Against the Madness: action news / Avnery on Nasrallah’s timing

TEL-AVIV, SATURDAY, JULY 22 ANTI-WAR COALITION PLANS ANOTHER PROTEST

March starting at Rabin Square early evening – stay tuned for final details via Gush answering machine 03-5221732

==================================

[ One days blood toll / Adam Keller in Amsterdam / Avnery on Nasrallah’s timing / Reservist refuser from Sderot / Reports, photos and video of the July 17 demo / ‘End it Now’ by Susie Becher on Ynet / Zvi Bar’el in Ha’aretz on inavoidable Nasrallah / Letters from Beirut ]

One week of the Big Madness in Lebanon, three weeks in Gaza. Today’s death toll: at least 54 Lebanese killed in the Israeli Air Force bombings, of them one (1) Hibbullah militant with the rest being civilians, including an unspecified number of children; two Israeli children killed in a rocket attack on Nazareth and two soldiers killed during an incursion into Lebanese territory which also took the lives of an unspecified number of Lebanese militants; six Palestinians killed in the disregarded Gaza Strip fighting, and three more on an Israeli army raid into Nablus…

At such times, it is our task to make the voice of dissent and protest sound as loud and clear as possible. In addition to Uri Avnery’s extra article of analysis, we bring you the news of Staff Sergeant Itzik Shabat, the first conscientious objector and military rebel of the new war; and we provide links to several other pieces by people who had not entirely lost their minds, as well as to reports of Sunday’s anti-war march in Tel-Aviv. (To those who can’t be in the next and probably bigger Tel-Aviv demo, planned for the coming Saturday, a description will be availalbe on the Gush Shalom website by Saturday night or Sunday morning.)

Meanwhile, Adam Keller of Gush Shalom (who is at the Netherlands for the next few days) will be among the speakers at an anti-War demonstration to be held in Amsterdam on the same Saturday, July 22. Contact: +31-6-20571487

=======================================

“Stop that shit!”

By Uri Avnery, 18.7.06

A WOMAN, an immigrant from Russia, throws herself on the ground in total despair in front of her home that has been hit by a missile, crying in broken Hebrew: “My son! My son!” believing him dead. In fact he was only wounded and sent to the hospital.

Lebanese children, covered with wounds, in Beirut hospitals. The funeral of the victims of a missile in Haifa. The ruins of a whole devastated quarter in Beirut. Inhabitants of the north of Israel fleeing south from the Katyushas. Inhabitants of the south of Lebanon fleeing north from the Israeli Air Force.

Death, destruction. Unimaginable human suffering.

And the most disgusting sight: George Bush in a playful mood sitting on his chair in St. Petersburg, with his loyal servant Tony Blair leaning over him, and solving the problem: “See? What they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbullah to stop doing that shit, and it’s over.”

Thus spake the leader of the world, and the seven dwarfs – “the great of the world” – say Amen.

SYRIA? BUT only a few months ago it was Bush – yes, the same Bush – who induced the Lebanese to drive the Syrians out of their country. Now he wants them to intervene in Lebanon and impose order?

31 years ago, when the Lebanese civil war was at its height, the Syrians sent their army into Lebanon (invited, of all people, by the Christians). At the time, the then Minister of Defense Shimon Peres and his associates created hysteria in Israel. They demanded that Israel deliver an ultimatum to the Syrians, to prevent them from reaching the Israeli border. Yitzhak Rabin, the Prime Minister, told me then that that was sheer nonsense, because the best that could happen to Israel was for the Syrian army to spread out along the border. Only thus could calm be assured, the same calm that reigned along our border with Syria.

However, Rabin gave in to the hysteria of the media and stopped the Syrians far from the border. The vacuum thus created was filled by the PLO. In 1982, Ariel Sharon pushed the PLO out, and the vacuum was filled by Hizbullah.

All that has happened there since then would not have happened if we had allowed the Syrians to occupy the border from the beginning. The Syrians are cautious, they do not act recklessly.

WHAT WAS Hassan Nasrallah thinking of, when he decided to cross the border and carry out the guerilla action that started the current Witches’ Sabbath? Why did he do it? And why at this time?

Everybody agrees that Nasrallah is a clever person. He is also prudent. For years he has been assembling a huge stockpile of missiles of all kinds to establish a balance of terror. He knew that the Israeli army was only waiting for an opportunity to destroy them. In spite of that, he carried out a provocation that provided the Israeli government with a perfect pretext to attack Lebanon with the full approval of the world. Why?

Possibly he was asked by Iran and Syria, who had supplied him with the missiles, to do something to divert American pressure from them. And indeed, the sudden crisis has shifted attention away from the Iranian nuclear effort, and it seems that Bush’s attitude towards Syria has also changed.

But Nasrallah is far from being a marionette of Iran or Syria. He heads an authentic Lebanese movement, and calculates his own balance sheet of pros and cons. If he had been asked by Iran and/or Syria to do something – for which there is no proof – and he saw that it was contrary to the aims of his movement, he would not have done it.

Perhaps he acted because of domestic Lebanese concerns. The Lebanese political system was becoming more stable and it was becoming more difficult to justify the military wing of Hizbullah. A new armed incident could have helped. (Such considerations are not alien to us either, especially before budget debates.)

But all this does not explain the timing. After all, Nasrallah could have acted a month before or a month later, a year before or a year later. There must have been a much stronger reason to convince him to enter upon such an adventure at precisely this time.

And indeed there was: Palestine.

TWO WEEKS before, the Israeli army had started a war against the population of the Gaza Strip. There, too, the pretext was provided by a guerrilla action, in which an Israeli soldier was captured. The Israeli government used the opportunity to carry out a plan prepared long before: to break the Palestinians’ will to resist and to destroy the newly elected Palestinian government, dominated by Hamas. And, of course, to stop the Qassams.

The operation in Gaza is an especially brutal one, and that is how it looks on the world’s TV screens. Terrible pictures from Gaza appear daily and hourly in the Arab media. Dead people, wounded people, devastation. Lack of water and medicaments for the wounded and sick. Whole families killed. Children screaming in agony. Mothers weeping. Buildings collapsing.

The Arab regimes, which are all dependent on America, did nothing to help. Since they are also threatened by Islamic opposition movements, they looked at what was happening to Hamas with some Schadenfreude. But tens of millions of Arabs, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf, saw, got excited and angry with their government, crying out for a leader who would bring succor to their besieged, heroic brothers.

Fifty years ago, Gamal Abd-el-Nasser, the new Egyptian leader, wrote that there was a role waiting for a hero. He decided to be that hero himself. For several years, he was the idol of the Arab world, symbol of Arab unity. But Israel used an opportunity that presented itself and broke him in the Six-Day War. After that, the star of Saddam Hussein rose in the firmament. He dared to stand up to mighty America and to launch missiles at Israel, and became the hero of the Arab masses. But he was routed in a humiliating manner by the Americans, spurred on by Israel.

A week ago, Nasrallah faced the same temptation. The Arab world was crying out for a hero, and he said: Here am I! He challenged Israel, and indirectly the United States and the entire West. He started the attack without allies, knowing that neither Iran nor Syria could risk helping him.

Perhaps he got carried away, like Abd-el-Nasser and Saddam before him. Perhaps he misjudged the force of the counter-attack he could expect. Perhaps he really believed that under the weight of his rockets the Israeli rear would collapse. (As the Israeli army believed that the Israeli onslaught would break the Palestinian people in Gaza and the Shiites in Lebanon.)

One thing is clear: Nasrallah would not have started this vicious circle of violence, if the Palestinians had not called for help. Either from cool calculation, or from true moral outrage, or from both – Nasrallah rushed to the rescue of beleaguered Palestine.

THE ISRAELI reaction could have been expected. For years, the army commanders had yearned for an opportunity to eliminate the missile arsenal of Hizbullah and destroy that organization, or at least disarm it and push it far, far from the border. They are trying to do this the only way they know: by causing so much devastation, that the Lebanese population will stand up and compel its government to fulfill Israel’s demands.

Will these aims be achieved?

HIZBULLAH IS the authentic representative of the Shiite community, which makes up 40% of the Lebanese population. Together with the other Muslims, they are the majority in the country. The idea that the weakling Lebanese government – which in any case includes Hizbullah -would be able to liquidate the organization is ludicrous.

The Israeli government demands that the Lebanese army be deployed along the border. This has by now become a mantra. It reveals total ignorance. The Shiites occupy important positions in the Lebanese army, and there is no chance at all that it would start a fratricidal war against them.

Abroad, another idea is taking shape: that an international force should be deployed on the border. The Israeli government objects to this strenuously. A real international force – unlike the hapless UNIFIL which has been there for decades – would hinder the Israeli army from doing whatever it wants. Moreover, if it were deployed there without the agreement of Hizbullah, a new guerilla war would start against it. Would such a force, without real motivation, succeed where the mighty Israeli army was routed?

At most, this war, with its hundreds of dead and waves of destruction, will lead to another delicate armistice. The Israeli government will claim victory and argue that it has “changed the rules of the game”. Nasrallah (or his successors) will claim that their small organization has stood up to one of the mightiest military machines in the world and written another shining chapter of heroism in the annals of Arab and Muslim history.

No real solution will be achieved, because there is no treatment of the root of the matter: the Palestinian problem.

MANY YEARS ago, I was listening on the radio to one of the speeches of Abd-el-Nasser before a huge crowd in Egypt. He was holding forth on the achievements of the Egyptian revolution, when shouts arose from the crowd: “Filastine, ya Gamal!” (”Palestine, oh Gamal!”) Whereupon Nasser forgot what he was talking about and started on Palestine, getting more and more carried away.

Since then, not much has changed. When the Palestinian cause is mentioned, it casts its shadow over everything else. That’s what has happened now, too.

Whoever longs for a solution must know: there is no solution without settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And there is no solution to the Palestinian problem without negotiations with their elected leadership, the government headed by Hamas.

If one wants to finish, once and for all, with this shit – as Bush so delicately put it – that is the only way.

~~~

“Someone has to be the first to break the silence and it will be me”

The Lebanon 2006 war has produced its first conscientious objector – Staff Sergeant Itzik Shabbat, a 28-year-old TV producer, who is a resident of Sderot. “I know people will attack me and ask how could I refuse to take part in this war when Qassams are falling on my hometown and Katyushas on the towns in the north. But only this type of opposition will put an end to the ongoing madness and shatter the false feeling that the entire home front supports this unnecessary war. Someone has to be the first to break the silence, and it will be me. It is a shame that my mobilization order was signed by a fellow Sderot resident, Defense Minister Peretz.”

www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/740241.htm

~~~

A thousand protestors: stop the war monstrosity

Some 1,000 protestors joined Sunday evening [July 17] in a rally in Tel Aviv to protest the IDF strikes in Southern Lebanon. Police have arrested three of the protesters claiming they were holding a demonstration without a permit. The protesters chanted “Olmert agreed with Bush: War and occupation.” “Stop the war monstrosity,” and “Say no to the brutal bombardments”. They also accused Defense Minister Amir Peretz of murdering children: “Peretz, don’t worry, we’ll be seeing you at The Hague.” (…) Also on Sunday, a women’s protest was held next to the central Haifa train depot where a Hezbollah rocket landed a few hours earlier, killing eight people. They were organised by a new group of Arab and Jewish women against the war.

From the Y-Net News report of the July 17 anti-war demo in Tel-Aviv

English www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3276906,00.html

www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/739042.html

zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en

Hebrew www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3276871,00.html

www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART1/450/202.html (Ma’ariv )

www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/739029.html

zope.gush-shalom.org/home/he

Photos (Heb/Eng captions) gush-shalom.org/pics/telaviv-16-7-06/

“Social TV” video (in Hebrew, but quite comprehensible to non-speakers of the languague)

www.tv.social.org.il/medini/hafgana-16-7-06-web.htm

~~~

End it Now

by Susie Becher

(a rare dissenting voice in the mainstream media)

Both PM Olmert and Defense Minister Peretz keep praising the public’s stamina, with the not-so-hidden message that to voice opposition is to play into the hands of the enemy. This glorification of consensus and de-legitimization of political or popular protest poses a greater threat to Israel than the missiles being fired from the north. By making our ability to suffer in silence a test of our loyalty and bravado, the government is engaging in psychological warfare against its own citizens. www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3278178,00.html

~~~

Nasrallah’s terms of surrender will be hard to change

Sober analysis from Zvi Bar’el of Haaretz, 19/07/2006

After all that has taken place so far in Lebanon, nothing has succeeded in altering the basic equation: Any diplomatic solution will have to pass through the Lebanese political grinder and gain Hezbollah’s agreement. “Everything is up in the air” according to Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, including direct and indirect talks with Hezbollah, and therefore nothing has changed since before the outbreak of fighting.

www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/739999.html

~~~

Three letters from Beirut (the voice which Israelis hardly hear)

By Rasha

Sometimes it is hard for me to believe that the leadership of Hezbollah are not acquainted with “The Society of the Spectacle”. (…) I never thought Nasrallah was charismatic. A huge majority of people do. He survived the Israeli attempt on his life and addressed the nation by phone, thirty minutes later. (…) Now, he announced, the warship that had bombed the southern suburb was in flames and its personnel was drowning. “Look at it!”, he said, this is one of the many surprises we have saved for the Zionist army… And he fell silent. By the time he had spoken his words, it was too late to catch sight of the warship being hit, all that cameras captured was a huge ball of fire in the open sea.(…) . The news of the downed warship spread fear in our hearts. We were sure the retaliation would be numbing in violence.

nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/07/73157.html

GUSH SHALOM p.o.b. 3322 Tel Aviv 61033 Your donation helps make our voice heard Please, send checks in your own currency â*” for confirmation of receipt include email address In several countries tax-exemption can be obtained by donating through local charities info@gush-shalom.org www.gush-shalom-org