the Israeli forces intensified efforts to gain territory and to obliterate any resistance to their project.  Despite the presence of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) as international peacekeepers, the Israelis insisted on their own form of deadly control.

On 4 June 1982 Israel conducted air raids in and around Beirut.*  Together with its mercenary militia, Israeli ground forces also engaged in intense artillery fire in Southern Lebanon.  Both the Secretary General  of UNIFIL and the President of the UN Security Council issued urgent appeals to ‘adhere strictly to the cease-fire that had been in effect since July 1981 and to refrain immediately from any hostile act likely to provoke an aggravation of the situation’.

By way of answer, the next day Israeli forces amplified their intent.  They multiplied air strikes.  They increased artillery fire on the ground with added naval artillery power.  Again, UNIFIL reiterated its call for a simultaneous cessation of hostilities.  The UN Security Council passed Resolution 508, calling for all parties ‘to cease immediately and simultaneously all military activities within Lebanon and across the Lebanese-Israeli border’.

The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) agreed.  The Israeli Representative, however, stated the Resolution would have to be brought before the Israeli Cabinet.

Despite UNIFIL’s continued efforts throughout the night of 5 June, Israeli air strikes resumed shortly after 0600, the morning of 6 June—precisely the deadline given in Resolution 508 to cease fire.

The Chairman of the PLO informed UNIFIL that ‘in spite of heavy Israeli air-strikes after the scheduled time of the cease-fire, he had given orders to all PLO units to withhold fire for a further, unspecified period’.   When UNIFIL then met later that morning with the chief of the Israeli military forces, the agenda was the implementation of Resolution 508.

Instead, UNIFIL was informed that Israel was launching a military operation into Lebanon within half an hour.  UNIFIL was warned to stay out of the way.  UNIFIL protested, to no avail:

Israeli ground forces, including a very large number of tanks and armoured personnel carriers, moved into Lebanese territory in strength. . . . UNIFIL troops attempted to prevent the entry and advance of the Israeli forces.  On the coastal road, for example, Dutch soldiers planted obstacles before advancing Israeli tank column; one tank was damaged; the obstacles, however, were pushed aside, as was the Dutch guardhouse.  Tank barrels were pointed at UNIFIL soldiers during the entire encounter, likewise, in the other battalion areas, obstacles were forcibly removed and bulldozed.  At Khardala Bridge, a small Nepalese position stood its ground for two days, despite harassments and threats.  On the morning of 8 June, their position was partially destroyed/and some 100 Israeli tanks began to cross the bridge.  Despite the efforts of UNIFIL, from the start of the invasion, the overwhelming strength and weight of the Israeli forces precluded the possibility of stopping them, and UNIFIL positions in the line of the invasion were thus overrun or by-passed.

Later that day, the UN Security Council met again and unanimously adopted Resolution 509, demanding the withdrawal of Israeli military forces and cessation of all military activities.

Contrary to the Resolution, on 7 June, Israeli forces—comprising more than two mechanized divisions, with full air and naval support—expanded their positions northward and waged intense fighting.

On 8 June, the Security Council met again, but no resolution was adopted, because of the negative vote from the US.  At the same time, Israeli forces resumed their pattern of blocking movement of UNIFIL forces and took prisoner 62 Lebanese Army soldiers who were serving under the operational command of UNIFIL.  When UNIFIL demanded their return, the Israeli military released them to its mercenary militia instead.  This common ruse was vigorously protested.  Again to no avail.

And so this pattern of lawlessness continued, bringing years of violent rampage through Lebanon.  There was nothing civilized about it.  Just as there was nothing civilized in the recent shooting of protesters in Lebanon and Syria.  When advertisement-maker Pamela Geller suggests otherwise, the facts fail to substantiate her claim.

In her review of the Celebrate Israel parade, she refers several times to the event in religious terms.  God was smiling on the paraders, she tells us, providing them with sunshine for their pro-Jewish rally.  Syrians and Palestinians, on the other hand, she classifies as interchangeable Muslims, Jew-haters, Nazis upon whose Nakba bund rallies God frowned upon with torrential rains.  The celebration, it seems, had little to do with a political entity, and much to do with being a so-called chosen people.  A so-called civilized people.

But in civilized society, we might counter, we co-exist not by the rule of force, but by the rule of law.  In civilized society, God—whether we accept ‘God’ as a concept or as a reality—represents justice and righteousness.  It is a gross distortion of civilized thought to imagine God laying down bets on his favourite football club and then fixing the game for a good laugh.  No, in a civilized society, we take responsibility for our actions.

*The details of the events of June 1982 are documented in the ‘Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon’, S/15194/Add.1, 11 June 1982, http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/7264B57A6DD3E85B8525701B0072A4F5

Perhaps the most egregious example of its so-called ‘regrettable mistakes’ occurred fifteen years ago, on 18 April 1996. Israeli Forces shelled the compound of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in the village of Qana, Southern Lebanon. Over 100 people were killed, with many more, including four UN soldiers, severely wounded. Those who survived would never be the same.

In words that sadly foreshadowed those of the original 2009 Goldstone Report, the 1997 Human Rights Watch investigation noted that the assault on Qana was in line with a pattern of Israeli behaviour— ‘acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which was to spread terror among the civilian population’ underscored by an ‘appalling willingness to conduct military operations in which civilians would bear the brunt of the suffering’. The conclusion was clear:

the absence of precautions prior to the attack in close proximity to the town of Qana and the U.N. base located there, as well as the means and methods of attack chosen by the IDF (a sustained artillery barrage without lines of sight to the target), put Israel in violation of international humanitarian law.

By noting the pattern of Israeli behaviour, Human Rights Watch suggested a darker side of what was being excused by some as mere negligence: the attack had not been foolhardy—it had actually been deliberate.

At the height of the Occupation Era, on 11 April 1996 the Israel military launched a sustained assault on Lebanon. For sixteen days, Israeli pilots carried out at least 600 air raids, firing 25,000 shells into Lebanon. 154 Lebanese civilians were killed, with another 351 injured. Countless Lebanese families fled their homes. Others were unwilling or unable to flee the barrage.

By 1996 the Lebanese people had grown accustomed to the wanton violence they suffered at the hands of the Western Israeli Alliance. They had grown accustomed to the presence of the multi-national blue-helmets, watching, reporting and, with growing frustration, protesting the bold and defiant attacks of the Western Israeli Alliance. But even those who had grown numb to the seemingly endless aggressions were sickened by the cold brutality of Qana.

Although Israeli forces had frequently targeted UNIFIL positions throughout the years of occupation, their assault on Qana marked a brazen escalation of their intent to terrorise the Lebanese into submission. The assault on Qana was a wilful rage against civilian families seeking safe haven within the protective arms of the United Nations. Fuelled by hatred and arrogance, however, Israel sneered at the UN and fired on their target.

Even the conservative American Time news magazine admitted that UN personnel on the ground in Lebanon had fervently attempted to stop the impending ‘mistake’:

the shelling, which by their log lasted from 2:08 to 2:25 p.m., continued for at least 10 minutes after they had explicitly, urgently notified Israel that a U.N. base crammed with civilian refugees was under attack. Three neighboring U.N. posts fired red warning flares. ‘We made the effort to make them stop,’ says Lieut. Colonel Wame Waqanivavalagi, commander of the Fijian battalion. ‘But they kept firing.’

The Israeli response to the public outcry was that it had all been a mistake. But the official UN report is clear: “it is unlikely that gross technical and/or procedural errors led to the shelling of the United Nations compound.”

Major-General Franklin Van Kappen, Military Adviser to the UN, later stated:

I’ve heard that some Israelis think this is an anti-Jewish vendetta,” he said. “My wife is Jewish. I’m not anti-Israeli. When I went there, I believed the Israeli army—a few shells had just overshot.” Yet after 10 minutes of standing on a roof in Qana, he said, “I knew I was in deep s—. This was not a simple overshoot. Seventeen shells landed.

Amnesty International, on its own research, concluded that the attack was knowing and deliberate. Amnesty stated:

the IDF intentionally attacked the UN compound… the bombardment of the UN compound was not the result of an artillery scatter of stray shells which overshot the Hizbullah mortar, as claimed by the IDF, but was the result of a separate barrage of shells aimed at the compound itself… even if the IDF did not have specific information regarding civilians sheltering there, the general information it did possess concerning civilians in UN compounds—in addition to Israel’s recognition that UN positions as such are not legitimate targets—should have been sufficient to prevent such an attack. The fact that the attack proceeded can only indicate a callous disregard for the protection of civilian lives and therefore a clear breach of the laws of wars prohibitions on directly or indiscriminately targeting civilians.

Too horrendous to believe? Robert Fisk, British journalist for the Independent, reported his eyewitness account. He described the brutal reality of what he discovered just hours after the bombing of Qana:

The Lebanese refugee women and children and men lay in heaps, their hands or arms or legs missing, beheaded or disembowelled. There were well over a hundred of them. A baby lay without a head. The Israeli shells had scythed through them as they lay in the United Nations shelter, believing that they were safe under the world’s protection.

Perhaps equally disturbing in its way, was the video film footage that would soon complete the story. A UN soldier happened to be filming home video and captured Israeli spotter aircraft verifying the target. “Here at last,” said Fisk, “in living colour, was the proof: distinct pictures of the small Israeli aircraft over Qana, the plane that the Israelis—for two weeks—claimed was never there.

One UN officer who saw the tape stated bluntly: “I and many others have risked our lives under constant Israeli shelling. We put up with their lies and the arrogance of their explanations…. But even if it means the end of my military career, I’ll never say this was an accident. The Israelis knew they were firing at innocent people.”

The lesson of Qana? Where there is impunity for one, there is vulnerability for the other. When we continue to turn a blind eye to the ruthless and illegal aggressions of the Western Israeli Alliance, we are refusing to even look at the pain we enable to be inflicted. All the while, others will continue to suffer the atrocities that we have refused to judge.

Based on the Cabinet’s responsibility to preserve Leba­non’s sovereignty, its independence, unity and the safety of its land, the government underscores Lebanon’s right through its people, army and resistance to liberate or regain authority of Shebaa Farms, Kfarshouba hills and the occupied part of Ghajar village and defend the country against any aggression.

For the sake of argument, however, let us set aside the dictates of political expediency. Let us look at the reality of what this stance entails.

The crux of the grievance being voiced these days is that the Lebanese Army should have exclusive domain over national defence. The grievance asserts that the Islamic Resistance of Hezbollah has usurped this privilege for its own advancement. The puzzling bit of this accusation, however, is that it is being raised not by the Army—but by various politicians.

In contrast to the opinions of the 14th of March personalities, the Lebanese Army has for over twenty-five years maintained an efficient working relationship with the Resistance. The developments in Lebanon over the past six years have left this harmony stronger than ever. Building on the firm, longstanding commitment exhibited by Generals Michel Aoun and Emile Lahoud, the Lebanese Army remains a proud partner of the Resistance.

When Lebanese Army General Michel Sleiman took on the role of President in 2008, he carried with him the experience to judge the elements required for an adequate national defence. He stated that the success of the Resistance in defeating the occupier was ‘achieved by virtue of the support granted by the Lebanese people, the State, and the Lebanese Army’. Such success notwithstanding, he continued,

the enemy’s persistence in threatening to violate our sovereignty imposes upon us to elaborate a defensive strategy that will safeguard the country concomitantly with a calm dialogue to benefit from the capacities of the Resistance in order to better serve this strategy. Accordingly, we will manage to avoid depreciating the achievements of the Resistance in internal conflicts and subsequently we will safeguard its values and national position.

President Sleiman reiterated his conviction just weeks ago in response to Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak’s warning that Israeli military may invade Lebanon yet again. Barak ‘knows full well’, said Sleiman, ‘ that entering Lebanon is no longer a walk in the park. The defence minister’s threat to send his forces into Lebanon again shows premeditated intentions of aggression. The Lebanese people, army and resistance are ready to respond to any such aggression.’

President Sleiman’s confidence in the existing defence framework is shared by the head of the Lebanese Army, General Jean Kahwagi. Addressing his troops last year, he advised them to ‘cling to the will of steadfastness and confrontation and to benefit from all the Lebanese capabilities residing in the capacities of the Army, the people and the Resistance as well as from the presence of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon and its support’.

Whereas the stance currently adopted by the 14th of March campaigners clearly resents the ability of the Resistance, General Kahwagi openly describes all contributions toward the national defence as honourable:

Let us look with veneration and respect at the souls of our pious martyrs, whether soldiers, citizens or resistance fighters, who fell while defending their country… and drew with their innocent blood the path of dignity and liberation for a country that we can be proud of in front of the whole world since we are its true and loyal protectors.

As the Israeli media grins at the banners being waved in Beirut that read ‘We want only the arms of the Lebanese army’, again it becomes imperative to look at the reality of what this stance entails.

The Lebanese Army remains committed to a cooperative national defence, to a formula of the Army, the people and the Resistance. Just days ago, General Kahwagi reiterated:

The Lebanese Army abides by this formula since it is part of the decisions and guidance of the political authority represented by the Cabinet and it is totally convinced by this formula since experience has proved its primary role in liberating the greater part of south Lebanon and western Bekaa from Israeli enemy occupation in addition to its role in defeating this enemy in the war of July 2006 and in safeguarding Lebanon in these days.

A system of mutual support has evolved. To disallow the arms of the Resistance would be to arbitrarily disregard the consistent evaluation of the Army’s top leaders. This is nonsensical. Such a suggestion would leave Lebanon vulnerable; of this there is no doubt. The only conclusion, then, is that such a suggestion is either gross negligence or wilfull acceptance of Lebanon’s being engulfed. We have to wonder whether the current swirl of rhetoric over who gets to be commander-of-the-day has more to do with protection or politics. If both the acting Army General and the President, a former Army General, embrace the contributions of the Resistance, then the state of Lebanon is already well in control of its defence.

The Goldstone Report: The Legacy Of The Landmark Investigation Of The Gaza Conflict

Edited by Adam Horowitz, Lizzy Ratner, and Philip Weiss

Foreword by Desmond Tutu

Introduction by Naomi Klein,

Nation Books, 2011.  449 pages (paperback).

Here in Central New York, some local activists in the Syracuse Peace Council started the group Central New York Working For A Just Peace In Palestine & Israel as a direct result of the invasion of Gaza. In February, the Judaic Studies Program at Syracuse University hosted journalist Peter Beinart, a self-identified liberal Zionist, who has recently signed a public letter urging President Obama to support a United Nations resolution condemning the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. (The US vetoed the resolution.) Neither Beinart’s willingness to sign this letter, nor an invitation extended by the Judaic Studies Program to someone expressing these views, would have been conceivable before the Gaza invasion. (For a less than positive review of the Beinart lecture, see my blog post here).

The Goldstone Report: The Legacy Of The Landmark Investigation Of The Gaza Conflict is invaluable in assessing what really happened in Gaza. It presents an abridged version (327 pp.) of the “Report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission On the Gaza Conflict (September, 2009),” with 11 insightful essays which explore the Goldstone document from progressive legal, historical, and political, as well as personal perspectives. This version also intersperses witness testimonies which were published by the Mission, but not included in the original report. (Full disclosure: I am a contributor to Mondoweiss.net which is edited by Weiss and Horowitz.)

The stark fact is that the Israeli army killed over 1,400 people during the Gaza invasion. This is as opposed to 13 Israeli fatalities, some of which were Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers killed by “friendly fire.” Of the 1,400 fatalities, over 80% were civilians. Approximately 5,300 Gazans were injured, including 2,400 women and children; 2,114 houses were destroyed, with an additional 3,400 houses rendered uninhabitable. The three-week Israeli assault resulted in over 51,000 displaced persons. Among the IDF’s targets were mosques, hospitals, private residences, a chicken farm, a sewage treatment plant, and a United Nations Relief and Welfare Agency (UNRWA) field office compound, which was sheltering 600 to 700 civilians. According to Goldstone, there was no military advantage gained by any of these attacks.

The Mission employed testimonies of Gazans, as well as on-site inspections in order to document its findings. Although the Israeli government refused to cooperate, and vehemently tried to prevent their citizens and soldiers from doing so, the Mission did interview Israelis outside of Israel and employed public testimony from the so-called “Soldiers’ Forum” at Israel’s Oranim military academy, as well as reports from the dissident soldiers’ group “Breaking the Silence.” The report contains statements made by Israeli officials, which were widely quoted in the Israeli and foreign press, that Israel’s declared aim was to punish the civilian population. The document also includes justifications made by Israeli officials, reported in the press for specific Israeli military actions. Most of these were shown to be inaccurate, many purposefully so.

A Tzipi Livni quote illustrates the IDF intent to violate international norms of military conduct. Livni, who was the Israeli Foreign Minister during Operation Cast Lead, said, “Israel is not a country upon which you fire missiles and it does not respond. It is a country that when you fire on its citizens it responds by going wild – and this is a good thing.” The Israeli “wildness” violated the laws of war, including: use of human shields, capricious home invasions, illegal detention of civilians including elected officials, massive wanton destruction of personal property and of infrastructure, and killing of unarmed and non-threatening civilians.

The Goldstone Mission concluded that Operation Cast Lead “was a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.” Targeting a civilian population clearly violates international humanitarian law. The Mission also concluded, as did many who read the Israeli press before and during the three-week Israeli assault, that one purpose of the attack was to punish Gazans for voting for Hamas in the free democratic election of 2006.

The Goldstone Report not only addresses the Gaza invasion, but seeks to place it in the context of the ongoing struggle between Israel and the Palestinians, as well as between Israel and its Arab neighbors. In describing this history, the report harshly criticizes the Israelis for, among other things, the 8,000 Palestinian political prisoners in Israel from the occupied territories (a violation of international human rights law), the restriction of movement (between Gaza and the West Bank and within each territory), the suppression of legitimate dissent in the occupied territories, and the blockade of Gaza. It also condemns Israel for its settlements on conquered land, a violation of the Geneva Conventions, the Judaization of East Jerusalem, and construction and maintenance of the separation wall, which has been ruled illegal by the World Court. And all that is not even to mention the illegitimate and disproportionate use of force during the 2006 Lebanon War.  This is hardly the portrayal of an enlightened Western democracy. And it is a characterization of Israel which is all the more shocking for many because it came from Richard Goldstone.

Judge Richard Goldstone is a nightmare for the Israeli and US pro-Israel spin doctors. He is an internationally-recognized jurist with extensive experience in redressing the injustices of apartheid in his native South Africa. He is not only Jewish, but is a self-identified Zionist, and was an honorary member of the Board of Governors of Hebrew University for ten years. His daughter immigrated to Israel where she now lives. This made it difficult to dismiss Goldstone as an anti-Semite from a United Nations whose moral and legal authority Israel has always ignored, with the aid of the United States veto. However, this did not stop the Israelis and their US supporters from smearing the judge.

Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School called Goldstone “an evil man” and “a traitor to the Jews.” The usual charges of “self-hating Jew” echoed loudly in the Israeli and US media. On November 3, 2009 the US House of Representatives voted 344 to 36 for House Resolution 867, which called the Goldstone Report, “irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy.” The Obama administration, not known for great courage in its foreign policy decisions, has danced to the tune of what some euphemistically call “certain political interests.” In so doing, the US has followed the advice of the House resolution and blocked any further consideration of the Goldstone Report at the United Nations.

Judge Goldstone has invited “fair minded people” to read the report and “point out where it failed to be objective or even-handed.” Neither the Congress nor the Obama Administration has done so. The US mainstream media has all but shut the door on criticism of Israeli conduct during the Gaza invasion. But despite the dismissive response to the Goldstone Report and to the critics of the Gaza invasion, both the report and the invasion have resulted in increased public opposition to US policy regarding Israel. The US pro-Israel camp, alarmed by this new reality, has inaccurately labeled it “a campaign of delegitimization of Israel.”

The essays contained in the Goldstone Report do little to legitimize an Israeli perspective. Jerome Slater criticizes Goldstone’s position that Israel’s war in Gaza could be justified by the claim of self-defense. He writes that “when illegitimate and violent repression engenders resistance” then the claim of self-defense is invalid. Brian Baird, an ex-Congressman, details the degree to which his House colleagues passionately spoke in defense of Israel while demonstrating their almost complete lack of knowledge of the facts. All his attempts to educate them met with indifference — caused by the giant shadow of the pro-Israel lobby.

The final word is given to Laila El-Haddad, a Palestinian journalist and blogger. She spent Operation Cast Lead in North Carolina connected via Skype and email to her father, who was under siege in his home in Gaza City. She details his messages of fright, courage, and despair, followed by relief and muted hope. These thoughts given from father to daughter provide the reader with a visceral understanding of the terror and horror visited on Gazans during the invasion, a horror which is impossible to transmit through a United Nations document. Sadly and soberingly, El-Haddad tells us that for now, for the people of Gaza, the Goldstone Report is just “ink on paper,” since it has not led to any improvement in their lives.

The presentation of the Goldstone Report and the accompanying materials contained in the volume are valuable because they make this extraordinary document accessible to those who might normally be reluctant to read it in its entirety on the United Nations web site. The book is especially recommended to those liberals who still check their progressivism at the gate before entering the portal of Palestine. What they read here just may shake some of their deeply-held beliefs.

• An earlier version of this book review appeared in the Syracuse Peace Council’s Peace Newsletter (March, 2011, PNL #802).

But just as powerful has been the resonance in Israel. It has no precedent for an assertive, democratic neighbour. Except for Turkey.

As the US was putting the finishing touches on NATO (established in April 1949), Turkey became the first Muslim nation to recognise Israel, in March 1949 (Iran did so a year later). Under the watchful eye of its military, Turkey and Israel had close diplomatic, economic and military relations throughout the Cold War.

The first hint of trouble was Turkey’s denunciation of “Israeli oppression” of the Palestinians in 1987, but it was not until the Justice and Development Party came to power in 2002 that a strong critical voice was heard. In 2004 Turkey denounced the Israeli assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as a “terrorist act” and Israeli policy in the Gaza Strip as “state-sponsored terrorism”.

Saudi acquiescence to US-Israel hegemony is understandable because of the Saudi monarchy’s total reliance on the US dollar income from its oil. As US secretary of state Henry Kissinger told Business Week after Saudi Arabia defied the US with its oil embargo in support of Egypt in the 1973 war against Israel, any more such behaviour would lead to “massive political warfare against countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran to make them risk their political stability and maybe their security if they did not cooperate”.

His words were not idle. King Faisal, who had risked all to help the Egyptians and Palestinians, was assassinated shortly after that, and his act of defiance was the last peep heard from the Saudis. Or Egypt, which went on to make peace with Israel. Even as Turkey’s resistance to Israel has grown hotter, Israel continued to find comfort in the accommodating nature of president Hosni Mubarak’s rule, though it has been a “cold peace” between enemies.

Yes, enemies. For despite official relations and a trickle of photo ops of Egyptian-Israeli leaders shaking hands over the past three decades, 92 per cent Egyptians continued to view Israel as the enemy, according to a 2006 Egyptian government poll. Perhaps Mubarak also found maintaining good relations with Israel distasteful, but he complied with US wishes, getting the second largest US aid package (after Israel).

Current Israeli military strategy was honed in the early 1980s, after the elimination of Egypt as a military threat. Two names are identified with it. Ariel Sharon announced publicly in 1981, shortly before invading Lebanon, that Israel no longer thought in terms of peace with its neighbours, but instead sought to widen its sphere of influence to the whole region “to include countries like Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and areas like the Persian Gulf and Africa, and in particular the countries of North and Central Africa”. This view of Israel as a regional superpower/ bully became known as the Sharon Doctrine.

Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 followed traditional imperialism’s strategy of direct invasion and co-opting of local elites, in this case a Christian one. But already this strongman policy was losing its appeal. It didn’t work for Israel in Lebanon. There was always the risk of a strongman turning against his patron or being overthrown.

The more extreme version of the new Israeli game plan to make Israel the regional hegemon was Oded Yinon’s “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s”. Yinon was nicknamed ‘sower of discord’ for his proposal to divide-and-conquer to create weak dependent statelets with some pretense of democracy, similar to the US strategy in Central America, which would fight among themselves and, if worse comes to worst and a populist leader emerges, be sabotaged easily – the Salvador Option. Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah described the Israeli policy based on Yinon in 2007 as intended to create “a region that has been partitioned into ethnic and confessional states that are in agreement with each other. This is the new Middle East.”

Yinon was using as a model the Ottoman millet system where separate legal courts governed the various religious communities using Muslim Sharia, Christian Canon and Jewish Halakha laws. Lebanon would be divided into Sunni, Alawi, Christian and Druze states, Iraq divided into Sunni, Kurd and Shia states. The Saudi kingdom and Egypt would also be divided along sectarian lines, leaving Israel the undisputed master.

“Genuine coexistence and peace will reign over the land only when Arabs understand that without Jewish rule between Jordan and the sea they will have neither existence nor security.” Yinon correctly observed that the existing Middle East states set up by Britain following WWI&II were unstable and consisted of sizable minorities which could be easily incited to rebel. All the Gulf states are “built upon a delicate house of sand in which there is only oil”.

Following on Yinon’s strategy in 1982, Richard Perle’s 1996 “A Clean Break” states: “Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right.”

Israeli internal security minister Avi Dichter said shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003: “Weakening and isolating Iraq is no less important than weakening and isolating Egypt. Weakening and isolating Egypt is done by diplomatic methods while everything is done to do achieve a complete and comprehensive isolation to Iraq. Iraq has vanished as a military force and as a united country.”

According to Haaretz correspondent, Aluf Benn, writing on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Sharon and his cohorts “envision a domino effect, with the fall of Saddam Hussein followed by that of Israel’s other enemies: Arafat, Hassan Nasrallah, Bashar Assad, the ayatollah in Iran and maybe even Muhammar Gadaffi.” By presenting the US with facts-on-the-ground and using its US lobby, Israel would keep itself at the heart of American plans for the Middle East.

The invasion of Iraq was always intended as a prelude to the invasion of Iran. The Israeli logic, which is hard to fault, is that with Iraq now occupied, unstable and its inevitably pro-Iranian Shia majority asserting control, Iran has been strengthened, and that the same war plan against Iran is necessary to defeat the chief remaining regional anti-Israeli regime, which is now gathering support from not only Shia, but from Sunni opponents to the US-Israeli project throughout the Arab world. Ben Eliezer told the gathering: “They are twins, Iran and Iraq.”

Despite Turkish storm clouds on the horizon, until 25 January 2011, Israel’s plan was still to replace the Ottoman Turks of yore as the local imperial power. The Arab nations (prepared by British imperial divide-and-conquer and local-strongman policies) would be kept divided, weak, dependent now on Israel to ensure safe access to oil. An Israeli-style peace would break out throughout the region.

But this tangled web has unravelled. Despite the $36 billion poured into Egypt’s military and Americanisation of Egypt’s armed forces since the peace treaty with Israel, according to wikileaks-egypt.blogspot.com US officials complained of the “backward-looking nature of Egypt’s military posture” (read: Israel is still Egypt’s main enemy), that the army generals remained resistant to change and economic reforms to further dismantle central government power.

Egyptian Minister of Defence Muhammad Tantawi “has resisted any change to usage of FMF [foreign military financing] funding and has been the chief impediment to transforming the military’s mission to meet emerging security threats.” In plain language, Egypt’s de facto head of state was criticised by the US because he refused to go along with the new US-Israeli strategy which would incorporate Egypt’s defence into a broader NATO war against “asymmetric threats” (read: the “war on terror”) and to acquiesce to Israel as the regional hegemon.

Mubarak was the Egyptian strongman that fit Sharon’s strategy for the region. But he was overthrown in a truly unforeseen manner — by the people. Yinon’s divide-and-rule strategy — in the case of Egypt, by inciting Muslim against Copt — has also come to naught with the popular revolution here, one of its symbols being the crescent and cross.

There has indeed been “a clean break” with the past, but not the one foreseen by Perle. His scheme can be rephrased as: Egypt and Turkey can shape their strategic environment, in cooperation with Syria and Lebanon, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Israel. As for Dichter’s hubris, it is impossible at this point to see what the future holds for Iraq, but it will not be what he had in mind. And Iran can now breathe a sigh of relief.

A year and a half ago, an Israel Navy submarine crossed the Suez Canal to the Red Sea, where it conducted an exercise, reflecting the strategic cooperation between Israel and Egypt, aimed at sending a message of deterrence to Iran. Just one week after the fall of Mubarak, the canal is being used to deliver a message of deterrence – but this time the message is for Israel, as Iranian warships cross the canal on their way to Syrian ports.

Nor are the upheavals across the Arab world at present following the sectarian scenario envisioned by Yinon. Even the Shia uprising in Bahrain is more about an oppressive neocolonial monarchy, originally imposed by the British, than about Shia-Sunni hostility.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has expressed fears about Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood “undermining the peace treaty” which 85 per cent of Israelis approve of. But he need not fear. While Egyptians have no love for Israel, none contemplate another war against what is clearly a more powerful and ruthless neighbour.

What really hurts for the Likudniks is the new Egypt in cooperation with the new Turkey will put paid to the Sharon/ Yinon strategy for establishing Israel as the regional empire. It will have to join the comity of nations not as a ruthless bully, but as a responsible partner.

When their unopposed air force devastated large parts of Lebanon’s infrastructure (as well as Hezbollah’s headquarters area of Beirut) in 2006, Israel’s leaders thought that by doing so they would turn the Lebanese army and Christian and Sunni militias against Hezbollah. In other words, by massively punishing all of Lebanon, Israel’s leaders believed they could push the Lebanese army and Christian and Sunni militias into doing the Zionist state’s dirty work.

But once again Israeli strategy (state terrorism pure and simple) backfired. Israel’s 2006 war united the Lebanese (more or less) and Hezbollah came out of it stronger not weaker. (It’s worth remembering that Hezbollah would not have come into existence if Israel had not invaded Lebanon all the way to Beirut in 1982 and remained in occupation of the south. Just as Hamas would not have come into existence if Israel had been prepared to do the two-state business with Arafat).

Fast forward to today.

Israel’s leaders are itching to have another go at Hezbollah and hopefully destroy it. But there’s a problem. Hezbollah today is much better armed than it was in 2006. It has rockets and (some say) missiles, primarily for defense, but which could do a great deal of damage to, and in, Israel’s cities including Tel Aviv.

The soft underbelly of Israeli public opinion would not like that. For most Israeli Jews, wars are only great if they are relatively cost free in terms of casualties on their side. So if Hezbollah succeeded in making Israel pay a high price in terms of IDF forces and civilians killed and wounded, it’s by no means impossible that, for the first time ever, many Israeli Jews would seriously question their government’s policy of living by the sword.

From an Israeli leader’s perspective, that must not happen.

So before they go to war again, Israel’s leaders (and their unquestioning American allies) know they need to discredit Hezbollah in order to greatly improve the prospects of other Lebanese forces making effective common cause with Zionism to destroy Nasrallah and all he and his movement represent.

I must confess, and do so cheerfully, that one thing above all others has always puzzled me about the circumstances of the explosion that killed Rafik Hariri and 22 others. His wealth and contacts would have ensured the he had state of the art electronic protection when he was on the move. Taking it out or in some way neutralizing it surely had to be an inside job? (That’s a question not a statement). Who could have had the necessary access?

A Mossad agent? Very possible.

A CIA agent? Again, very possible.

A Hezbollah agent? Unlikely, or so it seems to me.

Ironically this sudden western awakening to the plight of Christian Arabs comes at a time when all Arabs, both Muslims and Christians, are crushed by U.S. and Israeli military occupation or foreign political hegemony, but worse still, when they are in the grip of a social upheaval in the very states that are by will or by coercion loyal to this alliance, where unbalanced development and an unemployment rate more than double the world average are pushing masses onto the streets to challenge the legitimacy of their own pro–west governments. Exactly at this time, when Arab masses need their “social” unity for national liberation, sovereignty, liberty and freedom, a European campaign is being waged to divide them along religious and sectarian lines.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy — who, on December 9, 2009, wrote in Le Monde defending a Switzerland vote banning Muslim mosques from building minarets and made a national fuss on banning less than two thousand French citizens from wearing Niqab — said on January 6 that he “cannot accept” what he described as “religious cleansing” of Arab Christians. His Foreign Minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, wrote to the EU’s foreign affairs baroness, Catherine Ashton, asking for the union to draw up a plan of action in response. France took the initiative to call a meeting of the UN Security Council last November 9 to discuss international protection of Iraqi Christians. On December 22, Italy’s foreign Minister Franco Frattini said his country was presenting a resolution to the UN to condemn their “persecution.” Together with his French, Polish and Hungarian counterparts, Frattini wrote a joint letter to Ashton asking her to table the issue at the foreign ministers meeting on January 31 and to consider taking “concrete measures” to protect them. On December 17, the German Bundestag passed a resolution defending the freedom of religion around the world, but viewed with “great concern” the resolution of the UN Human Rights Council on March 25 last year against the “defamation of religions” because it “undermines the existing human rights understanding.”

The European political reaction sounds excessively selective in its concern over an allegedly missing right of the freedom of religion of the Christian minority in a region where civil and human rights for the Muslim majority are missing thanks in the first place for the support the regional governing regimes, which confiscate these same rights, receive from the U.S.–European alliance, and the European selectivity allegedly in defense of the “threatened” existence of the Christian Arab minorities speaks louder when it is compared with the deafening European silence over the threatened existence of the Arab and Islamic cultural identities of the majority, let alone the European incitement against both identities, a double standard that explicitly invokes suspicious questions about the credibility and sincerity of the European “rights” concerns and about the real political goals behind these pronounced concerns. For example, more than 300 mosques were attacked, some of them of a UNESCO World Heritage Center standards, hundreds of Muslim clerics were murdered, millions of Muslims were forced either to migrate internally or immigrate externally in the U.S.–occupied Iraq, and the plight of Iraqi Christians has been, and still is, merely a side show of the overall destruction of the whole state there, but the European rights consciousness did not, and still does not, find it worth a similar call for defense and protection.

Unfortunately, this traditional European divide–and–rule policy in the Arab world, as it was the case for centuries, is today finding ample papal blessing from the Vatican to justify itself, not in the eyes of Arabs, but in the eyes of its own audiences. President Sarkozy’s whistle blower cry this January 6 that Christians in the Arab–Islamic world are victims of a planned ‘religious cleansing,” came on the backdrop of the Vatican’s Pope Benedict XVI repeated call on the world leaders to rise up for the protection and “defense of the Christians in the Middle East.” It is a cry fraught with the connotations of the historical precedent of the Vatican–blessed Fourth Crusade, which consisted mainly of a crusading army originating from areas within France and which was diverted from invading Egypt by sea to the sacking of Constantinople, the capital of the political and spiritual rival, the Orthodox Church, to which the overwhelming majority of Christians in the Arab–Muslim world belong, instead of “liberating” Jerusalem from Muslims.

Pope Benedict XVI’s wilful or careless indifference towards exploiting his church concerns by “secular” politicians like Sarkozy to serve their down to earth goals, or towards exacerbating Islamophobia, which, in turn, fuels Christianphobia, is reminiscent of how the older Sarkozy–type “Christ–abiding” and non–secular politicians concealed from the bulk of the crusading army a letter from Pope Innocent III, who made the new Fourth Crusade the goal of his pontificate, warning against the diversion of the crusade, forbidding any atrocities against “Christian neighbors” and threatening excommunication. In as much as the indifference of the crusader pope to carry out his threat had led to the demise of the Byzantine Empire, the fall of Constantinople in the hands of the Muslims less than three hundred years later and turning the crusades into a war against the rival church more than against the Muslims, the indifference of the present day Pope Benedict XVI is threatening to counterproductively achieve the demise of Christian existence in the “East,” which he has made, it seems, the goal of his pontificate.

Ever since the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204, Arab Christians in the Muslim world have been wary of the messages and emissaries of Rome as a cultural spearhead of foreign invasion and hegemony. Even a Catholic loyal to the Vatican like the incumbent Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, had this to tell the Israeli Haaretz exclusively four days before Benedict XVI’s “pilgrimage” to the Holy Land in September 2009: “The thing that worries me most is the speech that the pope will deliver here. One word for the Muslims and I’m in trouble; one word for the Jews and I’m in trouble. At the end of the visit the pope goes back to Rome and I stay here with the consequences.” Patriarch Twal’s fears were vindicated last week when Egypt recalled its Vatican envoy for consultations over the Pope’s remarks on Egyptian Copts: The “new statements from the Vatican” are “unacceptable interference” in Egypt’s “internal affairs,” the Egyptian foreign ministry said in a statement. Syrian analyst, Sami Moubayed, recently wrote that similar papal remarks were to the “fundamentalists .. a blessing in disguise.”

Pope Benedict XVI, since he occupied the papacy seat, seems totally insensitive to the worries of his representative in Jerusalem.  He  doesn’t seem short of words and seems careful not to miss an opportunity to utter provocative anti-Muslim pronouncements that place both his church clergy and followers on the defensive among both their Christian as well as Muslim compatriots. However, he places them in a more critical position by his helplessness to find any words or an opportunity in his latest torrential rhetoric about the protection of Christians and their plight in Holy Land itself, where they have been victims of actual ethnic and religious cleansing for more than sixty years now since the Palestinian Nakba in 1948, when the state of Israel was declared independent on the ruins of their homes.

From a regional perspective, both Christian and Muslim, the very existence of Christians is threatened, besieged and gradually cleansed by the Israeli military occupation in the Palestinian cradle of Christianity – - where Christ was born, spread the word of God, love and peace and crucified. The papal silence on this simple fact of life is much louder in the region than the Pope’s pronounced appeals for the defense and protection of Christians on the peripheries of the birthplace of Christianity, in Iraq, Egypt or Lebanon, for example, because when the center of Christian gravity crumbles in Jerusalem, the periphery supports would not hold for long and even the important St, Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican would be a pale substitute, and the center of Christian gravity in Jerusalem is almost totally Judaized, and is off limits to the Christians both in the Palestinian cradle of Christianity as well as to their brethren on the Arab and Muslim periphery, unless they are granted an Israeli military permit to visit, which is rare and very tightly selective.

Viewed from Christian regional perspective, the papal appeals for their protection could hardly be described other than contradictory, if not hypocrite, particularly in view of a Vatican’s document in July 2007, approved by Benedict XVI, which declared Catholicism as “the only true church of Christ” and “other Christian communities are either defective or not true churches.”

So, “what” Christians is Pope Benedict appealing to defend and protect? A year earlier, Coptic Pope Shenouda III denied there was any dialogue or contacts with the Vatican although thirty three years before both sides agreed to form joint committees for bilateral dialogue. With the exception of Armenian church as a late newcomer, but nonetheless an independent church, the Coptic, Orthodox, Chaldean, Assyrian, Syriac, Melkite and other Eastern communions have existed and coexisted among, and with, Arabs since the earliest days of Christianity, because they are Arabs either by ethnicity or by culture and they are the overwhelming majority of Christians in the Middle East and an integral part of the Arab society.

Islamophobia is warning that Muslims are “returning” to Islam, but is it not top on the agenda of Pope Benedict XVI to return Europe to Christianity? “We must reject both secularism and fundamentalism,” the Pope said in his annual address on Christmas Day, but is it not secularism that the Pope, Europe and the U.S. are preaching now to de-Arabise and de-Islamise Arabs? This double standard ironical western contradiction deprives their calls for the protection of Arab Christians of whatever credibility it might still have in the Arab eyes. Their “protection” will prove counterproductive sooner or later. Christianphobia that fuels anti– Christian blind terror is an already active byproduct.

The ‘Church of Islam’

Commenting on the Synod of Middle East Christian leaders that convened in the Vatican last October, the spiritual leader of the Melkite “Catholics,” Patriarch of the Church of Antioch, Gregorios III, had this to say, quoted by the Lebanese Daily Star last December: “The Synod for the Middle East is a Synod for Arab countries, for Arabs, a Synod for Arab Christians in symbiosis with their Arab society. It is a Synod for the ‘Church of the Arabs’ and ‘Church of Islam’.” The adviser to the Muslim Sunni Mufti of Lebanon, Dr. Mohammad Al–Sammak, who was invited to the Synod, recognized the Arab identity of Christians in the Middle East: “I cannot live my being Arabic without the Middle Eastern Christian Arab .. They are an integral part of the .. formation of Islamic civilization,” he told the Synod.

Politically and religiously these Christians have been on the other side of the Vatican – blessed old or modern western conquests, and politically and religiously they have been all along protected by Arabs and Muslims; otherwise, they would not have survived. Their existence is now under threat because the existence of their Arab–Islamic incubator is on the line, besieged either by direct military occupation in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan or by economic sanctions and political hegemony; their existence was not threatened when the Arab–Islamic state was an empire and a world power, nor was it threatened during the crusades despite the atrocities committed by their western co-religious crusaders, which would have invited a reprisal had it not been for the teachings of Islam, itself.

The U.S.–led world war on terror targeting mainly Arabs and Muslims is perplexing western pro–law, peace and human rights audiences by smoke–screening their governments’ military adventures and modern crusades, which is the real action that created terrorism as the only possible reaction expected by the overpowered nations. However, the invading creator and the created terrorists in their bloody divide are smoke–screening also any possible resurface of the forgotten Islamic covenants that protected the indigenous two thousand–year old Arab Christians since the advent of Islam in the seventh century. In the year 628 AD, a Christian delegation from St. Catherine’s Monastery, in Egypt’s Sinai, met Prophet Mohammad and requested his protection. The Prophet granted them a protection charter.

Dr. Muqtedar Khan, Director of Islamic Studies at the University of Delaware and a fellow of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, wrote this about the charter:

The document is not a modern human rights treaty but even though it was penned in 628 A.D., it clearly protects the right to property, freedom of religion, freedom of work, and security of the person. A remarkable aspect of the charter is that it imposes no conditions on Christians for enjoying its privileges. It is enough that they are Christians. They are not required to alter their beliefs, they do not have to make any payments and they do not have any obligations. This is a charter of rights without any duties! The first and the final sentence of the charter are critical. They make the promise eternal and universal. By ordering Muslims to obey it until the Day of Judgment the charter again undermines any future attempts to revoke the privileges. These rights are inalienable.

In the year 631, Prophet Muhammad received a delegation of sixty Christians from Najran in the Prophet’s mosque in Medinah, allowed them to pray in the mosque, and concluded the “covenant to the Christians of Najran” treaty which granted them religious and administrative autonomy as citizens of the Islamic State. In 637, Islamic Caliph Omar ibn al – Khattab granted the similar “Covenant of Omar” to the Patriarch of Jerusalem Sophronius.

However, neither Islamophobians nor their terrorist Islamists have any interest but to dump these Islamic ideological covenants for the protection of Arab Christians. No Arab Christian fears for his life from his Muslim neighbor or his government, but he or she definitely fears these two protagonists, who are both foreign to his history and culture. No foreign protection of Arab Christians could match the protection and solidarity they received from their Muslim compatriots both in Iraq and Egypt following the bombings of a church in Baghdad on October 31 and a church in Alexandria on New Year Eve. In the latter case there were reports of Muslim human shields to protect the Christmas religious celebrations of Egyptian Christians, let alone the solidarity statements by both outlawed Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya and the Muslim Brotherhood and the thousands of police deployed for the same purpose, in a remarkable show of national unity and historic coexistence.

The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), scheduled to meet in the UAE on January 19, will discuss the situation of Christians in member states, according to Lebanon parliamentary Speaker Nabih Berri. On this background, there are also reports that Egypt will ask the Arab League economic summit this month to discuss foreign, and, in particular, western interference in Arab Affairs. European offers of protection are already backlashing.

The only real threat to the existence of Arab Christians showed for the first time when the European colonialism first, then the U.S. imperialism, self–appointed western powers as their protectors. It is noteworthy that in both the Iraqi and Egyptian cases the native Christian Arabs are now paying the heavy price of the U.S. anti–Pan–Arabism of both the late Jamal Abdul Nasser and Saddam Hussein. Their plight started with the forcing of pro–U.S. regimes in both countries.

To describe the latest attacks against Christians as a plan of “religious cleansing,” as President Sarkozy has done, suggests a persecution that doesn’t exist; this is “not the case in the Middle East at the moment,” it is “not supported by the wider community,” said Fiona McCallum of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, who is a specialist on the Christian communities in the Middle East, adding: “It’s important to also note that immigration takes place from the region from both Christians and Muslims as well.”

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) said “Gaza remains sealed-off from the outside world (after) the single most brutal event in” the occupation’s history, and “impunity for war crimes prevails.”

To date, victims’ rights have been unaddressed. International law remains ignored. Indisputable war crimes were airbrushed from history. Israeli war criminals were shielded from justice. Only three lower-ranking soldiers were convicted for war-related offenses. One was for credit card theft, two others for using a nine year old boy as a human shield. Israeli government officials who ordered war, generals and top commanders who planned and implemented it, and other complicit figures were uncharged and unpunished.

World leader silence condoned them. The rule of law was trashed for imperial Israel, including allowing it to slowly suffocate over 1.5 million Gazans. Moreover, a newly released WikiLeaks cable says Israel plans major wars on Gaza and Lebanon. More on them below.

Preventing Gaza’s Reconstruction

On December 21, the Gisha Legal Center for Freedom of Movement asked “Who will rebuild Gaza?” Six months after Israel’s cabinet decision to ease closure, a new Gisha report headlined “Reconstructing the Closure: Will recent changes to the closure policy be enough to build in Gaza,” saying:

Despite the cabinet’s decision, Israel continues to ban the entrance of steel, gravel and cement, (essential) items which are not considered to be dual-use according to international standards.” Narrow exceptions only were allowed with “burdensome bureaucratic strings attached.

For most items, Israel bogusly claims Hamas may use construction materials to build bunkers and “enhance its military capability” in other ways. As a result, little rebuilding progress has been made. Gaza remains in ruins, and over 1.5 million Palestinians struggle daily to cope.

For example, from July 6 – December 6, 2010, only 744 truckloads of cement, gravel and steel entered Gaza for international projects. In addition, up to 900 tons of concrete (equaling 36 truckloads), 300 tons of steel, or 250 tons of gravel move through tunnels on any given day. Though way short of enough, whatever’s supplied helps. In contrast, prior to June 2007 (when siege began), over 5,000 truckloads of these materials came in monthly. Israel is determined to suffocate Gazans, committing the equivalent of slow-motion genocide.

Ongoing Gaza Displacement

On December 27, the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights new report headlined, “On-going Displacement: Gaza’s Displaced Two Years after the War,” saying:

Two years after Cast Lead, “tens of thousands of Gaza residents continue to live a life of displacement” because of Israel’s suffocating siege. As a result, they’ve gotten little “meaningful relief (or) their right to adequate housing.”

After Cast Lead ended, UN Under Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs, John Holmes, said it’s “absolutely critical that (construction) material(s) be allowed into Gaza on a regular and hopefully free basis.”

For over two years, Israel’s prevented them, collectively punishing tens of thousands of Gazans, unable to rebuild their homes and lives. Gaza’s Ministry of Housing and Public Works said 51,553 homes were destroyed or damaged. Of these, 3,336 were completed demolished and 4,021 sustained major damages.

Most aid Gazans got came from Hamas, the UN Development Program (UNDP), and UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Other agencies also provided materials, equipment and food. Also, families whose homes were totally destroyed got cash. Refugee homeless families received about $5,000 from Hamas and a comparable amount from UNWRA. Others whose properties sustained major damage got about $2,500 from Hamas and another $3,000 from UNWRA.

Non-refugee families were also helped, amounts based on whether their homes were entirely or partially destroyed. Families who lost properties have been most harmed, needing alternate shelter, mostly in leased apartments until their homes are rebuilt.

Based on a random survey from its “home demolitions” database among families whose homes were entirely destroyed, Al Mezan estimates:

– 93.3% of families haven’t gotten rebuilding help so must live elsewhere;

– 13.3% rebuilt their homes; 86.6% can’t do it because they didn’t receive enough help;

– 56.6% have rented homes or apartments; of those, 41.2 % (23.3% of the total) get regular assistance, covering their full rent expense; another 35.3% receive only partial help;  33.3% get no help for rent;

– 10% live in houses other than their own;  6.7% live with relatives or their families;  10% live in tents;

– 30% had to move their children to new schools;

– 66.7% said alternative housing doesn’t provide comfort and privacy like their own; and

– 86.7% are dissatisfied with how service providers handled home demolition and destruction problems.

A second survey among families whose homes were partially destroyed showed findings only modestly better, except that:

– 83.3% were living in their own residences, despite damage; and

– 43.3% were dissatisfied with service providers, half the percentage of homeless families.

Overall, however, Gaza remains in crisis, ongoing since June 2007, and exacerbated by Cast Lead destruction, atrocities, regular assaults, little concern by the international community, and no accountability for Israeli war criminals. Occupied Palestine’s history shows sustained justice denied, especially in Gaza under siege.

Another Lebanon and Gaza War?

A disclaimer: nations like Israel and America regularly prepare operational plans for wars that never are fought. Why? So they’re ready in case they are. For example, America’s Afghanistan war began on October 7, 2001, four weeks post-9/11, a conflict that took months to plan.

It’s also true for Israel’s 2006 Lebanon war and Cast Lead. Neither was impromptu following pretexts cited to launch them. They were in place many months in advance as are preparations for all wars. In other words, plans alone don’t automatically mean war. Most often, they don’t. However, given the belligerent history of America and Israel, information suggesting more war can’t be discounted. Too many previous ones were waged so sooner or later expect another.

Juan Cole writes regularly for his Informed Comment site, on January 2 headlining “WikiLeaks: Israel Plans Total War on Lebanon, Gaza,” saying:

Norway’s Aftenposten newspaper “summarized an Israeli military briefing by Israeli Chief of Staff Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi” for US congressional members over a year ago, saying:

The memo on the talks….as well as numerous other documents from the same period, to which Aftenposten has gained access, leave a clear message: The Israeli military is forging ahead at full speed with preparations for a new war in the Middle East.

Cole emphasized “serious and specific” preparations, not contingency planning. US cables quoted Ashkenazi saying:

I’m preparing the Israeli army for a major war, since it is easier to scale down to a smaller operation than to do the opposite….In the next war Israel cannot accept any restrictions on warfare in urban areas.

Neither did Israel’s last two conflicts in 2006 against Lebanon and Cast Lead, under its “Dayiya Doctrine,” named after the Beirut suburb destroyed in summer 2006. It reflected how future wars would be fought as IDF Northern Command head Gabi Eisenkot explained at the time, saying:

What happened in the Dayiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. We will apply disproportionate force at the heart of the enemy’s weak spot (civilians and non-military targets) and cause great damage and destruction. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages (towns or cities), they are military bases. This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.

Cast Lead (like Lebanon 2006) showed that civilians and non-military targets are attacked freely without cause to inflict maximum damage, deaths, injuries and human misery – “Dayiya.”

Whether or not true, Ashkenazi and America’s State Department claim Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah amassed large stockpiles of rockets, threatening Israel. In fact, no nation endangered Israel since the 1973 war, and given its dominant regional strength, none does so now. Other nations’ weapons are purely defensive and no match for Israel, nuclear-armed and dangerous.

Cole observes that Israel “could have a peace treaty with Syria and Lebanon tomorrow by giving back the Golan Heights and the Shebaa Farms….” For decades, Palestinians have also sought peace, but Israel chooses conflict. So does America.

As a result, Cole fears that Washington’s support for Israeli belligerence will incite inevitable blowback, “finally finish(ing) off the (few remaining) civil liberties enshrined in the American Constitution.” Already on life support, they need only a shove to be cut off.

Of course, it is also about other scars – the scar of the land:

Now, that ancient village with its walls made of secrets and trees planted in blood, looked inanimate. Around Jerusalem and in the West Bank, settlements on every hilltop – with their manicured green lawns and red roofs metastasizing into the valleys like an earth rash – contrasted cruelty to the crumbling Arab homes where sewage from these settlements drained and where settlers often dumped their garbage.

And it is about the scar that is Zionism itself, with its ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population, an ethnic cleansing that consisted of massacres in about 30 Arab villages, with two to three thousand massacred, and the subsequent bulldozing and destruction of more than 500 such villages. And it is about the scaring of Palestine and of its people. And it is about the scaring of humanity with Zionism’s brutality and of its ongoing destruction – genocide really – of another people’s identity and culture. Israel has trouble accepting that Palestine is the home of the Palestinian people and simultaneously claiming legitimacy for itself, as well it should, as the claims are incompatible.

The author says of the Israelis what she claims the Israelis already know:

… that their history is contrived from the bones and traditions of Palestinians. The Europeans who came knew neither hummus not falafel but later proclaimed them “authentic Jewish cuisine.” They claimed the villas of Qatamon as “old Jewish homes” even though, hard as they tried, they could not duplicate the Arab architecture that arched every which way in the ceilings, staircases, windows, and doors. They had no old photographs or ancient drawings of their ancestry living on the land, loving it, and planting it. They arrived from foreign nations and uncovered coins in Palestine’s earth from the Canaanites, the Romans, the Ottomans, and then sold them as their own “ancient Jewish artifacts.” They came to Jaffa and found oranges the size of watermelons and said, “behold! The Jews are known for their oranges.” But those oranges were the culmination of centuries of Palestinian farmers perfecting the art of citrus-growing.

We follow Amal from childhood as her life intersects the major events of Palestinian history since 1948 and simultaneously we empathize with her suffering in the loss of her ancestral home in the village of Ein Hod and the loss, one by one of the members of her family to Israeli bullets and Israeli aerial bombardments, or in the case of David, her baby brother, his disappearance into the hands of an Israeli soldier who wants him as a gift to his childless wife. We experience Amal’s loss of her mother to insanity resulting from the death of her husband who resisted the advance of the Jewish forces toward their village and the disappearance of her baby boy, to where, she never knows.

Palestinian history is projected onto to the family of Amal as it is, in reality, projected onto so many Palestinian families.

At what price, Israel? What price does the world pay for Israel’s existence?

Ms Abuldawa takes us through the 1948 expulsion of the Palestinian villagers from Ein Hod as we hide with the child, Amal, underneath her home which is destroyed over her. And we watch the villagers in long lines carrying their life possessions away from their village. Pictures of these processions from 1948 have survived, one is displayed on the cover of Benny Morris’s book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. Another on the cover of Ilan Pappe’s book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. And another, on the cover of Nur Masalha’s book, The Expulsion of the Palestinians.

We may read from historian, Benny Morris (Operation Dani):

About noon on 13 July, Operation Dani HQ informed IDF General Staff/Operations: Lydda police fort has been captured. [The troops] are busy expelling the inhabitants. … Lydda’s inhabitants were forced to walk eastward to the Arab legion lines; many of Ramle’s inhabitants were ferried in trucks or buses. Clogging the roads … tens of thousands of refugees marched, gradually shedding their worldly goods along the way. It was a hot summer day. The Arab chroniclers, such as Sheikh Muhammed Nimr al Khatib, claimed that hundreds of children died in the march, from dehydration and disease. One Israeli witness described the spoor: the refugee column ‘to begin with [jettisoned] utensils and furniture and, in the end, bodies of men, women, and children.

Now in the Jenin refugee camp, she recounts the brief surge of optimism upon reading in the press of the arrival to Palestine of UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, who was sent to Palestine by the Secretary General in order to produce a recommendation as an alternative to the partition resolution with which the UN was then having second thoughts. And days later she read in the same press of his assassination by the Jewish terrorist group, Stern Gang, on the orders of its head, Yitzhak Shamir who later was to become Israel’s Prime Minister. Count Folke Bernadotte had in previous years negotiated the release of 25,000 Jewish prisoners from Nazi concentrations camps in Germany. Murder at the hands of Jewish terrorists was his reward.

The author relates the 1967 War – Israel’s takeover of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and its further wave of ethnic cleansing, consisting of another 300,000 refugees, and, of her brother, Yousef, she says:

As the conquest in 1948 did for Hasan [her father], Israel’s attack in 1967 and subsequent occupation of the West Bank left his son Yousef with a tentative destiny. The grip of Israeli occupation wrapped around his throat and would not let up. Soldiers ruled their lives arbitrarily. Who could or could not pass was up to them, and not according to any protocol. Who was slapped or not was decided on a whim. Who was forced to strip and who was not – the decision was made on the spot. …

Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. … They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation. …

But the heart must grieve. Sometimes pain emerged as joy. Sometimes it was difficult to tell the difference. …

Of the days leading up to the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israel, the author tells us that Israel had been striking Lebanon to provoke the PLO into retaliating with Israeli defense minister, Ariel Sharon vowing to wipe out the resistance once and for all, and in July 1981, Israeli jets killed two hundred civilians in a single raid on Beirut. By April 1982, we are told, the UN had recorded 2,125 Israeli violations of Lebanese airspace and 625 violations of Lebanese territorial waters.

I recall, and recorded, the bombardment of Beirut in the summer of 1982. It lasted two months, day after day, with, what looked to me of about 250 dead per day with hospitals, schools and apartment buildings destroyed and with people being killed inside of hospitals from the bombardment.

The author tells us that by August, there were 17, 500 civilians killed, 40,000 wounded, 400,000 homeless (10% of Lebanon’s population), and 100,000 without shelter. “Prostrate Lebanon lay devastated and raped without an infrastructure for food or water.”

The Israelis said, “We are here for peace. This is a peace mission.”

The author quotes from veteran Middle East journalist, Robert Fisk, in Pity the Nation, describing Israeli’s use of phosphorus artillery shells, one more Israeli violation of international humanitarian law:

Dr Shammaa’s story was s dreadful one and her voice broke and she told it. ‘I had to take the babies and put them in buckets of water to put out the flames,’ she said. ‘When I took them out half and hour later, they were still burning. Even in the mortuary, they smouldered for hours.’ Next morning, Amal Shammaa took the tiny corpses out of the mortuary for burial. To her horror, they again burst into flames.

The Israeli invasion and occupation of the Arab capital, Beirut, was capped by the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in central west Beirut.

The author says:

The PLO withdrew from Lebanon only after an explicit guarantee from US envoy Phillip Habib and Alexander Haig that the United States of America, with the authority and promise of it President, Ronald Reagan, would ensure the safety of the women and children left defenseless in the refugee camps. Phillip Habib personally signed the document.

Thus the PLO was exiled to Tunisia carrying the written promise of the United States. The fate of those I loved lay in the folds of that Ronald Reagan promise.

She continues:

On September 16, in defiance of the ceasefire, Ariel Sharon’s army circled the refugee camp of Sabra and Shatila, where Fatima and Falasteen [the wife and daughter of Amal’s brother, Yousef] slept defenselessly without Yousef. Israeli soldiers set up checkpoints, barring the exist of the refugees and allowed their Phalange allies into the camp. Israeli soldiers, perched on rooftops, watched through binoculars during the day and lit the night sky with flares to guide the path of the Phalange, who went from shelter to shelter in the refugee camps. Two days later the first western journalist entered the camp and bore witness.

Possibly, as many as 2000 people were either killed in the refugee camps or were taken away in trucks never to be seen again.

She quotes again from Robert Fisk:

They were everywhere, in the road, the laneways, in the back yards and broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry and across the top of garbage tips. When we had seen a hundred bodies, we stopped counting. Down every alleyway, there were corpses – women, young men, babies and grandparents –lying together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had been knifed or machined-gunned to death. Each corridor through the rubble produced more bodies. The patients at the Palestinian hospital had disappeared after gunmen ordered the doctors to leave. Everywhere, we found signs of hastily dug mass graves.

Even while we were there, amid the evidence of such savagery, we could see the Israelis watching us. From the top of the tower block to the west, we could see them staring at us through field glasses, scanning back and forth across the streets of corpses, the lenses of the binoculars sometimes flashing in the sun as their gaze ranged through the camp. Loren Jenkins [of the Washington Post] immediately realized that the Israeli defense minister would have to bear some of the responsibility for this horror. ‘Sharon!’ he shouted. ‘That fucker Sharon! This is Deir Yassin all over again.’

What we found inside the Palestinian Shatila camp at ten o’clock on the morning of 18 September 1982 did not quite beggar description, although it would have been easier to retell in the cold prose of a medical examination. … these people, hundreds of them, had been shot down unarmed. This was a mass killing, an incident – how easily we used the word ‘incident’ in Lebanon – that was also an atrocity. It went beyond even what the Israelis would have in other circumstances called a terrorist atrocity. It was a war crime.

… these were women lying in houses with their skirts torn up to their waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies – blackened babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24 hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition – tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded US army ration tins, Israeli army medical equipment, and empty bottles of whisky.

Down a laneway to our right, no more than 50 yards from the entrance, there lay a pile of corpses. There were more than a dozen of them, young men whose arms and legs had been wrapped around each other in the agony of death. All had been shot at point blank range through the cheek, the bullet tearing away a line of flesh up to the ear and entering the brain. Some had vivid crimson or black scars down the left side of their throats. One had been castrated, his trousers torn open and a settlement of flies throbbing over his torn intestines. The eyes of these young men were open. The youngest was only 12 or 13 years old.

On the other side of the main road, up a track through the debris, we found the bodies of five women and several children. The women were middle-aged and their corpses lay draped over a pile of rubble. One lay on her back, her dress torn open and the head of a little girl emerging from behind her. The girl had short, dark curly hair, her eyes were starring at us and there was a frown on her face. She was dead. Someone had slit open the woman’s stomach, cutting sideways and then upwards, perhaps trying to kill her unborn child. Her eyes were wide open, her dark face frozen in horror.

Ms Abulhawa weaves this historical material of the last paragraph into the story. The woman and child become Amal’s sister-in-law and niece causing her brother, Joseph, to blow himself up along with the 63 persons, including many CIA operatives, at the US Embassy in Beirut. Blowback?

Forgive me, Amal. It is time they taste a small dose of the heaps they have fed us all of our lives.

–Yousef

It is actually unlikely that the suicide bomber who hit the US Embassy was a Palestinian from the occupied territories. Though no one took responsibility for the attack, a new group at the time calling itself Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attack some months later of the Marine barracks near the Beirut airport killing 247 US Marines. Calling themselves, ‘soldiers of God yearning for martyrdom’ the caller said that their goal was an Islamic Republic for Lebanon and the expulsion of the Israelis and their supporters. The Palestinian struggle has been largely secular for most of its history.

In addition to the US broken promises to prevent Israel from invading West Beirut and to protect the refugee camps, which also included Shiite Muslims from southern Lebanon who had taken refuge there after the Israeli invasion, the US had abandoned its neutral stance when the battleship, Virginia, anchored off the coast, shelled Muslim-leftish coalition forces whom it claimed were threatening Lebanese army positions. The destruction of the embassy and its personnel also had the effect of scuttling the signing of a US and Israeli sponsored Lebanese-Israeli peace treaty, likely the main purpose of the bombing.

The State Department, who concluded that the bombing was the work of Hezbollah, was probably right in its conclusion that the bombing sprang from the fermenting soil of the southern Lebanese Shiites but was most likely wrong in the belief that it was Hezbollah which was not even fully formed until 1985.

But ‘blowback’ still. Such a massacre cannot go unanswered, not in the maelstrom of an Israeli invasion which left Lebanon raped with as many as 20,000 killed thanks the American acquiescence to the invasion.

There is the children-instigated Intifada begun in 1988, in which her lifelong friend’s son looses the ability to speak and can no longer look anyone in the eye after arrest and presumably torture under Prime Minister Rabin’s policy of “might, force and beatings.”

The book concludes with Israel’s 2002 massacre at the Jenin refugee camp which was part of the invasion and trashing of West Bank cities during that spring. It does not, however, capture the barbarity and devastation that occurred, and which is comparable to a highly mechanized modern army equipped with Apache and Cobra US made helicopters equipped with air to surface missiles and F16 jet fighters destroying a housing project of largely impoverished people with a handful of defenders armed with only rifles.

A book coming closer to capturing the reality of the massacre is Ramzy Baroud’s book, Searching Jenin. That book consists of personal interviews with about 100 residents of the refugee camp who endured the invasion plus the testimonies of twenty of so international who managed to enter and view there camp some days afterward. Together they describe massive shelling and bulldozing of buildings, men, women, and children being shot by snipers, men being executed with their hands tied behind their backs. One of the internationals whose testimony appears is that of Susan Abulhawa herself.

I found it somewhat improbable that Amal would return to Jenin with her teenage daughter on the eve of Israel’s invasion of West Bank cities and thus put her own life as well as her daughter’s in peril.

I found the style fresh and sometime lyrical and sometimes dreamy as befits an author who also writes poetry.

An interesting and enjoyable book grounded in facts which are a part of the history of the Palestinian people. Perhaps it will reach readers who would not otherwise read through the scholarly historical works.

Ms Abulhawa says in the book Searching Jenin:

Though the heroism of Jenin’s fighters may be perverted by propaganda, history will bow to these lightly armed men who fought until their last breath with an indomitable will and held off a mighty foe for ten days – four days longer than five armies were able to do in the past They are the true sons of the land. Having walked in the wake of what they died trying to prevent, I am changed.