Soha Bechara.
“Israel has plans to occupy Lebanon and redraw borders and thought that with a few bombs it could wipe out Hezbollah, but it is suffering very heavy losses in the south of the country and is unable to make significant progress in the ground offensive,” says Soha Bechara, icon of the Lebanese resistance during the second Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
In 1988, at the age of 21, Soha Bechara attempted to assassinate Antoine Lahad, head of the militia responsible for Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon. She was detained for ten years in Khiam prison, six of which in total isolation, in a cell measuring 1.80 m by 60 cm, with one meal a day and ten minutes to eat.
She says it was the Sabra and Shatila massacre, when Lebanese Phalangist militias, with the tacit support of Israel, murdered hundreds of Palestinians in a refugee camp in Beirut, that gave rise to her decision to join the resistance wing of the Communist Party. “I realized that if we didn’t resist, what happened to the Palestinians would happen to the Lebanese. It became clear to me that Israel, the occupying power, was Lebanon’s real enemy.”
With the nightmare she knew repeating itself today before her eyes, Bechara denounces a Israeli strategy of false pretexts that hide the dominant driving element. “Israel evokes different reasons each time it attacks Lebanon. The pretext for the first invasion in 1978 was the existence of Palestinian armed groups in Lebanon, now Hezbollah. But the first Israeli massacres in Lebanon date back to 1948, when there were no Palestinians and the Lebanese Shiite movement did not exist,” she emphasizes, adding that the real reason is to advance the religious project of “Greater Israel”, which consists of annexing parts of Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
“The Zionist state has taken advantage of every opportunity to annex territory,” points out the Lebanese activist, recalling that the Six-Day War in 1967 resulted in the occupation of the Golan Heights, but also of seven villages in Lebanese territory, includingthe Shebaa farms, despite Lebanon not having participated in the conflict.
The same scheme will be repeated in successive waves, Bechara recaps. “Between 1948 and 1978, Israel pushed the Palestinians into exile. And then began to persecute them in exile in Lebanon, occupying a region in the south to create a safe zone. In 1982, it was about expelling armed Palestinians from Lebanon, and they ended up occupying territory as far south as Sidon.”
In the Lebanese resistance’s opinion, Israel creates faits accomplis and considers that just as the extermination of Indians in the United States passed into history without consequences for those responsible, so the Zionist state can redraw borders by eliminating and expelling entire populations with impunity. “What is happening in Lebanon today was not something that came suddenly, it was something that was already prepared, they had been preparing for the colonization of the country for a long time and they think it should have been done before.”
Israel has become convinced that the rules are imposed by the strongest and this is thanks to the passivity of the international community, which “since 1948 until today has granted Israel total impunity after every massacre, every bombing of refugee camps, schools, hospitals, churches and mosques, cultural heritage,” emphasizes Bechara, warning of the damage that this attitude will certainly bring to international institutions guardians of humanitarian law. “Almost six months have passed since the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court requested an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, yet it took the ICC less than a month to issue an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin.”
An impasse that raises fundamental questions. Will Europe be able to resist? Will the United States and the neoliberal system, holder of a currency that controls the entire world, remain? Can Israel, as a racist and genocidal state, persist? “I don’t think so. There have been many other barbaric systems and empires in history that collapsed, not because they didn’t know how to calculate, but because they were inhumane.”
In negotiations surrounding the conflict in Lebanon, Israel seeks to separate Lebanon from the Palestinian issue. Will Hezbollah give in to all this pressure? “Frankly, I don’t think so,” says the Lebanese activist. “Hezbollah had the option of doing nothing, of letting it happen, of saying nothing. Despite this, they said no to the genocide in Gaza. Maybe because they knew it was only a matter of time, before the Israelis attacked Lebanon to redesign the region in their own way.”
For Soha Bechara the question now is whether Hezbollah will maintain its support for Palestine until Israel stops the genocide. “Especially because on the ground, Israel has so far been unable to advance, not even establish itself safely 300 meters from the blue line,” she concludes.
