"Empire comes to Lebanon" [View All]

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Empire comes to Lebanon

AIJAZ AHMAD

The U.S.-Israel axis goes all out to remove the last impediments to building a "New Middle East".

LET us begin with a supposedly "undisputed" fact:

The official story, told first by the Israeli government and automatically accepted by governments and media outlets across the world, is that Hizbollah is a Muslim fundamentalist, terrorist organisation which periodically lobs shells and rockets into civilian population centres of northern Israel and that, in its latest outrage on July 12, it attacked a border military post inside Israeli territory, killing six Israeli soldiers and capturing two. Having waited several years for "the international community" and the Lebanese government to disarm this "terrorist" organisation, Israel is said to have been finally exasperated by this latest outrage and, acting in self-defence, it decided to retaliate so as to "break Hizbollah" for ever and ever, for the sake of the security of its citizens.

This official version raises some basic questions regarding the character of Hizbollah itself, about the very incident that is supposed to have "provoked" Israel beyond endurance, and about the scope of Israel's "retaliation".

The background to the rise of Hizbollah is instructive, as is its present role in Lebanese politics in general. There is a long history of United States and Israeli military interventions in Lebanon, dating back to the landing of U.S. Marines there in 1958 and including major Israeli invasions in 1978 and 1982, which predate the very formation of Hizbollah. It was in 1978 that Israel first captured a large swath of territory in the predominantly Shia region of southern Lebanon and held it as a self-declared "security zone" until a Lebanese armed resistance movement, led by Hizbollah, put an end to that occupation, except for a mountainside at the point where the borders of Israel and Syria meet with that of Lebanon, known as Shebaa Farms, which Israel has continued to occupy and which therefore continues to be a point of military contention between the occupiers and the resistance.

Hizbollah itself came into being some four years after the invasion of 1982, when Israel occupied about half of Lebanon, destroyed much of Beirut and oversaw the infamous massacres of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps on the outskirts of the city. In its formative phase, Hizbollah drew many of its guerilla fighters from among the relatives of those who had been killed during the Israeli invasions and, throughout its history, it has been based predominantly among the Shias who constitute roughly half the population of Lebanon, the overwhelming majority in the south and the bulk of the urban poor in Beirut itself. Until 2000, it was devoted almost exclusively to fighting the Israeli occupiers. After evicting the Israelis from virtually the whole of southern Lebanon, it entered into Lebanese politics as a party and now has 12 members in Parliament and two in the Cabinet; there are other forces, including wholly secular as well as non-Muslim forces, which are allied with it in a parliamentary bloc. In fact, the list of candidates for the alliance it led during the 2005 elections included five Christians, three Sunni Muslims and a Druze alongside 14 Shia candidates. <more>

http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/stories/20060811005800600.htm