JUST NU: Israel anfaller Libanon [2006]

"---The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten has summarized an Israeli military briefing by Israeli Chief of Staff Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi of a US congressional delegation a little over a year ago and concludes that:
‘The memo on the talks between Ashkenazi and [Congressman Ike] Skelton, as well as numerous other documents from the same period of time, to which Aftenposten has gained access, leave a clear message: The Israeli military is forging ahead at full speed with preparations for a new war in the Middle East.
The paper says that US cables quote Ashkenazi telling the US congressmen, “I’m preparing the Israeli army for a major war, since it is easier to scale down to a smaller operation than to do the opposite.”
The general’s plans are driven by fear of growing stockpiles of rockets in Hamas-controlled Gaza and in Hizbullah-controlled Southern Lebanon, the likely theaters of the planned major new war. Ashkenazi does not seem capable of considering that, given a number of Israeli invasions and occupations of those regions, the rockets may be primarily defensive.
Ashkenazi told the visiting delegation that Israeli unmanned drones had had great success in identifying rocket emplacements in southern Lebanon, and that it had been aided in this endeavor by the US National Security Agency,which spies on communications.
The new, major war will be a total war on civilians, Ashkenazi boasted: “In the next war Israel cannot accept any restrictions on warfare in urban areas.” (I den neste krigen kan Israel ikke godta noen restriksjoner på krigføring i byområder in Norwegian, or let us just translate it into the original German: In den nächsten Krieg, den Israel kann keine Beschränkungen Kriegsführung in städtischen Gebieten.) Mind you, the civilian deaths deriving from this massive and unrestricted bombing campaign on targets in the midst of civilian urban populations will be “unintentional.” Planning to bomb civilian areas with foreknowledge that you will thereby kill large numbers of civilians is a war crime.
Ashkenazi also admitted to then Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) that Hamas is not in control of even more radical groups, which had infiltrated cells into Hamas itself, and which had rocket-making capabilities. In public, Israeli officials routinely demonize Hamas for every rocket fired from the lawless, besieged territory of Gaza, but here in private Ashkenazi was admitting the opposite. He even admitted that Israeli intelligence had no means to distinguish the even-more-radical from the merely Hamas.
Other State Department documents on the same theme say that last year this time Hizbullah had about 20,000 rockets, some of which can now reach Tel Aviv, and that the Shiite militia will attempt to stretch out its supplies for a two-month-long war, and would try to lob about 100 rockets at Tel Aviv per day.
In the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon, one fourth of the Israeli population was be forced to move house. It will be more this time, and for longer.
The memos reveal that none of the goals of Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon and its 2008-9 war on little Gaza were achieved, and that both Hamas and Hizbullah have effectively re-armed. What makes Ashkenazi think things would be different this time? Israel hawks have doomed themselves to the particular hell of Sisyphus, forced to roll the same stone up the hill over and over again with no hope of ever balancing it on the summit.---"

original German: In den nächsten Krieg, den Israel kann keine Beschränkungen Kriegsführung in städtischen Gebieten.)

"---We live in very bizarre times. On the one hand, we could not have wished as activists for a better Israeli government. I think that this particular government makes any sophisticated analysis about what Zionism in Israel is all about quite redundant. It is very easy to expose not only the Israeli policies, but also the racist ideology behind them. On the other hand, Israel is the most successful economy in the West in the last three years; it has done much better than the Germany, much better than most of the economic powers of the West; its banking system is very stable, its currency is one of the strongest in the world and it doesn’t suffer at all from all the hardships that had affected the Western capitalist economies in the last three years.

The result is a very bewildering gap between what average and decent people in the West think about Israel and the way the Israelis, specially the Israeli Jews, think about themselves. They think that they live in a very successful society, they believe that the Arab-Israeli conflict is over, that the Palestinian question has ended, yes, you have a problem in Gaza, yes you have a problem with Hezbollah in Lebanon, but this is a global problem, this is not a particular Israeli problem; this is part of the so-called war against terror.

We also live in bizarre times because despite of the – and Mazin Qumsiyeh talked about it yesterday in very details way, so I don’t have to repeat it - , we also live in a time where particular and specific Israeli policies are severely criticized. People go and demonstrate against the massacre in Gaza, people go and demonstrate against the attack of the flotilla to Gaza, and yet, nobody dares to attack the ideology that is behind these policies. There is no demonstration against Zionism, because the European parliament even regards a demonstration against Zionism as anti-Semitism.---"

"---It is, of course, important to create an Israeli offensive threat as a means of pressure on Iran. However, intelligence personnel in some Western countries are warning that a premature Israeli attack would terminate the possibility of diplomatic activity against Iran. In a speech he delivered two months ago in New Orleans to the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America, Netanyahu called on the Americans to create a concrete threat against Iran. The reprimand followed immediately: Defense Secretary Robert Gates stated in an interview that an attack would only allow the rulers in Tehran to regroup against their opponents.---"

“Wikileaks confirmed yet another suspected, but never confirmed, relationship between Lebanon and Israel. American diplomatic reports from 2008 detail discussions between the Lebanese defense minister and American officials. The Lebanese minister discussed how Israel could hit key Hezbollah targets, and cripple the Iranian-backed Shia force. The minister also believed that Israel could take out Hezbollah without enraging the rest of Lebanon if the fighting was confined to Hezbollah held areas. It was also important that targets in Christian Lebanese areas not be bombed.”

–”Lebanon Faces The Hidden Enemy”, strategypage.com

“The aim of America and Israel is to spread chaos in Lebanon and to find excuses for foreign intervention.”

– Hezbollah’s Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah

When Israeli troops and armored units swept into Lebanon on July 12, 2006, not one soldier from the Lebanese Army was deployed to the South to defend the country. The army stayed safely tucked away in the North while Hezbollah militiamen engaged the IDF in ferocious combat for more than a month. 1,200 civilians were killed in the fighting and vast parts of the country’s vital infrastructure were destroyed before Hezbollah prevailed and sent the IDF fleeing back into Israel. Lebanon managed to avoid Israeli occupation because of the heroic efforts of Hezbollah.---"

It goes almost without saying that Pappe's "victims" are primarily Palestine's Arabs; and all, or almost all, of the "greedy" and the "cynical" are Israelis. In fairness I should add that he does dish up some "misogynist" Palestinians, which is not surprising, given the fact that in Arab and Islamic societies women are by tradition, and often by law, third-class members, who often lack basic rights (in some countries they have no vote, in others they cannot drive cars, and so on). In this respect, Palestinian society is similar to Syrian or Jordanian or Egyptian society, but Pappe papers this over by repeatedly pointing to the continuously "improving" nature of Palestinian women's status at certain points in time--for example, during the two Palestinian intifadas or rebellions against Israel.

Unfortunately, much of what Pappe tries to sell his readers is complete fabrication. In trying to demonstrate women's growing political involvement (and, incidentally, Israeli beastliness), he tells us at one point that "one third of the overall [Palestinian] casualties [in the intifada of 1987-1991] were women," and that "rural women" took "a central role, boldly confronting the army." Among urban women, the proportion of participants in the intifada was even higher, he says. All of this is pure invention. In fact, women constituted about 5 percent of the Palestinian casualties in the first intifada. According to B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, eleven hundred Palestinians died at the hands of Israeli army and security personnel during that uprising, and of these, fifty-six were women.