Remnants from the 2006 war (1)

“We are facing a real annihilation carried out by Israel,” with these desperate words, the Lebanese Cabinet expressed their helpless observation of the current situation in Lebanon.

For the past five days, Israel’s destructive machinery has been demolishing the country’s infrastructure: bridges, roads, highways, power stations, buildings, airports, whole cities and villages… The numbers of dead and injured people is continuously on the rise.

Among the hundred and fifty individuals or so killed so far, the vast majority are civilians and children.

Numbers do not count anymore!

We’re under a real sea, air and land blockade; a blockade worthy of “the middle ages” like a Lebanese official declared few days ago. In the already deprived southern villages, the situation is disastrous and people are running out of food and medical care. The highly populated area of the southern suburbs of Beirut, where Hizbullah’s strongholds lies, has been almost wiped out. There’s a mass exodus of thousands of people leaving the south and staying in schools, parks, and empty houses. The country is almost completely cut off from the outside world.

Of course one can always adopt the American position and say, well, Israel has the right to defend itself; Hizbullah has fired rockets on Northern Israeli towns killing civilians as well.

But when you see a little girl shredded into pieces, it means we’ve entered the absurd vicious cycle of war where violence begets violence and logic and words are simply meaningless.

On Wednesday, Hizbullah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers in order to press Israel to free four Lebanese prisoners. The Lebanese resistance group was founded in 1982 with the support of Iran as the result of Israel’s invasion of the country then.

Hizbullah was nationally and regionally praised when it succeeded in driving Israel out of the occupied southern parts of Lebanon in 2000 after 22 years of occupation.

When all this started on Wednesday _I can’t believe we reached this stage of horror in just five days_, a lot of Lebanese bared a grudge about Hizbullah’s operation.

A majority of Lebanese were probably saying: “Hizbullah is crazy, they have dragged the whole country into a war that none of us chose. The decision of making war or peace has to be in the hands of the state and not of a militia.” Most of us were thinking of their plans for the weekend. Baalbek’s festival was about to open with a musical by Lebanon’s diva Fairouz. Most people had plans to tan on the beach, to hike in the mountains, go shopping… but NOT GO TO WAR.

Officials, hotel owners, businessmen were talking about high hopes and expectations about this year’s touristy season. Hundred thousands of tourists were here, more were coming, everybody was happy about the growth all this would generate and then in the blink of an eye Beirut’s summer turned into a nightmare.

But the disproportionate reaction of Israel to the kidnapping of two of its soldiers and the killing of eight more leaves one with total indignation with Israel’s “barbaric and systematic war on Lebanon.”

None of this is new, what we have seen in Gaza and the Palestinian territories recently and continuously, should have fueled our imagination about Israel’s collective punishment in response to the kidnapping of its soldiers when the conflict started four days ago.

By now, we all pretty much understand that Hizbullah’s chief Hassan Nasrallah had opened “Pandora’s box.”

Many Lebanese think that Hizbullah has acted in coordination with Iran and Syria as a response to the international community’s pressure on Iran’s nuclear program and their mounting criticism of Syria for supporting violence in Iraq.

"The war is no longer Lebanon’s ... it is an Iranian war," said one of Lebanon’s staunchest opposing figure to Syria and Iran, Druze leader Walid Jumblatt on
Saturday.

Even Lebanon’s Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora had repeated that the government was not aware of Hizbullah’s operation. “We’re the last to know, and the first to be held accountable,” he said.

Anyway, the war in Lebanon is ongoing with the total indifference of the United Nations and lack of real defense or support from the Arabs. Like during Lebanon’s 15 year-old “civil war,” we are living “the others’ war on our territory.”

“The situation is literally: fearless Lebanese men fighting with high-technology Iranian arms.” This is what a former Hizbullah fighter boasted to me about the Lebanese resistance guerilla’s capacity to combat Israel “for a long time.”

Of course, this declaration is not the least surprising. For the past year, everybody here in Lebanon has feared that Hizbullah would drag the whole country in a war against Israel, orchestrated by Iran and Syria.

Although Syria and Iran are repeatedly accused by the US and Israel of standing behind Hizbullah, both countries are still outside the conflict. “For the moment, it is only Lebanon that we are targeting,” are the Israelis saying.

But beyond all these considerations, I think Hizbullah, which is fundamentally a religious group, views the conflict as “the Muslim nation’s war” against Israel, a war that would avenge all the long years of humiliation inflicted on Arabs and Muslims by the Jewish State.

"You Arab and Muslim people must take a position toward your future, the future of your children," Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in a video-taped message. "The peoples of the Arab and Islamic world have a historic opportunity to score a defeat against the Zionist enemy ... We are providing the example."

"Hizbullah is not fighting a battle for Hizbullah or even for Lebanon, but for the Islamic nation," he said.

How haven’t we understood all this from the start? Hizbullah has repeatedly said that it was “a Lebanese” resistance and that it was not intending to “liberate” Palestine, -they even fully integrated in the country’s political life with parliamentarians and ministers. Did we really expect that the Party of God (this is what Hizbullah means in Arabic) which believes rewards are in the afterlife and which base their ideology on sacrificing human life for a bigger cause could really accept becoming a mediocre political party?

It’s only day five of the regional war fought on a Lebanese ground. With both Israel and Hizbullah seemingly determined to make it the last war against each other, no signs of hope fights would stop are clear in the horizon. Will repeated calls for ceasefire from the Lebanese government and the international community bare their fruits anytime soon? Nothing is less sure so far!

*This entry was published in a blog on Beirut during the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel published by the website of the german newspaper, Die Zeit.