In the early morning hours of 29 June 2006, the Israeli military ordered a massive bombardment of Qana, a village in southern Lebanon. A few days earlier, the military had dropped leaflets from the air, warning that the entire area was a potential military target. At the same time, the Israeli military continued its ongoing destruction of roads and other civilian infrastructure such as petrol stations and continued to target certain vehicles (for example, minivans and pick-up trucks). For those few who were in possession of transport and fuel, it was an almost impossible choice: flee and risk being killed on the road or stay behind and risk being killed in their homes. Read more about Israel must be stopped
Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora condemned Israel’s massacre in Qana today as a “heinous crime” and called Israeli leaders “war criminals.” Reacting to an earlier atrocity, he wondered: “Is the value of human life in Lebanon less than that of the citizens of other countries?” Israel’s latest bloodbath, which claimed the lives of dozens of children and women hiding from the relentless bombing in what they hoped was a secure basement in Qana, betrays not only Israel’s criminal disregard for the value of Arab human life, a typical colonial attitude towards natives, but also its increasingly fundamentalist perception of Gentiles in general as lesser humans. Read more about Israel's Latest Massacre in Qana: Racist Jewish Fundamentalism a Factor
The scenes of carnage from Qana, where ten years after an almost identical massacre, rescue workers are pulling the broken bodies of children from the rubble, break the heart and generate a deep and boiling anger. But it is not enough to point the finger at Israel’s war criminal government which carried out the atrocity, nor the United States administration, which encourages Israel and arms it. We must also demand that all those with the power to act do so immediately. EI co-founder Ali Abunimah argues that Arab states must immediately break off ties with Israel to show Israelis they will pay a price unless they change course. Read more about Arab states must repudiate ties with Israel now
Israel has virtually destroyed the infrastructure of Lebanon. Instead of confronting Hezbollah directly (which I think they are afraid to do), they’ve bombed the civilian areas of Lebanon, hoping the Lebanese and Arabs will turn on Hezbollah. What’s interesting is that the Arab world is becoming more united than ever against what Israel, with American support, is doing to the Lebanese. Israel has bombed the milk factory in Beirut, the grain silos in Tripoli, hospitals, all the bridges in the country, the highways leading in and out of Lebanon, as well those leading in and out of the villages they are bombing. Read more about Israel's cruel offensive
“On a daily and hourly basis, Beirut is now the target of an unsurpassed savagery from the air, from the sea, from the land. They are pounding Beirut. Their ships, their fighter jets, their artilleries, their unparalleled barbarity, pounding Beirut like there is no tomorrow, burning it to ashes, murdering its fragile peace, shredding its imperceptible harmony to pieces, its gloriously cantankerous and divided thinkers, journalists, artists, writers, historians, poets, photographers, filmmakers …” In part two of a two-part series, Professor Hamid Dabashi analyzes the state of affairs that allows the carnage in Lebanon to continue. Read more about How Do we Sleep While Beirut is Burning? (Part Two)
When journalists use the word “apparently”, or another favourite, “reportedly”, they are usually distancing themselves from an event or an interpretation in the supposed interests of balance. But I think we should read the “apparently” contained in a statement from the head of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, relating to the killing this week of four unarmed UN monitors by the Israeli army in its other sense. When Annan says that those four deaths were “apparently deliberate”, I take him to mean that the evidence shows that the killings were deliberate. And who can disagree with him? Read more about The lies Israel tells itself (and we tell on its behalf)
The crux of the problem is that the Jewish state resents the United Nations because it has failed to accept repeated humiliations - and worse - with sufficient obsequiousness. In the Israeli view, international organizations should follow the example of the United States, which has frequently betrayed both the safety and the reputation of its own military and diplomatic personnel by meekly accepting Israeli atrocities and provocations. The US government forced the US Navy to help cover up the nature of Israel’s deliberate 1967 attack on the USS Liberty, which killed dozens of American servicemen, and to deny proper decorations to victims and survivors alike. Read more about Israel's long history of abusing the United Nations
“The paramount mood of Beirut in late-June 2006 was the hustle bustle of a thriving cosmopolis. Ours was a privileged perspective — two foreigners familiar with the pulse of the neighborhood, embraced and welcomed by a constellation of friends and acquaintances, comrades and colleagues… Beirut was thriving. Lebanon could have been a model of productive ideological conflicts, of civil discourse, progressive politics, foreign investments, domestic contestations, intellectual diversity, moral variations. Beirut was civil, civilizing, cosmopolitan.” In part one of a two-part series, Professor Hamid Dabashi reflects on the beauty of a country reduced to rubble by the Israelis and into two dimensions by the news media. Read more about How Do we Sleep While Beirut is Burning?
It cannot be happening again. But of course, it is happening again — the recurring nightmare from which I cannot awaken. The Lebanon I last visited in 2003 has suddenly been transformed into the Lebanon of 1983. Israel made good on its promise to “bomb Lebanon back 20 or 30 years into the past.” In just two weeks, the death toll is four times higher than the number of those killed in Israel’s 16-day “Operation: Grapes of Wrath” of 1996. It has taken two full weeks for the sorrow, horror, rage and exhaustion of the war in Lebanon to knock me off the rails; two weeks for me to really grasp that this is happening again. The nightmare has returned. Read more about The nightmare returns
Israel is not sacrificing its soldiers and citizens only to please the Bush administration. The “new Middle East” has been a dream of the Israeli ruling military circles since at least 1982, when Sharon led the country to the first Lebanon war with precisely this declared goal. Hezbollah’s leaders have argued for years that its real long-term role is to protect Lebanon, whose army is too weak to do this. They have said that Israel has never given up its aspirations for Lebanon and that the only reason it pulled out of Southern Lebanon in 2000 is because Hezbollah’s resistance has made maintaining the occupation too costly. Read more about Israel's "New Middle East"
