[wvns] Jonathan Cook: Lebanon a Year After
Lebanon a Year After
By Jonathan Cook
Countercurrents.org
This week marks a year since the end of hostilities
now officially called the Second Lebanon war by
Israelis. A month of fighting -- mostly Israeli aerial
bombardment of Lebanon, and rocket attacks from the
Shia militia Hizbullah on northern Israel in response
-- ended with more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians and a
small but unknown number of Hizbullah fighters dead,
as well as 119 Israeli soldiers and 43 civilians.
When Israel and the United States realised that
Hizbullah could not be bombed into submission, they
pushed a resolution, 1701, through the United Nations.
It placed an expanded international peacekeeping
force, UNIFIL, in south Lebanon to keep Hizbullah in
check and try to disarm its few thousand fighters.
But many significant developments since the war have
gone unnoticed, including several that seriously put
in question Israel's account of what happened last
summer. This is old ground worth revisiting for that
reason alone.
The war began on 12 July, when Israel launched waves
of air strikes on Lebanon after Hizbullah killed three
soldiers and captured two more on the northern border.
(A further five troops were killed by a land mine when
their tank crossed into Lebanon in hot pursuit.)
Hizbullah had long been warning that it would seize
soldiers if it had the chance, in an effort to push
Israel into a prisoner exchange. Israel has been
holding a handful of Lebanese prisoners since it
withdrew from its two-decade occupation of south
Lebanon in 2000.
The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who has been
widely blamed for the army's failure to subdue
Hizbullah, appointed the Winograd Committee to
investigate what went wrong. So far Winograd has been
long on pointing out the country's military and
political failures and short on explaining how the
mistakes were made or who made them. Olmert is still
in power, even if hugely unpopular.
In the meantime, there is every indication that Israel
is planning another round of fighting against
Hizbullah after it has "learnt the lessons" from the
last war. The new defence minister, Ehud Barak, who
was responsible for the 2000 withdrawal, has made it a
priority to develop anti-missile systems such as "Iron
Dome" to neutralise the rocket threat from Hizbullah,
using some of the recently announced $30 billion of
American military aid.
It has been left to the Israeli media to begin
rewriting the history of last summer. Last weekend, an
editorial in the liberal Haaretz newspaper went so far
as to admit that this was "a war initiated by Israel
against a relatively small guerrilla group". Israel's
supporters, including high-profile defenders like Alan
Dershowitz in the US who claimed that Israel had no
choice but to bomb Lebanon, must have been squirming
in their seats.
There are several reasons why Ha'aretz may have
reached this new assessment.
Recent reports have revealed that one of the main
justifications for Hizbullah's continuing resistance
-- that Israel failed to withdraw fully from Lebanese
territory in 2000 -- is now supported by the UN. Last
month its cartographers quietly admitted that Lebanon
is right in claiming sovereignty over a small fertile
area known as the Shebaa Farms, still occupied by
Israel. Israel argues that the territory is Syrian and
will be returned in future peace talks with Damascus,
even though Syria backs Lebanon's position. The UN's
admission has been mostly ignored by the international
media.
One of Israel's main claims during the war was that it
made every effort to protect Lebanese civilians from
its aerial bombardments. The casualty figures
suggested otherwise, but increasingly so too does
other evidence.
A shocking aspect of the war was Israel's firing of at
least a million cluster bombs, old munitions supplied
by the US with a failure rate as high as 50 per cent,
in the last days of fighting. The tiny bomblets,
effectively small land mines, were left littering
south Lebanon after the UN-brokered ceasefire, and are
reported so far to have killed 30 civilians and
wounded at least another 180. Israeli commanders have
admitted firing 1.2 million such bomblets, while the
UN puts the figure closer to 3 million.
At the time, it looked suspiciously as if Israel had
taken the brief opportunity before the war's end to
make south Lebanon -- the heartland of both the
country's Shia population and its militia, Hizbullah
-- uninhabitable, and to prevent the return of
hundreds of thousands of Shia who had fled Israel's
earlier bombing campaigns.
Israel's use of cluster bombs has been described as a
war crime by human rights organisations. According to
the rules set by Israel's then chief of staff, Dan
Halutz, the bombs should have been used only in open
and unpopulated areas -- although with such a high
failure rate, this would have done little to prevent
later civilian casualties.
After the war, the army ordered an investigation,
mainly to placate Washington, which was concerned at
the widely reported fact that it had supplied the
munitions. The findings, which should have been
published months ago, have yet to be made public.
The delay is not surprising. An initial report by the
army, leaked to the Israeli media, discovered that the
cluster bombs had been fired into Lebanese population
centres in gross violation of international law. The
order was apparently given by the head of the Northern
Command at the time, Udi Adam. A US State Department
investigation reached a similar conclusion.
Another claim, one that Israel hoped might justify the
large number of Lebanese civilians it killed during
the war, was that Hizbullah fighters had been
regularly hiding and firing rockets from among south
Lebanon's civilian population. Human rights groups
found scant evidence of this, but a senior UN
official, Jan Egeland, offered succour by accusing
Hizbullah of "cowardly blending".
There were always strong reasons for suspecting the
Israeli claim to be untrue. Hizbullah had invested
much effort in developing an elaborate system of
tunnels and underground bunkers in the countryside,
which Israel knew little about, in which it hid its
rockets and from which fighters attacked Israeli
soldiers as they tried to launch a ground invasion.
Also, common sense suggests that Hizbullah fighters
would have been unwilling to put their families, who
live in south Lebanon's villages, in danger by
launching rockets from among them.
Now Israeli front pages are carrying reports from
Israeli military sources that put in serious doubt
Israel's claims.
Since the war's end Hizbullah has apparently relocated
most of its rockets to conceal them from the UN
peacekeepers, who have been carrying out extensive
searches of south Lebanon to disarm Hizbullah under
the terms of Resolution 1701. According to the UNIFIL,
some 33 of these underground bunkers or more than 90
per cent -- have been located and Hizbullah weapons
discovered there, including rockets and launchers,
destroyed.
The Israeli media has noted that the Israeli army
calls these sites "nature reserves"; similarly, the UN
has made no mention of finding urban-based Hizbullah
bunkers. Relying on military sources, Haaretz reported
last month: "Most of the rockets fired against Israel
during the war last year were launched from the
'nature reserves'." In short, even Israel is no longer
claiming that Hizbullah was firing its rockets from
among civilians.
According to the UN report, Hizbullah has moved the
rockets out of the underground bunkers and abandoned
its rural launch pads. Most rockets, it is believed,
have gone north of the Litani River, beyond the range
of the UN monitors. But some, according to the Israeli
army, may have been moved into nearby Shia villages to
hide them from the UN.
As a result, Haaretz noted that Israeli commanders had
issued a warning to Lebanon that in future hostilities
the army "will not hesitate to bomb -- and even
totally destroy -- urban areas after it gives Lebanese
civilians the chance to flee". How this would diverge
from Israel's policy during the war, when Hizbullah
was based in its "nature reserves" but Lebanese
civilians were still bombed in their towns and
villages, was not made clear.
If the Israeli army's new claims are true (unlike the
old ones), Hizbullah's movement of some of its rockets
into villages should be condemned. But not by Israel,
whose army is breaking international law by concealing
its weapons in civilian areas on a far grander scale.
As a first-hand observer of the fighting from Israel's
side of the border last year, I noted on several
occasions that Israel had built many of its permanent
military installations, including weapons factories
and army camps, and set up temporary artillery
positions next to -- and in some cases inside --
civilian communities in the north of Israel.
Many of those communities are Arab: Arab citizens
constitute about half of the Galilee's population.
Locating military bases next to these communities was
a particularly reckless act by the army as Arab towns
and villages lack the public shelters and air raid
warning systems available in Jewish communities.
Eighteen of the 43 Israeli civilians killed were Arab
-- a proportion that surprised many Israeli Jews, who
assumed that Hizbullah would not want to target Arab
communities.
In many cases it is still not possible to specify
where Hizbullah rockets landed because Israel's
military censor prevents any discussion that might
identify the location of a military site. During the
war Israel used this to advantageous effect: for
example, it was widely reported that a Hizbullah
rocket fell close to a hospital but reporters failed
to mention that a large army camp was next to it. An
actual strike against the camp could have been
described in the very same terms.
It seems likely that Hizbullah, which had flown
pilotless spy drones over Israel earlier in the year,
similar to Israel's own aerial spying missions, knew
where many of these military bases were. The question
is, was Hizbullah trying to hit them or -- as most
observers claimed, following Israel's lead -- was it
actually more interested in killing civilians.
A full answer may never be possible, as we cannot know
Hizbullah's intentions -- as opposed to the
consequences of its actions -- any more than we can
discern Israel's during the war.
Human Rights Watch, however, has argued that, because
Hizbullah's basic rockets were not precise, every time
they were fired into Israel they were effectively
targeted at civilians. Hizbullah was therefore guilty
of war crimes in using its rockets, whatever the
intention of the launch teams. In other words,
according to this reading of international law, only
Israel had the right to fire missiles and drop bombs
because its military hardware is more sophisticated --
and, of course, more deadly.
Nonetheless, new evidence suggests strongly that,
whether or not Hizbullah had the right to use its
rockets, it may often have been trying to hit military
targets, even if it rarely succeeded. The Arab
Association for Human Rights, based in Nazareth, has
been compiling a report on the Hizbullah rocket
strikes against Arab communities in the north since
last summer. It is not sure whether it will ever be
able to publish its findings because of the military
censorship laws.
But the information currently available makes for
interesting reading. The Association has looked at
northern Arab communities hit by Hizbullah rockets,
often repeatedly, and found that in every case there
was at least one military base or artillery battery
placed next to, or in a few cases inside, the
community. In some communities there were several such
sites.
This does not prove that Hizbullah wanted only to hit
military bases, of course. But it does indicate that
in some cases it was clearly trying to, even if it
lacked the technical resources to be sure of doing so.
It also suggests that, in terms of international law,
Hizbullah behaved no worse, and probably far better,
than Israel during the war.
The evidence so far indicates that Israel:
* established legitimate grounds for Hizbullah's
attack on the border post by refusing to withdraw from
the Lebanese territory of the Shebaa Farms in 2000;
* initiated a war of aggression be refusing to engage
in talks about a prisoner swap offered by Hizbullah;
* committed a grave war crime by intentionally using
cluster bombs against south Lebanon's civilians;
* repeatedly hit Lebanese communities, killing many
civilians, even though the evidence is that no
Hizbullah fighters were to be found there;
* and put its own civilians, especially Arab
civilians, in great danger by making their communities
targets for Hizbullah attacks and failing to protect
them.
It is clear that during the Second Lebanon war Israel
committed the most serious war crimes.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming
"Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and
Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and
available in the United States from the University of
Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
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