August 30, 2006
A week into the uneasy ceasefire in Lebanon, an Israeli battle tank retreating in navigational disarray from an engagement with Hezbollah guerrillas, drove into a minefield laid prior to the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the country in May 2000. One soldier was killed and two injured. It was a vivid illustration, even if a perverse one in which perpetrator became victim, of the legacy of decades of Israeli aggression against Lebanon. Since Israel’s supposed withdrawal from a self-declared security belt in the south of the country, the Lebanese government has repeatedly asked for a map of the minefields sown through the years of occupation, only to be consistently turned down.
Inquiries by a number of global bodies meanwhile, provided a summation of widespread moral concerns over Israel’s war-fighting strategies. To take the lesser – though more persistent -- of the simultaneous bloodbaths that Israel has been engaged in, a recent report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), has documented 202 Palestinian deaths, of which 44 have been children, in Gaza since June. Thousands of Palestinians have been forced to flee their homes by continuing Israeli ground incursions and artillery shelling. Only limited quantities of humanitarian aid have reached the beleaguered Gaza population because the main crossing point into the territory has been shut. The damage to the region’s electricity and water supply systems, inflicted in the first week of the Israeli attack, remains unrepaired. With Gaza’s only power plant rendered inoperative, the territory’s 1.4 million people have had to cope with at best, intermittent supplies of electricity and water.[i]
The London-based human rights group, Amnesty International, had as far back as June 30, offered an authoritative judgment on Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Referring to Israel’s scorched earth policy in the territory, ostensibly in retaliation for a militant attack on an army post in which one soldier was taken prisoner, Amnesty observed that the “deliberate attacks by Israeli forces against civilian property and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip violate international humanitarian law and constitute war crimes”. Israel was obliged under international law, Amnesty decreed, to “take urgent measures to remedy the long-term damage it has caused and immediately restore the supply -- at its own cost -- of electricity and water to the Palestinian population in the affected areas”.[ii]
With all these strictures, when a very similar provocation occurred on its northern frontier, Israel was only emboldened to transfer its patented military techniques to Lebanon: attacking an entire civilian population to achieve a military objective against poorly equipped adversaries. What Israel’s opponents lacked in terms of weaponry though, they made up in determination and organisational skills. And for all that, they engaged in the conflict with a far greater sense of scruple. A few days before the ceasefire in Lebanon, an enumeration of the casualties put the number of those killed in Israel at 98, of which no more than 35 were civilians. The total killed in Lebanon though, numbered 1,103, of which all but 98 were civilians.[iii] Even if more lives were lost in the following days of hostilities, the proportion between civilian and combatant casualties remained substantially unchanged on either side.
Far from exciting the moral scruples of Israel’s champions, this only challenged them to evolve newer doctrines of humanitarian law. Alan Dershowitz, a professor of law at Harvard University and author of a recent bestseller, The Case for Israel – proven to be at least a borderline case of plagiarism from a thoroughly discredited 1982 book – argued that it was no longer axiomatic that an individual’s civilian status rendered him innocent, or ensured him immunity from military action.[iv] There is a vast difference in both moral and legal terms, Dershowitz wrote, “between a 2-year-old who is killed by an enemy rocket and a 30-year-old civilian who has allowed his house to be used to store Katyusha rockets”. Though both are technically civilians, “the former is far more innocent than the latter”. Then there was another essential distinction to be made between “civilians who are held hostage against their will by terrorists who use them as involuntary human shields, and civilians who voluntarily place themselves in harm's way in order to protect terrorists from enemy fire”.
This range of situations suggested to Dershowitz, that the term “civilian” did little else than equate “the truly innocent with guilty accessories to terrorism”. What was required in place of this vague and unsatisfactory term, was the notion of a “continuum of civilianity” -- admittedly an awkward phrase, but one that allowed for all the inherent complexities of the real-world. If this continuum were to become part of the commonsense, then the civilian casualties of Lebanon would in Dershowitz’s estimation, “fall closer to the line of complicity” than “the line of innocence”. “Every civilian death is a tragedy”, the learned professor concluded, “but some are more tragic than others”.
The upshot of this exercise in legal chicanery then, is simply that an Israeli civilian’s life, supposedly so detached and distinct from that of a soldier, is worth much more than an Arab’s. Most Arabs, whether civilian or combatant, believe subliminally in the wicked, terrorist agenda of destroying Israel. This makes them accessories, if not active agents, of terrorism. To expect conventional rules of war to be observed in this situation was plain foolishness. Norms worked out in a context of warfare between rival armies, clearly distinguished by the uniforms they wore, were clearly inapplicable in a situation of terrorism.
A similar rationalisation for the killing of innocents was advanced in The New Republic, shortly after the Qana massacre of July 30 – when Israel devastated an entire multi-storey structure in southern Lebanon, killing an estimated 28, including 16 children. As the literary editor of the journal put it, “the killing of children” though an unequivocal evil, is not quite the same thing when it happens in a “just war”. “Moral clarity” is easily achieved about “the evil done in a wrong cause”, since an “unjust war” must “be opposed even when no such outrages occur, even when it is conducted with humanitarian diligence”. Such clarity of moral conviction though, was virtually impossible in a just war, where despite every effort to avoid needless suffering, the wickedness of the adversary makes unwitting victims of civilians on its side.[v]
As a corollary of these exercises in moral obfuscation, it could be asked where exactly on the “continuum of civilianity” the citizens of Israel fall. Despite encountering the Palestinians on a daily basis and being aware of their presence as a dispossessed people living on the land that world Jewry claims as its exclusive patrimony, Israeli civilians have repeatedly elected governments that have denied Palestinian rights and engaged in a quite deliberate effort to thin down their population by making their life under occupation intolerable. It is a question that Dershowitz chooses not to address.
Beyond the legal subterfuge, those who entered the field of hostilities to seek an understanding of ground realities, had little difficulty arriving at the appropriate judgments. Shortly after the Qana massacre, Human Rights Watch (HRW), the advocacy body based in New York, released a report documenting how this incident was merely one among many deliberate efforts to terrorise the civilian population of Lebanon.[vi] After exhaustive inquiries at the site of the atrocity and a significant forensic effort, HRW concluded that every alibi Israel had advanced, failed to measure up to any standard of credibility.
Qana on July 30 seemed eerily reminiscent of a day over ten years before -- April 18, 1996 -- when Israel, executing what was titled “Operation Grapes of Wrath”, laid siege to a U.N. refugee compound in the same village, ignored repeated pleas from peacekeepers entrusted with securing the facility, and in essence, showed its contempt for all norms of civilised conduct, by shelling and bombing hapless refugees from its own campaigns of ethnic cleansing, killing over a hundred women and children. As history now repeats itself, HRW has found that there was no legitimate military target anywhere in the vicinity of the apartment building where some 63 Lebanese civilians had taken shelter on July 29. With its much vaunted military sophistication, which enables withering responses to missile launches within seconds, Israel should have known that no hostile actions had been undertaken from anywhere near that forlorn site of refuge for a besieged people. And yet, as the HRW report documents, Israeli fighter jets made two bombing raids on the building, the second seemingly to underline a deliberate intent to kill and maim.
After a July 25 attack on a U.N. military observers’ post which killed four peacekeepers, Israel angrily rebuffed the perfectly reasonable surmise by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, that the attack had been “apparently deliberate”. Israel then contrived to parlay this simulated outrage into a bid to keep the U.N. out of the official inquiry. After its own investigations, HRW found adequate cause for a more serious and systematic investigation, since subsequent days too had seen a number of attacks that placed U.N. personnel in jeopardy and in some cases actually caused them grievous injury. In very few, if any, of these cases, were Hezbollah guerrillas known to be operating in the vicinity of U.N. installations, which could have made the plea of targeting error credible.
The depopulation of civilian areas through military action constitutes an unequivocal war crime. HRW concedes that a belligerent power could, in particular circumstances, legitimately warn civilians of impending military strikes, so that they have time to get out of harm’s way. But it also observes quite definitively, that Israel adopted this procedure in a particular perverse fashion. All Lebanese civilians south of the Litani river were at some stage or the other, ordered to leave and Israel’s Justice Minister concluded after a few such perfunctory efforts, that anybody choosing to stay behind, should be deemed a terrorist liable to attack without further notice. Yet the order to leave, in most instances, was followed by a deliberate effort to cut off all routes of exit, with bridges and roads being repeatedly bombed. In several instances, civilians fleeing the scene of aerial bombing and artillery attacks were mowed down, despite flying the white flag that universally symbolises the absence of hostile intent.
A forgetful international community could soon consign this year’s atrocities in Lebanon to the black hole of historical memory, as with the 1996 Qana massacre, as with the carnage on Gaza beach of June 9, which killed seven innocent civilians and left the traumatised ten year-old, Huda Ghalia, as the sole survivor in a family of eight. But there are fresh stirrings in civil society groupings, which have in recent times sought to bring war criminals of the worst stripe to account through the principle of universal jurisdiction.
Though contentious as a concept, universal jurisdiction, championed by organisations like Amnesty International, has a simple basis in law. States that are party to covenants like the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war, are obliged by the terms of their accession, to enact domestic legislation to operationalise these commitments. Even when certain States Party fail to do so, whether on account of legislative inertia or internal political resistance, other States Party are entitled to assume universal compliance. Despite all its implications of extra-territorial application of national laws, universal jurisdiction is soundly based in the rule of law. In a paper prepared in 1999, Amnesty International, explained that the principle was invoked by the victorious parties in World War II, when they began to prosecute the main agents of the war from the defeated side. This legal action was undertaken on behalf of the international community and pertained in most cases to “crimes against humanity and war crimes” that the victorious powers had no jurisdiction over in terms of national law. In the years that followed, a few states had exercised universal jurisdiction to bring to book those guilty of particularly odious crimes. And interestingly, the list that includes Australia, Canada and the U.K., also counts Israel among its member.[vii]
For this reason, Amnesty’s judgment after its review of much the same ground that HRW went over, is especially compelling: many of the “violations” of international humanitarian law by Israel, it has said, “are war crimes that give rise to individual criminal responsibility”. This means in essence, that, “people against whom there is prima facie evidence of responsibility for the commission of these crimes are subject to criminal accountability anywhere in the world through the exercise of universal jurisdiction”.[viii]
Precedents are not lacking, though they have all failed to arrive at a final determination of the validity of universal jurisdiction and the powers that judicial bodies can assume under the doctrine. Belgium in 2003, acting on the strength of a decade-old law, admitted a petition pleading for the arrest and prosecution of Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s Prime Minister, for complicity in the 1982 massacre of Palestinian refugees in the Shabra and Shattilla refugee camps on the outskirts of Beirut. In 2005, a London magistrate issued warrant for the arrest of Major-General Doron Almog, commander of Israeli occupation forces in Gaza, for a 2002 bombing attack which killed 15 Palestinians, including 8 children, in a supposed effort to eliminate one militant of the Islamic resistance. Petitions for the arrest and prosecution of Lieutenant-General Dan Halutz, chief of staff of the Israel Defence Force, and his predecessor, Moshe Yaalon, are also pending before London courts. Needless to say, after the experience of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1999, no officer, whether serving or retired, from Israel’s top military command has been very keen on visiting London. Sharon himself won immunity from arrest after the Belgian law was amended under pressure from the U.S. But till he was laid low by an incapacitating stroke in January this year, he did not show much interest in visiting Belgium or any other country which might have had a mutual cooperation treaty in criminal matters with Belgium.
The severe setbacks that Israel’s image has suffered, must be weighed against the dubious strategic gains garnered from the operations in Lebanon. As the ceasefire came into effect, the Israeli public remained bitterly divided over the outcome of the war. The stated objective – the destruction of Hezbollah – had widespread public endorsement. But the day the hostilities were suspended, as many Israeli citizens were convinced they had lost as believed they had won. A substantial plurality was unsure of what exactly the war had achieved. And Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who commanded almost universal approval within the country at the beginning of the war, had fallen sharply in public esteem in this space of five weeks.
All this makes for a rather unsatisfactory outcome for the vaunted Israeli military machine, which by all accounts, had prepared intensively for this war over many years. Indeed, the moment Israeli forces pulled out of Lebanon in May 2000, it was foretold that another visitation of mayhem in the region was inevitable, a final settling of accounts. More than Israel’s own objective of liquidating Hezbollah, there was by fairly reliable accounts, a strong U.S. interest in a successful outcome to the operations in Lebanon. The investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has indeed proposed that the U.S. may have been the more ardent of the two for war.[ix]
The demonstration effects of Lebanon were something that the U.S. hoped to garner major strategic gains from. Haunted by the possibility that it would only be able to escape from the military quagmire of Iraq by accommodating Iran’s ambitions for a heightened role in regional geopolitics, the U.S. was hoping that the decimation of Iran’s supposed proxy in Lebanon would minimise the need for painful concessions. In operational terms, Israel’s military action against fortified Hezbollah positions and missile launching pads, was expected to give the U.S. valuable inputs for possible action against Iran’s nuclear assets at a time of its choice.
Israel’s failure in Lebanon has to be viewed in the context of the wider prospect of a collapse of the Pax Americana in West Asia. Whatever their other failings, top officials of the U.S. administration do not lack the ability to coin attractive life-cycle metaphors to describe the politics of the region. It was in May 2005 that Vice President Dick Cheney – the man who had visions of flower-strewn parades as Iraqis heralded the U.S. invasion as long-awaited liberation – asserted that the insurgency in the country was in its “death throes”. And mid-July this year, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, after surveying the wreckage of Lebanon and the mounting toll in human lives, made the chirpy prediction that these were the “birth pangs” of a new political order in the region.
John Prescott, the British Deputy Prime Minister, recently used an unflatteringly vivid four-letter epithet to describe U.S. policy in West Asia. Standing in for a vacationing Tony Blair, Prescott complained that the only reason he had gone along with the decision to invade Iraq was the promise held out that the “roadmap” to peace in Palestine would be implemented shortly after victory was sealed on that front. As with several other western leaders who still only partially realise how they were duped, or went along with all the pretexts for war in the belief that victory would be swift, Prescott fails to understand that the U.S. invasion was intended precisely to create the conditions in the wider region that would allow Israel to implement a larger, unilateral, agenda. This much was suspected and widely spoken of elsewhere in the world, well before the invasion began and particularly after all the frantic efforts failed to turn up evidence that Iraq was in possession of the proscribed weapons that had been the casus belli.[x]
In recent times, as public disillusionment within the U.S. has grown, the taboo subject of Israel’s role in instigating Bush’s misadventure, has emerged in public focus. And the debate was truly ignited in March 2006, when John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, professors of political science at Chicago and Harvard, published a working paper, arguing with a wealth of documentation, that Israel’s undue influence over U.S. foreign policy had become an insupportable strategic burden.[xi] They were promptly denounced as anti-Semites, but their case has not quite been so easy to dismiss.
The rebellion of the Palestinian nation under its occupation, forced Israel to confront a painful dilemma. Rather than opt for the many possibilities of peace that the Palestinians offered, Israel chose the path of unilateralism. Ehud Olmert, the hapless Israeli Prime Minister who faces within six months of his installation, a crisis of credibility with the Israeli public, was perceived for long as an accidental leader, placed in a position of authority only because of the sainted Ariel Sharon’s incapacitation. In elections held in March, Olmert won an endorsement, though of a far more modest magnitude than expected when Sharon had split from the Likud Party, and floated a new entity, the Kadima, as a vehicle for making a reality of what he saw as Israel’s final destiny. It was to be the Zionist programme’s climactic manoeuvre in the global strategic arena, rivalling in its historic significance, the declaration of the state of Israel by David Ben-Gurion in May 1948 and the conquest of all of the land of Palestine in 1967.
After Theodore Herzl who conjured up the dream of a Jewish homeland in Palestine and Ben-Gurion who made it a reality, Sharon’s role, as the third in this succession of Zionist prophets, was to work out a final definition of national borders that would safeguard Israel’s identity as a country with a stable and substantial Jewish majority. The Palestinians offered a way: Israel could withdraw to its 1967 borders, and acknowledge that the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 had made victims of a people with pre-existing rights to the land. This meant essentially that the Palestinian “right of return” would be recognised under international law, though it was not evident that all those who had been evicted from their land -- and their descendants -- intended to exercise it. Rather, the recognition of their rights as a dispossessed people, and their voluntary surrender of the right of return, would only mean that they would gain recompense in several other ways, which could be negotiated.
Obsessed by its own sense of power, Israel chose to turn its back on these proposals, and paint the Palestinians as an obstreperous people, undeserving of partnership in peace negotiations. It then proceeded, through innumerable provocations, to engineer a violent uprising by the occupied people, painting an entirely legitimate movement of resistance against military oppression as “terrorism”. Once the label was foisted on the Palestinian resistance, Israel had little problem gaining a licence from the international community to crush the movement through the most barbaric means. But since a constant state of war was not a prospect that it yearned to live with, Israel decided, within a year of the Palestinian uprising, that it would enforce a policy of “unilateral separation” of the Jewish people from the Palestinians.[xii] The program of “unilateral separation”, mooted by Israel’s Labour Party Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, in 2001, was taken over by Likud Party Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, in 2005. When he found that his own party would not easily yield on its entrenched commitment to a “Greater Israel”, Sharon split to form the Kadima, which entered into an alliance with Labour after the 2006 general elections, to impose Israel’s unilateral agenda.
Sharon’s project involved the pretence of an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the conversion of that tiny, over-populated and devastated strip into the world’s largest prison, garrisoned through air and sea-power. It involved the construction of an apartheid wall across the West Bank that sundered Palestinian communities one from another, destroying lives and livelihoods, and marking out illegal Jewish settlements – and the roadways and tunnels to access them -- as eternal parts of the Jewish nation. And finally, it involved securing the northern settlements by bludgeoning Syria and Lebanon into submission.
Israel’s failure in Lebanon is magnified by the collapse of its pretended withdrawal from Gaza. And an immediate consequence of the Lebanon fiasco has been that Israel’s plans for an aggressive effort to remake the topography of the West Bank, and formally declare the strategically more important and better endowed tracts an eternal part of the Jewish state, have had to be put on hold.
The strategic partnership between the U.S. and Israel to redesign the political geography of West Asia, is clearly in deep trouble. After all the purported rationalisations for the invasion of Iraq were dealt with and found to be hollow, a perfectly reasonable inference has begun increasingly to demand attention: that the U.S. in invading Iraq was seeking merely to destroy an Arab state that had been a strategic nuisance and a continuing impediment to Israel’s efforts to draw a new political map in the region. Israel’s failure in Lebanon now compounds the abject collapse of the U.S. project in Iraq. Between them, they constitute clear evidence that the Pax Americana in the region, is threatened as never before.
After recently surveying the miscued judgments that had led the U.S. into successive disasters in West Asia, Zbigniew Brzezinksi, a top advisor to several past Democratic administrations, concluded rather gloomily, that the “neoconservative (or neocon) prescriptions” that dominate U.S. policy today, would prove “fatal for America and ultimately for Israel”. The “lessons of Iraq”, he said, speak for themselves: “Eventually, if neocon policies continue to be pursued, the United States will be expelled from the region and that will be the beginning of the end for Israel as well”.[xiii]
Well into its sixth decade, the Zionist state is yet to define its borders. It sees no way of securing itself, except through random and indiscriminate acts of terrorist violence against its neighbours and those living under its military tyranny. And despite enjoying income levels that put it in the league of the more affluent European nations, it is still dependent on U.S. aid to the extent of $ 500 annually for every Israeli citizen. A state with such a dubious record is by any account, a failed state. The consequences for the region from a failed state equipped with nuclear arms, could well be grim. If ever there was a case for international guardianship over a country, it is now.
[i] U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, The Gaza Situation Report, 07-24 August, 2006, available at this writing at one of the OCHA websites, http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/LSGZ-6SZGFB?OpenDocument&RSS20=22-P.
[ii] Amnesty International, “Israel/Occupied Territories: Deliberate Attacks a War Crime”, June 30, 2006, available at: http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGMDE150612006?open&of=ENG-2MD.
[iii] “Pessimism on deal amid clashes at the U.N.”, The Guardian, August 10, 2006.
[iv] For a full rundown of the plagiarism case, for Dershowitz’s own defence and his various stratagems to ensure that the matter was not brought into the full glare of publicity, see the website of Norman Finkelstein: http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/, especially his remarks on the release of his book, Beyond Chutzpah. Dershowitz’s column on the war in Lebanon appeared in the Los Angeles Times of August 26: “Civilian Casualty? It Depends”, available at the time of writing at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-dershowitz22jul22,0,7685210.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail.
[v] Leon Wieseltier, “The Children of Qana”, The New Republic, August 14, 2006, available at this writing at: http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060814&s=diarist081406.
[vi] Human Rights Watch, Fatal Strikes, Israel’s Indiscriminate Attacks against Civilians in Lebanon, Volume 18, Number 3 (E), August 2006, available at this writing at: http://hrw.org/reports/2006/lebanon0806/.
[vii] Amnesty International, 14 Principles on the Effective Exercise of Universal Jurisdiction, May 1, 1999, available at: http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engior530011999?OpenDocument.
[viii] Amnesty International, “Israel/Lebanon: Deliberate Destruction of ‘Collateral Damage’? Israeli attacks on civilian infrastructure”, available at: http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGMDE180072006.
[ix] Seymour Hersh, “Watching Lebanon, Washington’s Interest in Israel’s War”, The New Yorker, August 21, 2006.
[x] See this author’s “Israel: An Equal Partner in Occupation of Iraq”, Economic and Political Weekly, October 9, 2004, available at: http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2004&leaf=10&filename=7776&filetype=html.
[xi] John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby”, London Review of Books, Volume 28, Number 6, March 23, 2006; available at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html. A version complete with footnotes and references is available at the website of the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University: http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011. The article had been commissioned by the Atlantic Monthly, which refused to publish it on learning of its full scope and contents. The authors were subsequently unable to find a publisher in the U.S. and had to cross the Atlantic to find one.
[xii] For more on the background to the “unilateral separation” decision, see this author’s “Intelligence, Incompetence and Iraq: Or, time to talk of democracy, demography and Israel”, in Social Scientist, Volume 33, Numbers 11-12, Nov-Dec 2004.
[xiii] Brzezinski’s rather grim prognoses was made in the course of an interview with a journalist, Nathan Gardels, who published the entire text on a news and current affairs website. The text is available at this writing at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-gardels/beginning-of-the-end-for-_b_26247.html.
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Israel after Lebanon: Failed State
August 22, 2006:
Just before formally accepting a U.N. resolution mandating a cessation of hostilities in Lebanon, the Israeli government sent a request to the U.S., urging that shipments of a particularly lethal brand of anti-personnel munitions be speeded up. Within a week of the fragile and uneasy ceasefire, Israel had already conducted two armed intrusions into Lebanese territory with deeply suspect motives. There may have been, in one instance, an intent to abduct or murder a leader of the Hezbollah militia in the south of the country. In the other instance, the stated purpose was of interdicting an Iranian effort to resupply the militia with missiles. The first of these endeavours was reportedly repelled by Hezbollah fighters, who succeeded in shooting dead an Israeli officer involved. And the latter effort was roundly condemned by top U.N. officials, who saw it as a serious threat to the fragile ceasefire.
Israel remained unrepentant. It had through five weeks of vengeful destruction, portrayed the U.N. failure to call for a ceasefire as a sanction to wage war in Lebanon. In similar vein, it now chose to read the ambiguously worded ceasefire resolution as an endorsement of regular cross-border forays. Clearly though, even after a 34-day offensive that reduced much of southern Lebanon to rubble and destroyed the country’s civilian infrastructure, Israel considers its mission unaccomplished.
Hastily put together by the U.S., which had for the entire duration of the war, thwarted every effort to rein in its terrorist proxy in West Asia, the U.N. ceasefire resolution was within a week, beginning to be seriously weighed down by its ambiguities. France, which had been expected to lead the mobilisation of men and machines for a 15,000 strong peace-keeping army in Lebanon, had committed no more than 200 troops. Italy, Spain and Finland, were also expressing similar reservations about putting troops into Lebanon, absent a clear mandate and defined rules of engagement.
For its part, Israel firmly sought to discourage potential troop contributions from countries it did not have diplomatic relations with. Dan Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the U.N. – famously remembered for his jibe last March that all Muslims may or may not be terrorists, but all terrorists certainly are Muslim – argued in an interview with a prominent news channel, that Muslim countries which had friendly relations with Israel were welcome. But countries that had failed to recognise Israel could hardly be expected to guard its frontiers, said the diplomat who retains his job despite utterances that have clearly been beyond the pale of civilised discourse.
Clearly, the purpose of the U.N. peacekeeping deployment in Lebanon, in Israeli perceptions, is merely to serve as a surrogate for its own army. Between 1982 and 2000, Israel maintained a self-declared “security belt” within Lebanese territory, as the only available means it had to safeguard its northern towns. The effort proved rather too much for even Israel’s formidable military resources. Its precipitous withdrawal in May 2000 was celebrated all across the Arab world as a long overdue moment of reckoning for an arrogant foe. That vicarious sense of delight did not last long within the regimes that rule the Arab world. Celebration soon turned to concern that Hezbollah, which had led the resistance to the Israeli occupation, would capitalise on the legitimacy it had gained in the successful defence of Lebanese territorial sovereignty, to entrench itself still more deeply within the country’s political order and society.
When the recent hostilities began, the first instinct of collaborationist Arab regimes was to blame Hezbollah. Syria, still regarded a good Arab state, was chided for the alliance of convenience that put it in the dubious company of culturally alien Iran, in joint sponsorship of the Hezbollah. But the effort to prise Syria away from its proximity with Iran came a cropper. And as Hezbollah withstood the undiscriminating and promiscuous fury of the Israeli assault, defiantly firing rockets into enemy territory to the very moment of the ceasefire, the regimes sought to take out an insurance policy by committing themselves to finance the reconstruction of Lebanon once the guns fell silent.
All this may well have come too late in the day. Defying the continuing threat of Israeli bombing and the lurking danger of unexploded ordnance, almost a million Lebanese displaced by the fighting streamed back to their ruined homes in the immediate wake of the ceasefire. Though the Lebanese army was concurrently being deployed in the devastated south in a bid to reimpose the writ of the national government, there was little uncertainty about whose authority really mattered in the region. No sooner had the ceasefire taken effect than Hezbollah transformed itself from a fighting force into a reconstruction agency, clearing the rubble of the war, salvaging the few dwelling units that remained serviceable, handing out instant and generous cash grants to every family that had suffered.
Resentful murmurs were heard in western circles, about Iran under-writing the entire Hezbollah political project using the rich dollar harvest it was garnering as a consequence of unprecedented peaks in oil prices. Though true, this only served to further magnify the failure of the collaborationist Arab regimes, several of which have benefited in greater measure than Iran from the oil price boom, and chose cynically to blame the victim when a defenceless nation was bombed several decades back into the past.
Hezbollah’s undisputed claims to political pre-eminence were also recognised by the Lebanese national army as it moved into the south. Though the U.N. ceasefire resolution envisages the disarming of Hezbollah as a mission to be accomplished at the earliest, few in Lebanon – least of all the army -- seemed to be taking that project seriously. The consensus within Lebanese political circles and the media rather, was that Hezbollah had proved its mettle as a fighting force in the defence of the country. Far from disarming Hezbollah, the overwhelming priority in Lebanon seemed to be the incorporation of the militia’s fighting prowess into the formal structures of national defence.
Israel has ample reason to worry. As the ceasefire came into effect, the Israeli public remained bitterly divided over the outcome of the war. The stated objective – the destruction of Hezbollah – had widespread public endorsement. But the day the hostilities were suspended, as many Israeli citizens were convinced they had lost the war as believed they had won. And Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who commanded almost universal approval within the country at the beginning of the war, had fallen sharply in public esteem in this space of a mere five weeks.
Olmert was perceived for long as an accidental leader, placed in a position of authority only because the sainted Ariel Sharon, hero of some of Israel’s most brutal ethnic cleansing campaigns, had suffered an incapacitating stroke and slipped into coma in January. In elections held in March, Olmert won an endorsement, though of a far more modest magnitude than expected when Sharon split from the Likud Party and floated a new entity, the Kadima, as a vehicle for making a reality of what he saw as Israel’s final destiny. It was to be the Zionist programme’s climactic manoeuvre in the global strategic arena, rivalling in its historic significance, the declaration of the state of Israel by David Ben-Gurion in May 1948 and the conquest of all of the land of Palestine in June 1967. It was Theodore Herzl who conjured up the dream of a Jewish homeland in Palestine and Ben-Gurion who made it a reality. Sharon’s role, as the third in this succession of Zionist prophets, was to work out a final definition of national borders that would safeguard Israel’s identity as a country with a stable and substantial Jewish majority. It was a project that involved the “unilateral separation” of the Jewish people from the Palestinians, on the basis of territorial frontiers to be decided entirely at Israel’s convenience.
Needless to say, Sharon’s project involved the pretence of an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the conversion of that tiny, over-populated and devastated strip into the world’s largest prison, garrisoned through air and sea-power. It involved the construction of an apartheid wall across the West Bank that sundered Palestinian communities one from another, destroying lives and livelihoods, and marking out illegal Jewish settlements – and the roadways and tunnels to access them -- as eternal parts of the Jewish nation. And finally, it involved securing the northern settlements by bludgeoning Syria and Lebanon into submission.
Israel’s failure in Lebanon is magnified by the collapse of its pretence of a withdrawal from Gaza. Weeks before the crisis in Lebanon, the Gaza situation had erupted in fullblown military savagery, with a daily toll running into dozens of Palestinian lives. Though the carnage in Lebanon momentarily pushed Gaza off world headlines, the two have been linked inextricably in global perceptions as consequences on two different front of the same root cause: Israeli military unilateralism backed up by the unswerving support of the U.S. This unilateralism in turn, is seen to be the direct outcome of the pretence of a peace process that Israel, with the open encouragement of its superpower patron, engaged in since 1993. When stealth and subterfuge failed and the Palestinians refused to be accomplices in their own occupation, Israel unveiled its iron fist.
Whatever their other failings, top officials of the U.S. administration today do not lack the ability to turn attractive life-cycle metaphors to describe the politics of the region. It was in May 2005 that Vice President Dick Cheney – the man who had seen visions of flower-strewn parades as Iraqis greeted invading U.S. troops as liberators – asserted that the insurgency in the country was in its “death throes”. And in mid-July this year, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, after blithely surveying the wrecked infrastructure of Lebanon and the mounting toll in human lives, made the chirpy prediction that these were the “birth pangs” of a new political order in the region.
John Prescott, the British Deputy Prime Minister, recently used an unflatteringly vivid four-letter epithet to describe U.S. policy in West Asia. Standing in for a vacationing Tony Blair, Prescott complained that the only reason he had gone along with the decision to invade Iraq was the promise held out that the “roadmap” to peace in Palestine would be implemented shortly after victory was sealed on that front. There was in another words, an explicit promise that the U.S. had held out between achieving its ends in Iraq and delivering justice to Palestine.
As with several other western leaders who still only partially realise their idiocy, Prescott fails to understand that the U.S. invasion was intended precisely to create the conditions in the wider region that would allow Israel to implement its unilateral agenda – drawing its borders according to its own strategic convenience and expelling large numbers of Palestinians, so that the Jewish majority within is not jeopardised for the foreseeable future. This much was suspected and widely spoken of elsewhere in the world well before the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003. But in recent times, as public disillusionment within the U.S. has grown, the hitherto taboo subject of Israel’s role in instigating Bush’s misadventure, has reemerged in public focus. The debate was truly joined in March 2006, when John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, professors of political science at Chicago and Harvard Universities, published a working paper titled “The Israel Lobby”, arguing with a wealth of documentation, that Israel’s undue influence over U.S. foreign policy had become an insupportable strategic burden.
Mearsheimer and Walt were promptly denounced by Zionist zealots as anti-Semites. But their case has not quite been so easy to dismiss. The strategic partnership between the U.S. and Israel to remake the political geography of West Asia, is clearly in deep trouble. A clear indication to this effect came from Zbigniew Brzezinksi, a top advisor to several past Democratic administrations in the U.S. Surveying the miscued judgments that had led the “neoconservative” lobby that dominates policy today into successive disasters in West Asia, Brzezinski told a recent interviewer that “these neocon prescriptions, of which Israel has its equivalents, (would be) fatal for America and ultimately for Israel”. The “lessons of Iraq”, he said, speak for themselves: “Eventually, if neocon policies continue to be pursued, the United States will be expelled from the region and that will be the beginning of the end for Israel as well”.
Well into its sixth decade, the Zionist state is yet to define its borders. It sees no way of securing itself, except through random and indiscriminate acts of terrorist violence against its neighbours and those living under its military tyranny. And despite enjoying income levels that puts it in the league of the more affluent European nations, it is still dependent on U.S. aid to the extent of $ 500 annually for every Israeli citizen.
A state with such a dubious record is by any account, a failed state. And from this perspective, the final outcome that Brzezinski suggests, more in sorrow than anger, may well be the most happy denouement that the world could hope for.
Just before formally accepting a U.N. resolution mandating a cessation of hostilities in Lebanon, the Israeli government sent a request to the U.S., urging that shipments of a particularly lethal brand of anti-personnel munitions be speeded up. Within a week of the fragile and uneasy ceasefire, Israel had already conducted two armed intrusions into Lebanese territory with deeply suspect motives. There may have been, in one instance, an intent to abduct or murder a leader of the Hezbollah militia in the south of the country. In the other instance, the stated purpose was of interdicting an Iranian effort to resupply the militia with missiles. The first of these endeavours was reportedly repelled by Hezbollah fighters, who succeeded in shooting dead an Israeli officer involved. And the latter effort was roundly condemned by top U.N. officials, who saw it as a serious threat to the fragile ceasefire.
Israel remained unrepentant. It had through five weeks of vengeful destruction, portrayed the U.N. failure to call for a ceasefire as a sanction to wage war in Lebanon. In similar vein, it now chose to read the ambiguously worded ceasefire resolution as an endorsement of regular cross-border forays. Clearly though, even after a 34-day offensive that reduced much of southern Lebanon to rubble and destroyed the country’s civilian infrastructure, Israel considers its mission unaccomplished.
Hastily put together by the U.S., which had for the entire duration of the war, thwarted every effort to rein in its terrorist proxy in West Asia, the U.N. ceasefire resolution was within a week, beginning to be seriously weighed down by its ambiguities. France, which had been expected to lead the mobilisation of men and machines for a 15,000 strong peace-keeping army in Lebanon, had committed no more than 200 troops. Italy, Spain and Finland, were also expressing similar reservations about putting troops into Lebanon, absent a clear mandate and defined rules of engagement.
For its part, Israel firmly sought to discourage potential troop contributions from countries it did not have diplomatic relations with. Dan Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the U.N. – famously remembered for his jibe last March that all Muslims may or may not be terrorists, but all terrorists certainly are Muslim – argued in an interview with a prominent news channel, that Muslim countries which had friendly relations with Israel were welcome. But countries that had failed to recognise Israel could hardly be expected to guard its frontiers, said the diplomat who retains his job despite utterances that have clearly been beyond the pale of civilised discourse.
Clearly, the purpose of the U.N. peacekeeping deployment in Lebanon, in Israeli perceptions, is merely to serve as a surrogate for its own army. Between 1982 and 2000, Israel maintained a self-declared “security belt” within Lebanese territory, as the only available means it had to safeguard its northern towns. The effort proved rather too much for even Israel’s formidable military resources. Its precipitous withdrawal in May 2000 was celebrated all across the Arab world as a long overdue moment of reckoning for an arrogant foe. That vicarious sense of delight did not last long within the regimes that rule the Arab world. Celebration soon turned to concern that Hezbollah, which had led the resistance to the Israeli occupation, would capitalise on the legitimacy it had gained in the successful defence of Lebanese territorial sovereignty, to entrench itself still more deeply within the country’s political order and society.
When the recent hostilities began, the first instinct of collaborationist Arab regimes was to blame Hezbollah. Syria, still regarded a good Arab state, was chided for the alliance of convenience that put it in the dubious company of culturally alien Iran, in joint sponsorship of the Hezbollah. But the effort to prise Syria away from its proximity with Iran came a cropper. And as Hezbollah withstood the undiscriminating and promiscuous fury of the Israeli assault, defiantly firing rockets into enemy territory to the very moment of the ceasefire, the regimes sought to take out an insurance policy by committing themselves to finance the reconstruction of Lebanon once the guns fell silent.
All this may well have come too late in the day. Defying the continuing threat of Israeli bombing and the lurking danger of unexploded ordnance, almost a million Lebanese displaced by the fighting streamed back to their ruined homes in the immediate wake of the ceasefire. Though the Lebanese army was concurrently being deployed in the devastated south in a bid to reimpose the writ of the national government, there was little uncertainty about whose authority really mattered in the region. No sooner had the ceasefire taken effect than Hezbollah transformed itself from a fighting force into a reconstruction agency, clearing the rubble of the war, salvaging the few dwelling units that remained serviceable, handing out instant and generous cash grants to every family that had suffered.
Resentful murmurs were heard in western circles, about Iran under-writing the entire Hezbollah political project using the rich dollar harvest it was garnering as a consequence of unprecedented peaks in oil prices. Though true, this only served to further magnify the failure of the collaborationist Arab regimes, several of which have benefited in greater measure than Iran from the oil price boom, and chose cynically to blame the victim when a defenceless nation was bombed several decades back into the past.
Hezbollah’s undisputed claims to political pre-eminence were also recognised by the Lebanese national army as it moved into the south. Though the U.N. ceasefire resolution envisages the disarming of Hezbollah as a mission to be accomplished at the earliest, few in Lebanon – least of all the army -- seemed to be taking that project seriously. The consensus within Lebanese political circles and the media rather, was that Hezbollah had proved its mettle as a fighting force in the defence of the country. Far from disarming Hezbollah, the overwhelming priority in Lebanon seemed to be the incorporation of the militia’s fighting prowess into the formal structures of national defence.
Israel has ample reason to worry. As the ceasefire came into effect, the Israeli public remained bitterly divided over the outcome of the war. The stated objective – the destruction of Hezbollah – had widespread public endorsement. But the day the hostilities were suspended, as many Israeli citizens were convinced they had lost the war as believed they had won. And Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who commanded almost universal approval within the country at the beginning of the war, had fallen sharply in public esteem in this space of a mere five weeks.
Olmert was perceived for long as an accidental leader, placed in a position of authority only because the sainted Ariel Sharon, hero of some of Israel’s most brutal ethnic cleansing campaigns, had suffered an incapacitating stroke and slipped into coma in January. In elections held in March, Olmert won an endorsement, though of a far more modest magnitude than expected when Sharon split from the Likud Party and floated a new entity, the Kadima, as a vehicle for making a reality of what he saw as Israel’s final destiny. It was to be the Zionist programme’s climactic manoeuvre in the global strategic arena, rivalling in its historic significance, the declaration of the state of Israel by David Ben-Gurion in May 1948 and the conquest of all of the land of Palestine in June 1967. It was Theodore Herzl who conjured up the dream of a Jewish homeland in Palestine and Ben-Gurion who made it a reality. Sharon’s role, as the third in this succession of Zionist prophets, was to work out a final definition of national borders that would safeguard Israel’s identity as a country with a stable and substantial Jewish majority. It was a project that involved the “unilateral separation” of the Jewish people from the Palestinians, on the basis of territorial frontiers to be decided entirely at Israel’s convenience.
Needless to say, Sharon’s project involved the pretence of an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the conversion of that tiny, over-populated and devastated strip into the world’s largest prison, garrisoned through air and sea-power. It involved the construction of an apartheid wall across the West Bank that sundered Palestinian communities one from another, destroying lives and livelihoods, and marking out illegal Jewish settlements – and the roadways and tunnels to access them -- as eternal parts of the Jewish nation. And finally, it involved securing the northern settlements by bludgeoning Syria and Lebanon into submission.
Israel’s failure in Lebanon is magnified by the collapse of its pretence of a withdrawal from Gaza. Weeks before the crisis in Lebanon, the Gaza situation had erupted in fullblown military savagery, with a daily toll running into dozens of Palestinian lives. Though the carnage in Lebanon momentarily pushed Gaza off world headlines, the two have been linked inextricably in global perceptions as consequences on two different front of the same root cause: Israeli military unilateralism backed up by the unswerving support of the U.S. This unilateralism in turn, is seen to be the direct outcome of the pretence of a peace process that Israel, with the open encouragement of its superpower patron, engaged in since 1993. When stealth and subterfuge failed and the Palestinians refused to be accomplices in their own occupation, Israel unveiled its iron fist.
Whatever their other failings, top officials of the U.S. administration today do not lack the ability to turn attractive life-cycle metaphors to describe the politics of the region. It was in May 2005 that Vice President Dick Cheney – the man who had seen visions of flower-strewn parades as Iraqis greeted invading U.S. troops as liberators – asserted that the insurgency in the country was in its “death throes”. And in mid-July this year, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, after blithely surveying the wrecked infrastructure of Lebanon and the mounting toll in human lives, made the chirpy prediction that these were the “birth pangs” of a new political order in the region.
John Prescott, the British Deputy Prime Minister, recently used an unflatteringly vivid four-letter epithet to describe U.S. policy in West Asia. Standing in for a vacationing Tony Blair, Prescott complained that the only reason he had gone along with the decision to invade Iraq was the promise held out that the “roadmap” to peace in Palestine would be implemented shortly after victory was sealed on that front. There was in another words, an explicit promise that the U.S. had held out between achieving its ends in Iraq and delivering justice to Palestine.
As with several other western leaders who still only partially realise their idiocy, Prescott fails to understand that the U.S. invasion was intended precisely to create the conditions in the wider region that would allow Israel to implement its unilateral agenda – drawing its borders according to its own strategic convenience and expelling large numbers of Palestinians, so that the Jewish majority within is not jeopardised for the foreseeable future. This much was suspected and widely spoken of elsewhere in the world well before the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003. But in recent times, as public disillusionment within the U.S. has grown, the hitherto taboo subject of Israel’s role in instigating Bush’s misadventure, has reemerged in public focus. The debate was truly joined in March 2006, when John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, professors of political science at Chicago and Harvard Universities, published a working paper titled “The Israel Lobby”, arguing with a wealth of documentation, that Israel’s undue influence over U.S. foreign policy had become an insupportable strategic burden.
Mearsheimer and Walt were promptly denounced by Zionist zealots as anti-Semites. But their case has not quite been so easy to dismiss. The strategic partnership between the U.S. and Israel to remake the political geography of West Asia, is clearly in deep trouble. A clear indication to this effect came from Zbigniew Brzezinksi, a top advisor to several past Democratic administrations in the U.S. Surveying the miscued judgments that had led the “neoconservative” lobby that dominates policy today into successive disasters in West Asia, Brzezinski told a recent interviewer that “these neocon prescriptions, of which Israel has its equivalents, (would be) fatal for America and ultimately for Israel”. The “lessons of Iraq”, he said, speak for themselves: “Eventually, if neocon policies continue to be pursued, the United States will be expelled from the region and that will be the beginning of the end for Israel as well”.
Well into its sixth decade, the Zionist state is yet to define its borders. It sees no way of securing itself, except through random and indiscriminate acts of terrorist violence against its neighbours and those living under its military tyranny. And despite enjoying income levels that puts it in the league of the more affluent European nations, it is still dependent on U.S. aid to the extent of $ 500 annually for every Israeli citizen.
A state with such a dubious record is by any account, a failed state. And from this perspective, the final outcome that Brzezinski suggests, more in sorrow than anger, may well be the most happy denouement that the world could hope for.
Friday, July 28, 2006
Lebanon ravaged: time to rein in the racist outlaw Israeli regime
Official India’s attitude towards West Asia displays a curious tendency to be several steps behind time. This is a region of unending turmoil, today the epicentre of a confrontation that could engulf the entire world. This much has been evident since at least 2003, when the U.S. began gearing up for its invasion of Iraq, the final act in a saga of destruction that would reduce one of the Arab world’s most viable states to a pathetic state of internal meltdown. For weeks on end, the Indian government dawdled, rather than take a stand. It sat through two weeks and a few days of the invasion, before finally issuing a statement in Hindi that cleverly sought to obscure the distinction between “condemning” and “deploring” the thoroughly illegitimate war of destruction. And it urged the withdrawal of invading forces from Iraq on the precise day that U.S. forces were entering Baghdad.
It is necessary to recall this bit of recent history since the habitual tendency to delay taking a stand has not changed with the UPA government. On July 20, the Ministry of External Affairs issued a statement declaring Israel’s actions “unjustified”. This might have seemed a timely response to the Israeli military’s destructive rampage through Lebanon, which had wrecked most of that country’s civilian infrastructure and killed in excess of 300 civilians. But no, the Indian government’ statement it transpired, bore reference to the trail of destruction that Israeli marauders had left in Gaza. It was at least three weeks since Israel had bombed Gaza’s only power plant, abducted most elected representatives of the Palestinian people, and ground the administrative offices of the Palestinian National Authority to rubble. And while the Indian government agonised over the appropriate response to these crimes against humanity, the Israeli killing machine had moved on to open another front in Lebanon. It was not as if the slaughter in the Gaza had ceased. It was just that it had acquired a “business as usual” dimension and been knocked off the world headlines, since the massacre in Lebanon had momentarily acquired greater dimensions.
A few days later, the criminal U.S. administration of George Bush sent its principal diplomat, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, to West Asia to find a way to end the bloodshed in Lebanon. In what was intended to be a conciliatory gesture towards bruised Arab sensibilities, Rice visited the beleaguered Lebanese capital of Beirut first. She met with the Prime Minister, the speaker of parliament, and other significant participants in the coalition of sectarian groups that is the ruling arrangement in Lebanon. She did not receive, by any account, a single word of sustenance and was sent on her way with the unequivocal demand that Israel stop its aggression and a reconstruction effort be set underway before the terms of a final peace settlement could be discussed.
The Lebanese perception in this sense was congruent with the global commonsense, that for a durable peace to be negotiated, the immediate provocation of Israel’s wanton military brutality should be reined in. Uniquely however, the U.S. had a different perception. Obviously believing that the deafening sound of missiles and bombs wrecking the civilian infrastructure of a country would concentrate minds, the U.S. was insisting that a ceasefire would only be the final outcome of a comprehensive peace settlement. The Lebanese were under duress, being stampeded into signing a peace agreement with Israel – much like the shameful documents of surrender authored by Egypt in 1980 and Jordan in 1994 – that would take the country out of the Arab orbit and make it an accomplice in the cultural genocide of Palestine.
It was already clear by the time of the Rice visit though, that the U.S.-Israeli stratagem was faltering. Much store had been set by this axis of evil on the sectarian groups within Lebanon’s political mosaic rebelling against the Shi’a militant group, Hezbollah, that had sparked off the crisis by its cross-border raid into Israel to kill six Israeli soldiers and capture two prisoners of war. Initial rumbles of discontent from the Maronite Christian leadership within Lebanon seemed to indicate that the game-plan may bear fruit. But during Rice’s visit to Beirut, when she met the Sunni prime minister, the Shi’a speaker of parliament and leaders of other factions within Lebanon’s unique mosaic of confessional politics, she was unequivocally told that the Israeli aggression was perceived across all schisms, as a national rather than a sectarian problem.
The reasons are not far to seek. The religious factions in Lebanese politics are all too aware of the disastrous consequences that disunity can have at this juncture. Memories of the country’s 15 year-long civil war, punctuated by the brutal Israeli invasion of 1982 and the destruction of much of its capital city, are still raw.
Then, the bloodletting was only ended by the 1990 Taif accord sponsored by the Arab League. The conditions both implicit and explicit under which the truce came into effect have never been a secret. Syria would under-write the peace in Lebanon and honour the National Accord of 1943, which was the foundational document of the brittle peace between the country’s different confessional groupings. Lebanese Christians had lost their social, economic and above all, numerical preeminence since the 1943 compact assured them the presidency of the republic in perpetuity. Natural growth and the influx of Palestinian victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing in 1948 and subsequent years, had altered the demographic balances. But if the Taif accord committed itself to honouring the 1943 compact, it was only on the essential condition that the resistance would be kept alive.
There would in other words, be no peace treaty with Israel without a broader settlement of all issues of concern to the Arab world. Uniquely for a process of national reconciliation, the Lebanese state agreed in 1990 to an abridgment of its powers, granting Hezbollah the autonomy in southern Lebanon to sustain the resistance. This was in part a recognition of the stellar role the Shi’a militant group – which operates as a full-fledged parliamentary party in Lebanese politics – had played in sustaining a sense of civil society and nationality in the south of the country through the years of Israeli aggression and occupation. As Rafiq al-Hariri, then the Prime Minister of Lebanon, put it in 1996: “The resistance...is not made by the Lebanese government. It is made by the people. All we are saying is that the people have the right to fight the occupation”.
Today, both the U.S. and Israel seek to portray Hezbollah as the terrorist proxy of hostile governments in Syria and Iran. This self-serving narrative overlooks the close links that Hezbollah has managed to forge with all sections of Lebanese national life. It is for precisely this reason that the U.S. and Israel, after wheedling and coercing the U.N. Security Council into passing resolution 1559 demanding the disarming of Hezbollah and the extension of the Lebanese government’s writ over the entire country, have been unsure about the means available to enforce it. An effort to deploy the Lebanese national army in disarming the Hezbollah would, absent a broader settlement in the region, fail to muster up a political consensus. Even if the battle were to be joined, it would be an unequal fight since Hezbollah, as the most powerful military force in Lebanon, commanding the allegiance of its largest confessional grouping, would easily prevail.
Hezbollah fought the Lebanese general elections of 2005 with a slate of predominantly Shi’a candidates. But it draws the unswerving support of the Palestinian diaspora in the country. And the powerful Druze chieftain, Walid Junblatt, has also allied himself with Hezbollah in the ruling arrangement in Beirut. Further political sustenance has come from Michel Aoun, a former chief of staff of the Lebanese army and a Maronite Christian who has credibility and respect across all confessional groupings. Both Junblatt and Aoun have long opposed the influence exerted by Syria in Lebanese affairs and in allying themselves closely with Hezbollah, they have effectively rubbished the self-serving myth that the U.S. and Israel have sought to propagate.
Unfortunately, some of the more influential Arab states -- motivated both by loyalty to the U.S. aid-giver and apprehension over growing Iranian geopolitical influence – have chosen to buy the western myth. Foreign Ministers of the Arab League were called into session at Cairo on the fourth day of the offensive against Lebanon. In an obvious effort to set the tone for this meeting, King Abdullah of Jordan joined President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in issuing a statement putting the onus of finding a peace on Hezbollah. Its brand of “adventurism” did not serve “Arab interests” according to the joint declaration, which explicitly warned Hezbollah to steer clear of any actions that could plunge the region into “uncalculated confrontations”. Concurrently, a spokesman for the Saudi Arabian ruling family, came out with a denunciation of Hezbollah’s “uncalculated adventures” which had ostensibly exposed “Arab nations... to grave dangers without these nations having a say in the matter.”
In compliance with a U.S. demarche, the Saudi foreign minister read out a statement at the Arab League session, demanding that Hezbollah cease its “unexpected, inappropriate and irresponsible acts” of aggression against Israel. Saudi Arabia was joined in this demand by Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, the Gulf states and the Palestinian authority, represented not by its elected parliament but by the increasingly isolated president, Abu Mazen. Ranged on the other side, were Syria, Algeria, Yemen and Libya, among others.
Two weeks on, with the Hezbollah resistance showing no signs of crumbling, the mood in the Arab camp was somewhat different. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia authored a personal communication to the U.S. president, delivered by his kinsman and foreign minister, reportedly “beseeching” him to end the Israeli aggression. The Jordanian foreign minister declared that his country would support a ceasefire and the deployment of an international force in southern Lebanon to “dislodge” the Hezbollah from the strategic positions it had occupied. And reverting to the brand of diplomacy that it is most comfortable with, Saudi Arabia committed itself to provide a sum of $ 1.5 billion for the reconstruction of Lebanon.
Israel was by this time reconciled to the strategic reality that its use of air and artillery power had failed to complete the job of decimating the Hezbollah. Leaflets were being profusely dropped in southern Lebanon, warning the civilian population to leave, since Israel intended to convert the entire region into a free-fire zone where nothing would be safe. Israel’s chief of defence staff, Lt-Gen Dan Halutz – who is effectively persona non grata in several countries because of the threat of prosecution for war crimes under universal jurisdiction laws – was urging his forces to destroy at least ten buildings in Lebanon for every rocket that Hezbollah fired. And evidence was emerging that Israel had, as during its wars of destruction against Lebanon in 1982, 1993 and 1996, again been using banned incendiary weapons on civilians in the south of the country.
In 1996, the international advocacy group, Human Rights Watch, had recorded powerful and persuasive eyewitness testimony about Israel’s use of white phosphorus weapons -- which when not fatal, cause intense burns and permanent scars – on Lebanese civilians including children. “The available circumstantial evidence of the illegal use of phosphorus, and/or other incendiaries, by Israel against Lebanese civilians during the 1993 events and afterwards is so compelling as to warrant serious investigation and a public response by the Israeli government”, it had observed: “Among other evidence, Human Rights Watch saw several civilians, including children, in southern Lebanon with burns that are likely to have been caused by phosphorus”.
Far from being forced to account for its crimes, Israel has only been given greater licence and leeway to kill and destroy. As Israel presses on with its ground offensive into Lebanon, it is reportedly prepared for a long stay, till the U.S. is able to cobble together an international force that will be empowered to take aggressive enforcement action against Hezbollah. Few countries have yet volunteered troops for this enterprise. And just when the U.S. administration was seeking to step up its mobilisational efforts, the news emerged of the deliberate targeting by Israel of a U.N. observer post in Lebanon. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has expressed deep anger and called for an investigation into the incident, which has claimed at least four lives. At the time of writing, it seems that some of the casualties could have been Indian personnel on peace-keeping duties with the U.N.
As with Iraq in 2003, India could soon be faced with a request from the U.S. to volunteer troops for the dirty work of policing Israel’s regime of coercion and aggression in West Asia. And unlike then, it is greatly to be hoped that India will respond this time, not with waffling and equivocation, but with a firm and decisive “no”. The more worthwhile and principled foreign policy pursuit would obviously be to rein in the racist outlaw regime of Israel in the cause of justice for Palestine and Lebanon.
It is necessary to recall this bit of recent history since the habitual tendency to delay taking a stand has not changed with the UPA government. On July 20, the Ministry of External Affairs issued a statement declaring Israel’s actions “unjustified”. This might have seemed a timely response to the Israeli military’s destructive rampage through Lebanon, which had wrecked most of that country’s civilian infrastructure and killed in excess of 300 civilians. But no, the Indian government’ statement it transpired, bore reference to the trail of destruction that Israeli marauders had left in Gaza. It was at least three weeks since Israel had bombed Gaza’s only power plant, abducted most elected representatives of the Palestinian people, and ground the administrative offices of the Palestinian National Authority to rubble. And while the Indian government agonised over the appropriate response to these crimes against humanity, the Israeli killing machine had moved on to open another front in Lebanon. It was not as if the slaughter in the Gaza had ceased. It was just that it had acquired a “business as usual” dimension and been knocked off the world headlines, since the massacre in Lebanon had momentarily acquired greater dimensions.
A few days later, the criminal U.S. administration of George Bush sent its principal diplomat, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, to West Asia to find a way to end the bloodshed in Lebanon. In what was intended to be a conciliatory gesture towards bruised Arab sensibilities, Rice visited the beleaguered Lebanese capital of Beirut first. She met with the Prime Minister, the speaker of parliament, and other significant participants in the coalition of sectarian groups that is the ruling arrangement in Lebanon. She did not receive, by any account, a single word of sustenance and was sent on her way with the unequivocal demand that Israel stop its aggression and a reconstruction effort be set underway before the terms of a final peace settlement could be discussed.
The Lebanese perception in this sense was congruent with the global commonsense, that for a durable peace to be negotiated, the immediate provocation of Israel’s wanton military brutality should be reined in. Uniquely however, the U.S. had a different perception. Obviously believing that the deafening sound of missiles and bombs wrecking the civilian infrastructure of a country would concentrate minds, the U.S. was insisting that a ceasefire would only be the final outcome of a comprehensive peace settlement. The Lebanese were under duress, being stampeded into signing a peace agreement with Israel – much like the shameful documents of surrender authored by Egypt in 1980 and Jordan in 1994 – that would take the country out of the Arab orbit and make it an accomplice in the cultural genocide of Palestine.
It was already clear by the time of the Rice visit though, that the U.S.-Israeli stratagem was faltering. Much store had been set by this axis of evil on the sectarian groups within Lebanon’s political mosaic rebelling against the Shi’a militant group, Hezbollah, that had sparked off the crisis by its cross-border raid into Israel to kill six Israeli soldiers and capture two prisoners of war. Initial rumbles of discontent from the Maronite Christian leadership within Lebanon seemed to indicate that the game-plan may bear fruit. But during Rice’s visit to Beirut, when she met the Sunni prime minister, the Shi’a speaker of parliament and leaders of other factions within Lebanon’s unique mosaic of confessional politics, she was unequivocally told that the Israeli aggression was perceived across all schisms, as a national rather than a sectarian problem.
The reasons are not far to seek. The religious factions in Lebanese politics are all too aware of the disastrous consequences that disunity can have at this juncture. Memories of the country’s 15 year-long civil war, punctuated by the brutal Israeli invasion of 1982 and the destruction of much of its capital city, are still raw.
Then, the bloodletting was only ended by the 1990 Taif accord sponsored by the Arab League. The conditions both implicit and explicit under which the truce came into effect have never been a secret. Syria would under-write the peace in Lebanon and honour the National Accord of 1943, which was the foundational document of the brittle peace between the country’s different confessional groupings. Lebanese Christians had lost their social, economic and above all, numerical preeminence since the 1943 compact assured them the presidency of the republic in perpetuity. Natural growth and the influx of Palestinian victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing in 1948 and subsequent years, had altered the demographic balances. But if the Taif accord committed itself to honouring the 1943 compact, it was only on the essential condition that the resistance would be kept alive.
There would in other words, be no peace treaty with Israel without a broader settlement of all issues of concern to the Arab world. Uniquely for a process of national reconciliation, the Lebanese state agreed in 1990 to an abridgment of its powers, granting Hezbollah the autonomy in southern Lebanon to sustain the resistance. This was in part a recognition of the stellar role the Shi’a militant group – which operates as a full-fledged parliamentary party in Lebanese politics – had played in sustaining a sense of civil society and nationality in the south of the country through the years of Israeli aggression and occupation. As Rafiq al-Hariri, then the Prime Minister of Lebanon, put it in 1996: “The resistance...is not made by the Lebanese government. It is made by the people. All we are saying is that the people have the right to fight the occupation”.
Today, both the U.S. and Israel seek to portray Hezbollah as the terrorist proxy of hostile governments in Syria and Iran. This self-serving narrative overlooks the close links that Hezbollah has managed to forge with all sections of Lebanese national life. It is for precisely this reason that the U.S. and Israel, after wheedling and coercing the U.N. Security Council into passing resolution 1559 demanding the disarming of Hezbollah and the extension of the Lebanese government’s writ over the entire country, have been unsure about the means available to enforce it. An effort to deploy the Lebanese national army in disarming the Hezbollah would, absent a broader settlement in the region, fail to muster up a political consensus. Even if the battle were to be joined, it would be an unequal fight since Hezbollah, as the most powerful military force in Lebanon, commanding the allegiance of its largest confessional grouping, would easily prevail.
Hezbollah fought the Lebanese general elections of 2005 with a slate of predominantly Shi’a candidates. But it draws the unswerving support of the Palestinian diaspora in the country. And the powerful Druze chieftain, Walid Junblatt, has also allied himself with Hezbollah in the ruling arrangement in Beirut. Further political sustenance has come from Michel Aoun, a former chief of staff of the Lebanese army and a Maronite Christian who has credibility and respect across all confessional groupings. Both Junblatt and Aoun have long opposed the influence exerted by Syria in Lebanese affairs and in allying themselves closely with Hezbollah, they have effectively rubbished the self-serving myth that the U.S. and Israel have sought to propagate.
Unfortunately, some of the more influential Arab states -- motivated both by loyalty to the U.S. aid-giver and apprehension over growing Iranian geopolitical influence – have chosen to buy the western myth. Foreign Ministers of the Arab League were called into session at Cairo on the fourth day of the offensive against Lebanon. In an obvious effort to set the tone for this meeting, King Abdullah of Jordan joined President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in issuing a statement putting the onus of finding a peace on Hezbollah. Its brand of “adventurism” did not serve “Arab interests” according to the joint declaration, which explicitly warned Hezbollah to steer clear of any actions that could plunge the region into “uncalculated confrontations”. Concurrently, a spokesman for the Saudi Arabian ruling family, came out with a denunciation of Hezbollah’s “uncalculated adventures” which had ostensibly exposed “Arab nations... to grave dangers without these nations having a say in the matter.”
In compliance with a U.S. demarche, the Saudi foreign minister read out a statement at the Arab League session, demanding that Hezbollah cease its “unexpected, inappropriate and irresponsible acts” of aggression against Israel. Saudi Arabia was joined in this demand by Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, the Gulf states and the Palestinian authority, represented not by its elected parliament but by the increasingly isolated president, Abu Mazen. Ranged on the other side, were Syria, Algeria, Yemen and Libya, among others.
Two weeks on, with the Hezbollah resistance showing no signs of crumbling, the mood in the Arab camp was somewhat different. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia authored a personal communication to the U.S. president, delivered by his kinsman and foreign minister, reportedly “beseeching” him to end the Israeli aggression. The Jordanian foreign minister declared that his country would support a ceasefire and the deployment of an international force in southern Lebanon to “dislodge” the Hezbollah from the strategic positions it had occupied. And reverting to the brand of diplomacy that it is most comfortable with, Saudi Arabia committed itself to provide a sum of $ 1.5 billion for the reconstruction of Lebanon.
Israel was by this time reconciled to the strategic reality that its use of air and artillery power had failed to complete the job of decimating the Hezbollah. Leaflets were being profusely dropped in southern Lebanon, warning the civilian population to leave, since Israel intended to convert the entire region into a free-fire zone where nothing would be safe. Israel’s chief of defence staff, Lt-Gen Dan Halutz – who is effectively persona non grata in several countries because of the threat of prosecution for war crimes under universal jurisdiction laws – was urging his forces to destroy at least ten buildings in Lebanon for every rocket that Hezbollah fired. And evidence was emerging that Israel had, as during its wars of destruction against Lebanon in 1982, 1993 and 1996, again been using banned incendiary weapons on civilians in the south of the country.
In 1996, the international advocacy group, Human Rights Watch, had recorded powerful and persuasive eyewitness testimony about Israel’s use of white phosphorus weapons -- which when not fatal, cause intense burns and permanent scars – on Lebanese civilians including children. “The available circumstantial evidence of the illegal use of phosphorus, and/or other incendiaries, by Israel against Lebanese civilians during the 1993 events and afterwards is so compelling as to warrant serious investigation and a public response by the Israeli government”, it had observed: “Among other evidence, Human Rights Watch saw several civilians, including children, in southern Lebanon with burns that are likely to have been caused by phosphorus”.
Far from being forced to account for its crimes, Israel has only been given greater licence and leeway to kill and destroy. As Israel presses on with its ground offensive into Lebanon, it is reportedly prepared for a long stay, till the U.S. is able to cobble together an international force that will be empowered to take aggressive enforcement action against Hezbollah. Few countries have yet volunteered troops for this enterprise. And just when the U.S. administration was seeking to step up its mobilisational efforts, the news emerged of the deliberate targeting by Israel of a U.N. observer post in Lebanon. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has expressed deep anger and called for an investigation into the incident, which has claimed at least four lives. At the time of writing, it seems that some of the casualties could have been Indian personnel on peace-keeping duties with the U.N.
As with Iraq in 2003, India could soon be faced with a request from the U.S. to volunteer troops for the dirty work of policing Israel’s regime of coercion and aggression in West Asia. And unlike then, it is greatly to be hoped that India will respond this time, not with waffling and equivocation, but with a firm and decisive “no”. The more worthwhile and principled foreign policy pursuit would obviously be to rein in the racist outlaw regime of Israel in the cause of justice for Palestine and Lebanon.
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Israel in Lebanon: focusing minds through bombs and missiles
Over the third weekend of July, television studios in the U.S. were resonant with talk of an apocalyptic struggle of good against evil. Israel had just begun a destructive military rampage in Lebanon, gutting Beirut’s international airport, destroying the country’s electricity grid and throwing transportation networks out of gear. In obvious admiration, Newt Gingrich, the right-wing ideologue and prospective Republican candidate for the U.S. presidency, spoke of these actions as the first salvos of “World War Three”. Joining him in this ascent towards a variety of religious rapture, were news and talk-show hosts in virtually all channels with a tilt towards the right. If the “war on terror” has lost some of the spectral magic that earned the rabid right two significant electoral victories in the U.S., it evidently needs now to be supplanted by an ever more frightening vision.
But for a war that pitted such clearly defined moral categories as good and evil against each other, the line-up of geopolitical forces on either side of World War III remained indeterminate. With the exception of the U.S. and Israel, global public opinion remained firmly on the side of the supposed forces of darkness. And the dynastic regimes of the Arab world, none too firm in their adherence to democracy, stood uneasily on the side of the U.S. This arrangement of pieces on the international checkerboard had altered, though ever so subtly, in the days since the war began. But every minute shift conveyed grim suggestions of unending turmoil in the region.
Though no explicit words of approval were uttered in public, the U.S. was prepared to risk international isolation in resisting any multilateral involvement to curb Israel’s absolute freedom to terrorise its neighbourhood. At the same time, it was prepared with unseemly haste, to rush to unfavourable judgment in all matters involving Israel’s adversaries. Eleven days into the war, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice paid a visit to the region. In a gesture of conciliation towards bruised Arab sentiments, she chose Beirut as her first port of call, expressing sympathy for the Lebanese civilians caught up in a vicious war, but saying nothing that could be construed as disapproval of Israel’s military actions. Rather, she rehearsed yet again, her well-worn line that a ceasefire would be of little substantive value, if it were to be breached within a matter of months. To be of any enduring use, a ceasefire would have to be accompanied by a comprehensive peace that addressed all the fundamental problems of the region. And in identifying the problems that needed immediate attention, Rice proved disinclined to take a broad view. The one problem she had in mind was the pervasive presence and influence of the Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon, where it had effectively become a “state within a state”, unamenable to central control from Beirut and able to threaten Israel’s northern settlements at will through lethal rocket fire.
The U.S. attitude in effect reverses the commonsense of international diplomacy, which had been articulated the preceding Thursday by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Addressing the U.N. Security Council, Annan paid due obeisance to the U.S. sensibilities, criticising Hezbollah for its “provocative” foray across the border a week before, when two Israeli soldiers were taken prisoner. This action, carried out without the authority of a duly constituted political authority, showed a “reckless disregard for the interests of the government of Lebanon”. But having said all this, Annan was firm in his belief that Israel's “excessive use of force” was completely unwarranted. It did “little or nothing to decrease popular support” for Hezbollah, and made the Lebanese government, whose authority Israel wanted extended to the entire country, a hapless hostage to the actions of a guerrilla force. Staying well within the bounds of diplomacy, Annan chided Israel for instigating a humanitarian crisis that was likely in little time, to engulf upto a million people.
Fundamental to the divergence between the U.S. and the rest of the world are rival perceptions about the conditions under which negotiations should best be conducted. While conceding that there is a large complex of issues to be resolved, Annan’s proposals suggested that negotiations should ideally proceed in a calm and settled atmosphere. With her own interventions, Rice in effect, was articulating the U.S. position that peace talks are most likely to achieve their objective if conducted with the deafening crescendo of bombs and missiles in the background.
From behind the scenes though, another story was emerging in unsubtle leaks: that even as Rice was setting off for her tour of the region, the U.S. had given Israel a clear deadline of a week to complete its military campaign. Beyond that, the U.S. was reportedly, not prepared to hold out the assurance that it would resist the international call for a ceasefire. Whether this conformed to the professional military assessment from the Israeli side was unclear. At a cabinet meeting the day before the Rice visit, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had reportedly assured his ministerial colleagues that “the diplomatic process” would not be pursued “at the expense of destroying infrastructures of terror”, which would “take a very long time”.
Evidently to ensure that maximal havoc was created in the available time, the U.S. was also, as the New York Times reported on July 22, hastening its deliveries of lethal munitions to Israel. “The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration”, reported the newspaper: “Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah”.
Even without the additional element of rancour injected by this report, Arab states had begun by then to show deep signs of disquiet. Foreign Ministers of the Arab League were called into session at Cairo on the fourth day of the offensive against Lebanon. In an obvious effort to set the tone for this meeting, King Abdullah of Jordan joined President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in issuing a statement putting the onus of finding a peace on Hezbollah. The predominantly Shi’a Muslim formation, which represents the largest of Lebanon’s many confessional groupings and is a significant presence in the national parliament, was accused of “adventurism that does not serve Arab interests” and explicitly told to steer clear of any actions that could plunge the region into “uncalculated confrontations.” As if on cue, a spokesman for the Saudi Arabian ruling family immediately afterwards, came out with a denunciation of Hezbollah’s “uncalculated adventures” which had ostensibly exposed “Arab nations... to grave dangers without these nations having a say in the matter.”
In compliance with a U.S. demarche, the Saudi foreign minister read out a statement at the Arab League session, demanding that Hezbollah cease its “unexpected, inappropriate and irresponsible acts” of aggression against Israel. Saudi Arabia was joined in this demand by Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, the Gulf states and the Palestinian authority, represented not by its elected parliament but by the increasingly isolated president, Abu Mazen. Ranged on the other side, were Syria, Algeria, Yemen and Libya.
Within a week, the Saudi foreign minister, accompanied by two other members of the ruling family, called on the U.S. President in Washington, to deliver a letter from Saudi King Abdullah. According to media reports, the King “beseeched” the U.S. President to intervene in Israel's military campaign in Lebanon. As he left the presidential premises, the Saudi minister said that he had “requested a cease-fire to allow for a cessation of hostilities”. The “bleeding in Lebanon” had to stop, and there had to be “an agreement to save Lebanese lives, Lebanese properties and what the Lebanese have built, and to save this country from the ordeal it is facing”.
Behind this shift in Saudi attitudes, lies a sense of alarm at the violence inflicted upon Lebanon. Israel had obviously calculated that the scale of mechanical and explosive force it was prepared to apply through air and artillery power, would unhinge the loose coalition of confessional groups that is the ruling arrangement in Lebanon. It had hoped that the Maronite Christian element, traditionally viewed as allies, would lead a revolt against the Hezbollah, if necessary ejecting the party from the ruling coalition and deploying the Lebanese national army to rein in its militia.
It did not take very long before this calculation came a cropper. The religious factions in Lebanese politics are all too aware of the disastrous consequences that disunity can have at this juncture. Memories of the country’s 15 year-long civil war, punctuated by the brutal Israeli invasion of 1982 and the destruction of much of its capital city, are still raw. The bloodletting was ended by the 1990 Taif accord sponsored by the Arab League and its conditions – both implicit and explicit – have never been a secret. Syria would under-write the peace in Lebanon and honour the National Accord of 1943, which was the foundational document of the brittle peace between the country’s different confessional groupings. The Christians had lost their social, economic and above all, numerical preeminence since the 1943 compact assured them the presidency of the republic in perpetuity. Natural growth and the influx of Palestinian victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing in 1948 and subsequent years, had altered the demographic balances. But if the Taif accord committed itself to honouring the 1943 compact, it was only on the essential condition that the resistance would be kept alive. There would in other words, be no peace treaty with Israel without a broader settlement of all issues of concern to the Arab world.
Shortly after the Israelis blasted a residential building of Beirut with 20 tonnes of explosives in an effort to kill him, Hezbollah’s leader Shaikh Hassan Nasrallah sat down for an interview with the Al Jazeera news channel. Asked about the impunity with which Hezbollah functioned in southern Lebanon, engaging in hostile actions that endangered the fragile peace with Israel, he was categorical that the Shi’a militia was operating within the terms of a broader agreement with the Lebanese government. “The government statement, on the basis of which we participated in the government, talks about the Lebanese Government's endorsement of resistance and its national right to liberate the land and the prisoners”, said Nasrallah. Uniquely for a process of national reconciliation, the Lebanese state agreed in 1990 to an abridgment of its powers, granting Hezbollah the autonomy in southern Lebanon to sustain the resistance. And the objectives of the resistance as laid out by Nasrallah, were manifold, though not all were of equal priority.
Despite vacating much of southern Lebanon in 2000, Israel continues to be in occupation of a small patch of land called the Shab’a farms. Furthermore, violations of the sovereign space of Lebanon through land, air and sea are almost a daily occurrence. But neither of these, in Nasrallah’s account, merited great attention on the part of the resistance. Though the border violations in particular, were a grievous provocation, Lebanon he declared, could live with them. Where it would not compromise though, was in respect of the Lebanese nationals and Palestinians who were being held without trial in Israeli prisons, and the civilians who were subject to the daily military atrocities of the Israeli armed forces. Strategically and tactically, in the aggravated situation that prevailed mid-July, with Israeli military action against civilians scaling new heights of random and disproportionate violence, the Hezbollah had no option but to conduct its raid across the border and take two soldiers prisoner.
The subsequent reaction by the Arab states had disappointed Lebanon, but there were in Nasrallah’s strategic estimation, no grounds for anxiety in the internal situation. “We do not fear the internal front”, said Nasrallah: “They are trying to play on the sectarian divisions. They know that playing on the sectarian divisions is dangerous. …. If they want to play on the differences between Sunni and Shi’a, Muslim and Christian, or Druze and Shi’a, it will be dangerous to the country”.
These locutions have multiple layers of significance. On the one hand, an effort to deploy the Lebanese national army in disarming the Hezbollah would, absent a broader settlement in the region, fail to muster up a political consensus. It would moreover, be an unequal battle, since Hezbollah, as the most powerful military force in Lebanon, commanding the allegiance of its largest confessional grouping, would easily overwhelm the Lebanese army. If external powers were to intervene, the outcome would be a descent into civil war, which in conjunction with the daily bloodshed in Iraq, could plunge the entire region into anarchy.
Within Lebanon itself, Hezbollah fought the general elections of 2005 with a slate of predominantly Shi’a candidates. But it draws the unswerving support of the Palestinian diaspora in the country. And the powerful Druze chieftain Walid Junblatt, has also allied himself with Hezbollah in the ruling arrangement in Beirut. Further political sustenance has come from Michel Aoun, a former chief of staff of the Lebanese army and a Maronite Christian who has credibility and respect across all confessional groupings.
Both Junblatt and Aoun have been long-time opponents of the overweening influence exerted by Syria in Lebanese affairs. In allying themselves so closely with Hezbollah, they have effectively rubbished the notion, so pronounced in the Israeli and U.S. narration, that Hezbollah is little else than a terrorist proxy for Syria, determined to work contrary to Lebanon’s national interests. At another level, Nasrallah’s statements reflect a certain confidence that the Israeli assault would heal, rather than deepen sectarian fissures within Lebanon. Since the Israeli strategy has been quite explicitly to inflict pain on all of Lebanon rather than only the offending elements, it seemed to have precisely this effect after the first two weeks. Further, in standing up and signaling that Israel would be called to account for its atrocities on the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Hezbollah has the potential to transcend the sectarian split between Shi’a and Sunni Muslim, and appeal to a broad mass of the Arab people.
Since the farce of its withdrawal from Gaza, Israel has, with the acquiescence of all Arab regimes, considerably stepped up its daily attacks on the very fabric of civic life in occupied Palestine. These attacks have ascended several notches in virulence since Palestinian national elections in February brought the Islamic resistance group Hamas to power. Western governments have been mobilised to stop all aid flows to the beleaguered people, tax revenues rightfully belonging to the Palestinian administration have been withheld, and access routes through both land and sea have been blocked. In what would be recognised under international rules of war as a legitimate act of self-defence, Hamas militants in June carried out a raid on an Israeli military picket enforcing the illegal siege of Gaza. Two soldiers were killed and one taken prisoner. Since then, Israel has been engaged in the kind of destructive rampage through Gaza that it is now visiting on Lebanon.
That no Arab state managed to summon up the political will to condemn Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, has been a blot on their already besmirched reputations. That a non-state actor like Hezbollah should have taken up the onus of demanding accountability from Israel, is a further challenge to the Arab state system. Early reactions to the atrocities in Lebanon were conditioned by the aversion most Arab regimes have towards any accretion to the regional strategic influence of Iran, which is still considered, with obvious inattention to truth, the external prop without which Hezbollah would be a negligible political force. The later mood within the Arab leadership, which seemed almost to verge on panic, could well suggest the beginnings of a rearguard to safeguard their rapidly shrinking political legitimacy.
July 25, 2006
But for a war that pitted such clearly defined moral categories as good and evil against each other, the line-up of geopolitical forces on either side of World War III remained indeterminate. With the exception of the U.S. and Israel, global public opinion remained firmly on the side of the supposed forces of darkness. And the dynastic regimes of the Arab world, none too firm in their adherence to democracy, stood uneasily on the side of the U.S. This arrangement of pieces on the international checkerboard had altered, though ever so subtly, in the days since the war began. But every minute shift conveyed grim suggestions of unending turmoil in the region.
Though no explicit words of approval were uttered in public, the U.S. was prepared to risk international isolation in resisting any multilateral involvement to curb Israel’s absolute freedom to terrorise its neighbourhood. At the same time, it was prepared with unseemly haste, to rush to unfavourable judgment in all matters involving Israel’s adversaries. Eleven days into the war, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice paid a visit to the region. In a gesture of conciliation towards bruised Arab sentiments, she chose Beirut as her first port of call, expressing sympathy for the Lebanese civilians caught up in a vicious war, but saying nothing that could be construed as disapproval of Israel’s military actions. Rather, she rehearsed yet again, her well-worn line that a ceasefire would be of little substantive value, if it were to be breached within a matter of months. To be of any enduring use, a ceasefire would have to be accompanied by a comprehensive peace that addressed all the fundamental problems of the region. And in identifying the problems that needed immediate attention, Rice proved disinclined to take a broad view. The one problem she had in mind was the pervasive presence and influence of the Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon, where it had effectively become a “state within a state”, unamenable to central control from Beirut and able to threaten Israel’s northern settlements at will through lethal rocket fire.
The U.S. attitude in effect reverses the commonsense of international diplomacy, which had been articulated the preceding Thursday by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Addressing the U.N. Security Council, Annan paid due obeisance to the U.S. sensibilities, criticising Hezbollah for its “provocative” foray across the border a week before, when two Israeli soldiers were taken prisoner. This action, carried out without the authority of a duly constituted political authority, showed a “reckless disregard for the interests of the government of Lebanon”. But having said all this, Annan was firm in his belief that Israel's “excessive use of force” was completely unwarranted. It did “little or nothing to decrease popular support” for Hezbollah, and made the Lebanese government, whose authority Israel wanted extended to the entire country, a hapless hostage to the actions of a guerrilla force. Staying well within the bounds of diplomacy, Annan chided Israel for instigating a humanitarian crisis that was likely in little time, to engulf upto a million people.
Fundamental to the divergence between the U.S. and the rest of the world are rival perceptions about the conditions under which negotiations should best be conducted. While conceding that there is a large complex of issues to be resolved, Annan’s proposals suggested that negotiations should ideally proceed in a calm and settled atmosphere. With her own interventions, Rice in effect, was articulating the U.S. position that peace talks are most likely to achieve their objective if conducted with the deafening crescendo of bombs and missiles in the background.
From behind the scenes though, another story was emerging in unsubtle leaks: that even as Rice was setting off for her tour of the region, the U.S. had given Israel a clear deadline of a week to complete its military campaign. Beyond that, the U.S. was reportedly, not prepared to hold out the assurance that it would resist the international call for a ceasefire. Whether this conformed to the professional military assessment from the Israeli side was unclear. At a cabinet meeting the day before the Rice visit, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had reportedly assured his ministerial colleagues that “the diplomatic process” would not be pursued “at the expense of destroying infrastructures of terror”, which would “take a very long time”.
Evidently to ensure that maximal havoc was created in the available time, the U.S. was also, as the New York Times reported on July 22, hastening its deliveries of lethal munitions to Israel. “The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration”, reported the newspaper: “Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah”.
Even without the additional element of rancour injected by this report, Arab states had begun by then to show deep signs of disquiet. Foreign Ministers of the Arab League were called into session at Cairo on the fourth day of the offensive against Lebanon. In an obvious effort to set the tone for this meeting, King Abdullah of Jordan joined President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in issuing a statement putting the onus of finding a peace on Hezbollah. The predominantly Shi’a Muslim formation, which represents the largest of Lebanon’s many confessional groupings and is a significant presence in the national parliament, was accused of “adventurism that does not serve Arab interests” and explicitly told to steer clear of any actions that could plunge the region into “uncalculated confrontations.” As if on cue, a spokesman for the Saudi Arabian ruling family immediately afterwards, came out with a denunciation of Hezbollah’s “uncalculated adventures” which had ostensibly exposed “Arab nations... to grave dangers without these nations having a say in the matter.”
In compliance with a U.S. demarche, the Saudi foreign minister read out a statement at the Arab League session, demanding that Hezbollah cease its “unexpected, inappropriate and irresponsible acts” of aggression against Israel. Saudi Arabia was joined in this demand by Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, the Gulf states and the Palestinian authority, represented not by its elected parliament but by the increasingly isolated president, Abu Mazen. Ranged on the other side, were Syria, Algeria, Yemen and Libya.
Within a week, the Saudi foreign minister, accompanied by two other members of the ruling family, called on the U.S. President in Washington, to deliver a letter from Saudi King Abdullah. According to media reports, the King “beseeched” the U.S. President to intervene in Israel's military campaign in Lebanon. As he left the presidential premises, the Saudi minister said that he had “requested a cease-fire to allow for a cessation of hostilities”. The “bleeding in Lebanon” had to stop, and there had to be “an agreement to save Lebanese lives, Lebanese properties and what the Lebanese have built, and to save this country from the ordeal it is facing”.
Behind this shift in Saudi attitudes, lies a sense of alarm at the violence inflicted upon Lebanon. Israel had obviously calculated that the scale of mechanical and explosive force it was prepared to apply through air and artillery power, would unhinge the loose coalition of confessional groups that is the ruling arrangement in Lebanon. It had hoped that the Maronite Christian element, traditionally viewed as allies, would lead a revolt against the Hezbollah, if necessary ejecting the party from the ruling coalition and deploying the Lebanese national army to rein in its militia.
It did not take very long before this calculation came a cropper. The religious factions in Lebanese politics are all too aware of the disastrous consequences that disunity can have at this juncture. Memories of the country’s 15 year-long civil war, punctuated by the brutal Israeli invasion of 1982 and the destruction of much of its capital city, are still raw. The bloodletting was ended by the 1990 Taif accord sponsored by the Arab League and its conditions – both implicit and explicit – have never been a secret. Syria would under-write the peace in Lebanon and honour the National Accord of 1943, which was the foundational document of the brittle peace between the country’s different confessional groupings. The Christians had lost their social, economic and above all, numerical preeminence since the 1943 compact assured them the presidency of the republic in perpetuity. Natural growth and the influx of Palestinian victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing in 1948 and subsequent years, had altered the demographic balances. But if the Taif accord committed itself to honouring the 1943 compact, it was only on the essential condition that the resistance would be kept alive. There would in other words, be no peace treaty with Israel without a broader settlement of all issues of concern to the Arab world.
Shortly after the Israelis blasted a residential building of Beirut with 20 tonnes of explosives in an effort to kill him, Hezbollah’s leader Shaikh Hassan Nasrallah sat down for an interview with the Al Jazeera news channel. Asked about the impunity with which Hezbollah functioned in southern Lebanon, engaging in hostile actions that endangered the fragile peace with Israel, he was categorical that the Shi’a militia was operating within the terms of a broader agreement with the Lebanese government. “The government statement, on the basis of which we participated in the government, talks about the Lebanese Government's endorsement of resistance and its national right to liberate the land and the prisoners”, said Nasrallah. Uniquely for a process of national reconciliation, the Lebanese state agreed in 1990 to an abridgment of its powers, granting Hezbollah the autonomy in southern Lebanon to sustain the resistance. And the objectives of the resistance as laid out by Nasrallah, were manifold, though not all were of equal priority.
Despite vacating much of southern Lebanon in 2000, Israel continues to be in occupation of a small patch of land called the Shab’a farms. Furthermore, violations of the sovereign space of Lebanon through land, air and sea are almost a daily occurrence. But neither of these, in Nasrallah’s account, merited great attention on the part of the resistance. Though the border violations in particular, were a grievous provocation, Lebanon he declared, could live with them. Where it would not compromise though, was in respect of the Lebanese nationals and Palestinians who were being held without trial in Israeli prisons, and the civilians who were subject to the daily military atrocities of the Israeli armed forces. Strategically and tactically, in the aggravated situation that prevailed mid-July, with Israeli military action against civilians scaling new heights of random and disproportionate violence, the Hezbollah had no option but to conduct its raid across the border and take two soldiers prisoner.
The subsequent reaction by the Arab states had disappointed Lebanon, but there were in Nasrallah’s strategic estimation, no grounds for anxiety in the internal situation. “We do not fear the internal front”, said Nasrallah: “They are trying to play on the sectarian divisions. They know that playing on the sectarian divisions is dangerous. …. If they want to play on the differences between Sunni and Shi’a, Muslim and Christian, or Druze and Shi’a, it will be dangerous to the country”.
These locutions have multiple layers of significance. On the one hand, an effort to deploy the Lebanese national army in disarming the Hezbollah would, absent a broader settlement in the region, fail to muster up a political consensus. It would moreover, be an unequal battle, since Hezbollah, as the most powerful military force in Lebanon, commanding the allegiance of its largest confessional grouping, would easily overwhelm the Lebanese army. If external powers were to intervene, the outcome would be a descent into civil war, which in conjunction with the daily bloodshed in Iraq, could plunge the entire region into anarchy.
Within Lebanon itself, Hezbollah fought the general elections of 2005 with a slate of predominantly Shi’a candidates. But it draws the unswerving support of the Palestinian diaspora in the country. And the powerful Druze chieftain Walid Junblatt, has also allied himself with Hezbollah in the ruling arrangement in Beirut. Further political sustenance has come from Michel Aoun, a former chief of staff of the Lebanese army and a Maronite Christian who has credibility and respect across all confessional groupings.
Both Junblatt and Aoun have been long-time opponents of the overweening influence exerted by Syria in Lebanese affairs. In allying themselves so closely with Hezbollah, they have effectively rubbished the notion, so pronounced in the Israeli and U.S. narration, that Hezbollah is little else than a terrorist proxy for Syria, determined to work contrary to Lebanon’s national interests. At another level, Nasrallah’s statements reflect a certain confidence that the Israeli assault would heal, rather than deepen sectarian fissures within Lebanon. Since the Israeli strategy has been quite explicitly to inflict pain on all of Lebanon rather than only the offending elements, it seemed to have precisely this effect after the first two weeks. Further, in standing up and signaling that Israel would be called to account for its atrocities on the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Hezbollah has the potential to transcend the sectarian split between Shi’a and Sunni Muslim, and appeal to a broad mass of the Arab people.
Since the farce of its withdrawal from Gaza, Israel has, with the acquiescence of all Arab regimes, considerably stepped up its daily attacks on the very fabric of civic life in occupied Palestine. These attacks have ascended several notches in virulence since Palestinian national elections in February brought the Islamic resistance group Hamas to power. Western governments have been mobilised to stop all aid flows to the beleaguered people, tax revenues rightfully belonging to the Palestinian administration have been withheld, and access routes through both land and sea have been blocked. In what would be recognised under international rules of war as a legitimate act of self-defence, Hamas militants in June carried out a raid on an Israeli military picket enforcing the illegal siege of Gaza. Two soldiers were killed and one taken prisoner. Since then, Israel has been engaged in the kind of destructive rampage through Gaza that it is now visiting on Lebanon.
That no Arab state managed to summon up the political will to condemn Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, has been a blot on their already besmirched reputations. That a non-state actor like Hezbollah should have taken up the onus of demanding accountability from Israel, is a further challenge to the Arab state system. Early reactions to the atrocities in Lebanon were conditioned by the aversion most Arab regimes have towards any accretion to the regional strategic influence of Iran, which is still considered, with obvious inattention to truth, the external prop without which Hezbollah would be a negligible political force. The later mood within the Arab leadership, which seemed almost to verge on panic, could well suggest the beginnings of a rearguard to safeguard their rapidly shrinking political legitimacy.
July 25, 2006
Monday, July 24, 2006
Mumbai and the question of terror
Mumbai is a generous city, a city that for all its signs of decay, still manages to accommodate any needy person in search of a livelihood. And as Mumbaikars showed the very day after the serial bombing of their city’s lifeline, it is a courageous city. Both by compulsion and by unswerving commitment to the basic credo of getting on with life, while likewise allowing all others, Mumbai is a city whose rhythms can never be silenced.
Following the July 11 attacks on Mumbai’s suburban transportation system, there was much lament in public forums, that India’s struggle against terrorism had gone seriously adrift. The proposition was advanced, not unheard of before, that force can only be combated by an equal, opposite -- perhaps even a disproportionate -- application of the same principle. And there was some bemoaning of the fact that India’s campaign against terrorism, after its brief victory in the early-1990s in the Punjab theatre, had lost sight of the basics in subsequent challenges: in Kashmir and in the proliferation of affronts that the Indian state has had to face in diverse corners of the country.
The closest perhaps that Mumbai has come to having its spirit broken, was for two weeks in January 1993, when its streets were taken over by rampaging mobs intent on inflicting maximum violence on a vulnerable minority. And just two months later, it was paralysed into silence and submission when a retaliatory sequence of bombings devastated crucial nodes of its daily life.
Since that horrendous outrage, there have been several attacks on civic life in the city that have challenged the common citizen’s loyalty. And yet, with all the provocation, there has been no occasion since when civic peace has been disturbed, when the fabric of inter-community understanding has been in danger of being shredded.
If there is a lesson underlying all this, it is simply that a citizenry committed to peace and determined to preserve the civic responsibilities that make life in a big city possible, is the principal resource that a state can count upon in its struggle against terrorism. It is a curiosity then, that in all the policy deliberations that followed Mumbai’s tragedy, not to mention the advisory opinions that the media so generously proffered, this issue never featured in any significant manner.
As a term, “terrorism” may remain slippery and evasive, though there is little that is vague about the real world manifestations of the threat. India in particular, has suffered enormously from successive, and intimate, encounters with the random and insensate violence of terrorism, designed with deliberate intent, to disrupt the rhythms of daily life for a civilian population and sap public loyalty to the political order. The motives of terrorism could be various: a sense of grievance at real or imagined injustices, a quest for vengeance against palpably real atrocities. But in terms of its long-term calculus, terrorism invariably targets the will of an entire people, to sap their stated and unstated consent in the perpetuation of a political order.
That Mumbai has defied this calculus despite repeated provocation, is a tribute to the resilience of the city and to the vital stakes that all of India has in its well-being. At the very least it would seem, the citizens of Mumbai need recognition for their fortitude -- an example for the whole country – and this can only come through pursuing the perpetrators of July 11 with all the determination and fairness that the law mandates.
Initial signals have not been the most propitious. The principal opposition party, the BJP, has with its allies, made known its determination to put the government on the mat in the monsoon session of Parliament over its alleged softness on terrorism. Reprising a favoured theme – which it has never tired of harping upon since the Terrorism and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act (TADA) was repealed in the mid-1990s and the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) in 2004 – it has demanded the enactment of a special category of law in addition to all existing statutes, to deal the modern-day scourge of terrorism.
The Government for its part has responded with a disavowal of any such intent, but in a meeting with chief secretaries from all the states on July 20, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh effectively acknowledged that prevalent practices and procedures had proven woefully inadequate. “It is the primary responsibility of the state to maintain public order and ensure the safety of its people”, said the Prime Minister: “You will have to empower your police forces to discharge their functions at higher levels of efficiency”.
It is not clear that the additional powers sought for the police and security agencies would be achieved through legislation. Some part of the challenge in the Prime Minister’s perception evidently involves the enhancement of operational efficiencies within these forces. But a little consideration would show that there is a strategic challenge beyond these relatively more mundane matters, that still remains to be grappled with.
Media reports of July 14, obviously primed by well-planned leaks, suggested that the union cabinet at its first meeting since the Mumbai atrocities, had been told by top security officials, that Pakistan was directly responsible. The consensus though, was vitiated by two senior ministers. One of the dissenters, according to the media leaks, pointed to the finding by an independent initiative, that the alleged terrorist plot on the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) headquarters in Nagpur, and the June 1 police encounter in which all its intending authors were killed, had in fact been staged. Another senior minister, harked back to a lethal bomb blast in the district headquarters town of Nanded in Mahrashtra, in which two people had been killed, both of them associated with Hindu extremist organisations. The timing of the Nanded blasts, he pointed out, suggested a deep political intent, since it came around the time that BJP leader L.K. Advani was to transit through Maharashtra as part of his cross-country odyssey focusing attention on terrorism.
Since neither of the ministers identified as the dissenters within the union cabinet could have wanted to be associated with an unpopular viewpoint in an especially fraught moment, it is safe to assume that the media leak about their interventions came from other sources. But since dissent has reached the level of the union cabinet on the issue of terrorism – where the unspoken national consensus so far has been to lay all the blame on Pakistan – it is perhaps important to assess how credible the underlying information is.
The inquiry into the Nagpur incident was led by B.G. Kolse Patil, a former judge of the Bombay High Court, and involved twelve other individuals representing five distinct civil liberties and legal advocacy bodies. Its report, completed mid-June and covered rather indifferently by the media, is brief but convincing. It points to numerous lacunae and discrepancies in the official narration of the encounter in which three “jehadi” terrorists were killed, and refers to the unwillingness or inability of the Nagpur police commissioner to meet with the inquiry team and answer certain very basic doubts. It concludes in the light of all the information available, that the encounter was “fake” and requires a “fair probe” in the national interest.
Similar ambiguities and concerns surround the Nanded bomb blasts, which did not receive any of the nation-wide coverage that the Nagpur incident did. The few media reports that did emerge, quoted authoritative police sources identifying the deceased as active members of a Hindu extremist organisation, who had been engaged in the fabrication of an explosive device. But interest soon died out and the police, for reasons yet unclear, sought to dissuade any further media coverage on the grounds that it would damage the investigative process.
When public scepticism over the Nagpur incident was acknowledged in the media, it was only to deflect awkward questions. The argument was deployed that the intelligence and security services had acted on credible information that an attack was imminent. Rather than arrest the militant elements and pursue the tedious legal process of prosecution, the agencies decided that a more effective recourse would be to eliminate them. Recent incidents, such as the hijacking of Indian Airlines IC 814 in 1999, when the Indian government was compelled to release three terrorists held for operations in the Kashmir theatre, had shown that detaining jehadi elements and pursuing the process of the law was a high-risk enterprise.
It cannot be a very reassuring thought for most common people, that summary justice will be the norm when the security agencies deal with the risk of terrorism. The policy of shooting first and then suppressing, or when that is impossible, evading the awkward questions, may play well in an environment of overwrought nationalism and hyper-insecurity. But it feeds into a climate of official impunity, makes for very poor long-term efficacy and involves numerous risks to ordinary citizens.
December 13, 2001 was a defining moment in India in this sense. The attack on India’s parliament premises by two car-loads of gun-wielding desperados, marked a transition from a holding operation by the Indian State, to an offensive doctrine of prevention and even pre-emption of terrorism. It enabled a coordination on the terrain of principle and practice between India and other self-proclaimed leaders of the struggle against terrorism, notably the U.S. and Israel. And in the domestic arena, it was to be the test case of the efficacy of a newly crafted anti-terrorism law, POTA.
Nearly five years years after that pivotal event in India’s history, the long-term consequences remain ambivalent at best. Of the four individuals who were arrested shortly afterwards and charged with waging war against the Indian state, three were swiftly convicted and sentenced to death under POTA. One other accused person, a woman, was sentenced to an extended term in prison, the sentence partly moderated by the fact that she had a child of tender years.
In appeal before the Delhi High Court, two of the convictions were quashed. But the prosecution, led by the Special Task Force (STF) of the Delhi Police would have none of it. Choosing its occasion well, it went in appeal to India’s Supreme Court on December 13, 2003. On August 4, 2005, the Supreme Court confirmed the acquittals handed down by the Delhi High Court. It also absolved another of the accused of the charge of conspiracy, instead holding him guilty of the lesser crime of concealing knowledge about the conspiracy. Yet, even as it mitigated the sentence of this individual, effectively knocking out several of the props of the prosecution case, the Supreme Court contrived, in a surviving curiosity of judicial reasoning, to uphold the death sentence on the fourth defendant.
Multiple suspicions arise once it is noted that the only person against whom the charge of involvement in the December 13 conspiracy has stuck, was a surrendered militant, obliged by the terms of his capitulation, to keep regular contact with the anti-insurgency wing of the Jammu and Kashmir Police. It was an invidious position that he found himself in, subsequent to his 1993 surrender. While having to go the extra distance to prove his fealty to the terms of his surrender, he was also under constant threat of liquidation by his erstwhile confederates in the Kashmir militancy. For a while, the way out of the conundrum was, seemingly, to pay up a sum – determined at the momentary discretion of his handler in the security apparatus – as protection money. The alternative was to enlist as a “special police officer”, or in plain language, a police informer.
When the December 13 case was in appeal in the Delhi High Court, some of India’s most eminent jurists appeared on behalf of the accused. Ram Jethmalani argued that “the evidence discloses total non-application of mind and an unforgivable frivolity of attitude”. He also charged that the police case was “riddled with illegality”, and the evidence disclosed “concoction and fabrication”. In similar vein, senior advocate Shanti Bhushan, contended that his client had “been falsely implicated in the conspiracy case by the investigating agency”, which had “gone out of its way in concocting evidence”.
If this record of manifest ineptitude is the legacy of the December 13 attacks, which had international ramifications and almost brought India and Pakistan to war, then the state-of-play in the prosecution of the worst terrorist atrocity ever on Indian soil, the 1993 Mumbai blasts, does not inspire very much confidence either. In October 2000, the designated judge in Mumbai declared that the hearing of the case had concluded. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) was given a limited period of time to present concluding evidence regarding the nature of the explosives used in the attacks, following which the defence lawyers were expected to submit their final pleas. Six years on, the case is effectively frozen in the limbo it was then cast into. Meanwhile, of the 124 accused, ten have died, while over 30 remain still in custody. The rest have obtained bail and by all accounts, are not under any serious encumbrance, since their ranks include some of the affluent and influential. Whether from the viewpoint of the victims or the alleged perpetrators of the 1993 atrocities, the ends of justice clearly, are a long way from being met.
Can it do any good for public confidence that the police and intelligence agencies have come a cropper in two of India’s most significant terrorism trials, despite being empowered with extraordinary statutes? Can it be taken for granted then, that the resolve of the common citizen, an unacknowledged though invaluable resource in the battle against terrorism, will remain as firm as it is now? These questions need to be posed now with a fresh vigour by the public, since to this record of conspicuous failure must be added a story of the deliberate abdication of responsibility in pursuing the guilty of the 1993 communal carnage in Mumbai. In most reasonable assessments, January 1993 was a macabre turning point in that city’s career of cosmopolitanism and civic concord. Mumbai’s people deserve nothing less than full accountability for all the crimes they have suffered, starting from then.
(ENDS)
Following the July 11 attacks on Mumbai’s suburban transportation system, there was much lament in public forums, that India’s struggle against terrorism had gone seriously adrift. The proposition was advanced, not unheard of before, that force can only be combated by an equal, opposite -- perhaps even a disproportionate -- application of the same principle. And there was some bemoaning of the fact that India’s campaign against terrorism, after its brief victory in the early-1990s in the Punjab theatre, had lost sight of the basics in subsequent challenges: in Kashmir and in the proliferation of affronts that the Indian state has had to face in diverse corners of the country.
The closest perhaps that Mumbai has come to having its spirit broken, was for two weeks in January 1993, when its streets were taken over by rampaging mobs intent on inflicting maximum violence on a vulnerable minority. And just two months later, it was paralysed into silence and submission when a retaliatory sequence of bombings devastated crucial nodes of its daily life.
Since that horrendous outrage, there have been several attacks on civic life in the city that have challenged the common citizen’s loyalty. And yet, with all the provocation, there has been no occasion since when civic peace has been disturbed, when the fabric of inter-community understanding has been in danger of being shredded.
If there is a lesson underlying all this, it is simply that a citizenry committed to peace and determined to preserve the civic responsibilities that make life in a big city possible, is the principal resource that a state can count upon in its struggle against terrorism. It is a curiosity then, that in all the policy deliberations that followed Mumbai’s tragedy, not to mention the advisory opinions that the media so generously proffered, this issue never featured in any significant manner.
As a term, “terrorism” may remain slippery and evasive, though there is little that is vague about the real world manifestations of the threat. India in particular, has suffered enormously from successive, and intimate, encounters with the random and insensate violence of terrorism, designed with deliberate intent, to disrupt the rhythms of daily life for a civilian population and sap public loyalty to the political order. The motives of terrorism could be various: a sense of grievance at real or imagined injustices, a quest for vengeance against palpably real atrocities. But in terms of its long-term calculus, terrorism invariably targets the will of an entire people, to sap their stated and unstated consent in the perpetuation of a political order.
That Mumbai has defied this calculus despite repeated provocation, is a tribute to the resilience of the city and to the vital stakes that all of India has in its well-being. At the very least it would seem, the citizens of Mumbai need recognition for their fortitude -- an example for the whole country – and this can only come through pursuing the perpetrators of July 11 with all the determination and fairness that the law mandates.
Initial signals have not been the most propitious. The principal opposition party, the BJP, has with its allies, made known its determination to put the government on the mat in the monsoon session of Parliament over its alleged softness on terrorism. Reprising a favoured theme – which it has never tired of harping upon since the Terrorism and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act (TADA) was repealed in the mid-1990s and the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) in 2004 – it has demanded the enactment of a special category of law in addition to all existing statutes, to deal the modern-day scourge of terrorism.
The Government for its part has responded with a disavowal of any such intent, but in a meeting with chief secretaries from all the states on July 20, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh effectively acknowledged that prevalent practices and procedures had proven woefully inadequate. “It is the primary responsibility of the state to maintain public order and ensure the safety of its people”, said the Prime Minister: “You will have to empower your police forces to discharge their functions at higher levels of efficiency”.
It is not clear that the additional powers sought for the police and security agencies would be achieved through legislation. Some part of the challenge in the Prime Minister’s perception evidently involves the enhancement of operational efficiencies within these forces. But a little consideration would show that there is a strategic challenge beyond these relatively more mundane matters, that still remains to be grappled with.
Media reports of July 14, obviously primed by well-planned leaks, suggested that the union cabinet at its first meeting since the Mumbai atrocities, had been told by top security officials, that Pakistan was directly responsible. The consensus though, was vitiated by two senior ministers. One of the dissenters, according to the media leaks, pointed to the finding by an independent initiative, that the alleged terrorist plot on the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) headquarters in Nagpur, and the June 1 police encounter in which all its intending authors were killed, had in fact been staged. Another senior minister, harked back to a lethal bomb blast in the district headquarters town of Nanded in Mahrashtra, in which two people had been killed, both of them associated with Hindu extremist organisations. The timing of the Nanded blasts, he pointed out, suggested a deep political intent, since it came around the time that BJP leader L.K. Advani was to transit through Maharashtra as part of his cross-country odyssey focusing attention on terrorism.
Since neither of the ministers identified as the dissenters within the union cabinet could have wanted to be associated with an unpopular viewpoint in an especially fraught moment, it is safe to assume that the media leak about their interventions came from other sources. But since dissent has reached the level of the union cabinet on the issue of terrorism – where the unspoken national consensus so far has been to lay all the blame on Pakistan – it is perhaps important to assess how credible the underlying information is.
The inquiry into the Nagpur incident was led by B.G. Kolse Patil, a former judge of the Bombay High Court, and involved twelve other individuals representing five distinct civil liberties and legal advocacy bodies. Its report, completed mid-June and covered rather indifferently by the media, is brief but convincing. It points to numerous lacunae and discrepancies in the official narration of the encounter in which three “jehadi” terrorists were killed, and refers to the unwillingness or inability of the Nagpur police commissioner to meet with the inquiry team and answer certain very basic doubts. It concludes in the light of all the information available, that the encounter was “fake” and requires a “fair probe” in the national interest.
Similar ambiguities and concerns surround the Nanded bomb blasts, which did not receive any of the nation-wide coverage that the Nagpur incident did. The few media reports that did emerge, quoted authoritative police sources identifying the deceased as active members of a Hindu extremist organisation, who had been engaged in the fabrication of an explosive device. But interest soon died out and the police, for reasons yet unclear, sought to dissuade any further media coverage on the grounds that it would damage the investigative process.
When public scepticism over the Nagpur incident was acknowledged in the media, it was only to deflect awkward questions. The argument was deployed that the intelligence and security services had acted on credible information that an attack was imminent. Rather than arrest the militant elements and pursue the tedious legal process of prosecution, the agencies decided that a more effective recourse would be to eliminate them. Recent incidents, such as the hijacking of Indian Airlines IC 814 in 1999, when the Indian government was compelled to release three terrorists held for operations in the Kashmir theatre, had shown that detaining jehadi elements and pursuing the process of the law was a high-risk enterprise.
It cannot be a very reassuring thought for most common people, that summary justice will be the norm when the security agencies deal with the risk of terrorism. The policy of shooting first and then suppressing, or when that is impossible, evading the awkward questions, may play well in an environment of overwrought nationalism and hyper-insecurity. But it feeds into a climate of official impunity, makes for very poor long-term efficacy and involves numerous risks to ordinary citizens.
December 13, 2001 was a defining moment in India in this sense. The attack on India’s parliament premises by two car-loads of gun-wielding desperados, marked a transition from a holding operation by the Indian State, to an offensive doctrine of prevention and even pre-emption of terrorism. It enabled a coordination on the terrain of principle and practice between India and other self-proclaimed leaders of the struggle against terrorism, notably the U.S. and Israel. And in the domestic arena, it was to be the test case of the efficacy of a newly crafted anti-terrorism law, POTA.
Nearly five years years after that pivotal event in India’s history, the long-term consequences remain ambivalent at best. Of the four individuals who were arrested shortly afterwards and charged with waging war against the Indian state, three were swiftly convicted and sentenced to death under POTA. One other accused person, a woman, was sentenced to an extended term in prison, the sentence partly moderated by the fact that she had a child of tender years.
In appeal before the Delhi High Court, two of the convictions were quashed. But the prosecution, led by the Special Task Force (STF) of the Delhi Police would have none of it. Choosing its occasion well, it went in appeal to India’s Supreme Court on December 13, 2003. On August 4, 2005, the Supreme Court confirmed the acquittals handed down by the Delhi High Court. It also absolved another of the accused of the charge of conspiracy, instead holding him guilty of the lesser crime of concealing knowledge about the conspiracy. Yet, even as it mitigated the sentence of this individual, effectively knocking out several of the props of the prosecution case, the Supreme Court contrived, in a surviving curiosity of judicial reasoning, to uphold the death sentence on the fourth defendant.
Multiple suspicions arise once it is noted that the only person against whom the charge of involvement in the December 13 conspiracy has stuck, was a surrendered militant, obliged by the terms of his capitulation, to keep regular contact with the anti-insurgency wing of the Jammu and Kashmir Police. It was an invidious position that he found himself in, subsequent to his 1993 surrender. While having to go the extra distance to prove his fealty to the terms of his surrender, he was also under constant threat of liquidation by his erstwhile confederates in the Kashmir militancy. For a while, the way out of the conundrum was, seemingly, to pay up a sum – determined at the momentary discretion of his handler in the security apparatus – as protection money. The alternative was to enlist as a “special police officer”, or in plain language, a police informer.
When the December 13 case was in appeal in the Delhi High Court, some of India’s most eminent jurists appeared on behalf of the accused. Ram Jethmalani argued that “the evidence discloses total non-application of mind and an unforgivable frivolity of attitude”. He also charged that the police case was “riddled with illegality”, and the evidence disclosed “concoction and fabrication”. In similar vein, senior advocate Shanti Bhushan, contended that his client had “been falsely implicated in the conspiracy case by the investigating agency”, which had “gone out of its way in concocting evidence”.
If this record of manifest ineptitude is the legacy of the December 13 attacks, which had international ramifications and almost brought India and Pakistan to war, then the state-of-play in the prosecution of the worst terrorist atrocity ever on Indian soil, the 1993 Mumbai blasts, does not inspire very much confidence either. In October 2000, the designated judge in Mumbai declared that the hearing of the case had concluded. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) was given a limited period of time to present concluding evidence regarding the nature of the explosives used in the attacks, following which the defence lawyers were expected to submit their final pleas. Six years on, the case is effectively frozen in the limbo it was then cast into. Meanwhile, of the 124 accused, ten have died, while over 30 remain still in custody. The rest have obtained bail and by all accounts, are not under any serious encumbrance, since their ranks include some of the affluent and influential. Whether from the viewpoint of the victims or the alleged perpetrators of the 1993 atrocities, the ends of justice clearly, are a long way from being met.
Can it do any good for public confidence that the police and intelligence agencies have come a cropper in two of India’s most significant terrorism trials, despite being empowered with extraordinary statutes? Can it be taken for granted then, that the resolve of the common citizen, an unacknowledged though invaluable resource in the battle against terrorism, will remain as firm as it is now? These questions need to be posed now with a fresh vigour by the public, since to this record of conspicuous failure must be added a story of the deliberate abdication of responsibility in pursuing the guilty of the 1993 communal carnage in Mumbai. In most reasonable assessments, January 1993 was a macabre turning point in that city’s career of cosmopolitanism and civic concord. Mumbai’s people deserve nothing less than full accountability for all the crimes they have suffered, starting from then.
(ENDS)
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Israel’s war in Gaza: a case for international intervention
Sukumar Muralidharan
Early in July, with Israeli forces rampaging through Gaza, killing, maiming and destroying with gay abandon, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had a moment of revelation. A sightseeing trip through the rain forests of Peru was just the stimulus needed to see distant events with a new and blinding clarity. And as he reflected on the violence in West Asia from the vantage point of Peru’s tropical splendour, what occurred most strikingly was the sheer lack of purpose of it all. Violence was inherent in nature, but it was always underlined by a grand purpose of species preservation. The subtle equations of nature are preserved in the struggle between species for living space and the nourishment that the elements provide. A delicate balance between predator species and their prey is often sustained by the dynamics of evolutionary biology. But this balance requires that species behave rationally and respect their inherent instincts for self-preservation.
What was on display in Palestine however, was completely contrary to rationality. Israel had evacuated the Gaza strip, wrote Friedman, but the Palestinian Islamic resistance, Hamas, chose not to use the opportunity to build “a nest for its young there -- a decent state and society, with jobs”. Instead, it decided on the path of obduracy and violence, launching “hundreds of rockets into Israel”. The Palestinians could instantly “have a state on the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem”, said Friedman, “if they and the Arab League clearly recognised Israel, normalised relations and renounced violence”. But they were intent, regrettably, on little else than the destruction of Israel, even if it also meant self-obliteration. “Species that behave that way in the rain forest”, Friedman concluded ominously, inevitably “become extinct”.
Wish-fulfilment is often a powerful, though unconscious, motivation for writers. Friedman’s unquestioning Zionist loyalty has never been a secret and his column written in Peru seemed rather eagerly to anticipate a moment in history, that for Israel has been the only possible solution to the conflict in Palestine: the extinction of the Palestinians as a national community and their dispersal into distant corners of the Arab world as a people devoid of a specific historical identity. The Zionist construction of history first denied the existence of the Palestinians and then grudgingly came around to recognising them as an irritant, a people whose claims to the land they had lived in for centuries did not have any of the sanctity of divine investiture that the Jews enjoyed. The annals of Zionism are replete with statements by its champions – David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Rabin, right down to Ehud Olmert – advocating the “transfer” of the Palestinian people as the only viable solution to what was called the “demographic problem” of Israel. And just to ensure that the conditions were appropriate for the departure of the Palestinians – always prefixed with the proviso that it would be “voluntary” -- Zionism was prepared to make their lives under occupation a veritable hell.
Israel’s newest war on Gaza began on June 28, just over nine months after an evacuation of the territory was accomplished to much internal discord and a torrent of global praise for what were deemed the Zionist state’s peaceful intentions. The immediate provocation for the invasion was a Palestinian attack on a military picket in which two Israeli soldiers were killed and one captured. It is important to note that the target of the Palestinian attack was a military post, instrumental in enforcing the illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza. Since the Palestinian national elections of February, the blockade has in its ruthlessness, managed to wed the lethal efficiency of U.S.-made weaponry to the savagery of medieval siege warfare. Effectively, the 1.5 million residents of Gaza have been deprived of the basic necessities of life since February, while being targeted with random and indiscriminate military strikes. The bombing of the Gaza beachfront on June 9, which killed seven innocent civilians and left the traumatised ten year-old, Huda Ghalia, as the sole survivor in a family of eight, may have shocked the world because of the media coverage it garnered. But Huda Ghalia’s trauma and tragedy have been played out repeatedly in the Palestinian lands since at least the last six years of the second intifada, which by the Palestinian’s avowal, will be their final uprising against colonialism.
By any applicable criterion of international law, the Israeli military outpost, engaged in illegal siege warfare against the population of Gaza, was a legitimate target. And the Israeli soldier captured on the occasion, Corporal Gilad Shalit, would be a prisoner of war, entitled to all the rights the status entailed. That indeed has been the burden of the Palestinian militants’ argument: that the release of the captured Israeli soldier is a matter to be negotiated by the Israeli government.
Israel has instead embarked upon a military rampage that has shocked the world. Gaza’s only electricity generating station was destroyed on the first day of the offensive. Roads and bridges essential to the movement of the civilian population and the sustenance of their livelihoods, soon followed, victims of high-technology ordnance manufactured in the U.S. On July 2, the London-based human rights group, Amnesty International observed after careful consideration, that the “deliberate attacks by Israeli forces against civilian property and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip violate international humanitarian law and constitute war crimes”. Israel was obliged under international law, to “take urgent measures to remedy the long-term damage it has caused and immediately restore the supply -- at its own cost -- of electricity and water to the Palestinian population in the affected areas”.
Effectively demolishing the argument that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza was a demonstration of its peaceful intent, Amnesty observed: “High numbers of Palestinian bystanders, including women and children, have been killed and injured by Israeli artillery shelling and air strikes in recent weeks and months”. And with greater subtlety, the human rights group laid to rest the myth that Israeli military actions have been a legitimate response to Palestinian provocations. The situation, said Amnesty, “looks set to worsen in light of the end of the unilateral cease-fire which the armed wing of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups had been observing since last year”.
If the situation that prevailed was one of a “unilateral ceasefire by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups”, what then could Friedman and others of his ilk mean by their constant harping on the “hundreds of rockets that are fired into Israel”? The answer is not far to seek. The rockets that are fired are essentially home-made weapons – no more sophisticated than firecrackers – that have had minimal military impact. Their significance indeed, has been little more than symbolic. Even as the organised political forces in Palestine declared a ceasefire in the expectation that Israel would reciprocate, individuals outside the control of these groups have kept up their symbolic gestures of defiance. Their argument is very simple: Israel has never been in the business of reciprocity and it would be foolish to expect the Zionist establishment to reverse course now.
The Israeli response, as always, has been disproportionate and indiscriminate. According to an assessment of the situation by the U.N. Office of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs, between November and December 2005, the Palestinians launched an estimated 283 home-made rockets into Israel. None of these caused any casualties. In supposed retaliation – though the more credible argument would be that theirs was the original provocation – the Israel Defence Force (IDF) conducted 124 air-strikes and fired 544 artillery shells into Gaza. And all these actions had seriously lethal implications. The number of Palestinians killed in Gaza since the so-called Israeli withdrawal, has been, in proportionate terms, considerably more than in the worst days of the occupation.
In December 2005, belying all claims of a withdrawal, Israel declared parts of northern Gaza a “no-go” area, where its forces would feel free to fire and kill without warning. Palestinian fishermen setting out to sea are routinely fired upon by the IDF in incidents involving loss of life. And routes of entry and exit from Gaza are under the ironhanded control of the IDF. The consequence of withdrawal in other words, has been little else than to convert Gaza from a site of brutal military occupation into the world’s largest unsupervised prison.
This was exactly how things were meant to be. Friedman and others of his stripe who argue that the Gaza withdrawal was a gesture of peace, are guilty of the worst form of disingenuousness. Indeed, the moment it was announced, the Israeli gameplan was denounced as a dilatory tactic to deny the Palestinians true sovereignty and retain indefinite control over the strategically more important West Bank. Such indeed was plainly stated by the then Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon’s principal political aide, Dov Weisglass. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz on October 8, 2004, Weisglass effectively laid out the hidden agenda of the Gaza withdrawal. By late-2003, as he recounted matters, Israel was deep in a quagmire. The bloody confrontation with the Palestinians had dragged on three years at considerable damage to Israel’s international image. The US was still firmly committed, but time was not on Israel’s side. The economy was stagnant and domestic dissent was growing. It was just a matter of time before international opinion, already considerably alienated, crossed the crucial threshold and began to think of sanctions against Israel as a distinct possibility.
In the circumstances, the Gaza withdrawal was a tactical master-stroke, which presented a semblance of real concessions to the Palestinians, while preserving Israel’s core strategic interests in the West Bank. The peace negotiations, Weisglass chortled, had been cast away, into an indefinite limbo. Referring to an exchange of letters between Sharon and U.S. President George Bush early in 2004, Weisglass described how the US had with little demur, endorsed Israel’s essential interests in the West Bank.
Though intended as an overture towards the restive constituency of settlers that saw the Gaza withdrawal as a treasonous ceding of Israel’s divine patrimony, Weisglass’s long and candid exposition of Israel’s agenda for Palestinian statehood attracted considerable international attention. Rather than offering the Palestinians the possibility of an honourable peace, the purpose as plainly stated, was to put the “peace process into formalin”, i.e., to preserve a dead organism as a laboratory specimen to be displayed whenever it suited Israel’s interests.
With its occupation forces having pulled out, Israel has felt at liberty to wildly escalate its retribution for real and imagined acts of defiance. The only difference is that, at least until the June 28 invasion, the violence was administered by fighter aircraft and helicopters from the safety of the skies. If the Palestinians have refused to be cowed down, that is only a tribute to the undying character of their struggle, which a morally anaesthetised world would happily bury in oblivion, if it were not for the visible brutality that Israel continues to visit on innocent civilians.
If the criteria for “humanitarian intervention” employed when the western powers launched successive wars of dismemberment against Yugoslavia in the 1990s were to be applied today, Israel would long since have been placed under international guardianship and its political leaders indicted for war crimes. On June 6, the U.N. Human Rights Council adopted a resolution condemning Israel's military operations in Palestine as a clear breach of international humanitarian law. The newly established body of the U.N. resolved by a margin of 29 against 11, with five abstentions, that it would send a fact-finding mission to Gaza.
From an Indian viewpoint, what is perhaps most significant about this resolution is simply the fact that India voted in its favour. After years of shameless kowtowing before the U.S.-Israeli agenda of depriving the Palestinians of their basic political rights and identity, India has awoken now to the responsibilities it owes to people elsewhere, struggling for their freedom from colonialism. This is a major gain, but it has been vitiated by commentary in the bourgeois media – reminiscent of the BJP Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh’s infamous statement after a visit to Israel – that India’s support for Palestinian national rights is a concession to “vote bank politics” at home. This variety of political idiocy clearly needs to be combated and defeated, if the commonsense and morality of India’s foreign policy is to be retrieved from the slough that it has been plunged into, by the recent ardour for courting the U.S.-Israel neo-imperial axis.
July 11, 2006
Early in July, with Israeli forces rampaging through Gaza, killing, maiming and destroying with gay abandon, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had a moment of revelation. A sightseeing trip through the rain forests of Peru was just the stimulus needed to see distant events with a new and blinding clarity. And as he reflected on the violence in West Asia from the vantage point of Peru’s tropical splendour, what occurred most strikingly was the sheer lack of purpose of it all. Violence was inherent in nature, but it was always underlined by a grand purpose of species preservation. The subtle equations of nature are preserved in the struggle between species for living space and the nourishment that the elements provide. A delicate balance between predator species and their prey is often sustained by the dynamics of evolutionary biology. But this balance requires that species behave rationally and respect their inherent instincts for self-preservation.
What was on display in Palestine however, was completely contrary to rationality. Israel had evacuated the Gaza strip, wrote Friedman, but the Palestinian Islamic resistance, Hamas, chose not to use the opportunity to build “a nest for its young there -- a decent state and society, with jobs”. Instead, it decided on the path of obduracy and violence, launching “hundreds of rockets into Israel”. The Palestinians could instantly “have a state on the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem”, said Friedman, “if they and the Arab League clearly recognised Israel, normalised relations and renounced violence”. But they were intent, regrettably, on little else than the destruction of Israel, even if it also meant self-obliteration. “Species that behave that way in the rain forest”, Friedman concluded ominously, inevitably “become extinct”.
Wish-fulfilment is often a powerful, though unconscious, motivation for writers. Friedman’s unquestioning Zionist loyalty has never been a secret and his column written in Peru seemed rather eagerly to anticipate a moment in history, that for Israel has been the only possible solution to the conflict in Palestine: the extinction of the Palestinians as a national community and their dispersal into distant corners of the Arab world as a people devoid of a specific historical identity. The Zionist construction of history first denied the existence of the Palestinians and then grudgingly came around to recognising them as an irritant, a people whose claims to the land they had lived in for centuries did not have any of the sanctity of divine investiture that the Jews enjoyed. The annals of Zionism are replete with statements by its champions – David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Rabin, right down to Ehud Olmert – advocating the “transfer” of the Palestinian people as the only viable solution to what was called the “demographic problem” of Israel. And just to ensure that the conditions were appropriate for the departure of the Palestinians – always prefixed with the proviso that it would be “voluntary” -- Zionism was prepared to make their lives under occupation a veritable hell.
Israel’s newest war on Gaza began on June 28, just over nine months after an evacuation of the territory was accomplished to much internal discord and a torrent of global praise for what were deemed the Zionist state’s peaceful intentions. The immediate provocation for the invasion was a Palestinian attack on a military picket in which two Israeli soldiers were killed and one captured. It is important to note that the target of the Palestinian attack was a military post, instrumental in enforcing the illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza. Since the Palestinian national elections of February, the blockade has in its ruthlessness, managed to wed the lethal efficiency of U.S.-made weaponry to the savagery of medieval siege warfare. Effectively, the 1.5 million residents of Gaza have been deprived of the basic necessities of life since February, while being targeted with random and indiscriminate military strikes. The bombing of the Gaza beachfront on June 9, which killed seven innocent civilians and left the traumatised ten year-old, Huda Ghalia, as the sole survivor in a family of eight, may have shocked the world because of the media coverage it garnered. But Huda Ghalia’s trauma and tragedy have been played out repeatedly in the Palestinian lands since at least the last six years of the second intifada, which by the Palestinian’s avowal, will be their final uprising against colonialism.
By any applicable criterion of international law, the Israeli military outpost, engaged in illegal siege warfare against the population of Gaza, was a legitimate target. And the Israeli soldier captured on the occasion, Corporal Gilad Shalit, would be a prisoner of war, entitled to all the rights the status entailed. That indeed has been the burden of the Palestinian militants’ argument: that the release of the captured Israeli soldier is a matter to be negotiated by the Israeli government.
Israel has instead embarked upon a military rampage that has shocked the world. Gaza’s only electricity generating station was destroyed on the first day of the offensive. Roads and bridges essential to the movement of the civilian population and the sustenance of their livelihoods, soon followed, victims of high-technology ordnance manufactured in the U.S. On July 2, the London-based human rights group, Amnesty International observed after careful consideration, that the “deliberate attacks by Israeli forces against civilian property and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip violate international humanitarian law and constitute war crimes”. Israel was obliged under international law, to “take urgent measures to remedy the long-term damage it has caused and immediately restore the supply -- at its own cost -- of electricity and water to the Palestinian population in the affected areas”.
Effectively demolishing the argument that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza was a demonstration of its peaceful intent, Amnesty observed: “High numbers of Palestinian bystanders, including women and children, have been killed and injured by Israeli artillery shelling and air strikes in recent weeks and months”. And with greater subtlety, the human rights group laid to rest the myth that Israeli military actions have been a legitimate response to Palestinian provocations. The situation, said Amnesty, “looks set to worsen in light of the end of the unilateral cease-fire which the armed wing of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups had been observing since last year”.
If the situation that prevailed was one of a “unilateral ceasefire by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups”, what then could Friedman and others of his ilk mean by their constant harping on the “hundreds of rockets that are fired into Israel”? The answer is not far to seek. The rockets that are fired are essentially home-made weapons – no more sophisticated than firecrackers – that have had minimal military impact. Their significance indeed, has been little more than symbolic. Even as the organised political forces in Palestine declared a ceasefire in the expectation that Israel would reciprocate, individuals outside the control of these groups have kept up their symbolic gestures of defiance. Their argument is very simple: Israel has never been in the business of reciprocity and it would be foolish to expect the Zionist establishment to reverse course now.
The Israeli response, as always, has been disproportionate and indiscriminate. According to an assessment of the situation by the U.N. Office of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs, between November and December 2005, the Palestinians launched an estimated 283 home-made rockets into Israel. None of these caused any casualties. In supposed retaliation – though the more credible argument would be that theirs was the original provocation – the Israel Defence Force (IDF) conducted 124 air-strikes and fired 544 artillery shells into Gaza. And all these actions had seriously lethal implications. The number of Palestinians killed in Gaza since the so-called Israeli withdrawal, has been, in proportionate terms, considerably more than in the worst days of the occupation.
In December 2005, belying all claims of a withdrawal, Israel declared parts of northern Gaza a “no-go” area, where its forces would feel free to fire and kill without warning. Palestinian fishermen setting out to sea are routinely fired upon by the IDF in incidents involving loss of life. And routes of entry and exit from Gaza are under the ironhanded control of the IDF. The consequence of withdrawal in other words, has been little else than to convert Gaza from a site of brutal military occupation into the world’s largest unsupervised prison.
This was exactly how things were meant to be. Friedman and others of his stripe who argue that the Gaza withdrawal was a gesture of peace, are guilty of the worst form of disingenuousness. Indeed, the moment it was announced, the Israeli gameplan was denounced as a dilatory tactic to deny the Palestinians true sovereignty and retain indefinite control over the strategically more important West Bank. Such indeed was plainly stated by the then Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon’s principal political aide, Dov Weisglass. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz on October 8, 2004, Weisglass effectively laid out the hidden agenda of the Gaza withdrawal. By late-2003, as he recounted matters, Israel was deep in a quagmire. The bloody confrontation with the Palestinians had dragged on three years at considerable damage to Israel’s international image. The US was still firmly committed, but time was not on Israel’s side. The economy was stagnant and domestic dissent was growing. It was just a matter of time before international opinion, already considerably alienated, crossed the crucial threshold and began to think of sanctions against Israel as a distinct possibility.
In the circumstances, the Gaza withdrawal was a tactical master-stroke, which presented a semblance of real concessions to the Palestinians, while preserving Israel’s core strategic interests in the West Bank. The peace negotiations, Weisglass chortled, had been cast away, into an indefinite limbo. Referring to an exchange of letters between Sharon and U.S. President George Bush early in 2004, Weisglass described how the US had with little demur, endorsed Israel’s essential interests in the West Bank.
Though intended as an overture towards the restive constituency of settlers that saw the Gaza withdrawal as a treasonous ceding of Israel’s divine patrimony, Weisglass’s long and candid exposition of Israel’s agenda for Palestinian statehood attracted considerable international attention. Rather than offering the Palestinians the possibility of an honourable peace, the purpose as plainly stated, was to put the “peace process into formalin”, i.e., to preserve a dead organism as a laboratory specimen to be displayed whenever it suited Israel’s interests.
With its occupation forces having pulled out, Israel has felt at liberty to wildly escalate its retribution for real and imagined acts of defiance. The only difference is that, at least until the June 28 invasion, the violence was administered by fighter aircraft and helicopters from the safety of the skies. If the Palestinians have refused to be cowed down, that is only a tribute to the undying character of their struggle, which a morally anaesthetised world would happily bury in oblivion, if it were not for the visible brutality that Israel continues to visit on innocent civilians.
If the criteria for “humanitarian intervention” employed when the western powers launched successive wars of dismemberment against Yugoslavia in the 1990s were to be applied today, Israel would long since have been placed under international guardianship and its political leaders indicted for war crimes. On June 6, the U.N. Human Rights Council adopted a resolution condemning Israel's military operations in Palestine as a clear breach of international humanitarian law. The newly established body of the U.N. resolved by a margin of 29 against 11, with five abstentions, that it would send a fact-finding mission to Gaza.
From an Indian viewpoint, what is perhaps most significant about this resolution is simply the fact that India voted in its favour. After years of shameless kowtowing before the U.S.-Israeli agenda of depriving the Palestinians of their basic political rights and identity, India has awoken now to the responsibilities it owes to people elsewhere, struggling for their freedom from colonialism. This is a major gain, but it has been vitiated by commentary in the bourgeois media – reminiscent of the BJP Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh’s infamous statement after a visit to Israel – that India’s support for Palestinian national rights is a concession to “vote bank politics” at home. This variety of political idiocy clearly needs to be combated and defeated, if the commonsense and morality of India’s foreign policy is to be retrieved from the slough that it has been plunged into, by the recent ardour for courting the U.S.-Israel neo-imperial axis.
July 11, 2006
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)