Empire Notes

It seems that Israel has an inexplicable hatred of Qana, the small Lebanese town whose inhabitants claim that here President Bush’s favorite political philosopher once turned water into wine.

Ten years ago, the liberal Labor government of Shimon Peres (with the generous Ehud Barak as Defense Minister) shelled a U.N. compound in Qana where several hundred of the half a million Lebanese refugees created by Peres’ “Grapes of Wrath” bombing campaign were sheltering, killing 106. The Israeli government claimed it was an accident; an Amnesty International investigation concluded that the bombing was deliberate, as did a Dutch general investigating for the U.N.

This time, it was an apartment building, shielding some 60 of the roughly 1 million refugees created by Operation “Change of Direction;” 56 people, 34 of them children, were killed, bringing the official Lebanese death toll to around 700. Israel once again claims that it was an accident, and that they were aiming at a Hezbollah rocket-launcher nearby.

This claim may give pause to any of you who have been asleep for the last three weeks and also during every previous Israeli bombing campaign in Lebanon. In this connection, one need simply note the circumstances of Israel’s shelling of a U.N. post near Khiyam on July 25, killing four U.N. observers. Over a period of six hours, Israeli artillery shells landed close to the post 10 times and after each one the observers called the Israeli military, which promised to stop shelling. Somehow, Israel still claims it was an accident

So there’s a bit of a problem for those who want to maintain a hard distinction between Israel’s supreme morality and Hezbollah’s terrorism. Either Israel hit the U.N. post on purpose, which is to say it kept shelling the immediate area without any regard for the observers’ safety, or its shelling is not very accurate. Similarly with the latest Qana massacre, where the argument can only be that its bombing is again inaccurate. In that case, why is it that Hezbollah’s rocket attacks, universally agreed to be inaccurate, is terrorism while Israel’s use of inaccurate bombing and artillery fire is moral warfare? After all, if we look at the results, two-thirds of those Hezbollah has killed in this war are soldiers, whereas about 90% of those Israel has killed in this war are civilians.

Perhaps, if all of the commentary and analysis was not so ridiculously biased, the least people would do is acknowledge that a weapon’s accuracy is only one relevant issue; another is the fact that the bombs Israel drops are far more powerful than the piddly Katyusha rockets Hezbollah shoots off at random. A 500-pound bomb has a quarter-mile blast radius; how does one justify using such a weapon against a temporarily placed mobile rocket launcher near apartment buildings?

The ridiculous claims of Israeli moral superiority also rest on the claim that Hezbollah is using civilians as human shields. This is the same refrain we hear any time the United States kills civilians, even after the gruesome bombing of the al-Amariyah bomb shelter in the 1991 Gulf War, which killed about 400 women and children. This is somehow used to shift the blame for the assault onto the enemy.

The truth, as Mitch Prothero of U.S. News and World Report writes, is that, far from using civilians as human shields, Hezbollah goes out of its way to do the opposite. Unlike Hamas and Fatah, for example, members of Hezbollah’s military wing shy away from contact even with their own civilian supporters when they are on military operations.

If the claim is meant to mean simply that Hezbollah conducts its operations in towns and villages, rather than perhaps flying to the Sahara Desert to fight from there, it is true but vacuous. When Israeli ground troops move in, as they have done several times during this war, they shelter in civilian residences as well – as do American troops in Iraq. They don’t remain on open ground, without cover, even though the weapons they face are far less formidable than those Hezbollah faces. If they occasionally salve their consciences by forcing civilians to flee, creating say 1 million refugees who will languish for weeks or months without adequate shelter, food, water, or medical care, then return to homes that have been destroyed by ceaseless shelling, how exactly does one claim that this does not constitute targeting civilians?

Violence is not simply the domain of those who massacre children with high-tech weaponry. The ones who construct convoluted arguments to justify them in the face of facts and reason do violence to – to the truth and to humanity.