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In defence of the defenceless, isn’t the targeting of a soldier of the brutal occupying army a legitimate target for Palestinian resistance fighters?

Irrespective of this inconvenient truth, the targeting of civilians is unjustifiable. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, like Ariel Sharon before him, is openly and primitively contravening standards of humanity in the modern era and international humanitarian law. He is explicit about the Israeli military objective to fire upon and terrorise civilians, which is anyway testified by the deplorable nature of Israel’s relentless military operations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the land of the landless and dispossessed, and now, lamentably once again, in Lebanon.

While the Occupied Palestinian Territories are increasingly a land cut-off, forgotten in the main by US and European commentators, coverage from Lebanon of the scorched bodies of children, strikes against Red Cross ambulances and vehicles bearing white flags, houses reduced to bent metal and rubble, and the massive number of displaced persons is still headline news. As for the notion either set of captors of Israeli soldiers bear responsibility for the beginnings of aggression and any Israeli suffering, Olmert and his Rich World supporters are like conquistadors moaning about the dangerous natives. In particular, due to a strange type of memory hole, it is necessary to stress Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel only after Israel attacked Lebanon.

Hamas holds a soldier of occupation, a prisoner of war, while Lebanese Hezbollah has long been trying to abduct Israeli soldiers to use as bargaining chips for the return of Lebanese political prisoners held in Israel. Hezbollah, who made such a failed attempt just a few months ago, was a home-grown response to Israel’s 18-year occupation of south Lebanon; this ended in 2000 primarily because the casualties Israel sustained in conflict with Hezbollah on Lebanese soil were too much for the Israeli public to bear. The US public has responded similarly to mounting US casualties in Occupied Iraq. Lebanese political prisoners officially number three, but there are a couple of hundred of unaccounted for persons; Israel holds onto thousands of Palestinian political prisoners including an estimated 300 minors.

A clear offer of negotiations, for the exchange of captured soldiers for Palestinian and Lebanese political prisoners, remains on the table. But Israel is executing some hidden agenda, since Israel is wantonly committing crimes against humanity by targeting civilians and the infrastructure of life, such as roads, schools, housing, water pipes, power stations, and the like. Likely there is a grand design, as evidenced by Israel’s habit of unilateral action and refusal to participate in diplomatic efforts including with Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. Anyway, Israel has also been bombing Lebanese army outposts and barracks, including twenty Lebanese soldiers killed in two strikes in as many days, so clearly Israel isn’t looking for Lebanon to exercise control inside Lebanon’s borders.

In short, Israel continues its barbarous methods of preventing the sovereign existence of the Palestinian people, and routine dismissal of the existence of the sovereign Lebanese people - including Lebanon’s sovereign right to control its security, borders, and air space, violated habitually by Israeli jets. Add to this the ongoing occupation of the Shebaa Farms, Israel knowingly provokes and keeps open the battlefront on its northern border. Perhaps Israel likes war.

Certainly no challenge to Israel’s agenda and unstoppable cruelty can come from the UN Security Council, rendered pointless primarily by the US power of veto but also by the United Kingdom and others’ similar abuse of power. Lebanon, like the Occupied Palestinian Territories, has been left alone against the dreadful, greedy and contemptuous regional superpower. But Israel is also significantly alone in the world: it is the only state that has never had internationally declared borders, and the only state where religion and state are wed to the severe detriment of democratic principles but not to its standing in the world as, ludicrously, ‘the only democracy in the Middle East.’

The day before the capture of Corporal Gilad Shalit, al-Jazeera reported Israel’s abduction of two civilians from Gaza, the brothers Osama and Mustafa Abu Muamar, sons of a Hamas activist and fate unknown. Not only is the abduction of civilians a serious crime, the same media that runs with the story of the almighty Israeli army caught with its pants down, fails to report it. Grave crimes against the defenceless are commonplace; perhaps they are so commonplace as to not warrant serious discussion in the mass media, which deems the constant harassment of and violence against Palestinians somehow separate from the inciting events identified as such by people in positions of power.

Poverty rates soar at around 80% in Gaza - a deliberate consequence of the Occupation - with the majority of Gazans now reliant to some extent on food aid. Grossly unacceptable conditions, which worsened still further under the reductive US and EU policy of ostracising the democratically elected Hamas-led government, deteriorate rapidly as militant Israel furthers its not-so-well hidden agendas. The biggest myth, given credibility by the farcical mass media, is the existence of a peace process, which does not only not exist, but the opposite of a peace process, the unilateral process of Israel gaining and gaining at the expense of the Palestinians, who must always be forced to give up more, has always been the order of the day, including at the much vaunted Camp David summit of 2000. Heed this warning, I am too tired to hold back: this vortex of evil - the Israeli official and the Zionist ideology - will not be finished with the civilians of the Occupied Palestinian Territories under its care, until an equal and opposite power stops it in its tracks.

Whether a prisoner in an Israeli jail, or a civilian on the street enduring life under the Israeli boot - Gaza is rightly regarded an open prison, the people, their long history of loss, and their looming humanitarian crisis kept in behind an electrified fence - similar techniques to flout your rights are employed. Sleep deprivation is one of Israel’s favourite torture techniques, while an Israeli MP quoted Olmert’s somewhat despotic instruction to his soldiery to “make sure no one sleeps in Gaza at night.” Now Israel plans to complete the caging of Palestinians in the West Bank too.

Olmert’s ‘convergence plan,’ or ‘consolidation plan’ as it’s also known, is terminology for Israel’s increasing momentum and violence toward bringing about the annexation of all the important lands and resources, including water, of the West Bank, with the division of what is left over into Palestinian - only partially self-governing, since Olmert asserts Israel must maintain control over the Jordan Valley - regions. Olmert also says he will “protect Jerusalem’s unity,” meaning Israel won’t negotiate on occupied East Jerusalem. Similarly, Syria’s Golan Heights, seized by Israel in 1967 and now predominantly inhabited by thousands of settlers illegally living in Jewish-only settlements, is a territory Israel likes to think of as its own. All this is endorsed and made possible primarily by the gift of a blank cheque from US taxpayers, even as millions of North Americans are themselves living below the poverty line. Surely this says something about our world leaders’ priorities. US Security of State Condoleezza Rice only eventually arranged for the requirement for US citizens to pay for their evacuation from under-siege Lebanon to be waived “in this case,” lest the US be otherwise cast in a poor light for poor treatment of its citizens.

Israel has threatened to bomb Lebanon “back 20 years.” Perhaps this is a savage official’s twitch, a flicker of contempt for Lebanon’s successful tourist industry, now punctually squashed. But in any event, Israel has performed this trick before. In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon intent on burying the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). Israel pushed the retreating PLO and civilians from south Lebanon back, into west Beirut, where Israel subsequently slaughtered some 17,500 people, mainly civilians without some place else to go or else too scared to step out through the front door, from the air. Finally, the international forces compliantly oversaw the implementation of Israel’s arrogant request that the PLO (and Syrian forces) be evacuated, leaving the fighters’ families left behind and exposed. Once the inhabitants of west Beirut were suitably devoid of the power to resist, Israel invaded and oversaw the Sabra and Shatila massacre of elderly, women, youth and children, and babies by Israel’s allies since 1976, the fascist Christian Phalangist militia, so brilliantly recalled in Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation. Now Israel is after Hezbollah.

With its absolute powers, Israel has laid siege to and closed off sovereign Lebanon, predictably pounding from sea and air the Shia south and quarters of Beirut, but also hitting as far north as the city of Tripoli and Christian areas, a worrying development because nowhere is safe and because it is a strong indication Israel aims to upturn Lebanon’s fragile and strained political arrangement and conjure, if it can, a new civil war. But while Israel seeks to imitate the US’s feigned legitimacy for its continued military occupation of Iraq, while Israel seeks to compromise an exit strategy and consolidate coming arguments for a permanent ’security buffer’ inside Lebanon, Lebanon digs in and so far remains united, united in their disgust at Israel’s unchecked audacity, destruction of homes, hospitals, and food stores, and mindless slaughter of Lebanon’s children.

On Saturday 15 July, the Israeli army ordered civilians out of Marwaheen as it reportedly was preparing to bomb the village within two hours. Naturally parents packed up their children, left behind their photo albums and homes in the line of fire, and fled. Or at least they tried to. The Israeli army fired upon vehicles, which it knew, because it ordered it, contained precious loads of whole families. A strike against two vehicles left at least twenty civilians dead, mostly children. More Israeli atrocities have since come to pass. It is also worth pausing to consider for a moment the difficulty of going anywhere in light of Israel’s wanton destruction of all the roads.

Backed by the UK, the US demonstrated tacit support for Israel’s war on Lebanese children and other civilians when it blocked UN Security Council efforts to implement an immediate ceasefire, marking yet another failure in humanity and confirming Israel’s monopoly on security.

In 1982, power described the thousands of civilian victims of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of west Beirut as knowing or unknowing “human shields” for the PLO. The civilian becomes, one way or another, indistinguishable from the ‘terrorist,’ a noun that, for barely veiled reasons of racism, is easily and deliberately applied to Muslim - normally Arab - groups and individuals in order to dismiss the details of their cause - logically there is one - and the deaths of the people they may or may not represent, and never to the current world’s greatest aggressors and oppressors.

On 13 July, unchallenged by presenter of the BBC’s ‘This Week’ programme, Andrew Neil, actress and Guardian columnist, Maureen Lipman, launched into a diatribe rejecting condemnation of Israel’s disproportionate use of force. Lipman thinks the question of disproportionality is irrelevant because there’s no equivalence between an Israeli and an Arab, in this case Lebanese or Palestinian, life. Moreover Lipman is clearly stating there is no equivalence between what the Israelis do and what the Arabs inherently are: “What’s proportion got to do with it? It’s not about proportion, is it? Human life is not cheap to the Israelis. And human life on the other side is quite cheap actually because they strap bombs to people and send them to blow themselves up.”

Actually, just the act of focusing on the relatively new phenomenon of suicide bombing, as opposed to on the decades long and far more deadly Israeli occupation, could be said to be racist. It could justifiably be said to be racist because the number of Palestinian victims are far, far more than the number of Israeli victims, even if we fail to mention the ethnic cleansing, military occupation, social injustice, and massacres including Sabra and Shatila. And aside from the fact Lipman is quite obviously a vulgar racist and Muslims are the last acceptable target of gross generalisation and belligerent hostility, you’d be forgiven for thinking many of Lipman’s fellow writers share her views, such is the consensual lexicon in general use that normalises Israeli brutality and condemns Palestinians without proof.

So we find in the mass media, Israelis are typically ‘victims,’ the ‘innocents’ in an inexorable ‘cycle of violence’; by default all Palestinians are possible ‘terrorists.’ The victims make ‘arrests’; the terrorists ‘kidnap.’ Dead Israelis are also victims, while Palestinian casualties of occupation live and die the fate of the undeserving terrorist, whether man, woman, or, too often to inspire confidence in the humanity of a so-called democracy that increasingly fails to speak out, child. Few journalists challenge the ‘information’ coming out of Israel. Israel is not required to provide proof a dead Palestinian had or was about to commit an actual grievous crime. On the rare occasion an Israeli spokesperson finds the affirmation the dead fellow or family were suspected terrorists rejected, she first denies they were the victims of Israeli aggression, and second, if it comes to it, buries an apology in a speech about ‘Israeli restraint’ and grand efforts to protect civilians. Power - and not knowledge - builds the structure of reference used by other powerful leaders to dodge reality and international humanitarian law, as they preach to and condemn those lacking in power, as well as by the mass media as it echoes power where it should rightly confront power. Almost nobody challenges the hollow affirmation of Israeli moral supremacy.

But perhaps even worse than the journalist who may or may not know they are aiding something diabolical, so ingrained are the principles of ‘objective’ journalism not to mention the shackles of conforming generally, are the legions of writers and defenders working away blithely from the US and Europe to market the democratic state of Israel, ‘the only democracy in the Middle East.’

These pro-Israel groups and individuals are moderated by nothing, no matter the human cost and information disproving their cause. Some of them influence government policy: Tony Blair is known to seek advice on Middle East policy from members of the Westminster-based pressure group, Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), while the power of pro-Israel lobby groups operating in the US is world-renowned.

Of course there is not a club with high VIP-MP membership working within the ruling British Labour Party to promote the interests of the Palestinian people, although LFI might like to derisively claim they perform that function too; nor for that matter is there a similarly successful group working to promote the interests of any other nation. There is however a Conservative Friends of Israel and also a Liberal Democrats Friends of Israel. For pro-Israel groups working outside of political parties, there is still the task of soullessly peddling the same misinformation to the citizens, lest they otherwise not support their government’s hand in the subjugation of millions.

Geoff Smith, Deputy Director of UK-based Christian Friends of Israel, claims to “report of real life in Israel,” but actually writes from the United Kingdom’s coastal town of Eastbourne to, among other formula, deny the parallels between apartheid and Zionism and spout forth allegations of anti-Semitism: “If something is repeated often enough you begin to think it must be true. That was the basic principle of Goebbels in the Nazi attacks he mounted against the Jewish people seventy years ago.”

Smith crudely overlooks the Palestinian diaspora - “an extreme form of apartheid” according to academic, activist, author, and self-designated ‘anti-Zionist Palestinian Jew,’ Uri Davis - in his analysis of whether or not Israel is an apartheid state. Nor does he mention the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the camps and ghettos that take hours to travel between because of checkpoints, permanent and mobile, where men, women, and children queue rigid to be humiliated by gangs of teenage soldiers, who’s responsibility it is to choose who will pass, and roadblocks, which appear on the landscape like giant mole hills, but never on the Jewish settler-only roads, or perhaps you live up against and surrounded by the Wall that looms like Mordor, or under one of the illegal settlements that dot the hills and have enough water for lawns and swimming pools. Nor does Smith dwell on the significance of a ‘Jewish state,’ something of a misnomer since almost a quarter of Israeli citizens are non-Jews, or the implication of ethnic cleaning since Israel stands in a naturally Arab land. Nor does he mention the ethnic separatism inside Israel, including Israel’s discriminatory system of land administration.

When the United Nations resolved in November 1947 to partition the region, less than 7% of the total land belonged to Jews; now the Israel Lands Administration (ILA) administers 93% of the land inside Israel. This land, which is either state-owned or Jewish National Fund (JNF) owned, incorporates the lands expropriated from Palestinians driven from their homes by the pre-national Jewish militia, Irgun Tsvai Leumi, to make room for the Jewish state in 1948. To date Palestinian refugees are refused the basic right of return conversely and perversely granted any Jew in the world. Those who lost their homes and land included ‘present absentees,’ a hateful concept meaning Palestinians who had remained in the country but on a given day were absent from their villages. Further to the illegal expropriation of Palestinian land - under international law - few non-Jews have been able to penetrate the elaborate leasing arrangements in Israel, leaving no doubt only Jews need apply for new housing. The JNF is overt about its policy of leasing to Jews only, while in practice the ILA is similarly discriminatory.

The balance of Smith’s argument quite simply fails to add up, not least because there is only one army - the army of occupation - and only one country - Israel. In his arrogance Smith contemptuously ignores the existence and experience of most every Palestinian alive. In 1948 apartheid in South Africa was instituted and the state of Israel was established. It was a bad year. Like South Africa in Africa, the evolution of Israel in the Middle East is unique due to the extent of immigration from Europe to the region. In both countries the subjugation of the indigenous inhabitants increased with immigration, and in both countries the ruling minority won support from powerful nations - due to diamonds in South Africa and oil in the Middle East. In the Middle East the story of subjugation is still unfolding, while in South Africa the black majority are living the legacy of subjugation - poverty - which the Poor World, its peoples, countries, and continents could talk at length about.

Time will reveal the extent to which the US at least has known in advance the current horrors we are witnessing from afar. Allegations that Iran manoeuvred the Hezbollah capture of soldiers suggests the US and Israel are conspiring to arrange a pretext to attack Iran, and certainly the US, with spokesperson Rice at the helm, seems keen to avoid the calls for a ceasefire now whispered in most corners. Instinctively we are witnessing the execution of a plan hatched a considerable time ago, first to settle Israel’s borders in favour of Israel and perhaps old scores, and second to consolidate Israel’s status as the undisputed regional superpower. Israel’s heedless violence is, according to Rice, “the birth-pangs of a new Middle East.”

Meanwhile Hezbollah’s leader, Shaikh Hassan Nasrallah, presents as calm, solid, and rational as ever. When asked whether Hezbollah would accept giving back the two soldiers they hold captive, Nasrallah replied they would like the Lebanese Government to negotiate on their behalf. In the end it is the world leaders and their advisors who have miscalculated. For the evil they plot they fail to see the arc of resistance is growing. Hezbollah and Hamas, both resistance movements and political parties that have seemingly been too successful for their own good, enjoy equally enormous popular support. That the resistance happens to be in the name of Islam is irrelevant, except that it serves to unite a huge and infinitely varied body of people in a common cause.

What we are witnessing is arguably the last anti-colonial resistance movement. In the end the only lesson learned is the raw dignity and resilience of people, who refuse to give up and bow down, and, in the case of the Palestinian people, to die the slow death Israel has made for them, no matter how hopeless and dangerous the situation. Without a country, rights, and certainly without an army, the Palestinian people are living proof the strength of a military is not, after all, equal to the strength of a nation. Insha’allah - God willing - the people will win.

“We are as small as the fear we feel, and as big as the enemy we choose”
(Sub-commandante Marcos’s alter ego, quoted by Eduardo Galeano in The Upside-Down World)

Sarah Skilton