ISRAEL’S COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT AND AMERICA'S FUZZY MATHEMATICS

Not for the first time, Israel with Washington’s approval has used its military might to collectively punish a whole country and its civilians. Presently that is the fate of Lebanon which is familiar with Israeli aggression but it is also the experience of Palestinians in Gaza. In both places Israel F-16s are degrading the whole infrastructure with a total disregard for the lives of civilians.
While that may well be a crime in international law it has not deterred Israel or the Bush administration, including John Bolton, its ambassador at the UN, from dismissing the civilian death toll in Lebanon from saying there is no moral equivalence between civilians killed by Hizbullah and those by the Israeli military. Bolton stated that clearly in the past week and found sanctuary in an oft repeated Israeli mantra that the deaths of civilians are unfortunate but a fact of war and the blame should never lie with Israelis. From Bolton’s perspective Israel’s self-defense philosophy justifies actions which will undeniably lead to civilian casualties. When civilians are killed by Israel, that country is not at fault but those Israel claims started the conflict.
What Bolton did not address was that Israel’s excessive use of force was not just aimed at Hizbullah targets in Lebanon but at the whole infrastructure, including factories, gas stations, power plants, apartment buildings and ports facilities. And while Israel insisted to the world that it warned civilians to flee cities like Beirut its planes bombed the roads and bridges on exit routes, making it impossible for large scale evacuations. Even more puzzling was that Israeli officials called for the Lebanese army to replace Hizbullah yet Israeli war planes bombed an army barracks, killing eight soldiers.
After the bombardment of Beirut began, Israeli officials and members of the Bush administration criticized the democratically elected government of Lebanon for ignoring the September 2004 UN resolution 1559 that called for the disarming of Hizbullah. Those same officials conveniently sidestepped the fact that Israel has been dismissive of the UN for decades and has shown little appetite for international law. It has been condemned by the International Court in The Hague and has been fortunate that the US has vetoed scores of UN resolutions condemning its actions in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East. For example, in March 1978 The UN Security Council demanded the unconditional withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon. Israel dismissed the resolution and remained in the country for over two decades. During its time there it was guilty of assassinations and the use of overwhelming force. It also facilitated the hideous massacres of several thousands Palestinians, many of them women, children and elderly in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Israeli troops surrounded the camps and allowed Lebanese militiamen a free hand over several days to slaughter at will and to later hide bodies in mass graves. The Israeli Defense Minister at the time was Ariel Sharon.
Israel’s right to defend itself is rarely compared with its willingness to invade the territory of others, to abduct its enemies and to dismiss international criticism of its actions. Recent statistics show that since it occupied Palestinian territories in 1967 over 650,000 Palestinians have been arrested and imprisoned and at present 9,000 are being held in Israeli jails. Eric Illsey who serves on the British parliament’s foreign affairs committee argues that Israel, always supported by Britain ad America, responds with a disproportionate use of force and it should now be told to stand down its forces and implement a ceasefire.
But in the midst of what is loosely called the fog of war, meaning there is a great deal of confusion about what is happening, many commentators have failed to grasp how this began and to ask if Washington neocons and Israel share the same agenda to redraw the map of the Middle East.
For a start, much has been made about the abduction of three Israeli soldiers, two of them by Hizbullah, as though that sparked Israel’s massive response. That is a fiction. There was nothing new in the abductions by Hizbullah. It happened before and Israel more than any other nation has an ongoing policy of abducting people from various Middle East countries, especially Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. It has been such a common practice that in 2004 there was a major prisoner exchange struck between Israel and Hizbullah. Since then, Israel has seized Hizbullah and Hamas figures and it was inevitable both groups would seek to grab Israeli soldiers to use as bargaining chips in another rounds of exchanges.
In the background, there were other factors raising tensions between Hizbullah, the Lebanese people as a whole, and Israel. Contrary to a UN resolution, Israel has continued to hold a strip of land in Lebanon known as the Shebba Farms, claiming it belongs to Syria but Syria denies that and has made it clear the land belongs to the Lebanese. For Israel it has been convenient to try to confuse Lebanon’s right to the land because there are Israelis living there under a strong Israeli military presence. Tension between Hizbullah and the Israeli military over the land issue and Israel’s holding of Hizbullah prisoners was so high in the past year that some observers predicted something would occur to spark a renewed conflict. Israel, always aware of what is happening in the region, could well have been waiting for Hizbullah to act in order to move aggressively against it. That reality of events has been conveniently ignored by Washington and Tel Aviv in all official pronouncements from those centers of power. Leading US and Israeli figures have cleverly focused on Hizbullah’s links to Iran and Syria and have claimed, without providing any proof, that those two nations told Hizbullah to abduct Israeli soldiers. That strategy of inserting Hizbullah into the now familiar “axis-of evil” rhetoric permits Tel Aviv and its neocon backers in Washington to serve a wider agenda. They are convinced, mostly on the say so of Israeli tacticians, that the destruction of Hizbullah and Lebanon’s whole economy, as well as the deaths of countless civilians in that country, will force the Lebanese people to rise up and throw out Hizbullah and any Iranian and Syrian influences in their midst. Such a naïve and dangerous political thesis had guided many US policy makers who have wrapped themselves in Israel’s Middle East agenda in the past four decades.
A striking example of where a reliance on Israel’s reading of events can lead is the war in Iraq where the country is disintegrating before the eyes of the world. Worse still, many neocons continue to insist that by getting rid of a secular regime and installing a majority Shia one the US will have created a friend and ally in the region and democracy will prevail. That is not just naïve but the height of stupidity and it is contradicted by history and the facts on the ground. Iraq’s Shias are loyal to their religious counterparts in Iran and already the signs are that the Iraq of the future will be dominated by the same religious elements that control Iran. In effect, US ham-fisted policy in Iraq has widened Iran’s influence in the region. That began when the US Provisional Authority – that long forgotten body during the heady days after the invasion – punished secularist Sunnis, disbanded the Iraqi army and allowed powerful religious Shia militias like the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigades to fill the vacuum. They will eventually be the enforcers of strict Islamic rules like Sharia Law if Shias manage to dominate Iraq and if it does not fall apart in a civil war.
What appears lost in the latest conflict in Lebanon is that the Israeli portrayal of Hizbullah, which is no Boy Scout organization, is not accurate. Until now, Hizbullah confined its targeting to the Israeli military and whether or not the West approved of its anti-Israel stance, it was part of the democratic parliamentary process in Lebanon. And for Israel to suggest the fledgling Lebanese democracy could have forcibly disarmed Hizbullah when Israel could not defeat it after 22 years of occupation in the country defies logic. Nonetheless, Israel is likely to continue to make such an argument to justify its excessive use of force. In other words, it is saying if the Lebanese can’t do it, we will. That is tantamount to saying, “if we don’t like your form of democracy so we are going to wreck it until it fits our agenda and mirrors our values.”
The problems facing the US are multi-layered. Its Middle East policy is in tatters and it lacks credibility. The Bush administration can talk tough and launch effective military strikes but it has never understood diplomacy. That reality is compounded by neocon links to Tel Aviv and reluctance on the part of the White House to criticize Israel or to permit UN Security Council resolutions to do so. The US will point to the Saudis as allies and say they are critical of Hizbullah. The Saudi leaders are Sunnis and have their own agenda, namely a fear of the growing power of Shias throughout Iran and Iraq. That same Saudi regime financed the most extremism form of Islam – Wahabism – that created the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and led to the attacks of 9/11.
On the matter of Israel’s right to defend its territory and citizens there is no dispute at an international level but there is about Israel’s adventurism in parts of the Middle East and its cavalier use of military force. What some US observers fail to understand is that Israel will do what it feels is necessary for its interests and it has supported all sides in the Middle East at different times in the past. When it felt Iraq was a bigger threat than Iran it supplied weapons to the Iranian regime of Ayatollah Khomeini and encouraged the Reagan administration to do so too. That led the US into the disastrous arms-for-hostages era and to funneling money from the sale of weapons to Iranians to the funding of Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
It was also Israel that persuaded neocons within the Bush administration that the replacement of Saddam with Ahmed Chalabi would be a good move and that the US should aggressively push for regime change in Iran and Syria. In order to convince the US public that Iran was a growing threat, Israeli spies based in Washington leaked classified US documents on Iran to journalists to bolster Israel’s case against Iran. Two of those spies were members of the AIPAC, the powerful Israel lobby grouping with headquarters in the capitol. They were linked to now jailed Pentagon analyst, Larry Franklyn, a leading neocon. Washington neocons connected to Tel Aviv have always believed that the projection of US power in the Middle East should be tailored to favor Israeli policy. So far that strategy has failed, leaving the US a weak peace broker unable to find an international resolution to the underlying causes of conflict in that region.

A New Moral Equivalence

On “Meet the Press” on July 16, former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich used a mathematical equation to justify Israel’s right to strike at its enemies. He said one had to compare the populations of Israel and the United states to fully understand what it meant when an Israeli soldier or civilian was killed by terrorists. By his calculation an Israel death was equivalent to the deaths of 500 Americans. By his reckoning, it could therefore be deduced that if Israel suffered the death toll America suffered on 9/11 that would be equal to the deaths of 1,250,000 Americans.
Gingrich did not apply his mathematical formula to the deaths of Palestinians but if he did, here is what he might come up with. Given that Israel has a population twice the size of Gaza and the West Bank, the death of one Palestinian civilian would therefore be equivalent to 1,000 Americans and if Palestinians suffered the same death toll as America did on 9/11 that would compared to 2,500,000 Americans dying. If one just went further and applied the Gingrich schematic to recent events when the Israeli military killed 20 Palestinian civlians that would equate to the deaths of 20,000 Americans. And, if his reasoning was applied to Lebanon that has the same size of population as Israel, it would produce scary figures for the opening days of the Israeli bombardment when approximately 250 civilians died. According to the Gingrich mathematical formula that death toll would equate to the killing of 125,000 Americans.