"Bombing Lebanon"

[Carl Remick]

Bombing Lebanon

[Another article from the current NY Press.]

Bombing Lebanon

By Charles Glass

When Israel gets angry, try not to be Lebanese. It doesn’t seem to matter 
who provokes Israel’s wrath, its government cannot break the habit of taking 
it out on Lebanon. It used to get mad at the Palestine Liberation 
Organization, and, sure as shooting, it would bomb Lebanon. Now when it 
loses patience with Syria, it considers carefully what to do, and, you 
guessed it, it bombs Lebanon.

No one should be surprised to see warplanes dispatched over Lebanon because 
the Orthodox vigilantes in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim throw rocks at people for 
driving on the Sabbath. Israel bombs Lebanon, north and south, up and down 
the coast. It hits houses and electricity plants, guerrilla bases and 
villages. In the latest bout of Israeli bellicosity, Lebanon lost three 
electricity stations. Lebanese far from the front lines of the 
Israeli-occupied south are, as a result, living most of their nights in 
darkness.

Lest anyone in Lebanon hit back at Israel, Israeli Foreign Minister David 
Levy issued a warning: "If Katyusha rockets fall on our settlements, the 
soil of Lebanon will burn." I’m trying to imagine what would make soil burn. 
In many years of covering wars in the Middle East, Africa and Eastern 
Europe, I’ve seen trees, office buildings and hospitals on fire, not to 
mention the bodies of people and animals. I’ve seen vineyards and grass go 
up in flames, leaving the earth scorched. But in all the lands that have 
been overrun by Iraqis, Somalis, Ethiopians, Israelis and Serbs, I’ve never 
seen dirt burn. Napalm might do it, I suppose, going deep into the soil the 
way its manufacturers intend it to penetrate human pores. Nuclear warheads 
could do the job, certainly, and Israel has those in abundance. Israeli 
military scientists, however, may have developed some new explosive that 
sets dirt on fire. Code-name: Topsoil Terminator. If the new superweapon 
proves effective, it would ignite not only the dry soil of the desert, but 
wet marshlands, riverbanks and seabeds.

There was a time when Israel wielded the mere threat to invade Lebanon. It 
was a fearsome prospect to the Lebanese, who went to war against the PLO in 
1975 in large part to avoid seeing it carried out. The threat became useless 
once it was used, in 1982. The Lebanese Shiite Muslims introduced the 
Israelis to their weapon of choice, the suicide car bomb, and Israel began 
backing out. Suddenly, the Lebanese–confronted with live Israeli soldiers on 
their unburned earth–were no longer afraid of them. Israeli boys have been 
dying in Lebanon ever since, and Israel’s latest aerial adventure came in 
part because Shiite guerrillas killed six of them in Lebanon.

No matter how far south the Israeli Defense Forces moved, they hung on 
tenaciously to the strip, about 10 percent of Lebanese territory, which they 
first occupied March of 1978. Israel invaded at the time to crush the PLO, 
which has subsequently become its collaborator in controlling the natives of 
the occupied West Bank and Gaza. The U.S., which would later go to war with 
Iraq over the principle that other countries should not be invaded and 
occupied, supplied Israel with weapons and diplomatic support while it set 
up camp on Lebanon’s fertile earth. The UN Security Council, however, passed 
one of its more muscular resolutions calling for "Israel immediately to 
cease its military action against Lebanese territorial integrity and 
withdraw forthwith its forces from all Lebanese territory." Some would 
accuse Israel of violating the resolution, cynically pointing out that 
Israeli forces are still there.

The destruction of south Lebanon is one of the saddest tales of modern 
times, a 30-year war against peasants that began when the Palestinians moved 
their bases to Lebanon from Jordan. The bloody southern war displaced 
hundreds of thousands of Lebanese Shiites and created the slums of southern 
Beirut from which the Hezbollah, or Party of God, sprang during Israel’s big 
invasion of 1982. Israel expelled the PLO from Beirut and found itself 
facing the newly created Hezbollah, a more vicious and effective enemy. 
Hezbollah, which ungraciously kidnapped me and a lot of other Westerners in 
the 1980s, wants to attack Israel steadily until it leaves Lebanon. From 
time to time, Syria, which has made Lebanon its colony, will not allow it to 
do so. Then, for Syrian reasons, south Lebanon becomes tranquil. When 
negotiations over the Golan Heights broke down, Syria allowed Hezbollah to 
resume its favorite pastime, attacking Israeli occupation forces. Yet Israel 
has not attacked Syria, whose army --although it could not win a war -- 
could inflict damage on Israel far greater than anything the Hezbollah 
guerrillas are capable of.

We should know more about the dirty game between Syria and Israel on 
Lebanese soil, but only a few reporters -- notably Britain’s David Hirst and 
Robert Fisk -- are around to keep an eye on it. Last September, Israel 
picked up a journalist in south Lebanon, a woman named Cosette Ibrahim, and 
two friends of hers. They locked her up in the notorious Khiam prison. That 
should discourage other Lebanese, and possibly foreign, reporters from 
looking too closely at what happens in the occupied area.

So, what is the solution? The Lebanese prime minister, a mild academic named 
Selim al Hoss, suggested, "We say that the solution, simply, would be to 
terminate the Israeli occupation." The Israelis say they intend to leave 
Lebanon in July. That’s one idea. But perhaps there is a more useful one. 
The rest of the world could follow the Israeli example. Nearly every country 
is troubled by dissidence or external attack, and every country wants to 
know how to respond to violence and intimidation by drug dealers, religious 
fanatics and political malcontents. Here is my advice to them all. When 
Algeria is bothered by Islamic fundamentalist bombers, when Canada can no 
longer cope with Quebecois separatists, when Britain is beset by the IRA, 
when Spain is confronted by angry Basques, when Turkey wants to make a point 
with rebellious Kurds, when dear Mother Russia wants to teach a lesson to 
recalcitrant Chechens, they could do what Israel does: bomb Lebanon. The 
Lebanese don’t mind. They’re used to it.

[end]

Carl


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