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Death is close here. And some of us
are not as close to death as others. The south of Lebanon is
cut off from humanitarian aid. Here on the north side of the
Litani River, the people in the south, taking the worse of the
missiles and mortars of the Israel aggression, are always on
our minds. There are whispers in the back of our thoughts: "How
long do they have? How can we possibly get to them?" The
roads and the bridges are bombed, cut and scarred. Israel has
banned movement south in the south. Any car that's on the road
can be hit. UN convoys, ambulances, the BBC, the big names and
those with Israeli clearances, have been hit.
Now hunger hits bellies in
the south. Their thirst must fit the water. There is no more.
No medication for chronic illness, or for sicknesses caused by
drinking polluted tap water in desperation, sicknesses that twist
your intestines and swiftly take the lives of children.
There are massacres everywhere.
How many deaths at once account for a massacre? Genocide? Monday
night an airstrike in Beirut in the Chiya neighborhood, a place
no one expected to be hit, killed 41 people. A civil worker sorting
through the rubble at the site of the strike on Thursday held
in his hand a list with 3 columns: names of the people dead,
the people injured, and the people missing. There are just as
many people missing as dead, mute under the rubble. A single
airstrike, 41 deaths. All over Lebanon there are the lips, the
caresses, the words, the fingers and the histories, buried beneath
concrete and metal. The missing have still not been added to
the death count, which is at 1056 and rising. There are massacres,
everywhere.
They are strong, the bombs.
The windows tremble. You awake running. You sleep again with
ghosts stalking your dreams, the children pulled from underneath
cement, wire, dust. The city shakes. The politicians talk, they
still talk, and people in their houses are silenced forever when
metal meets flesh.
Electricity comes and goes
in Beirut. We sit in darkness, wrapped in cigarette smoke, listening
to explosions, feeling the dead gather in the air.
More Israeli flyers drift down
from the sky. More airstrikes. If you hear the noise, you know
that one was not meant for you. But the impact reaches your belly,
ties you up in knots.
The gas is running out. At
night people steal it from the gas stations. Even if official
humanitarian aid workers risk traveling the roads, they don't
have enough gas to reach much of the south. And the hospitals
-- how many days until before the gas runs out? Israel blocked
two gas tankers docked off of Cyprus from arriving, and also
a boat with aid. If airstrikes don't kill enough civilians, the
Israelis seem to be finding other things that will.
Here in Beirut, it's hard to
tell the old ruins from the new ones. Here there is a collective
memory of Israeli terror. Is this destroyed building over here
from the decades before this when the Israelis attacked? This
refugee here, asking for bread, eyes haunted by bombs- how many
times in his life has he left his village, left his house, his
family who could not make the journey, to reach the teeming refugee
camps? What fear does he know?
Another explosion. Leaflets
dropped from Israeli warplanes onto the Chiya neighborhood, and
in parts of West Beirut. Tonight there will be more bombing.
The Israelis are stealing the
stars from our nighttime gazes. The planes light the sky seconds
before they strike, the birds chirp in response, a moment later
life is over.
The US will soon pass a deal
to sell M26 rockets with cluster ammunitions to Israel. Death
is close here. Inside these rockets are hundreds of grenades
which scatter over vast areas and explode. Israel wants to aim
them at Hizbollah rocket launching points. These weapons were
responsible for the deaths of countless civilians in the 1980s.
What will people in the United States do about this? March in
circles around federal buildings?
The Zionists argue that Israel
is defending its right to exist. Even one of the international
ceasefire conditions "Israel has a right to defensive strikes..",
the same condition not given to any Lebanese resistance. Israel's
right to exist, to defend itself: 1056 Lebanese civilians dead.
Civilians dead, in defense of Israel. Lebanese civilians must
cease to exist, their bodies reduced to shreds, weightless ashes,
or a collective scene of decomposition -- so that Israel can
exist. Not only men, women, children, babies, grandparents -
but gas, food, water, roads, communities, children's toys in
their bedroom's, books, photographs, hope, electricity, art,
memories, schools, playgrounds, villages, cherry trees......all
in defense of Israel.
Hezbollah missiles have killed
half as many Israel civilians as soldiers, and the total number
of the two is barely over a hundred. Israel has killed over a
thousand civilians, and barely 60 Hizbollah fighters. With such
sophisticated equipment, this is deliberate killing. Because-
who is Hizbollah exactly? Who are their fighters? Why do we never
see the fighters on the news? And who lives in a "Hizbollah
stronghold"? Are there parks in Hizbollah "strongholds"?
Schools? Homes? People? Or just vast areas in which to harbor
arms to hurt Israelis? The southern neighborhoods of Beirut,
nightly hit with airstrikes, now crumbled rubble where homes
once stood, is a poor Shia neighborhood, a "Hizbollah stronghold".
Who once lived there? Who died there? Who is it whose homes are
flattened there, who now sleep in abandonded building around
Beirut? Hizbollah fighters who launch rockets into Israel? The
same Hizbollah fighters who captured the two Israeli soldiers?
Killing and displacing civilians,
taking out their infrastructure, terrorizing their communities,
is a great military strategy if you are fighting a group as grassroots
as Hizbollah, when you don't know exactly who Hizbollah is. Maybe
everyone inside Lebanon is Hizbollah. As Rios Montt, the vicious
dictator of Guatemala put it while strategizing on fighting the
guerillas during the 36 year civil war, in order to kill the
fish you must take out the water. For this, hundreds of thousands
of civilians died in massacres when their villages were pillaged-
the "water" that kept the "fish" alive.
An old man, a refugee sleeping
in Beirut parks, says Hizbollah is in his heart. But he is not
a fighter. So long as Hizbollah is the only one resisting Israel,
they will remain in the hearts of those who have survived the
airstrikes. And with every Israeli airstrike, support for Hizbollah
grows.
In struggle we have learned
that in only one moment everything can change, one moment in
action can make the world a little better. And it only takes
one moment for a bomb to fall, and in one moment life is lost.
This is life here, the paradox of moments. Life is all we have.
On Saturday August 12 a
caravan made up of the civil society, Lebanese and international,
will head south on the scarred, severed, and threatened roads
to bring aid to the isolated and cut out southern region. They
are going without permission from the Israelis (Red Cross requests
to not be bombed on their missions), and without the backing
of political parties. Spontaneous mutual aid is everywhere in
Lebanon, some walk for hours with 80 pounds of supplies on their
backs, under Israel helicopter fire, to keep each other alive.
What will people in the US
do? Will they watch TV, learn about Lebanese people as correspondents
stumble over the pronunciation of "Shia"?
Will they listen to speeches at protests downtown, go home, and
smile at their children, grateful they are not the unfortunate
Lebanese? Or will they begin to participate in mass, targeted,
direct action? Will they blockade ports, roads, highways? Will
they shut down universities and companies invested in Israel?
Will they hold CNN accountable for its incorrect, biased journalism?
Will they allow thousands to
remain here so close to death?
Now
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
CounterPunch
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