Cathy Sultan's Blog, page 10

BLOOD, FIRE AND SLAUGHTER, QANA 1996

 

Shimon Peres was in a tight election race against Benjamin Netanyahu in April 1996. He thought a little war in south Lebanon would improve his dovish image and so he launched “Operation Grapes of Wrath.” On April 19, 1996, Israel attacked the U.N. camp in Qana killing 106 civilians.

“We did not know that several hundred people were concentrated in that camp,” claimed Shimon Peres. “The news came to us as a bitter surprise.” That was a lie. The United Nations had repeatedly told Israel that their camp in Qana was packed with refugees

Today when I heard that Shimon Peres, the so-called “Peacemaker” had died, I thought of Qana and the massacre that he unleashed that day.

I visited the U.N. camp shortly after the attack. In the opening lines to my book Tragedy in South Lebanon: The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2016, I describe what happened April 19, 1996.  

It was late afternoon in the tiny village of Qana, six kilometers southeast of Tyre in south Lebanon. The United Nations blue and white flag hanging over the compound usually billowed in the breeze. That day, its torn scraps snapped harshly at the same light wind, signaling something was horribly amiss.

The prequel to this particular day began five days earlier when the Israeli Air Force began an aerial bombing campaign across Lebanon called “Grapes of Wrath.” It was meant to pressure the Lebanese government to disarm Hezbollah, which was resisting Israel’s occupation of south Lebanon. Between April 13 and April 18, on orders from the Israeli military, some eight thousand civilians from areas around Qana fled their homes for points north. Eight hundred residents, who were either too poor or too old to flee, took shelter in a conference room in the center of the U.N. camp. Under the protection of this international body they assumed they would be safe.

At approximately 2:00 p.m., the Israeli military began shelling the compound. With 155 mm. artillery fire, they hit from all sides, trapping the people so no one could flee. Then they targeted the conference center. The shelling lasted seventeen minutes. Those not killed outright burned to death when the conference center’s roof caved in on top of them. In all, 106 Lebanese died.

The gravesite was at the base of the U.N. compound. The coffins, encased in mortar and cement and mounted atop slabs were arranged horizontally in rows of six. Photos of the dead were placed atop each coffin. Along the camp’s chain-link fence directly behind the gravesite, black mourning banners swayed in the breeze. Family members and friends, there to pay their respects, prayed silently beside the deceased. As a farewell gesture, they left behind bouquets of white lilies and jasmine. Their melancholic, sweet fragrance lingered in the air.

After I visited the gravesite I was handed an album with some twenty-five photos taken shortly after the air strike. In one, a charred body still smoldered. In another, the upper torso of a young child lay on a table, headless.

“Who was that man,” I asked as I walked away with the. “Why did he give me those photos?”

“He’s from Hezbollah,” explained my escort, Elie. “I told him you were a writer. He asks you to please tell the story of the people of south Lebanon so they will not be forgotten.”

And I did.

And so today, when I think of Shimon Peres, I think of those people and I want to pay tribute to them for they are the ones who bore the brunt of Israel’s twenty-two year occupation of south Lebanon.

There was a U.N. inquiry which stated that it did not believe the slaughter was an accident. In fact, the Israelis flew a drone over the camp that day—a fact Israeli denied until a U.N. soldier gave British journalist, Robert Fisk, his video of the drone frames which Fisk later published in The Independent.

The U.N. was accused of being anti-Semitic. However, much later a brave Israeli magazine published an interview with the artillery soldiers who fired at Qana. The officer had referred to the villagers as just a bunch of Arabs. “A few Arabs die,” he said. “There is no harm in that.”

Count, if you will, in the coming days how often the word “peacemaker” will be used in the Peres obituaries. Then count how many times the word Qana appears. And I almost forgot. Bill Clinton was president in April 1996. He never uttered a word of condemnation when he greeted Peres warmly at the White House a week after the massacre.

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THE 34TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SABRA-SHATILLA MASSACRE

 

The Sabra-Shatilla massacres occurred thirty-four years ago today. We still lived in Beirut at the time. Our apartment on Badaro Street was a mere mile and a half from the Palestinian camps. September 18, 1982 was an extremely hot day and by late afternoon a whiff of decomposing corpses filled the air. Unbeknownst to us, it was the third day of a mass killing.

As I recounted in A Beirut Heart: One Woman’s War, the massacres had begun on the night of September 16, when about two hundred militiamen, sent by Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, entered the camps. They were a carefully organized coalition of Christian Lebanese Forces and members of the South Lebanese Army, Israel’s proxy in their self-proclaimed ‘security zone’ in southern Lebanon. The men from the Lebanese Forces were chosen from the Damouri Brigade, one of the most extreme elements of the Christian militia, from Damour, a village in the south ravaged by Palestinian guerrillas in January, 1976, eight months after Lebanon’s civil war began. These young men had seen their family members slaughtered and defiled, their homes destroyed. Ariel Sharon chose these men well. He knew they would take revenge in the vilest way possible.

For thirty-eight hours, from the evening of September 16 to September 18, Israeli troops stood guard outside the camps to prevent anyone escaping, while they sent up flares to light the night sky to aid the militiamen inside the camps.  By the time the men left the camps they had slaughtered approximately two thousand innocent Palestinian civilians. The exact numbers are vague because no one knows precisely how many were killed. The militiamen bulldozed the bodies into heaps and then pushed them into make-shift graves, covering them with dirt.

It was many years later that I finally visited Shatilla. I was met by Zeinab, a Palestinian woman and educator, who worked with the children inside the camp.

She stopped at a shaded open space off to the right of the camp’s entrance and waved her arm for me to follow her. Sidestepping vendors, motorcycles strewn helter-skelter across the pavement and small children huddled on the ground playing what looked like jacks and marbles, I came to a halt at the edge of a vacant lot, vacant except for the piles of rotten garbage and a small corrugated metal shack. This, Zeinab explained, was the site of the mass grave where victims of the 1982 massacre were buried.

“We have no markers, no memorials here, only the memory of unspeakable evil,” she said, “where some two thousand Palestinians were massacred by far-right Lebanese militias in September 1982 while Israeli troops watched and covered them from positions outside the camp.“

“Were you here during the massacre?” I asked.

“Yes, I was a child but I remember vividly the day the militias entered the camp. A man, I don’t remember his name, came through the camp shouting for everyone to leave because the Israelis were at the gate with their tanks. My father wasn’t at home so my mother gathered all six of us children up and rushed us out of the camp by a side entrance. Many of our neighbors ignored the warning and were slaughtered.

“In the immediate aftermath of the massacres the world reeled in horror at what had been done to the Palestinians in this camp,” Zeinab explained, “but then they forgot us. We cannot forget but our lives must go on. And, sadly, if anyone remembers what happened here on those infamous days in September 1982, it is the dead they remember, not us, the living.”

 

“Are your parents still alive?” I asked.

“No, we eventually found my father…in the camp near the entrance. His throat had been slit. My mother died some ten years ago. They’re both buried here in the camp.”

I still cannot adequately find the words to describe this place of horror. Even the few tall trees that shaded the graves seem to bow their branches in sadness and shame at their inability to do little more than protect the deceased from the baking sun in this neglected, wretched camp where the living and the dead co-exist, where squalor and poverty are intertwined with abandonment and severe restrictions of movement imposed by the Lebanese government, where the people know only displacement and slaughter at the hands of an enemy that has confiscated their land and forcibly exiled them. And what of the children, I wondered, do they not dream the dreams of children even if the adult world has done its best to extinguish them?  Do their parents pray that the refugee camp will not be a sentence of life without parole for them for the sole crime, like them, of being born Palestinian?

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THE NEW U.S. FOOT SOLDIERS

 

There is a scene in The Syrian when Nadia is catching her husband, Elie, up on thirteen years worth of news. She’d just sprung him from a Syrian prison where he’d been held captive for those missing years.

“A lot’s happened in those years, Elie, but the short answer is that in 2000 Hezbollah forced the Israelis out of south Lebanon after a twenty-two year occupation and Israel’s been itching to repay Hezbollah for that insult ever since.

“And then there was the September 11th attack in 2001. Islamic terrorists, mostly Saudis, drove lanes into the World Trade Center in New York. The towers collapsed. Thousands died.”

Elie stared at his wife, speechless.

Nadia broke the silence. “Elie, you gave a lecture in ’93 to your class just before you were abducted about the first World Trade Center bombing, when Ramzi Yousef drove a truck full of explosives into the North Tower and tried to bring it down. Do you remember?”

“Of course! I linked that event back to 1985 when CIA Director Casey ordered U.S. Special Forces to teach state-of-the-art sabotage techniques to Pakistani Intelligence, who then trained thousands of Afghans and foreign mujahedin, most of them Saudis, to kill Soviet soldiers across Afghanistan. The CIA facilitated the greatest transfer of terrorist techniques in history. After Yousef’s failed attempt, I remember wondering what the next target would be.”

“I remember when the Soviet’s finally pulled the last of their troops out of Afghanistan in ’89,” said Nadia. “The Americans patted themselves on the back for helping to make that possible. After that, the mujahedin fell off everyone’s radar.

Fast forward to 2007, under the Bush administration, the US, Saudi Arabia, Israel and other regional allies planned to fund, arm and support a wide terrorist front—affiliated with Al Qaeda—to wage proxy war against Iran, Syria and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his article The Redirection: Is the Administration’s New Policy Benefiting our Enemies in the War on Terrorism?  wrote:

“To undermine Iran, which is predominately Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government which is Sunni, in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al-Qaeda.”

In the same year, David Wurmser, who served as Middle East Advisor to Dick Cheney said:  “We must do everything possible to destabilize the Syrian regime and exploit every single moment they strategically overstep. That would include the willingness to escalate as far as we need to go to topple the regime.”

Fast- forward to 2011, in the initial stages of the Syrian war when Washington recruited, armed, trained funded and directed ISIS, the newest generation of mujahedin to fight against the Assad regime in Syria.

When he arrived in Damascus in late January 2011 the newly appointed American Ambassador played a central role in laying the groundwork as well as establishing contact with these opposition groups. He was no ordinary diplomat. Working directly under the American Ambassador to Iraq at the time he had coordinated the convert support of death squads and paramilitary groups in Iraq with a view to fomenting sectarian violence and weakening the resistance movement. The gruesome Iraqi version of the “Salvador Option” was to serve as a “role model” for setting up the “Free Syrian Army” Contras. The objective in Syria was to create factional divisions between Sunni, Alawite, Shiite, Kurds, Druze and Christians.

A report published by Der Spiegel referring to atrocities committed in the Syrian city of Homs confirmed an organized sectarian process of mass-murder and extra-judicial killings comparable to that conducted by the US sponsored death squads in Iraq.

In early July 2011 the US Ambassador traveled to Hama and had meeting with members of the “protest movement,” according to The Washington Post, July 12, 2011. Reports confirmed that the Ambassador had numerous contacts with opposition groups both before and after his July trip to Hama.

Shortly after the Syrian war began Syria’s Interior Ministry identified gangs of “armed Salafist groups” who were seeking to establish “caliphates” and “were abusing the freedoms and reforms launched by President Assad. Assad blamed the unrest on a foreign plot to sow sectarian strife—echoing pronouncements from almost every other besieged leader in the region.

On October 24, 2011, the US Ambassador to Syria was recalled due to what the U.S. State Department described as “credible threats” to his safety when, in fact, he had attracted the ire of pro-Assad Syrians due to his strong support of the Syrian uprising and Assad booted him out of the country. According to a former CIA intelligence officer “prior to his forced removal he was traveling across Syria inciting groups to overthrow the Assad government.”

Sadly, the whole of the Syrian opposition is nothing more than a new generation of mujahedin, the same jihadists, mercenaries and terrorists the US used to fight the Russians in Afghanistan.  ISIS, al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham and their ilk—they are the new US foot soldiers.

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ISRAELI PRIMER ON HOW TO CREATE FEAR

It isn’t often that I post an article by someone else but Amira Hass who writes for the Israeli daily Haaretz  is always an exception. Much of what you’ll read below can be found in my book Israeli and Palestinian Voices: A Dialogue with Both Sides, but I think it has more of a punch when it comes from one of Israel’s premier journalists.

Amira Hass Aug 30, 2016 3:17 AM

A list of the people’s daily fears under democratic Jewish military rule in the West Bank:

* That soldiers will descend from a pillbox armed to the teeth and fire at me. Or at my daughter, or my husband.

This happened in Silwad late last week. Ultra-Orthodox soldiers from the Kfir Battalion in the Nahal Brigade were extremely fearful for their lives and shot Iyad Hamed, 38, who was walking in his village – in his home – in the fields he knew from childhood. He wasn’t armed. He wasn’t throwing stones.

Residents of Silwad village attend the funeral of 38-year-old Palestinian Iyad Hamed, August 26, 2016. Abbas Momani / AFP

He was running, said the soldiers in their defense. After all, everyone knows that a running Palestinian is a suspicious Palestinian. And a suspicious Palestinian is a Palestinian who should be killed. And an armed soldier who killed a Palestinian walking on his land isn’t a murderer.

* That a soldier will fire at children coming home at night from a swimming pool and kill one and wound four. This happened at Beit Ur al-Tahta.

A couple from Ramallah and their teenage children were traveling via the Atara checkpoint north of Birzeit for a family visit. S. tells what happened: “The soldier stood at a distance and aimed his weapon at us. Once they would just approach and peer into the car.

“But here I was afraid of his ignorance and fear, and what these would make him do. From a distance, with his weapon aimed, he ordered us to get out of the car and sit on the ground. He called my son to come to him.

“The rifle was aimed, and I was scared. My son’s phone could ring and he’d put his hand in his pocket automatically, and the soldier could invent the excuse that he was afraid my son was pulling out a knife, so he killed him in self-defense. I moved, started to get up, and the soldier shouted: ‘Stay where you are, don’t move,’ with his rifled aimed.”

Blindfolded and bound

* That my nephew will go outside to exercise his right to protest when soldiers raid our refugee camp or our village, and a soldier armed to the teeth will fire at him and kill or cripple him (as happened in places including al-Fawwar and Kafr Qaddum).

* That they’ll confiscate more of our land for another security road to a settlement.

* That my son will drive my SUV to bring a friend back home, and on the way he’ll encounter a soldier who’ll fire at him and wound him. After all, they can report a lie to their commanders. (Daheisheh)

* That soldiers in a jeep will slap my son, still a minor, whom they’ve detained and blindfolded and bound his arms and legs. Then they’ll kick him. (Beit Omar)

* That they’re torturing my brother right now during an interrogation, his hands behind his back that has been bent for hours, preventing sleep in a filthy cell amid curses. (the Shin Bet security services facilities in Petah Tikva or Kishon Prison)

* That they’ll declare our land state land, and soon a settlement will be built there.

* That my daughter will be the only one in her class who won’t receive an Israeli permit to go on a trip to the beach because I’m a released prisoner, as happened to A. from the Nablus area.

* That at the Allenby crossing the Israelis will send me back and won’t let me travel with my friends on a trip to Kazakhstan, as happened to N. in her 50s.

* That at the Allenby crossing they won’t be satisfied with denying my husband permission to leave but will also put me in administrative detention – detention without trial – without an explanation, without a search and without an interrogation, as happened to Omar Nezal.

* That I’ll lose my job in Israel because they’ll take away my Israeli exit permit in an attempt to recruit me to the Shin Bet as an informer.

* That they won’t allow my 60-year-old father to pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque because I was wounded. (Daheisheh)

* That a bulldozer will come escorted by soldiers, the Border Police and Civil Administration inspectors in a white jeep. Together they will destroy the tabun oven, the family tent, the trailer home donated by the European Union and the toilet donated by an aid organization. (Umm al-Khair)

The rifle scope and the bullet

* That a surveyor will come in preparation to expand a settlement, because of which they’ve already destroyed my tabun and now they’ll destroy the goat pen. (the Carmel settlement)

* That they’ll build another pillbox in order to guard the expanding outpost that was built on village land.

* That we’ll take the sheep to graze, and settlers will descend from the mountain and beat us, and the soldiers will stand aside. (the Maon Farm)

* That we’ll renovate the approach road to our fields and orchards, and the Civil Administration will stop the work in the middle. (Tekoa, Turmus Ayya, Duma)

* That we’ll be late to work again this morning because the soldiers at the checkpoint stopped the traffic from Ramallah so that the settlers heading from Ofra and Beit El can get to work on time. (Geva-Adam Junction)

* That my husband will have an appointment for an operation in East Jerusalem, because he suffers from heart disease, but we won’t get a permit to leave Gaza. (As happened to my friend A., or as our mutual friend F. in his mid-50s says: “My greatest fear is that one of us will fall ill and I won’t be able to give him or her the best possible treatment, because we won’t get an exit permit from Gaza.”)

* That a soldier on a surprise patrol in the neighborhood will say he was afraid and killed me. And that all the other soldiers think that the cure for fear is the rifle scope and the bullet; a finger on the trigger and bingo.

* That the world won’t be interested in all this, and only when a Palestinian kills a Jew and a rocket is launched from Gaza will Angela Merkel and Barack Obama denounce terror.

Amira Hass

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DRILLING FOR OIL IN THE ISRAELI-OCCUPIED GOLAN HEIGHTS

As explained in Israeli and Palestinian Voices: A Dialogue with Both Sides, Israel, in the 1967 Six-Day War, captured and occupied Syria’s Golan Heights and the Upper Mount Herman giving Israel unlimited access to the Upper Jordan River’s water supplies.

Approximately 130,000 Syrians were driven out of the Golan and most of its 200 villages destroyed.

In 1981, in violation of international law, Israel annexed the Golan Heights.

In 2006, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution that affirmed what it called the “inalienable rights” of the Arab population of the Golan over its natural resources.  As the occupying power, Israel is “prohibited from altering, transferring or confiscating immovable properties,” as well as looting the Golan’s resources. According to the 1907 Hague Regulations, stealing resources from an occupied territory constitutes the crime of pillage.

In 2011, Israel’s high court ruled that Israel’s occupation of the Golan is unique and not bound by the laws against pillage.

On April 17, 2016, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, in a cabinet meeting, declared: “It is time for the international community to recognize that the Golan Heights will remain under Israeli sovereignty forever,” and for good reason.

Israel’s Afek Oil and Gas, and its parent company Genie Energy, Ltd, based in New Jersey, have been given the right to perform exploratory tests for a possible large reservoir of natural gas and light oil. Genie Oil’s Director is Efraim Eitam, a Golan settler, a former Israeli military commander and former Knesset member who called for the expulsion of the “cancer” of Arabs from Israel. His cabal includes Rupert Murdoch, Dick Cheney, Lord Jacob Rothchild and former CIA Director James Woolsey. His Strategic Advisory Board includes Lawrence Summers, Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton and Director of the National Economic Council under President Obama, former Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu who helped pass the US-Israel Energy Cooperation Bill and former governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, an energy insider after serving as Clinton’s Energy Secretary.

At stake in this enterprise is a 153 square-mile region in the Golan Heights, demarcated by Israeli authorities as exclusive territory for Afek to perform exploratory testing.

Beyond the not-at-all minor issue of legality, Afek’s drilling in this region has stirred a more imperative concern. A large aquifer supplying the entire region’s drinking water is positioned uncomfortably close to the stores of fossil fuel, raising contamination concerns. Environmental and humanitarian groups have vocally criticized Afek’s exploratory drilling. None of this bothers the cabal since the Golan Heights represents to Big Oil little more than an exploitative business opportunity.

While the Afek group sets their sights on the Golan’s oil and gas, Turkey, the US, Russia, ISIS and a spat of others have been fighting over Syria’s geostrategic location for major oil pipelines under the cover of religious and civil strife.

As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. intoned in an April editorial for Ecowatch, “We may want to look beyond the convenient explanations of religion and ideology and focus on the more complex rationales of history and oil which mostly point the finger of blame for terrorism back to the champions of militarism, imperialism and petroleum here on our own shores.”

US interventions in the Middle East, and particularly Syria, have little to do with fighting terrorism and far more to do with the region’s rich petroleum reserves. Such insistent international meddling at the behest of corporate oil interests so destabilized the entire region it has contributed to the formation of ISIS and similar radical groups.

Oil exploration benefits the ongoing push by Israel to expand it occupation into more Syrian territory since US-backed Big Oil operates under the premise the manufactured nation’s encroachment on Syrian territory is perfectly legal. As is the case with Afek and Genie, the Golan Heights is dismissively referred to as “Northern Israel.”

Considering the notoriously powerful, monied warmongers backing Afek’s petroleum plans, outrage and violation of international law won’t factor one iota into matters concerning the Golan Heights.

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TEAM CLINTON AND HEZBOLLAH

Part of Hilary Clinton’s Middle East policy is apparently ready to be implemented once she is inaugurated president in January 2017. While the final details have yet to be coordinated with Israel, NATO and the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), they are, however, being advocated and pushed by AIPAC (American Israeli Political Action Committee) on Capitol Hill and among Clinton operatives on the Democratic National Committee.

The policy details how the Clinton administration “will destroy Hezbollah and cut off Tehran’s anti-Arab, anti-Sunni and anti-Christian hegemonic lifeline for its rapidly escalating domination of the Middle East.”

Who/what is Hezbollah? The conservative Wall Street Journal accurately defined it as a home-grown resistance movement born out of a twenty-two year illegal Israeli occupation of south Lebanon. Why, so many years later, this obsession with Hezbollah? As I explain in Tragedy in South Lebanon Israel calls Hezbollah a terrorist group because it wants a reason to destroy it. Remember George W’s war on terrorism—‘you’re either with us or against us’—when he declared that any group the U.S. didn’t like was a terrorist organization?  Israel got in on the act and demanded the U.S. declare Hezbollah a terrorist group and insisted it give up its arms. This has not happened because the majority of Lebanese consider a well armed Hezbollah their only deterrent against a future Israeli attack.

Hezbollah is also Israel’s sworn enemy because they succeeded in throwing Israel out of south Lebanon in May 2000, forcing an end to its illegal occupation. No Arab force before had ever dealt Israel such a humiliating blow. However, as with all things in the Middle East, this is only part of the equation.

Geopolitically, there’s a much bigger issue at play—the proxy war between the U.S. and Iran. Using Israel to attack Hezbollah, as it did in the July 2006 war, was an indirect attack on Hezbollah’s backer, Iran. Syria, however, was then and is still the real target because it is the linchpin between Iran and Hezbollah.

During the 2006 war in south Lebanon, the Bush regime wanted Israel to expand the war into Syria. The neocons believed that Israel should have fought directly against the real enemy, the one backing Hezbollah. Since that was impossible, it was decided that Iran’s strategic and important ally, Syria, should be hit. This didn’t happen, however, because Israel got bogged down in Lebanon fighting Hezbollah and was ultimately defeated.

Fast forward to 2016 where Team Clinton thinks Obama’s Middle East policy, particularly with respect to Syria and Hezbollah, is weak and wrongheaded, and it intends to correct this strategic mistake. History will soon decide whether the Clinton administration will be able to “reshape the region” by destroying both Hezbollah and Iran, as Israel’s Netanyahu is insisting she do. Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s U.S. Secretary of State, didn’t succeed when she declared that the 2006 war in south Lebanon marked the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.”

Destroying or severely crippling Hezbollah is also being advocated as a cheap throw-away, ‘crowd-pleaser,’ for the upcoming Clinton administration, both in Congress where the two sides of the aisle would very likely applaud attacks on Hezbollah as part of a rejuvenated expansion of the US-led War on Terrorism. The Israel lobby is expressing confidence on Capitol Hill that relentlessly targeting Hezbollah militarily and economically will please and embolden Washington’s friends who remain chagrined by Obama’s containment policy in Syria.

It is also being argued that the six GCC monarchies will welcome the Clinton administration’s action. As a result,they are expected to redouble their funding to shore up the Syrian opposition, the so-called “moderate” jihadists. One of Clinton’s advisers, Amos Yadlin, Israel’s former Military Intelligence chief, argues that Israel and the U.S. need to intervene in Syria more actively with a policy that leads to the defeat of “our most bitter enemies: Iran and Hezbollah.” Yadlin makes no secret of the fact that Israel will destroy Hezbollah “next time” it attacks Lebanon.

As an intense anti-Hezbollah campaign gets organized in Washington, the Israeli government already considers itself the winner because it expects to have not only more influence in the Clinton administration but also the green-light to destroy Hezbollah.

Whatever success the Clinton team will have with its perpetual wars and specifically its targeting of Hezbollah and Iran, the region, and Lebanon in particular, appears headed for yet more violence and tragic loss of life.

Tragedy in South Lebanon is available for purchase here:

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ARIEL SHARON, ARCHITECT OF THE INVASION OF LEBANON, 1982

I recount in A Beirut Heart: One Woman’s War, that four days after Lebanon’s newly elected president, Bachir Gemayal, was assassinated between fifteen hundred and two thousand men, women and children were found massacred in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla.

The massacres began on the night of September 16, 1982 when about two hundred militiamen, sent by then Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, entered the camps. These men were hand-picked by Sharon from one of the more extreme Christian militia whose village had been ravaged by Palestinian guerrillas. They had seen their family members slaughtered and defiled, their homes destroyed. Ariel Sharon knew they wanted revenge.

For forty-eight hours, from the evening of September 16 to September 18, Israelis stood guard outside the camps to prevent anyone from escaping. They sent up flares to aid the militiamen inside the camps. When the job was d one, they bulldozed the bodies into heaps, pushed them into shallow make-shift graves and covered them with dirt.

Ariel Sharon, Defense Minister in Menachem Begin’s government, was forced to resign after a special Israeli investigative panel declared him to be “personally responsible” for the massacre. Sharon was the architect of the invasion of Lebanon and his was a war of deception because he tricked his Cabinet colleagues into launching this operation by pretending the aims were very limited. In fact, his plan was to completely change the geopolitics of the region—to create a new order in Lebanon by electing Bachir Gemayal as president, getting him to sign a peace treaty with Israel, then expel the Syrian forces from Lebanon and replace Syria with Israeli hegemony in the Levant.

Sharon’s war of deception ended with the horrifying massacre and one that should resonate with people who are familiar with Jewish history. It was almost a replica of the Kishinev massacre in pre-First World War Russia, one of the worst atrocities in Israeli memory. The Tsar’s army surrounded Kishinev and allowed the people inside the village to rampage. Over a three day period, they killed forty-five Jews. On a much larger scale, this was pretty much what happened in Sabra-Shatila. The Israeli army surrounded it, sent in the Christian militiamen who went on a murderous spree, killing close to two thousand.

We lived about a mile and a half from the camps and, in the aftermath of the massacre, could smell the rotting corpses. My husband’s secretary lived in an apartment building across from the camps. She was terrified by the constant machine gun bursts but it was the voices of children crying, of women pleading for their lives that touched her soul.

“I was too frightened to even pull open the blinds and look out”, she said, “but it was the voices I heard, the pain in their pleas for mercy, that I’ll never forget.”

“There was a foul, almost sickeningly sweet smell in the air…and the flies. There were great hordes of them everywhere. That’s when I knew something horrible had happened.”

She recalled a group of young boys who looked as if they had been playing one of those games where children huddle together over a ball, arms linked, shoulders touching; they had fallen together in a pile. Their faces looked as if they had been daubed with dark red finger paint.

A small girl lay on her side in an alleyway a short distance away. She thought at first it was a doll, her dress blotched with blood and dirt, a crimson halo encircling her head.

While Ariel Sharon was forced to step down as Defense Minister, no one could have imagined that he would bounce back as Israel’s Prime Minister. But this was part and parcel of his career as a soldier and as a politician. Sharon committed his first war crime as a young major in 1953 when he destroyed many houses in the Jordanian village of Qibya and was responsible for the massacre of 69 civilians. The consistent thread in his career was the use of brute force.

President George W. Brush famously called Sharon a man of peace. There is not a single scintilla of evidence to support the notion of Sharon as such a man.

In January 2014, when Sharon’ finally died after a prolonged coma, the New York Times turned him from a war criminal and mass murderer into a god. They even released an earlier op-ed written by Sharon in which he justified the invasion of Lebanon and the massacre.

In September 2015, on the 30th anniversary of the massacre, the New York Times published another op-ed, this one with links to documents released by the Israel State Archive which showed that Sharon’s responsibility was far greater than originally thought. It also showed that the Israeli government knew perfectly well what he had planned and that they stonewalled to prevent the massacre from being stopped. On September 16, American diplomats ordered the Israelis to halt the massacres and withdraw their forces from Beirut. Sharon fended them off so that the killing could continue for another day.

Clearly, Ariel Sharon was never a man of peace.

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OUR POLICE FORCES ARE TRAINING IN ISRAEL

In many cities around the country the image of the friendly cop on the beat has been replaced by intimidating, fully armed military-style troops. This is not some chance happenstance.

In Israeli and Palestinian Voices: A Dialogue with Both Sides, I reported that since 2002, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee’s Project Interchange and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs have been sending police chiefs, assistant chiefs and captains on fully paid trips to Israel and the Palestinian occupied territories to observe the Israeli Border Patrol and the country’s intelligence services in action. Tax documents from the Jewish Institute show that in 2012 alone that organization spent $36,857 on such trips.

According to investigative journalist Max Blumenthal, writing about American police training alongside Israeli security forces, “Having been schooled in Israeli tactics perfected during a 63 year experience of controlling, dispossessing and occupying an indigenous population, local police forces have adapted these same techniques to monitor Muslim and immigrant neighborhoods in US cities. Also, former Israeli military officers have been hired to spearhead security operations at American airports and suburban shopping malls, leading to a wave of disturbing incidents of racial profiling, intimidation and FBI interrogations of innocent, unsuspecting people.

Why does any of this matter? Israel doesn’t have a domestic civilian policing model but instead applies a counter-insurgency policing model intended for a population under military occupation. Karen Greenberg, director of Fordham School of Law’s Center on National Security, told Blumenthal that after 9/11 the US reached out to the Israelis on many fronts and one of those fronts was torture. The training in Iraq and Afghanistan on torture was Israeli training. “There’s been a huge downside to taking our cue from the Israelis and we’re spreading that into the fabric of everyday American life.”

A cursory investigation shows that Israel maintains an extensive network of relations with US law enforcement agencies at the local, state and federal levels. It is no coincidence that the chief of the St. Louis County Police Department, which was responsible for some of the heavy-handed tactics employed against protesters in Ferguson, received training in Israel. Just a sampling of US cities and institutions that have trained or are training in Israeli methods are Atlanta, Boston, Tennessee, California, Maryland, Florida, NY City, Seattle, Connecticut and Michigan. These bilateral relationships were reinforced by arrangements put in place by high-level officials like the memorandum of understanding signed by former Israeli Minister Dichter and former US Director of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff in 2007.

Over the years, thousands of US personnel at all levels of law enforcement and hundreds of senior managers from local police chiefs to FBI detectives, have taken counterterrorism training in Israel or attended conferences sponsored by the Israeli government with no scrutiny for their role in the militarization of our police forces.

And this continues even though the Israeli occupation has been repeatedly declared illegal under international law. Such training by Israeli security and occupation forces is analogous to, and merits the same condemnation as a US city sending its officials to receive “police” training from Soviet security police who maintained military occupation of Eastern Europe in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s.

Of course, one killing, or two or three by a US police officer, does not mean that illegal military occupation tactics are being practiced in US cities, or does it?

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TRUTH IS BEST TOLD THROUGH FICTION

 

In The Syrian, a political thriller, part of the background of this fictional story is Washington’s proxy war with Iran. There is a particular scene where three older gentlemen, Camille, Tony and Yousef, who reside in Marjeyoun in south Lebanon and who lived through Israel’s twenty-two year occupation of address this in a conversation with Sonia, one of the lead protagonists.

“Why go after Syria?” she asked.

“Syria is the link to Iran,” Camille replied. “Both Israel and the U.S. think Iran is trying to undermine Sunni dominance and stir up Arab nationalism and so do Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The best way to destabilize Iran is through Syria. If it collapses, so the thinking goes, Iran will implode, making it easier for Israel or the U.S. to attack Hezbollah.”

Imagine my surprise, while researching material for the sequel to The Syrian, when I discovered recently unclassified documents (November 30, 2015) that specifically addressed the U.S. government’s policy on Syria and Iran dating back to December 21, 2000.

“The best way to help Israel deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria to overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad. It is the strategic relationship between Iran and the regime of Bashar Assad that makes it possible for Iran to undermine Israel’s security, not through a direct attack, which in thirty years of hostility has never occurred, but through its proxies in Lebanon, like Hezbollah, who are sustained, armed and trained by Iran via Syria. An end to the Assad regime would extinguish this dangerous alliance. Bringing down Assad would not only be a massive boon to Israel’s security, it would also ease Israel’s understandable fear of losing its regional nuclear monopoly.”

Recently released documents by the whistle blower website Wikileaks report that since 2006 the U.S. State Department has been funneling millions of dollars to the Movement for Justice and Development, a London-based dissident organization which broadcasts anti-government news into Syria.  Diplomatic cables from the U.S. mission in Damascus admitted the risky optics of the funding.

“Some programs may be perceived, were they made public, as an attempt to undermine the Assad regime. The Syrian Republic’s government would undoubtedly view any U.S. funds going to illegal political groups as tantamount to supporting regime change.”

In 2007, David Wurmser, then a senior adviser to Vice President Dick Chaney said that America should seize every opportunity to force regime change in Syria and Iran.

“We need to do everything possible to destabilize the Syrian regime and exploit every single moment they strategically overstep,” he said. “That would include the willingness to escalate as far as we need to go to topple the regime. An end to Baathist rule in Damascus could trigger a domino effect that would then bring down the Teheran regime.”

The history of the Bush administration’s approach toward Syria is also important to understand. Shortly after 9/11, former NATO Commander Wesley Clark was told, by a Pentagon source, that Syria was on the same hit list as Iraq. Wesley claimed that the Bush administration “wanted to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, and make it under our control.”

In a May 2002 speech Under Secretary of State John Bolton named Syria as one of the handful of “rogue states” along with Iraq that “can be expected to become our target.” Assad’s conciliatory and cooperative gestures were brushed aside.

No doubt, Syria’s opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its suspected though never proven involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri deepened the administration’s hostility toward Damascus.

When writing about the Middle East, the truth is, indeed, best told through fiction.

THE 530 DESTROYED VILLAGES

 

The village of Lifta was established by the Canaanites some 2000 years ago and until 1948 it remained a vibrant, wealthy community. On December 28 of that year members of the Stern Gang, a Zionist terrorist organization, entered the village and open fired on a coffee shop killing six and wounding several others. This event, along with a similar attack on a bus nearby prompted the exodus from Lifta, marking it as one of the first villages in Palestine to be ethnically cleansed during the Nakba. The Haganah, noting the efficiency of that kind of terrorism, adopted similar techniques in other areas of present day Israel. In the end, these militias destroyed more than 530 villages. About 13,000 Palestinians were killed and more than 750,000 were expelled from their homes.

On a recent trip to Palestine/Israel, I visited Lifta. The core of the village remains almost in its entirety, with dozens of original houses and a landscape, which, unlike other destroyed villages, has not been covered with Jewish National Fund (JNF) forests. Behind all this beauty lie all the elements of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict: the refugee problem, the demand for the right of return, basic human rights and denial of memory for it is against Israeli law to officially commemorate the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe).

Described by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe as “the quintessential Zionist colonist, Yossef Weitz, the first director of the JNF, declared: “It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both peoples…if the Arabs leave it, the country will become wide and spacious for us…The only solution is a Land of Israel…without…Arabs. There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer all of them, save perhaps the Palestinian Arabs of Bethlehem, Nazareth and old Jerusalem. No village must be left, not one tribe.”

And so, as instruments of concealment, the Jewish National Fund planted millions of trees on the sites of the destroyed Palestinian villages. With forests sprouting up where towns once stood, those who had been expelled would have nothing to return to. And to outsiders beholding the strangely Alpine landscape of northern Israel, in particular, it seemed as though the Palestinians had never existed. And that was the impression the Jewish National Fund hoped to create. The practice that David Ben Gurion and other prominent Zionists referred to as “redeeming the land” was, in fact, the ultimate form of green washing.

Unlike the majority of refugees from the 1948 war, 81 year old Abu Arab lives near his former village. He is an Israeli citizen but he has no more right to return to his village than do his relatives in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. In Israeli legal parlance, he is classified as a “present absentee,” present in Israel but absent from his property.

Organizations like Zochrot (“remembering” in Hebrew) and other Israeli NGOs have been fairly successful over the past few years in raising awareness of the Nakba. Thanks to their effort the destruction of hundreds of villages and resulting refugees have become part and parcel of the current Israeli discourse.  That said, its mere presence in Jewish Israeli discourse still does not mean broad acknowledgement of and accountability for the Nakba. The gap is largely due to the continued adherence of Jewish Israeli society to colonial concepts and practices and to the Zionist narrative of “a land without people for a people without land.”

These and similar stories can be found in Israeli and Palestinian Voices: A Dialogue with Both Sides, now in its third edition.