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Hezbollah, the United States
and the Context Behind Israel's Offensive on Lebanon
As Israeli warplanes continue to bomb Lebanon and Hezbollah
fires rockets into northern Israel we get context on the crisis
with two analysts: As'ad AbuKhalil, a Lebanese professor of
political science at California State University and Chris
Hedges, a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and the former
Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times.
Lecture date: 07/17/06
Democracy Now!
AMY GOODMAN: As we continue our discussion about
what’s happening in Lebanon, we turn to Chris Hedges, journalist
and author, foreign correspondent for the New York Times
for many years, but now currently senior fellow at the Nation
Institute. War Is a Force Which Gives Us Meaning is one
of his books. We have also heard that the U.S. embassy in Beirut
has just been evacuated, in addition to the news of Israeli
ground troops moving into Southern Lebanon and an Israeli plane
being shot down, a fighter jet, by Hezbollah. Chris Hedges, your
response.
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, this is the culmination of
essentially five years of refusal by the Bush administration to
do anything to keep alive the peace process. And what we see now
is the result of that. We have left extremists on all wings --
Palestinian, Lebanese and Israeli -- to dictate the language by
which the conflicts are set, and that language is a language of
violence. There is no other language now. And unless there is a
force that steps in to try and moderate this self-immolation on
the part of all of these extremist groups, the Middle East is
going to spin into a death spiral, which could have disastrous
consequences, not only for Lebanese, for Israelis, for
Palestinians, but ultimately for us, as well.
You know, every day the conflict is ratcheted up on the part
of Israel, with the news that you just read about ground troops
going in, and there are fears that, you know, because Hezbollah
is such an illusive target -- it’s not a conventional force --
because these sort of wild strikes and large numbers of
killings, I think, are ultimately ineffective, because the
weaponry that Hezbollah is now deploying is weaponry that they
have not deployed in the past -- I mean, the downing of an F-16,
the sinking of an Israeli gun boat, the dropping of rockets on
Haifa, and we hear rumors that they may have weaponry that can
reach as far as the outskirts of Tel Aviv, there is a kind of --
you know, we have opened a kind of Pandora's box, which always
happens in war. And now we’re just hanging on by the tail.
AMY GOODMAN: As’ad AbuKhalil, a professor at
California [State University], Stanislaus, visiting at UC
Berkeley, you’ve just returned from Lebanon. Did you see any of
this coming?
AS’AD ABUKHALIL: Well, yes, I have returned from
Lebanon only a week ago or less, and I have met and interviewed
a whole number of people, including the leader of Hezbollah,
Hassan Nasrallah. And I must confess to you that, no, there was
nothing in the air about what was coming, and that is because
these events were not planted in Lebanon and did not originate
inside the country, but outside. I must begin by dissenting by
the comments of Chris Hedges, and this is one of the frustrating
things watching these events here in the United States, and I
don't want to talk anything about the U.S. government or about
the mainstream media. I want to talk about progressives and
their stances, people like The Nation magazine's
editorial, about the words of Chris Hedges this morning.
He talks about the death of the peace process. No, no, no.
This is not because the peace process was not ongoing. This is
the peace process, Mr. Hedges. This is part of what the United
States has been doing since the beginning of the so-called peace
process, to subcontract the subjugation of the Arabs and all
those who defend against Israeli occupation in the area. I mean,
he speaks about the spiral of violence, extremists on both
sides. All this language is always intended to camouflage and
hide and disguise the aggressor, the nature of the aggressor.
Let me put the context for this audience here, because a lot
of people have been analyzing this conflict in terms of an
outside conspiracy. On the right, you have people like George W.
Bush, among others, blaming it all on Iran. On the left, you
have people like Robert Fisk, who believe this is all about a
Syrian conspiracy. Yet the truth resides in an article yesterday
by Robin Wright in the Washington Post. If there is a
conspiracy in all of this, it is an American, Israeli, Saudi
conspiracy that has been in planning for years in order to
disarm Hezbollah as part of the 1559 United Nations Security
Council resolution, and we are seeing the implementation of that
resolution by force.
But we have to remind the audience about something: how
Israel propaganda doesn't get updated. In 1982, I barely
survived an Israeli invasion of the country. Back then, the
Israelis were saying, “We are not against Lebanon. We just want
to expel the PLO out of Lebanon.” Now, they are saying the same,
with one difference: Hezbollah is the Lebanese population here.
I am from South Lebanon. I tell you that the entire population
of South Lebanon stands behind Hezbollah, whether you like it or
not. My 14-year-old nephew has been raised by secular leftists,
like my family is, and yet he is now a passionate, enthusiastic
supporter of Hezbollah. So when Israel said they want to drive
them away from South Lebanon, what are they going to do? We’re
talking about extermination of them?
And for people who talk about the beginning of this in the
arrest and capture of these two Israeli occupation soldiers, we
have to remember Israel has not been sitting idly by. Israel has
been violating Lebanese sovereignty for the last several years,
long after its so-called partial withdrawal from South Lebanon
in May of 2000. Israel violates Lebanese earth space. They
kidnap shepherds and fishermen from the area where I come from,
which is Tyre, at will. Some of these fishermen never come, some
of them are killed. Plus, there are demands that all the
Lebanese have, including the release of Lebanese prisoners held
in Israeli jail, the fact that Israel has refused over the last
several years all pressures and demands to give Lebanon, through
the United Nations, a list of the 400,000 land mines that Israel
has planted during its occupation in that region.
And when people on the left, like the editorial of The
Nation magazine this week, an awful editorial, when they
speak about -- as if this is about the ideology of Hezbollah.
No, when we leftists speak about what’s going on, it is not out
of sympathy for the ideology of Hezbollah. First of all, Israel
is not launching a war on the ideology of Hezbollah. It is
launching a war, as Rania put it very eloquently, on the whole
civilian population of Lebanon. This is exactly what we are
talking about.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Chris Hedges.
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, I certainly did not mean to imply
in any way that, you know, there we should ascribe equal amounts
of moral blame to each side. Israel is clearly to blame here,
both in terms of what is happening in Gaza and what is now
happening in Lebanon. On the other hand, this has been a long
process of severe repression in Gaza and the West Bank, a kind
of Africanization of the Palestinian people, reducing them to
subsistence level. Gaza has become virtually a giant walled
prison for 1.1 million Palestinians, and that kind of abuse,
that kind of repression, in the absence of international
condemnation and in the absence of any attempt on the part of
the United States to intervene and create a more humane
situation for the Palestinian, breeds extremism. It breeds an
extremist response. And these groups attempt to give back to the
oppressor, albeit on a much smaller scale, what the oppressor
has been meting out to them for years and years and years.
And so, while I sympathize with the argument that was just
made, I do believe that this unchecked response on the part of
Israel has fueled a movement where we now have two apocalyptic
groups on either side essentially speaking in the language of
violence, with large numbers of innocent people caught in the
middle. And this is a tragedy that I think was a long time
coming. I certainly do blame -- I lay the fault of this at the
feet of the Israelis.
And just as I think that Israel had a large hand in creating
Hezbollah after the invasion of Lebanon, it had a very large
hand in creating Hamas. When I first went to Gaza in 1988, Hamas
was a very marginal force. Fatah had almost complete control of
the sympathy of the populace and certainly the power structure.
So, while I don't in any way want to let Israel off the hook,
I think what we have done, and essentially by our negligence, is
-- and by standing aside -- and I’m speaking, of course, of the
United States -- is empowered these extremist forces, and we now
have a kind of Ahab-like self-immolation that is taking place in
the Middle East, and there seems to be no outside power,
certainly not coming from the Bush administration or Washington,
willing to step in and speak with any kind of reason or sanity.
AMY GOODMAN: The issue of the U.S. opposing a
ceasefire in Lebanon.
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, this is exactly the point that I’m
trying to make. You know, they have essentially washed their
hands and refused -- I mean, Washington is probably the one
force that can step in -- and not always successfully, as we’ve
seen in the past -- and bring some kind of restraint to Olmert's
hand, but Washington's refusal to do that thrusts us in an
incredibly dangerous environment, where there is no one to stay
the hand of the Israeli government. There are no checks, there
are no restraints. We don't know how far they’re going to go.
I mean, there are rumors or fears that, of course, they may
actually make attacks against Syria. They buzzed -- you know,
Israeli warplanes have sort of done flyovers of the house of the
Syrian president, and when you listen to the rhetoric out of
Jerusalem, it is all about stopping -- I’m not saying that the
rhetoric is why they’re in Lebanon, but the rhetoric is about
the weapon shipments that they claim are coming from Syria and
Iran into Hezbollah, and that’s why they say that they are
carrying out these massive air strikes and massive attacks
against Lebanon.
And, you know, I think we have to be clear that this has to
fail. Hezbollah is not a conventional military force. There is
no infrastructure to destroy to speak of. Their rockets are --
the rockets that they fire are in caches and wooden crates lying
all over Southern Lebanon. They may be able to target them after
they’re fired, but we’re not fighting a conventional war. Israel
is trying to fight a conventional war, but I think it’s doomed,
and as the attacks continue and if there are more waves of
rocket attacks -- and we think they have about 12,000, they have
probably fired about 1,000 -- I mean, if these things keep
coming and Israel, in their frustration, is allowed to continue
to accelerate the aggression, who knows where it will go?
AMY GOODMAN: As’ad AbuKhalil, Hezbollah is saying free
Lebanese prisoners in exchange for the capture of the Israeli
soldiers. Who are these prisoners?
AS’AD ABUKHALIL: Well, I mean, there are at least
three prisoners that we know of. The longest serving one is a
Lebanese Druze, in fact, who in the 1970s joined a Palestinian
organization, because he was, like many Lebanese at the time,
enthusiastic in lending out support for the Palestinians. The
brother of this one, Samir Quntar, is now head of a movement
that tries to bring attention to the plight of his brother. He
is not a member of Hezbollah. He is a leftist, and I met him in
the last trip. And his cause is well known all around Lebanon.
But it is not only about that. I mean, this is why so many
people like me in the Arab world level charges of racism at many
in the West, including on the left, because they seem to
subscribe to the terminology, as I think your guest does, of the
prevailing governments of the West, in terms of having more
weight given to the frustration, to the so-called anguish of
Israeli soldiers, than to the suffering of the civilian
populations in Gaza and in Lebanon. When we speak about these
two Israeli soldiers -- and I will not name them because I’m
afraid of giving credence to the propaganda of Israel, by which
all those Israeli human lives are more valuable than Arab human
lives -- we should speak also about the entire nations that are
held in captivity, whether it’s in Gaza or whether it’s in
Lebanon today.
I don't think Israel has an intention of launching any ground
troops into Lebanon, because they prefer to just bomb the hell
out of Lebanon from there, and they are cutting all these
bridges and roads so that, I think, rules out any possibility of
invasion. And notice many people, in fact, including you, Amy,
this morning, I’m afraid, you used the word “entrance,” about
whether Israel will enter Lebanon. I mean, countries invade
other countries, they don't enter. I mean, when Hitler went to
Poland, he invaded Poland, he did not enter it. So we have to be
careful about the language we use lest it lends propaganda
credence to the aggressor.
I also want to say, so, for the Lebanese, there are the
issues of the 10,000 Palestinian prisoners held without trial by
Israel, the fact that Israel refused to release those prisoners
-- and I must say as somebody who studies the various political
movements of the region, Hassan Nasrallah, five months ago, gave
a speech and he warned, he said, “If those prisoners are not
released, we will try to get an Israeli soldier.” I mean, he
made it very clear. And if anybody believes that Israel
spontaneously improvised an invasion and bombing of the country
that we are witnessing today is somebody who absolutely doesn't
know anything about the nature of policymaking inside Israel.
So at this point, any language, it seems to me, that speaks
about the so-called cycle of violence, like the Department of
State terminology and so on, is losing an opportunity to point
the finger at the party that is doing much of the violence and
much of the killing, the one that is committing this aggression.
The United States is not sitting idly by. The United States is
not washing its hand. Its hands are dipped in the blood of the
civilians of Lebanon. The United States is supporting
wholeheartedly what’s going on. The footage of the children
being killed in Tyre, the massacre in Marwahin, in the name of
the U.S. government and many in the U.S. media, is justified
self-defense.
These will have long scars. People are going to exact
revenge. I mean, I know that in America we always think that
Israel is the only one that is entitled to take revenge. I can
guarantee you -- I mean, Chris Hedges at least admitted that
Hezbollah was born within the womb, so to speak, of the Israeli
invasion of 1982. It didn't exist prior to that. I guarantee you
a new organization is going to be born out of the agony of the
Lebanese population, and they will certainly exact revenge,
against Israel, against America and against all those who
supported this aggression, and when that occurs, the American
population, as always, and the media will say in innocence and
wonder yet again, “Why do they hate us? What have we done to
them?”
AMY GOODMAN: Professor As’ad AbuKhalil, what about the
response of the Arab countries?
AS’AD ABUKHALIL: I mean, I think that there no doubt
Arab countries are in cahoots in this particular conspiracy.
There was a meeting of Arab foreign ministers in Cairo two days
ago, and the minutes were leaked to the Arabic press, including
to As-Safir, among others, and there was a clear
intention. The Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Kuwaitis, as well
as the Saudis, primarily the Saudis, are participating in this
campaign in order to disarm and weaken Hezbollah. What they
don't know, however, is this is going to have reverberations
that is going to affect their own stability.
Just yesterday, a group of Saudi dissidents, intellectuals
from inside the country, may of whom are Shiite, released a
strong denunciation of the policies of the Saudi government.
Inside Egypt yesterday, a large group of the most well known
Egyptian writers, intellectuals, leftists, released another
statement denunciating the position of the Egyptian government,
and there were demonstrations in Jordan about that. So, of
course, they are part of the conspiracy that I speak of. The
Arab governments are working side-by-side with the United States
and with the Israelis. As far as the U.S. is concerned, and the
United Nations, of course, we have too much respect for the
audience to speak about these entities as if they are
independent operators on the world stage.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Chris Hedges, your last comment.
CHRIS HEDGES: Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, I
share his frustration with Washington. On the other hand, this
is the world that we live in. And a Washington that I think has
always been partisan towards Israel, it’s been one of the
frustrations for those of us who have spent as long as I have in
the Arab world, is not a perfect scenario. On the other hand, a
disengaged Washington, one that makes no attempt at all to
restrain anything Israel does, that never questions this
rightwing government in Israel, that never offers any kind of --
or proposes any kind of restraint is worse.
So, you know, it’s not a choice between what’s moral and
immoral, it’s a choice between what’s immoral and what’s more
immoral, sadly. And I think this disengagement on the part of
the Bush administration, while I certainly share many of the
criticisms of previous administrations, in terms of how their
favoritism towards Israel, their partisanship, their failure to
understand the Palestinians, I think we have entered a new area
where the Bush administration has washed their hands,
essentially giving Israel the green light to do anything they
want, and I think the situation is much worse, and all we have
to do is look at our television screens to see that.
AMY GOODMAN: There's a repeated charge that the
weapons clearly -- the support clearly comes from Iran and, they
say, Syria. Is this clear? Have you seen evidence presented?
CHRIS HEDGES: There is no hard evidence. I mean, you
know, you have the shell casings. But let's not forget, Amy,
that as bombs are being rained all over Lebanon, those weapons
were made in American cities and have American markings on them,
and this was something that was always made clear to me after
attacks that I witnessed by the Israeli -- by Apache helicopters
and F-16s in Gaza. I think that one of the things we have to
remember is that Hezbollah, when matched against the might of
the Israeli army, is a marginal, is virtually a nonentity, that
they may be able to drop a few Katyusha rockets on Haifa, but
they certainly -- to somehow equate the firepower of Hezbollah
with the -- you know, it’s sort of equating a howitzer and an
AK-47. There just is no match.
So, yes, there probably is support, from all we can tell,
from both -- well, from Iran and certainly through Syria, in
terms of a transit point. But trying to deal with Hezbollah as a
conventional force and trying to bomb and occupy or destroy
Lebanon as a response for the capture of these Israeli soldiers
-- and let me make just one final point, this isn't the first
time that Israeli soldiers have been captured. We’ve had a long
and painful negotiations over kidnapped Lebanese, and Israeli
has made cross-border incursions into Lebanon to capture
Lebanese for years and years and years. That’s something well
known to Lebanese and probably not as well known to other
people.
But we had, just as in January of 2004, Israel freed 436 Arab
prisoners and released the bodies of 59 Lebanese for burial in
return for an Israeli spy and the bodies of three Israeli
soldiers. So these kinds of negotiations over captured or
kidnapped Israelis are something that we have seen in the past,
and that is, of course, a more appropriate way to deal with what
happened.
AMY GOODMAN: Then why are they saying no to Hamas and
to Hezbollah this time, saying we will we will not negotiate,
when it’s known that Israel has negotiated for prisoners in the
past?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, you know, that is for, I suppose,
public consumption. I mean, I think even when they make these
swaps, they would often make these statements that they don't
make negotiations, and then they do negotiate. I mean, one sets
down a public precedent, and then what happens behind the scene,
as certainly those of us who have worked in the Middle East know
well, is often very different.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with
us. Chris Hedges, former New York Times foreign
correspondent, he is the author of the book, War Is a Force
Which Gives Us Meaning, as well as other books, also is a
Nation Institute fellow. And As’ad AbuKhalil is a professor of
political science at California State University, visiting
professor at UC Berkeley. His blog is the “Angry
Arab News Service” at angryarab.blogspot.com.
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