| August
21 , 2006
Measured Amid the Wreckage
Israel's "Proportionate
Response"
By KATHY
KELLY
Beirut.
Upon
arrival in Beirut in early August, 2006, Michael Birmingham met
Abu Mustafa. Michael is an Irish citizen who has worked with Voices
campaigns for several years. Abu Mustafa is a kindly Lebanese cab
driver.
Having
fled his home in the Dahiya neighborhood which was being heavily
bombed, Abu Mustafa was living in his car. Abu Mustafa joked that
he sometimes went back to his home in the already evacuated area
of the Dahiya, just to take a shower or sometimes a proper nap.
His family was living with relatives in a safer area. Toward the
end of the war, Israeli bombs blasted buildings quite near his home.
He tore out of the suburb in his cab and made that his home until
we met him again on August 15th. hundreds of people, including parents
walking hand in hand with toddlers, process silently along streets
lined by wreckage. Even the small children looked extremely sad
and grim.
Before
the “Shock and Awe” bombing of Iraq in 2003, a contingent
of peace activists living in Baghdad hung huge banners at various
locales stating, “To bomb this place would be a war crime.”
On
Dahiya’s streets, we saw the sequel, banners that said “Made
in the U.S.A.” in Arabic and English, detailing U.S. complicity
in manufacturing and shipping the weapons that demolished homes,
gas stations, shopping malls, overpasses, clinics, the town square,
….block after block of ruin.
On
the fourth floor of a five-story apartment building, a father and
his daughters scooped up successive loads of broken glass and pitched
them onto the sidewalk below. They called out a warning before each
load came crashing down. You have to start somewhere.
On
August 17 and 18, two men, both named Mohammed and both in their
twenties, took Michael, Ramzi Kysia, Farah Mokhtarazedei, and me
to towns and villages south of the Litani River. In each of the
towns we visited, we saw appalling wreckage. Nowhere could we see
military targets.
In
Sriefa, the town center was almost completely destroyed. Residents
told us that five or six F-16s bombed the area on July 19th, destroying
ten houses, many of them three story buildings. We stared at the
rubble, spotting household items, - a child’s high chair,
a weaving loom, a toy plastic television.
Neighbors had buried nine corpses in shallow graves when it was
too dangerous to be outside for any length of time. On the outskirts
of Sriefa, as a handful of women and youngsters watched, workers
exhumed the bodies and placed them in plastic body bags which were
then wrapped in green shrouds and laid in wooden coffins. Workers
sealed the lids and then wrapped the coffins in flags. These slain
men were communists. The flags bore dual symbols for Lebanon and
the Lebanese communist party.
Later,
we watched a long funeral procession pass, carrying 25 of the 40
people killed in Sriefa. Uniformed men, marching, led the procession.
Women followed, clutching one another in grief, next boys bearing
flags, and finally the coffin-bearing vans, each with pictures of
the brothers, fathers, and sons that would be buried.
Abbas
Najdi stopped to talk with us on a street in Sriefa and then invited
us to his home. During the bombing, his wife and children left Sriefa,
but Abu Abbas, age 78, decided to stay. He wanted to watch over
his home and the family’s sole source of income, the “tabac”
which was carefully stored in a shed below the second story where
they lived. Fortunately, he had decided to sleep on the ground floor
during the first night of bombing. The back part of his home, their
sleeping room, took a direct hit. Debris from a collapsing building
across the street blocked the Najdi family’s front door, trapping
Abu Abbas inside for two days. Neighbors eventually freed him. Abu
Abbas’s left leg was injured by flying glass, but he felt
very lucky to have survived at all. Unluckily, his entire tabac
crop was burnt, the harvest of one year’s labor.
Before
we left the Najdi family, one of the daughters, Zainab Najdi, a
University student, stood to say goodbye and then laughed. "My
pants are falling down," she explained, still graceful as she
pulled them up. "I am 'daifah'” --the Arabic word for
thin or weak. Her loose clothes disguised how thin she is, but when
we embraced, I could nearly encircle her waist with my hands.
On
the morning of the 18th, explosions awakened us. I thought the cease
fire had ended. Our hosts reassured us that the Lebanese army was
blowing up explosives. In the garden outside the home where we stayed,
the local Hezbollah municipal leader spotted three unexploded cluster
bombs. We had nearly driven over two cluster bombs lying on the
road the previous day. The sound of each blast destroying hideous
bombs was oddly comforting. You have to start somewhere.
Many
people we talk to in Lebanon understand that the majority of Israelis
urged their government to fight this war once it began. Did the
proponents of war, in Israel, understand that there is no sign of
a military target in the villages of southern Lebanon where homes,
schools, clinics, grocery stores and children’s playgrounds
have been destroyed?
On
August 18th, Anthony Cordesman published a working draft of a report
called “Preliminary Lessons of Israeli-Hezbollah War.”
I read excerpts of it in commentary written by Helena Cobban. Cordesman,
a seasoned military strategist, writing about the Israeli Air Force
bombardment of Lebanon, remarks that “the air campaign continued
to escalate against targets that often were completely valid but
that sometimes involved high levels of collateral damage and very
uncertain tactical and military effect. The end result was to give
the impression Israel was not providing a proportionate response,
an impression compounded by ineffective (and often unintelligible)
efforts to explain IAF actions to the media.
I
honestly don’t understand. Why is a target completely valid
if it involved high levels of collateral damage, that is to say
high levels of civilians who are maimed and killed, of civilian
infrastructure ruined, of families rendered homeless, penniless,
jobless and hungry? Cordesman states that there was uncertain tactical
and military effect. Before completing the draft, I wish that Mr.
Cordesman could stand for just five minutes at one intersection
in the small city of Bint Jbail. He would see certain usage of conventional
military weapons used against a civilian population. He would see
certain evidence of a war crime. Turn in one direction and you see
the remains of a school building, some desks and chairs still aligned
in careful rows, visible because a whole side of the building is
demolished. In another direction, a damaged stadium. Next to it,
a field where 30 rockets killed a flock of sheep. One man managed
a chuckle, telling us that 2 million dollars was spent to kill these
sheep, that these must have been the most costly sheep in all of
Lebanon. On the 27th and 28th of July, 100 bombs fell between two
mosques in Bint Jbail within 11 minutes. At one point, the Israelis
bombed for 11 hours straight. Then there was a break and they bombed
for 21 hours until most of the town was completely destroyed.
It’s
estimated that about 60,000 people lived in Bint Jbail.
Of what military value, as a target, is a school, an entire block
of residences, a town square, a favorite swimming hole? Why is it
strategically valuable to drop many hundreds of cluster bombs that
fall in gardens and along roadsides between small farming villages?
The
residents of Bint Jbail and other southern Lebanese cities as well
as those who lived in the Dahiya and in Baalbeck had jobs, homes,
and basic securities just a little over a month ago. Now, billions
of euros and other currencies, along with ingenuity, resources,
talents, will be directed toward aid and recovery. Such aid might
have been helping relieve suffering elsewhere in the world had this
war not “escalated.”
Both
legally and rationally, you cannot say “everyone living there
is Hezbollah. You can’t just walk away from the appalling
damage and say, they were warned. Or can you? Can a state get away
with it, backed up by other world bodies?
If
that’s the case, then ordinary people bear a grave responsibility
to demand that leaders own up to war crimes. Yes, finding a proportionate
response to war crimes when so much power is concentrated in the
hands of fewer and fewer people, many of them reckless and dangerous
leaders of the United States and Israel, is a daunting task. But
let’s think of the people finding courage to return and rebuild,
let’s think of those trying to demine and clear out the cluster
bombs, let’s think of the parents trying to help children
orient themselves to a vastly insecure world. With them, we might
acknowledge, you have to start somewhere.
Kathy
Kelly is a co-coordinator of Voices
in the Wilderness. Her book, Other Lands Have Dreams, is published
by CounterPunch/AK Press. She can be reached at: kathy@vcnv.org
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