It is one of the most beautiful places in the world. While walking, you can't close your eyes for one second or you will miss a scene of sacred beauty. This is Lebanon...


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BY SASMEN


Good Morning Aadbel


Hit Of The Kamoua Pyramid


Above The Clouds


Kobayat Forests, The Sacred Lebanon


Akkar, The Water Temple Of Lebanon


The Forest Of Lights & Shadows


Kamoua, The Four Seasons


Good Morning Aadbel


Lebanon Is Burning


A Bee And A Flower
"I missed you like death" said the flower… "Where have you been all this time?"… "I waited until I lost my faith"… "Why were you late? My petals lost there brightness… my odor is barely sensed"… "I don't want to die like someone who came for nothing"…"Oh! My sweet flower of life!" said the bee… "I missed you so much"… "I left my home to come & see you"… "You were the most beautiful one on earth & you are always the same"… "But I see you are misevaluating yourself"… "Don't you see everything is ok?!"…"I felt the time eating me my little bee" said the flower… "I felt the seconds a day, & the day a year when you were away"… "When I was born I sent you a message with the soft breeze… and since then I'm hearing your sound around… filling my ears… but even I couldn't see you… I heard your voice even while sleeping… he didn't stop until I'm not sleeping anymore"… "Do you see? I missed you until becoming weak"…"I'm here my dear… at least now" said the bee… "I was signing the universe with my name so I can return one day to my home"… "I'm so sorry it took all this time"… "I missed you, I needed you and still"… "Yes, I need you to reach my destiny"… "I need you to become a king as my queen said"…"Oh! Sweetheart! As I need you to become eternal!" said the flower… "Yes, it's my elixir that you need"... "Take the soul that is made just for you… fly back while signing again the world with our name… sign it again & again… so everyone will know how life is beautiful when we are together… when unified"…A soft kiss filled the atmosphere with the most beautiful smell… no one sound but the bee wings song… the flower's petals were contracting with every musical note…It was a moment of love… the bee left glorious a flower that became grains… while he signed the sky with beauty…He reached his real home finally; he put the gift in the hexagons… and he received for that the queen's crown …A second day has risen, and hundreds of bees met the life to replay the same story…

A Personal Memo -

By EHSANI2

I have just returned from a three-week vacation to Syria. I must admit that I have struggled to think of something incisive to write about. What possible insight can I offer readers of this forum I thought? Given my personal interest in economic matters, it made sense for me to concentrate on this topic first. I will conclude my note with the inevitable discussion of non-economic issues as well. I warn the scores of regime supporters here: The truth is sometimes painful to hear. One tends to often read statements like “Syrians” are behind Bashar and are keen to maintain the status quo. Others may offer a different picture by proclaiming that “Syrians” are very unhappy with the regime but are afraid to say so in public. But which “Syrians” are we referring to here? In the personal opinion of this writer, Syria is made up of two separate countries: Syria 1 which contains close to one million people and Syria 2 which contains the remaining 19 million. Syria 1 is made up of the affluent, highly connected industrialists, merchants and very high Government officials. Given the high standard of living of this group, one would expect them to support the regime and the current status quo. While most may admit that that progress has been slow, they are quick to point that given the circumstances, the country is on the right track. They highlight their latest cell phones, home and office Internet connections as well as their brand new cars as irrefutable signs of the economic and social advances that the country has been experiencing as of late. My suspicion is that most readers of this forum fall in this group. My Syrian friends and I certainly do too. Seen from their prism, the Syrian economy seems prosperous judging by the superb outdoor dinners, number of servants, lovely homes, fancy cars, latest cell phones, rising land values, and monopolistic businesses. Life could not be more different for the 19 million people of Syria 2. As I opined in the past, Syria’s Baath has caused enormous economic damage to this country. It is clear that this silent majority has suffered the brunt of this grave economic mismanagement. This is evident in this group’s salary levels. If they were lucky enough to have jobs, salaries of this group is likely to be around Syp 10,000 ($200) per month. Their average family size is 6-7 (four to five children). They all seem to feel that what they really needed was an extra $100 per month before things would be “fine”. Almost a year ago, the Government has stopped offering new jobs in its vast public sector. You now need a huge connection to land such a job. What was truly amazing to me was how valuable people considered a job with the Government. A stable income of $200 was the envy of those aspiring to find such positions. Taxi drivers were an interesting case to study. 90% of them do not own their vehicles but are hired to drive it for close to 8 hours a day. Asked how much they expected to make on a daily basis, the level of Syp 300 ($6.0) was often cited. When asked how many children they had to support with this salary, an average of five children always seemed to be the answer. This does not mean that members of Syria 2 do not move up the income ladder. Highly technical machine technicians cited to me figures approaching Syp 20,000 ($400). Private Bank employees (newly commissioned ones) expected closer to $500 a month. Our highly connected and very entrepreneurial area “Mukhtar” is able to draw in close to Syp 40,000 (he sells gas cylinders on the side). Though not statistically accurate, it is my observation that close to 19 million lives in this $200 to $400 per month world. What can $200-$400 buy this group is the obvious next question. It is perhaps best to answer this by offering these anecdotes:A close friend of mine has recently started a small chain of coffee shops (call it a Syrian Starbucks). I frequently visited it during the past 3 weeks. A double espresso was my usual order at a cost of Syp 150 ($3). Two such orders a day cost me what my taxi driver earned in 8 hours of driving in a boiling non-air-conditioned Iranian or Chinese-made vehicle. Remember that this had to cover his cost of shelter, food, medical bills, and school supplies for all 6-7 members of his family. Eating out in Syria is relatively cheap. Before I left the country, my wife and I invited 10 of our best friends out for dinner. The food was amazing. The bill was Syp 8,000 ($160). Given what I would have paid for this overseas, I considered the outing an excellent value of money. For the record, my poor taxi driver will have to drive for 27 days to be able to afford this meal (his family can expect no money in the meantime). I am sure that lots of readers are going to argue that every country has its haves and have-nots. So what is special about Syria they might ask? What distinguishes Syria is how its middle class has been squashed by the horrific economic mismanagement by the country’s economic leadership. $6 a day for 6 people (average family size) is the unmistakable result of this catastrophic system. Every time I asked how they could possibly get by with such low income, the answer was “We have gotten used to it”. A note on politics:Contrary to what many people on this forum think, most of the people that I spoke to seem to think that the Hariri investigation is a massive cloud that continues to hang over the regime’s leadership. Another thing that struck me was the low confidence that most people have in the personality of their young President. Even his loyal supporters seem to admit that he lacks the charisma and purpose of his late foxy father. As for the regime’s ability to hold on to power, I found absolutely no evidence to indicate a weakening in the regime’s grip. Internal dissent was nonexistent. Why have the 19 million people decided to accept living in such conditions?I think the following quote by Karl Marx can answer this question best:“The great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes.”Conclusion:This visit to Syria has convinced me that the country’s economy is in a far worse position than currently believed. When Syria becomes a net oil importer by 2010, the current economic challenges will multiply. A very small minority of Syrians will continue to benefit from the current system and hence get even richer in the meantime. My own close friends are some of the richest people in the country. A number of them made hundreds of millions following the recent climb in land values. Money laundering was thought to be the main explanation behind the incredible advance in real estate. While it is easy to assume that Syria 1 is the reality of the situation, the truth is otherwise. The vast majority of the population is likely to suffer even further going forward. Though inconceivable, their children may fare even worse than their horrific $6 payday. The population explosion has resulted in scores of unemployed men walking its major cities. Those residing in the rural part of the country have fared even worse. Their decision to locate to the big cities has made things even worse. It is my conviction that this regime cannot reform fast enough to arrest the decline in its economy and the standards of living of its citizens. Bashar’s last interview with Dubai Television was striking. His admission of complete isolation from the other Arab leaders was rather shocking. It is my opinion that the Hariri investigation may unsettle this regime to the point where its survival beyond one more year could well be questioned. My friends in Syria 1 sure hope that I am wrong. The potatoes that make up Syria 2 are hopeless, powerless and confused. They have been squashed for 43 years now. They have learnt to accept their fate. They know no better. I have heard and read all the commentary that Syria has won the recent battle. Most Syrians on this forum and inside the country have rallied around their leader and the flag. This is to be expected in such times. This writer, on the other hand, sees things differently. He sees a country in decay. A majority that is deep in poverty. Soaring unemployment is unavoidable. Significantly falling standards of living is inevitable. This is the picture of Syria that most refuse to hear. Their nationalistic genes have blinded them to these obvious facts on the ground. Regrettably, our once proud nation is in a state of despair and decline.

American Jews Belong in Israel, Declare Israeli Authors Yehoshua and Halkin

By Allan C. Brownfeld

At a meeting celebrating the 100th anniversary of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua told the audience at the Library of Congress that American Jews belong in Israel.
According to the May 4, 2006 Washington Jewish Week, “Yehoshua dominated the panel discussion on ‘The Future of The Past: What Will Become of the Jewish People?’…insisting that one could fully be a Jew only by living in the Jewish state. ‘This is the success of Zionism—the Jews took responsibility,’ Yehoshua said at one point, arguing that the everyday decisions of Israel—whether to withdraw from territory, or ‘are we going to torture?’—are the important ‘Jewish decisions’ of our time. ‘You are not doing any Jewish decisions,’ he told the crowd…‘You are deciding, according to an American framework…You are playing with Jewishness.’”
Yehoshua’s chief sparring partner was Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, who declared that “people are not stupid servants of the state.” Nor is it the case, he said, that everything a Jew does is a Jewish act. “What matters is whether [Jews] are actively engaged in one’s Jewishness,” he said. When challenged by Yehoshua to name “an act of Jewishness,” Wieseltier responded with such examples as teaching Hebrew and learning about the history of the Jewish people. “These are not meaningless activities,” he said. Without them, “Jews will not survive, even if the state of Israel will.”
Wieseltier argued that “territory is not what kept Jews alive. The civilization of Jews was formed after the exile, after the destruction of the Temple…My pride in being Jewish has nothing to do with where I live.”
Discussing Yehoshua’s declaration that Jewish life in America is “meaningless,” J.J. Goldberg, editor of The Forward, noted in its May 12, 2006 issue that “Yehoshua expresses, in extreme, distilled terms, an essential truth about Israeli Jewish identity. Israelis tend to know very little about the reality of Jewish life in America. It’s not taught in their schools, rarely appears on their television screens and is seldom discussed in their newspapers. For Israelis, being Jewish consists of living in a Jewish country, speaking a Jewish language, serving in a Jewish army. What, they wonder, can it possibly mean to live as a Jew in Cleveland?”
“Jewish life in America…indeed seems like a kind of play-acting.”
Writing in the May 7, 2006 edition of Haaretz, correspondent Amiram Barkat declared: “The heads of American Jewish organizations do almost nothing to alter the perception common in the Israeli public…They come here several times a year and then return to their country brimming with delight, having heard the prime minister, foreign minister and head of the Jewish Agency pay lip service in speaking about Israel’s obligation to the Jewish people.” Instead, he writes, they should be asking why Israel isn’t teaching its children about the Diaspora and “conducting a genuine dialogue between Israelis and Jews living overseas.”
Concluded Forward editor Goldberg: “It ought to be obvious to both sides that Israelis are not wrong in their way of being Jewish, any more than Americans are wrong in their way—joining organizations, attending events, giving to charities and trying to live by what they understand as Jewish values. The two ways are merely different.”
In Israel, author Hillel Halkin, who has long called upon American Jews to emigrate, wrote in The Jerusalem Post’s International Edition of May 19-25 that “…deep down, I think that Yehoshua, manners aside, is more right than wrong. Israel is the only place in the world in which one can live a Jewish life that is total—in which, that is, there is no compartmentalization between the inner and the outer, between what is Jewish and what is not. It is the only place in the world in which Jews are totally responsible for the society they live in, for the environment that surrounds them, for the government that rules them. It is the only place in the world where Jewish culture is not a subculture in a greater culture but is rather that greater culture itself.”
“The Real Thing”
According to Halkin, Jewish life in Israel “is the real thing and by comparison, Jewish life in America, or anywhere else in the Diaspora, as dedicated and committed as it may be, indeed seems like a kind of play-acting. Why would a truly dedicated and committed Jew want to live anywhere but in a Jewish state?”
It is ironic that Yehoshua’s remarks were addressed to the AJC, an organization which in its earlier years was highly skeptical of Jewish nationalism. Indeed, in 1950 there was an historic exchange between the AJC’s then-president, Jacob Blaustein, and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. As summarized by the AJC, the agreement stipulated that: “(1) Jews of the United States, as a community and as individuals, have only one political attachment, namely to the United States of America; (2) that the Government and people of Israel respect the integrity of Jewish life in the democratic countries and the right of Jewish communities to develop their indigenous social, economic and cultural aspirations, in accordance with their own needs and institutions; and (3) that Israel fully accepts the fact that the Jews of the United States do not live ‘in exile,’ and that America is home for them.”
Whatever David Ben-Gurion may have said in 1950, the fact is that, ever since, the State of Israel has persisted in promoting the idea that Jews living outside its borders are indeed in “exile” and that all Jews should emigrate to the Jewish state. What, at its 100th anniversary, does the American Jewish Committee now think about all of this? Why, knowing his views, did it invite A.B. Yehoshua to participate in its celebration?
What the entire Yehoshua incident makes clear is that the rift between American Jews and Israel is growing dramatically. This division is explored in an article, “Whatever Happened to the Jewish People?” by Steven M. Cohen, research professor of Jewish social policy at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, and Jack Wertheimer, provost and professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Writing in the June 2006 issue of Commentary, Cohen and Wertheimer report that, “In 1989, a national survey conducted for the American Jewish Committee found 73 percent of Jews agreeing that ‘caring about Israel is a very important part of being a Jew’; in 2005, a mere decade and a half later, the corresponding figure had fallen to 57 percent. Younger adults, moreover, exhibit weaker attachment to Israel than do their elders. Nor is it just a matter of Israel. According to the 2000/2001 National Jewish Population Study, younger adults are significantly less likely than their elders to agree strongly that ‘Jews in the United States and Jews around the world share a common destiny’ or that ‘when people are in distress, American Jews have a greater responsibility to rescue Jews than non-Jews.’”
Responses to the simple statement, “I have a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people,” are especially telling. The proportions strongly agreeing drop steadily from a high of 75 percent among those aged 65 or over to a low of 47 percent for adults under 35.
According to Cohen and Wertheimer, “The late l980s, a period marked by the first Palestinian intifada, appear to have ushered in a period of creeping disaffection from Israel within sectors of the American Jewish community, and prior levels of support have never since been matched. During the second intifada, which began in 2000, a demonstration in Washington at the peak of the wave of Palestinian suicide bombings of Israeli civilians could muster only a relatively meager turnout.”
What is true of public displays of unity is also true of levels of giving on behalf of causes that explicitly address the needs of the Jewish people as a whole. The year 1985—a year characterized neither by an emergency in the Middle East nor by massive emigration to Israel requiring large infusions of aid—saw a total of $656 million raised by American federations of Jewish philanthropy. To have simply kept pace with inflation, this amount should have grown to $1.19 billion by the time of the 2005 annual campaign. Instead, total campaign receipts increased to only $860 million, a shortfall of l8 percent. In this same time frame, the total size of allocations to Israel dropped on an inflation-adjusted basis by almost two-thirds. In the decade 1990-2000, the proportion of Jewish households participating in the federations’ annual fund-raising campaigns fell by a third.
Seeking to explain these trends, which they lament, Cohen and Wertheimer provide this assessment: “Several social forces are clearly operating at once; Most of them, ironically enough, reflect well on the openness of contemporary American society and the relatively secure situation of Jews within it. The most blatant is the dramatically higher rate of intermarriage as compared with earlier generations. Of Jews now marrying, nearly half are being wed to non-Jewish partners…The intermarried tend to have fewer Jewish neighbors, fewer Jewish friends, lower levels of membership in Jewish institutions, less attachment to Israel, and less allegiance to the Jewish people. As for Christians who marry Jews, they tend to understand Jewishness narrowly, as a matter of religious practice and faith rather than as an ethnic identity.”
A Faith or a Nationality?
The fact that the vast majority of American Jews view Judaism as a religious faith rather than a nationality or ethnic identity disturbs those who continue to maintain the traditional Zionist view that Israel is the “homeland” of all Jews and that those who live elsewhere are in “exile.”
Beyond this, however, even if American Jews were to view their identity as being largely ethnic, the contemporary American society is eroding the ethnic identities of all those who emigrated from Europe. Cohen and Wertheimer note that “…despite the modish talk about multiculturalism and the requirement to honor ‘diversity,’ ethnicity is in fact a weak and weakening form of identification here. At least among white people of European descent…Over the past decades, internal solidarity among all American white ethnic groups has continued to fall off…Most of the once-traditional props of Jewish peoplehood in this country—large immigrant populations, neighborhoods, Yiddish-inflected folkways, a distinctive cuisine—have faded from the scene. American Jews are now regarded, and appear largely to regard themselves, as part of the undifferentiated mass of American whites, not as a distinctive group in the multicultural ‘rainbow,’ a term that in any case mostly encompasses blacks, Hispanics and Asian-Americans. Or worse, Jews are portrayed by critics of prevailing American arrangements as partners and allies of the ‘hegemonic monoculture’—today’s term for what was once known as the (white) ruling class.”
American Jews now volunteer less than they once did for communal endeavors, and they join Jewish organizations at consistently lower rates. The 2000/2001 National Jewish Population Survey found that the major Jewish membership organizations suffered a nearly 20 percent decline in affiliation over the decade of the 1990s alone.
Some Jewish groups are attempting to accommodate to the new reality. The slogan of the United Jewish Appeal used to be “We Are One.” Today, the collective rhetoric of peoplehood is soft-pedaled, if not quite abandoned. The United Jewish Communities, the renamed umbrella organization of federations of Jewish philanthropies, now raises funds under the new slogan “Live Generously: It Does A World of Good.” Rather than appealing to a donor’s sense of responsibility to the group, contributions are now solicited in the name of individual virtue.
In Israel, meanwhile, contempt for Jewish life in other countries continues to grow. In May, Israel’s government-sponsored rabbinic courts were ordered by the Chief Rabbinate to stop recognizing conversions and divorces performed by most Orthodox rabbis outside of Israel. The new rule means that persons who underwent an Orthodox conversion abroad will have to be converted again in Israel in order to be recognized as Jews by Israeli rabbinic courts. Jewish women who received an Orthodox divorce overseas and wish to remarry in Israel will have to ask their ex-husbands for another divorce certificate if the first one was approved by Orthodox rabbis not recognized by the Israeli rabbinate. In Israel, Reform and Conservative rabbis have no right to perform marriages or funerals. Now, even non-Israeli Orthodox rabbis have become suspect.
American ideas of religious freedom and separation of church and state—which groups such as the American Jewish Committee fully embrace—have yet to find their way to Israel.
Many American Jewish leaders have long claimed that Zionism was fully compatible with their own declaration of loyalty to the United States and belief in the religious values of Judaism. It may be that their own version of “Zionism” is indeed compatible with such values. But in Israel, a far different, more orthodox Zionist view prevails. The rift between these radically different worldviews is likely to grow as time goes on. Perhaps it was good that the American Jewish Committee heard what traditional Zionism really thinks. It is high time that, at the very least, both communities understand one another clearly.Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.

Every Generation of Arabs Hates Israel More Than the Last"

Every Generation of Arabs Hates Israel More Than the Last"

America's Rottweiler
By URI AVNERY

In his latest speech, which infuriated so many people, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad uttered a sentence that deserves attention: "Every new Arab generation hates Israel more than the previous one."
Of all that has been said about the Second Lebanon War, these are perhaps the most important words.
The main product of this war is hatred. The pictures of death and destruction in Lebanon entered every Arab home, indeed every Muslim home, from Indonesia to Morocco, from Yemen to the Muslim ghettos in London and Berlin. Not for an hour, not for a day, but for 33 successive days - day after day, hour after hour. The mangled bodies of babies, the women weeping over the ruins of their homes, Israeli children writing "greetings" on shells about to be fired at villages, Ehud Olmert blabbering about "the most moral army in the world" while the screen showed a heap of bodies.
Israelis ignored these sights, indeed they were scarcely shown on our TV. Of course, we could see them on Aljazeera and some Western channels, but Israelis were much too busy with the damage wrought in our Northern towns. Feelings of pity and empathy for non-Jews have been blunted here a long time ago.
But it is a terrible mistake to ignore this result of the war. It is far more important than the stationing of a few thousand European troops along our border, with the kind consent of Hizbullah. It may still be bothering generations of Israelis, when the names Olmert and Halutz have long been forgotten, and when even Nasrallah no longer remember the name Amir Peretz.
* * *
IN ORDER for the significance of Assad's words to become clear, they have to be viewed in a historical context.
The whole Zionist enterprise has been compared to the transplantation of an organ into the body of a human being. The natural immunity system rises up against the foreign implant, the body mobilizes all its power to reject it. The doctors use a heavy dosage of medicines in order to overcome the rejection. That can go on for a long time, sometimes until the eventual death of the body itself, including the transplant.
(Of course, this analogy, like any other, should be treated cautiously. An analogy can help in understanding things, but no more than that.)
The Zionist movement has planted a foreign body in this country, which was then a part of the Arab-Muslim space. The inhabitants of the country, and the entire Arab region, rejected the Zionist entity. Meanwhile, the Jewish settlement has taken roots and become an authentic new nation rooted in the country. Its defensive power against the rejection has grown. This struggle has been going on for 125 years, becoming more violent from generation to generation. The last war was yet another episode.
* * *
WHAT IS our historic objective in this confrontation?
A fool will say: to stand up to the rejection with a growing dosage of medicaments, provided by America and World Jewry. The greatest fools will add: There is no solution. This situation will last forever. There is nothing to be done about it but to defend ourselves in war after war after war. And the next war is already knocking on the door.
The wise will say: our objective is to cause the body to accept the transplant as one of its organs, so that the immune system will no longer treat us as an enemy that must be removed at any price. And if this is the aim, it must become the main axis of our efforts. Meaning: each of our actions must be judged according to a simple criterion: does it serve this aim or obstruct it?
According to this criterion, the Second Lebanon War was a disaster.
* * *
FIFTY NINE years ago, two months before the outbreak of our War of Independence, I published a booklet entitled "War or Peace in the Semitic Region". Its opening words were:
"When our Zionist fathers decided to set up a 'safe haven' in Palestine, they had a choice between two ways:
"They could appear in West Asia as a European conqueror, who sees himself as a bridge-head of the 'white' race and a master of the 'natives', like the Spanish Conquistadores and the Anglo-Saxon colonists in America. That is what the Crusaders did in Palestine.
"The second way was to consider themselves as an Asian nation returning to its home - a nation that sees itself as anheir to the political and cultural heritage of the Semitic race, and which is prepared to join the peoples of the Semitic region in their war of liberation from European exploitation."
As is well known, the State of Israel, which was established a few months later, chose the first way. It gave its hand to colonial France, tried to help Britain to return to the Suez Canal and, since 1967, has become the little sister of the United States.
That was not inevitable. On the contrary, in the course of years there have been a growing number of indications that the immune system of the Arab-Muslim body is starting to incorporate the transplant - as a human body accepts the organ of a close relative - and is ready to accept us. Such an indication was the visit of Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem. Such was the peace treaty signed with us by King Hussein, a descendent of the Prophet. And, most importantly, the historic decision of Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian people, to make peace with Israel.
But after every huge step forward, there came an Israeli step backward. It is as if the transplant rejects the body's acceptance of it. As if it has become so accustomed to being rejected, that it does all it can to induce the body to reject it even more.
It is against this background that one should weigh the words spoken by Assad Jr., a member of the new Arab generation, at the end of the recent war.
* * *
AFTER EVERY single one of the war aims put forward by our government had evaporated, one after the other, another reason was brought up: this war was a part of the "clash of civilizations", the great campaign of the Western world and its lofty values against the barbarian darkness of the Islamic world.
That reminds one, of course, of the words written 110 years ago by the father of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, in the founding document of the Zionist movement: "In Palestinewe shall constitute for Europe a part of the wall against Asia, and serve as the vanguard of civilization against barbarism." Without knowing, Olmert almost repeated this formula in his justification of his war, in order to please President Bush.
It happens from time to time in the United States that somebody invents an empty but easily digested slogan, which then dominates the public discourse for some time. It seems that the more stupid the slogan is, the better its chances of becoming the guiding light for academia and the media - until another slogan appears and supersedes it. The latest example is the slogan "Clash of Civilizations", coined by Samuel P. Huntington in 1993 (taking over from the "End of History").
What clash of ideas is there between Muslim Indonesia and Christian Chile? What eternal struggle between Poland and Morocco? What is it that unifies Malaysia and Kosovo, two Muslim nations? Or two Christian nations like Sweden and Ethiopia?
In what way are the ideas of the West more sublime than those of the East? The Jews that fled the flames of the auto-da-fe of the Christian Inquisition in Spain were received with open arms by the Muslim Ottoman Empire. The most cultured of European nations democratically elected Adolf Hitler as its leader and perpetrated the Holocaust, without the Pope raising his voice in protest.
In what way are the spiritual values of the United States, today's Empire of the West, superior to those of India and China, the rising stars of the East? Huntington himself was compelled to admit: "The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do." In the West, too, women won the vote only in the 20th century, and slavery was abolished there only in the second half of the 19th. And in the leading nation of the West, fundamentalism is now also raising its head.
What interest, for goodness sake, have we in volunteering to be a political and military vanguard of the West in this imagined clash?
* * *
THE TRUTH is, of course, that this entire story of the clash of civilizations is nothing but an ideological cover for something that has no connection with ideas and values: the determination of the United States to dominate the world's resources, and especially oil.
The Second Lebanon War is considered by many as a "War by Proxy". That's to say: Hizbullah is the Dobermann of Iran, we are the Rottweiler of America. Hizbullah gets money, rockets and support from the Islamic Republic, we get money, cluster bombs and support from the United States of America.
That is certainly exaggerated. Hizbullah is an authentic Lebanese movement, deeply rooted in the Shiite community. The Israeli government has its own interests (the occupied territories) that do not depend on America. But there is no doubt that there is much truth in the argument that this was also a war by substitutes.
The US is fighting against Iran, because Iran has a key role in the region where the most important oil reserves in the world are located. Not only does Iran itself sit on huge oil deposits, but through its revolutionary Islamic ideology it also menaces American control over the near-by oil countries. The declining resource oil becomes more and more essential in the modern economy. He who controls the oil controls the world.
The US would viciously attack Iran even it were peopled with pigmies devoted to the religion of the Dalai Lama. There is a shocking similarity between George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, The one has personal conversations with Jesus, the other has a line to Allah. But the name of the game is domination.
What interest do we have to get involved in this struggle? What interest do we have in being regarded - accurately - as the servants of the greatest enemy of the Muslim world in general and the Arab world in particular?
We want to live here in 100 years, in 500 years. Our most basic national interests demand that we extend our hands to the Arab nations that accept us, and act together with them for the rehabilitation of this region. That was true 59 years ago, and that will be true 59 years hence.
Little politicians like Olmert, Peretz and Halutz are unable to think in these terms. They can hardly see as far as the end of their noses. But where are the intellectuals, who should be more far-sighted?
Bashar al-Assad may not be one of the world's Great Thinkers. But his remark should certainly give us pause for thought.


Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom.

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Israel waging economic war on Lebanon

By Shakir Husain,

Dubai: Israel is waging an economic war against Lebanon by continuing its sea and air blockade of the country, Lebanese parliament speaker Nabih Berri said.
The Jewish state is also seeking to re-interpret the UN ceasefire resolution in order to stifle the nation, he told the London-based Financial Times newspaper in an interview.
"What it's doing is justifying its blockade, on the airport and the sea, because one of the objectives of this war is to hit Leb-anon economically, and this war is still continuing," said Berri, the leader of the Amal movement and an influential figure who has acted as the mediator between the Lebanese government and Hezbollah.
Berri said Israel had targeted companies during the war, including a milk factory and soft drink distributor, that had won contracts in the region against Israeli firms. "They impose an embargo on air and sea to deter investors from returning to Lebanon, at a time when there's an oil boom and when the Arabs want to invest here."
Sa'ad Al Zain, general-secretary of the Lebanese Business Council in Dubai, charged the Israelis carried out an orchestrated campaign against Lebanese businesses.
"What they did was well-planned. They destroyed a lot of businesses in the Bekaa Valley and southern parts. When peace prevails, Lebanon prospers. The Israelis do not like it," he told Gulf News.
Raed Charafeddine, a senior executive with a leading bank in Beirut, said Israeli air attacks targeted businesses, in addition to hitting civilian infrastructure. "We estimate Leb-anon suffered $9 billion of direct losses during the Israeli attacks. But indirect losses in lost opportunities could be $25 billion," Charafeddine said.
He said it is not just Hezbollah that Israel sees as a threat but there is an economic side of Lebanon that the Israelis do not like.
"Lebanon has strong tourism, service and financial industries supported by a skilled and educated workforce. In Africa, the Lebanese compete with the Israelis in the gold and diamond business," said Charafeddine.
According to reports in the Beirut press, Israel was particularly ruthless in destroying industries owned by Lebanon's Shiite entrepreneurs and 60 per cent of their businesses were targeted by the bombing.
Charafeddine believes Gulf investors will strongly support Lebanon's rebuilding efforts. "Although capital runs away from risks, there are clear signs that Arab investors are determined to support Leb-anon," he said.

How Lebanese Civilians Thwarted Israel's War Plans

By JAMES MARC LEAS


By simply returning to their homes Lebanese civilians played a key role thwarting Israel's plans in its most recent war in Lebanon. As the Associated Press reported on August 14, immediately upon the start of the UN sponsored cease fire tens of thousands of Lebanese families defied orders from Israeli commanders, took to the roads, and returned to their villages in southern Lebanon . Their courageous action stifled any hope the Israeli government may have had for accomplishing its grand vision for southern Lebanon with this war.As the Los Angeles Times reported in an article, "Old Feud over Lebanese River Takes on New Turn," August 10, 2006, three of Israel's founding fathers, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and Moshe Dayan, all favored occupying and annexing southern Lebanon up to the Litani River. Israel launched massive attacks on Lebanon in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996, and now in 2006, each time ultimately failing.Features of Israel's most recent attack reveal a military plan similar to that used in the 1967 war to acquire the Golan Heights from Syria. The massive bombing of Hezbollah positions along the border was designed to weaken or destroy Hezbollah's ability to resist Israel's coming ground attack. The bombing of population centers and civilian infrastructure in this region was designed to frighten and drive out most of the civilian population that would support the guerrilla fighters. The mobilization of 30,000 reserve soldiers meant that Israel intended to invade and occupy the region south of the Litani with sufficient ground troops to drive out remaining civilians and isolate surviving Hezbollah guerrilla fighters from support and resupply. Then those ground troops would destroy all remaining isolated guerrillas, entirely clearing the land between Israel's northern border and the Litani River. Finally, fully replicating Israel's successful depopulation and repopulation of the Golan Heights, Jewish settlers would be brought in to secure Israeli control of the land and guard against return of Lebanese villagers so Israel could ultimately annex the region.But Israeli bombing went much further than the region south of the Litani. Israel also intensely bombed residential apartment buildings, schools, power plants, bridges, roads, and hospitals in most other parts of Lebanon, including in densely populated Beirut. The bombing of the civilians and the civilian infrastructure south of the Litani succeed in driving out 3/4 million people, nearly emptying that region. But Israel aroused world wide condemnation for the part of its bombing campaign that focused on civilians, particularly the seemingly gratuitous part of the bombing extending far beyond the border region that seemed way out of proportion. That civilian targeting could only be explained by an Israeli goal that was far more sinister then Israel's stated goal of retrieving its captured soldiers or driving Hezbollah from Israel's northern border region. The devastating bombing of houses, apartment buildings, power plants, fuel storage, roads, and bridges as far away as Beirut, and the killing of over one thousand civilians, was seen as intentionally directed toward civilians throughout Lebanon. Its purpose appears to have been to demonstrate such a level of ruthlessness as to discourage villagers from returning to their homes in southern Lebanon once the expected UN cease fire was finally imposed. While the depopulation portion of its bombing in southern Lebanon succeeded, Israel found that its first two weeks of bombing did not dislodge Hezbollah rocket launchers or substantially weaken Hezbollah's ability to resist the coming ground assault. Thus Israel was forced to delay the ground offensive while extending the bombing campaign. When Israel finally launched its big invasion on August 11, intensely negative worldwide public opinion had already forced the UN Security Council to impose a cease fire and only three days remained before that cease fire took effect. Despite the month of bombing Israel found that its tanks and infantry met fierce resistance from Hezbollah which inflicted heavy losses and kept most of the Israeli ground troops locked in a region close to the border. Only by airlifting troops with helicopters could Israel expand its presence to the region near the Litani River but not in a sufficient numbers and not with sufficient supplies and equipment to have any hope of both protecting themselves from guerrillas and guarding the river to stop returning civilians.Perhaps it was the inspiring ability of Hezbollah to withstand the bombing and continue to resist. Perhaps tens of thousands of civilians just knew that if they hesitated after the cease fire, like the Palestinians, they would become long term refugees. Whatever the reason, despite the pulverizing bombardment for 33 days, amazingly the civilian population was not so shocked and awed that they were immobilized. By the tens of thousands a flood of Lebanese civilians boldly took to the roads in an enormous act of civil disobedience to the occupying Israeli troops. Hezbollah's well executed guerrilla strategy combined with the massive display of civilian courage crushed all hopes for Israel of getting any benefit at all from this war. The nearly solid Israeli support for the war shattered immediately after the cease fire began, and a powerful wave of criticism exploded, especially among returning soldiers, many of whom announced refusal to remain in the reserves. Extreme right wing factions called for resuming the war with even more devastating strategies for dealing with Lebanese civilians. For example, an editorial in the August 20 right wing Gamla newsletter states, "The IDF could have crushed the resistance within days. It is true that instead of 600-800 civilian deaths, there would have been much more. But when you have in your hands the very future of our people, you cannot think about how things will 'look' or what they will say to you in the mainstream media."Stopping the next war, whether it is again directed at Lebanon or whether it is directed against Syria or Iran, will require a sustained world wide campaign calling on Israel to immediately withdraw all its forces from Lebanon and abide by the cease fire. Whether the next war can be prevented depends on the ability of people all over the world to deny Israeli and US attempts to find pretext to destroy the cease fire and resume or expand the war. Because Israeli troops continue to occupy southern Lebanon and blockade its ports and because elite Israeli commandos continue military attacks in defiance of the cease fire resolution, Israel provides ample grounds for building this worldwide campaign. Lebanese civilians have already played a crucial role. Now its up to the rest of us.


James Marc Leas is a patent lawyer in South Burlington, Vermont. He is a member of the National Lawyers Guild and is a board member of the Refuser Solidarity Network. He has long been active with Jewish peace groups opposing the Israeli invasions of Lebanon and occupation of Palestine. He can be reached at: jolly39@juno.com

Descent Into Moral Barbarism

Should Alan Dershowitz Target Himself for Assassination?
By NORMAN FINKELSTEIN

As Israel's military bravely fires away shells and missiles to lay waste the fragile human and physical infrastructure of Lebanon, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, waging battle on a second front to legitimize Israel's criminal aggression, bravely fires away op-eds from his foxhole at Martha's Vineyard to lay waste the fragile infrastructure of international law. These are but the latest salvoes in Dershowitz's long and distinguished career of apologetics on behalf of his Holy State.
Since becoming a born-again Zionist after the June 1967 war Dershowitz has justified each and all of Israel's egregious violations of international law. In recent years he has used the "war on terrorism" as a springboard for a full frontal assault on this body of law. Appearing shortly after the outbreak of the second intifada, his book Why Terrorism Works (2002) served to rationalize Israel's brutal repression of the uprising. In 2006 Dershowitz published a companion volume, Preemption: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways, to justify Israel's preventive use of force against Iran. It is painfully clear from their content that Dershowitz possesses little knowledge or for that matter interest in the timely political topics that purport to be the stimuli for his interventions. In reality each book is keyed to a current Israeli political crisis and seeks to rationalize the most extreme measures for resolving it. If Why Terrorism Works used the war on terrorism as a juggernaut to set back the clock on protection of civilians from occupying armies, Preemption uses the war on terrorism to set back the clock on the protection of states from wars of aggression. Dershowitz's current missives from Martha's Vineyard take aim at the protection of civilians in times of war.
The central premise of Dershowitz is that "international law, and those who administer it, must understand that the old rules" do not apply in the unprecedented war against a ruthless and fanatical foe, and that "the laws of war and the rules of morality must adapt to these [new] realities." This is not the first time such a rationale has been invoked to dispense with international law. According to Nazi ideology, ethical conventions couldn't be applied in the case of "Jews or Bolsheviks; their method of political warfare is entirely amoral." On the eve of the "preventive war" against the Soviet Union, Hitler issued the Commissar Order, which mandated the summary execution of Soviet political commissars and Jews, and set the stage for the Final Solution. He justified the order targeting them for assassination on the ground that the Judeo-Bolsheviks represented a fanatical ideology, and that in these "exceptional conditions" civilized methods of warfare had to be cast aside:
In the fight against Bolshevism it must not be expected that the enemy will act in accordance with the principles of humanity or international lawany attitude of consideration or regard for international law in respect of these persons is an errorThe protagonists of barbaric Asiatic methods of warfare are the political commissars. Accordingly if captured in battle or while resisting, they should in principle be shot.
It was simultaneously alleged that the Red Army commissars (who were assimilated to Jews) qualified neither as prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Convention nor civilians entitled to trial before military courts, but rather were in effect illegal combatants. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
It is similarly instructive that, although Dershowitz is represented, and represents himself, in the media as a liberal and civil libertarian, the sort of arguments he makes crops up most often at the far right of the political spectrum. For example, in the recent landmark decision Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court found that the petitioner, a Yemeni national captured in Afghanistan and held in Guantanamo Bay, was entitled, under both domestic statute and international law, to minimum standards of a fair trial, which the Commission Order, setting the guidelines for military commissions, didn't meet. A centerpiece of Judge Clarence Thomas's dissent was that "rules developed in the context of conventional warfare" were no longer applicable because ­ quoting President Bush ­ "the war against terrorism ushers in a new paradigm" and "this new paradigmrequires new thinking in the law of war." Inasmuch as "we are not engaged in a traditional battle with a nation-state," he went on to argue, the Court's decision "would sorely hamper the President's ability to confront and defeat a new and deadly enemy." It's hard to know where Thomas (and Bush) ends and Dershowitz begins.
The main thrust of Preemption is to justify an Israeli assault on Iran's nuclear facilities. Although the book purports to the lofty goal of constructing a jurisprudence for criminal intent prior to commission of an actual crime, Dershowitz's range of historical reference is pretty much limited to the Bible and Israel, and it is plainly not the Bible that is uppermost in his mind. To justify the Israeli assault on Iran Dershowitz sets up Israel's attack on Egypt in June 1967 as the paradigm of legitimate preemptive war and its attack on Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981 as the paradigm of legitimate preventive war. His argument seems to be that if the legitimacy of the June 1967 attack is beyond dispute and the legitimacy of the 1981 attack has come to be seen as beyond dispute, then the legitimacy of a preventive war against Iran should also be beyond dispute.
Before analyzing this argument it is instructive to look at the current legal consensus on preemptive and preventive war. Dershowitz asserts that an "accepted jurisprudence" doesn't exist. In fact, however, there is an enduring consensus, which recent events haven't shaken. In 2004 a high-level U.N. panel commissioned by the Secretary-General published its report on combating challenges to global security in the 21st century. The report reaffirmed the conventional understanding of Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, which prohibits the unilateral use of force by a State except to ward off an "armed attack" or if a "threatened attack is imminent, no other means would deflect it and the action is proportionate" (emphasis in original), the latter commonly denoted preemptive use of force. The report went on to prohibit the unilateral use of force by a State to ward off an inchoate armed attack, or what's commonly denoted preventive use of force, reaffirming that the Security Council is the sole legitimate forum for sanctioning the use of force in such a circumstance. "For those impatient with such a response," it explained, the answer must be that, in a world full of perceived potential threats, the risk to the global order and the norm of non-intervention on which it continues to be based is simply too great for the legality of unilateral preventive action, as distinct from collectively endorsed action, to be accepted. Allowing one to so act is to allow all.
Although Dershowitz puts forth Israel's attack on Egypt in June 1967 as the paradigm of preemptive use of force, both as a matter of fact and theory this claim is patently untenable. The scholarly consensus is that an Egyptian armed attack was not imminent while it is far from certain that diplomatic options had been exhausted when Israel struck. Dershowitz himself acknowledges that "it is not absolutely certain" that Egypt would have attacked, and that "Nasser may not have intended to attack." He finesses this with the assertion that Israeli leaders "reasonably believed" that an Egyptian attack was "imminent and potentially catastrophic." Yet, apart from some transparently self-serving public statements there isn't a scratch of evidence to sustain this claim either. Again, Dershowitz himself cites (in an endnote) the acknowledgment of former Prime Minister Begin, who was a member of the National Unity government in June 1967, that Israel "had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him." Even if for argument's sake it were true that Israeli leaders honestly erred, how can resort to preemptive force on the mistaken belief that an attack was imminent constitute the paradigm of legitimate use of preemption ­ or, to use Dershowitz's coinage, how can a "false positive" be the paradigmatic case? Rather the contrary, if June 1967 were the paradigm of preemption, it would undercut the legitimacy of any such resort to force. Dershowitz seems not to be aware that he has made a case not for but against preemptive war.
Dershowitz next nominates Israel's attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor as "paradigmatic" of legitimate use of preventive force. He mounts his case from multiple angles, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, but always falsely. In the first instance, Dershowitz puts preemptive war at one pole of a continuum and preventive war at the opposite pole. Although asserting that "the distinction between preventive and preemptive military action is important," and that there are "real differences between these concepts," he more often than not uses the terms interchangeably. For instance, he goes back and forth depicting the 1981 Israeli attack on Iraq's nuclear reactor and the 2003 U.S. attack on Iraq both as preemptive and preventive uses of force. By collapsing the distinction between them, whereby not even a flea's hop separates the two poles on his continuum, Dershowitz in effect legitimizes preventive war as preemptive war by another name. In like manner he redefines preemption so as to include preventive use of force: "preemption is widely, if not universally, regarded as a proper option for a nation operating under the rule of law, at least in some circumstances ­ for example, when a threat is catastrophic and relatively certain, though nonimminent." If this is preemption, one wonders what prevention would be.
In addition, although acknowledging that the U.N. panel explicitly ruled out preventive use of force, Dershowitz nonetheless maintains that it has come to be seen as legitimate. To demonstrate this he alleges that Israel's attack on Iraq's nuclear reactor has become recognized as "the proper and proportional example of anticipatory self-defense in the nuclear age" and "the paradigm for proportional, reasonable, and lawful preventive action" in the "emerging jurisprudence of preventive military actions," notwithstanding the "lack of imminence and certainty" of the Iraqi threat to Israel. He bases this resounding conclusion on a recent article in Foreign Affairs which "would certainly seem to have justified Israel's bombing of the Osirak reactor." Plainly the import of the U.N. panel's findings pales by comparison.
Finally, invoking a philosopher's wisdom that "no one law governs all things," Dershowitz maintains that although preventive war might be illegitimate for all other States it remains a legitimate option for Israel. This is because the U.N., which is the court of last appeal for inchoate armed threats, is biased against it. Accordingly, unlike all other States, Israel cannot be held accountable to international law or, put otherwise, international law might apply to everyone else but it doesn't apply to Israel: "it cannot expect the United Nations to protect it from enemy attack, andwith regard to international law and international organizations, it lives in a state of nature." To demonstrate the U.N.'s inveterate hostility to Israel, Dershowitz specifically cites "Russia's and China's veto power" in the Security Council, which has allegedly blocked action supportive of it. Yet, not once in the past 20 years has Russia or China used the veto for a Security Council resolution bearing on Israel. On the other hand, the U.S. has exercised its veto power 23 times in just the past two decades (1986-2006) in support of Israel. Moreover, due to the U.S. veto Israel has been shielded from any U.N. sanctions, although the Security Council has imposed them on 15 member States since 1990, often for violations of international law identical to those committed by Israel. Not for the first time Dershowitz has turned reality on its head.
On a related note Dershowitz correctly observes that Israel "was not condemned by the Security Council" in June 1967, although its resort to force violated the U.N. Charter, an armed Egyptian attack having been neither actual nor imminent. The Security Council and General Assembly were both divided on how to adjudicate responsibility for the war. This would seem to suggest that far from being an inherently hostile forum, the U.N. has in fact granted Israel special dispensations. More generally, as former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami observes, it was Israel's policy of creeping annexation that shifted world opinion against it:
Neither in 1948 nor in 1967 was Israel subjected to irresistible international pressure to relinquish her territorial gains because her victory was perceived as the result of a legitimate war of self-defense. But the international acquiescence created by Israel's victory in 1967 was to be extremely short-lived. When the war of salvation and survival turned into a war of conquest and settlement, the international community recoiled and Israel went on the defensive. She has remained there ever since.
Insofar as the professed goal of Dershowitz's book is not descriptive but normative ­ i.e., to devise ideal laws and institutional arrangements for combating terrorism ­ it is curious that he doesn't propose reconfiguring the Security Council to mitigate its alleged bias. In this regard another of his claims merits attention: "The UN report fails to address the situation confronting a democracy with a just claim that is unable to secure protection from the Security Council and that reasonably concludes that failing to act unilaterally will pose existential dangers to its citizens." Yet, the High-level panel report explicitly addresses this concern and devotes one of its four parts specifically to proposals for reforming the Security Council as well as other U.N. institutions, noting preliminarily that:
One of the reasons why States may want to bypass the Security Council is a lack of confidence in the quality and objectivity of its decision-making.But the solution is not to reduce the Council to impotence and irrelevance: it is to work from within to reform itnot to find alternatives to the Security Council as a source of authority but to make the Council work better than it has.
The reason Dershowitz prefers to shunt aside the Security Council rather than reform it is not hard to find: it is difficult to conceive any configuration of the Security Council that would sanction Israel's periodic depredations of neighboring Arab countries. Finally, Dershowitz justifies ignoring the Security Council's strictures on the use of preventive force because its "anachronistic, mid-twentieth century view of international law" doesn't take into account the threat posed by "nuclear annihilation." It seems he forgot about the Cold War.
Apart from the alleged biases of the U.N., Dershowitz defends Israel's unilateral right to prevent its neighbors from acquiring nuclear weapons apparently on the ground that conventional nuclear deterrence strategy is anchored in the mutually implied threat of inflicting massive civilian casualties. However Israel's neighbors know, according to him, that it would never indiscriminately target civilian population centers. Lest there be any doubt on this score he quotes former Prime Minister Begin, "That is our morality." As Lebanese civilians witnessed for themselves in 1982, and have witnessed again in 2006 from the "most moral army in the world" (Prime Minister Olmert).
The indefeasible right of Israel to wage war as it pleases would seem to grant it very broad license: if there's just "five percent likelihood" that Israel might face a compelling threat in "ten years," according to Dershowitz, it has the right to attack now, and apparently regardless of whether this potential threat emanates from a currently friendly state. This would seem to mean that no place in the world is safe from an Israeli attack at any moment. In Dershowitz's mind, this is the essence of a realistic and moral jurisprudence on war.
***
Since the outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon in July 2006, Dershowitz has used the war on terrorism to target yet another branch of international law, the protection of civilians during armed conflict. Before analyzing his allegations, it is necessary to look first at the factual picture.
In early August Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a comprehensive report devoted mainly to Israel's violations of the laws of war during the first two weeks of the conflict. Its main findings were these: over 500 Lebanese had been killed, overwhelmingly civilians, and up to 5,000 homes damaged or destroyed; "in dozens of attacks, Israeli forces struck an area with no apparent military target"; Israel attacked "both individual vehicles and entire convoys of civilians who heeded the Israeli warnings to abandon their villages" as well as "humanitarian convoys and ambulances" that were "clearly marked," while none "of the attacks on vehiclesresulted in Hezbollah casualties or the destruction of weapons"; "in some casesIsraeli forces deliberately targeted civilians"; "no cases [were found] in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack"; "on some limited occasions, Hezbollah fighters have attempted to store weapons near civilian homes and have fired rockets from areas where civilians live." The "pattern of attacks during the Israeli offensive," HRW concluded, "indicate[s] the commission of war crimes."
Contrariwise, Dershowitz has repeatedly alleged in numerous op-ed pieces that Israel typically takes "extraordinary steps to minimize civilian casualties," while Hezbollah's typical tactics were to "live among civilians, hide their missiles in the homes of civilians, fire them at civilian targets from densely populated areas, and then use civilians as human shields against counterattacks." He adduces no evidence to substantiate these claims, all of which are flatly contradicted by HRW's findings. In addition, Dershowitz juxtaposes the "indisputable reality" that "Israel uses pinpoint intelligence and smart bombs in an effortto target the terrorists" against Hezbollah which "targets Israeli population centers with anti-personnel bombs that spray thousands of pellets of shrapnel in an effort to maximize casualties." Yet, HRW has documented Israel's use in populated areas of artillery-fired cluster munitions with a "wide dispersal pattern" that "makes it very difficult to avoid civilian casualties" and a "high failure rate" such that they "injure and kill civilians even after the attack is over." Finally, Dershowitz deplores not only the actions of Hezbollah but also of "the U.N. peacekeepers on the Lebanese border [who] have turned out to be collaborators with Hezbollah." Shouldn't he get some credit for a job well done after Israel killed four of these "collaborators" in a deliberate attack on a U.N. compound?
The "new kind of warfare" in the "age of terrorism," according to Dershowitz, underscores the "absurdity and counterproductive nature of current international law." He claims, for example, that this body of law "fails" to address contingencies such as the firing of missiles "from civilian population centers." International law "must be changed," he intones, and "it must become a war crime to fire rockets from civilian population centers and then hide among civilians," while those using human shields should incur full and exclusive responsibility for "foreseeable" deaths in the event of an attack. Yet, such a scenario is hardly new and the law has hardly been silent on it: use of civilians as a shield from attack is a war crime, but it is also a war crime to disregard totally the presence of civilians even if they are being used as a shield. Dershowitz further declares that "it should, of course, already be a war crime for terrorists to target civilians from anywhere." It of course already is a war crime. He alleges, however, that "you wouldn't know it by listening to statements from some U.N. leaders and 'human rights' groups." Isn't his real beef, however, that they don't only denounce the targeting of civilians by "terrorists" but the targeting of civilians by states as well?
International law, Dershowitz alleges, is based on "old rules ­ written when uniformed armies fought other uniformed armies on a battlefield far away from cities" ­ whereas nowadays "well-armed terrorist armies" like Hezbollah "don't belong to regular armies and easily blend into civilian populations" that "recruit, finance, harbor and facilitate their terrorism." But these conditions are scarcely novel. In his writings Dershowitz often cites Michael Walzer's 1977 study Just and Unjust Wars. He surely knows, then, that Walzer devotes the chapter on guerrilla war to these issues. Consider this passage:
If you want to fight against us, the guerrillas say, you are going to have to fight civilians for you are not at war with an army, but with a nation.In fact, the guerrillas mobilize only a small part of the nation.They depend upon the counter-attacks of their enemies to mobilize the rest. Their strategy is framed in terms of the war convention: they seek to place the onus of indiscriminate warfare on the opposing army.Now, every army depends upon the civilian population of its home country for supplies, recruits, and political support. But this dependence is usually indirect, mediated by the bureaucratic apparatus of the state or the exchange system of the economy....But in guerrilla war, the dependence is immediate: the farmer hands the food to the guerrilla.Similarly, an ordinary citizen may vote for a political party that in turn supports the war effort and whose leaders are called in for military briefings. But in guerrilla war, the support a civilian provides is far more direct. He doesn't need to be briefed; he already knows the most important secret: he knows who the guerrillas are.The people, or some of them, are complicitous in guerrilla war, and the war would be impossible without their complicity.[G]uerrilla war makes for enforced intimacies, and the people are drawn into it in a new way even though the services they provide are nothing more than functional equivalents of the services civilians have always provided for soldiers.
If the questions Dershowitz poses are not original, it must be said that his answers are, at any rate coming from someone who claims to be a liberal. He writes, for instance, that "the Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit." In fact, Walzer ponders precisely this scenario in the context of the Vietnam war where, according to the rules of engagement, "civilians were to be given warning in advance of the destruction of their villages, so that they could break with the guerrillas, expel them, or leave themselves.Any village known to be hostile could be bombed or shelled if its inhabitants were warned in advance, either by the dropping of leaflets or by helicopter loudspeaker." In Walzer's judgment such rules "could hardly be defended" in view of the massive devastation wrought. In the event that "civilians, duly warned, not only refuse to expel the guerrillas but also refuse to leave themselves," Walzer goes on to stress,
so long as they give only political support, they are not legitimate targets, either as a group or as distinguishable individuals.So far as combat goes, these people cannot be shot on sight, when no firefight is in progress; nor can their villages be attacked merely because they might be used as firebases or because it is expected that they will be used; nor can they be randomly bombed and shelled, even after warning has been given.
To be sure, Walzer wrote this in the context of Vietnam. Like Dershowitz, he became a born-again Zionist after the June 1967 war and accordingly has applied an altogether different standard to Israel. Whereas Dershowitz plays the tough Jew, Walzer's assigned role has been to stamp as kosher every war Israel wages, but only after anxious sighs. Thus, while HRW was deploring Israel's war crimes, Walzer opined on cue that "from a moral perspective, Israel has mostly been fighting legitimately," and that if Israeli commanders ever faced an international tribunal, "the defense lawyers will have a good case," mainly because Hezbollah has used civilians as human shields ­ even if in the real world they haven't.
Dershowitz purports to make the case that the laws of war need to be revised in the "new" age of terrorism. In fact, his real concern is an old one. A standard tactic of Israel in its armed hostilities with Arab neighbors has been to inflict massive, indiscriminate civilian casualties, and Dershowitz's standard defense has been to deny it. But the credibility of human rights organizations that have documented these war crimes is rather higher than that of this notorious serial prevaricator, which is why he so loathes them. Dershowitz now uses the war on terror as a pretext to strip civilians of any protections in time of war, dragging the law down to put it on level with Israel's criminal practices.
The main target of his "reassessment of the laws of war" has been the fundamental distinction between civilians and combatants. Ridiculing what he deems the "increasingly meaningless word 'civilian'" and asserting that, in the case of terrorist organizations like Hezbollah, "'civilianality' is often a matter of degree, rather than a bright line," Dershowitz proposes to replace the civilian-combatant dichotomy with a "continuum of civilianality":
Near the most civilian end of this continuum are the pure innocents ­ babies, hostages and others completely uninvolved; at the more combatant end are civilians who willingly harbor terrorists, provide material resources and serve as human shields; in the middle are those who support the terrorists politically, or spiritually.
He imagines that this revision wouldn't apply to Israel because "the line between Israeli soldiers and civilians is relatively clear." But is this true? Israel has a civilian army, which means a mere call-up slip or phone call separates each adult Israeli male from a combatant. Israeli civilians willingly provide material resources to the army. To judge by its targeting of Lebanese power grids, factories, roads, bridges, trucks, vans, ambulances, airports, and seaports, Israel must reckon all civilian infrastructure legitimate military targets, in which case all Israelis residing in the vicinity of such Israeli infrastructure constitute human shields. Israel's recent brutal assault on Lebanon, like its past wars during which massive war crimes were committed, has enjoyed overwhelming political and spiritual support from the population. "If the media were to adopt the 'continuum''' he has proposed, Dershowitz reflects, "it would be informative to learn how many of the 'civilian casualties' fall closer to the line of complicity and how many fall closer to the line of innocence." It would seem, however, that on his spectrum nearly every Israeli would be complicitous.
In light of the revisions Dershowitz enters in international law, his reasoning begins to verge on the bizarre. He asserts that inasmuch as the Lebanese population overwhelmingly "supports Hezbollah," there are no real civilians or civilian casualties in Lebanon: "It is virtually impossible to distinguish the Hezbollah dead from the truly civilian dead, just as it is virtually impossible to distinguish the Hezbollah living from the civilian living." If this be the case, however, it is hard to make out the meaning of Dershowitz's praise of Israel for only targeting Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon. Didn't he just say that all of the Lebanese are Hezbollah? Similarly he condemns Hezbollah for targeting Israeli civilians. But Israelis are no less supportive of the IDF than Lebanese are of Hezbollah. Doesn't this mean that Hezbollah can't be targeting civilians in Israel because there aren't any? These are of course quibbles next to the fact that Dershowitz has now sanctioned mass murder of the Lebanese people.
It remains to consider Dershowitz's own location on the continuum of civilianality. Israel could not have waged any of its wars of aggression or committed any of its war crimes without the blanket political and military support of the United States. Using his academic pedigree Dershowitz has played a conspicuous, crucial and entirely voluntary public role in rallying such support. He has for decades grossly falsified Israel's human rights record. He has urged the use of collective punishment such as the "automatic destruction" of a Palestinian village after each Palestinian attack. He has covered up Israel's use of torture on Palestinian detainees, and himself advocated the application of "excruciating" torture on suspected terrorists such as a "needle being shoved under the fingernails." He has aligned himself with the Israeli government against courageous Israeli pilots refusing the immorality of targeted assassinations. He has denounced nonviolent resisters to the Israeli occupation as "supporters of Palestinian terrorism." He has dismissed ethnic cleansing as a "fifth-rate issue" akin to "massive urban renewal." He has advised Israel's senior government officials that Israel is not bound by international law. He has now sanctioned the extermination of the Lebanese people.
Finally, in Preemption he boasts of having vicariously participated in a targeted assassination while visiting Israel:
I watched as a high-intensity television camera, mounted on a drone, zeroed in on the apartment of a terrorist ... I watched as the camera focused on the house and the nearly empty streets.
It seems, however, that this moral pervert missed the climactic scene of his little peep show, although it isn't reported whether he got his quarter back: "I was permitted to watch for only a few minutes, and no action was taken while I was watching because the target remained in the house." One wonders whether Dershowitz carefully inserted these weasel words because, as he well knows, targeted assassinations constitute war crimes, and he might otherwise be charged as an accessory to one.
In Preemption Dershowitz observes that "there can be no question that some kinds of expression contribute significantly to some kinds of evil." In this context he recalls that the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda handed down life sentences to Hutu radio broadcasters for inciting listeners to "hatred and murders." He also recalls the highly pertinent case of Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher, who was described by writer Rebecca West as "a dirty old man of the sort that gives trouble in parks," and by Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor as "neither attractive nor bright." Although Hitler had stripped this self-styled Zionist and expert on Jews of all his political power by 1940, and his pornographic newspaper Der Stuermer had a circulation of only some 15,000 during the war, the International Tribunal at Nuremberg nonetheless sentenced Streicher to death for his murderous incitement.
On his continuum of civilianality Dershowitz appears to fall in the proximity of the Hutu radio broadcasters and Streicher ­ less direct in his appeal, more influential in his reach. It is highly unlikely, however, that he will ever be brought before a tribunal for his criminal incitement. But there is yet another possibility for achieving justice. Dershowitz is a strong advocate of targeted assassinations when "reasonable alternatives" such as arrest and capture aren't available. The conclusion seems clear -- if , and only if, -- one uses his standard and his reasoning. Of course, the preponderance of humanity, this writer [and CounterPunch, Eds.,] included, does not think this way. After all the hard-won gains of civilization, who would want to live in a world that once again legally sanctioned torture, collective punishment, assassinations and mass murder? As Dershowitz descends into barbarism, it remains a hopeful sign that few seem inclined to join him.

Norman Finkelstein's most recent book is Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history (University of California Press). His web site is www.NormanFinkelstein.com.

An Open Letter to George W. Bush on Lebanon

Telling the Israelis to "Take Your Time"

By RALPH NADER

The widespread destruction of a defenseless Lebanon-its civilians, its life-sustaining public services, its environment-is a grim and indelible testament to your consummate cruelty and ignorance. Nearly two weeks ago when your tardy Secretary of State met with the Israeli Prime Minister, the message she carried was summarized in a large headline across page one of an Israeli newspaper, "TAKE YOUR TIME."
Yes, take your time, says George W. Bush, pulverizing fleeing refugees in cars full of families, bombing apartment buildings, hospitals and the poor huddled in large south Beirut slums.
Take your time, says George W. Bush, in destroying bridges, roads, gasoline stations, airports, seaports, wheat silos, vehicles with medical supplies, clearly marked ambulances taking the wounded to clinics, even a milk factory .
Take your time, says George W. Bush, while shelters are demolished with bodies of little children together with their mothers and fathers buried in the rubble.
Take your time, says George W. Bush, while the number of fleeing refugees nears one million Lebanese, many exposed to hunger, disease, lack of potable water and medicines. All this in a country friendly to the United States, which played by your rules, protested the Syrian army back into Syria and was trying democratically to put itself together.
Take your time, says George W. Bush, while he speeds more supplies of precision missiles containing deadly anti-personnel cluster bombs which will claim the lives of innocent children for years into the future. The phosphorous bombs laying waste to fields growing crops and horribly burning innocents come from the U.S.A. under your direction.
Do you think the taxpayers of America would approve of such shipped weapons were they ever asked?
Are there words in the English language suitable for the impeachable serial war crimes you are intimately involved in committing not only in Iraq but also now through your encouragement and supplying of the once again invading Israeli government?
Are there words to describe your strategic stupidity which will further increase opposition and peril to the United States around the world and especially in the Middle East? Your own Generals and former CIA Director, Porter Goss, among others in your Administration, have declared that your occupation of Iraq is a magnet attracting the recruiting and training of more and more "terrorists" from Iraq and other countries. And so now this will be the case in Lebanon. All this is a growing "blowback," to use the CIA word for a boomeranging foreign policy, that is endangering the security of the United States.
The calibrated Israeli terror bombing of Lebanon comes in three stages. With its electronic pinpoint precision bombing and artillery, the Israeli government goes after civilians, their homes, cities, towns and villages. Then after telling some to abandon their neighborhoods, it cuts population centers off from each other by destroying transportation facilities into and inside Lebanon, making both refugee flight and delivery of emergency relief efforts either impossible or very difficult. Then its planes, tanks and artillery endanger or destroy what food, water and relief efforts manage to get through to the injured and dying. Warehouse food supplies are incinerated. About four hundred small fishing boats north of Beirut on the oil-polluted coastline were demolished as well.
All the above mayhem and much more have been reported in the U.S., European, Lebanese and Israeli media. The bulk of the fatalities in Lebanon have been civilians. The bulk of the fatalities on the Israeli side have been soldiers. Very fortunately for the Israelis, the Hezbollah rockets are very inaccurate, the vast majority falling harmlessly. Unfortunately for the Lebanese, the precision American armaments of the Israelis are very accurate, which serves to account for why the total casualties and physical destruction are 100 times greater in Lebanon than in Israel.
Most of these accurate munitions come from your decision to send them. Knowing they will be used for offensive purposes, including the lethal demolition of a long-established UN compound, in violation of the Arms Export Control Act which you have sworn to uphold, places the responsibility of being a domestic law breaker squarely on your shoulders.
There is another law that is not being enforced-the Humanitarian Aid Corridor Act of 1996 sponsored by then Republican Senator Robert Dole. Foreign aid is supposed to be cut off to any nation that obstructs the provision of humanitarian aid to another country. As one example, press reports that two tankers, each with 30,000 tons of diesel fuel critical for operating Lebanese hospitals and water pumping stations, are idling in Cyprus from fear of the totally dominant Israeli navy and air force.
There are only a few days left of fuel in Lebanon, which is heading for a larger wave of secondary casualties. They and other critical suppliers need safe passage which the U.S. Navy in the area can readily provide, should it receive orders from the Commander in Chief.
You heard high Israeli officials accurately say on the day the massive bombing of Lebanon began, followed not preceded by Hezbollah rockets, that "nothing in Lebanon is safe." That huge over-reaction to the recent Hezbollah border raid, in addition to many more previous air, sea and land border violations by the Israeli government, certainly put you on public notice.
Since you view yourself as a reborn Christian, and since you have the power to stop the Israeli state terror assaults on Lebanon, you may wish to reflect on Leviticus 19:16 "Neither shalt thou stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor."
Lebanon was a friendly country to you and you have stood by not just idly, but willfully aiding and abetting its devastation.

Elegy for Beirut

By ROBERT FISK

In the year 551, the magnificent, wealthy city of Berytus - headquarters of the imperial East Mediterranean Roman fleet - was struck by a massive earthquake. In its aftermath, the sea withdrew several miles and the survivors - ancestors of the present-day Lebanese - walked out on the sands to loot the long-sunken merchant ships revealed in front of them.
That was when a tidal wall higher than a tsunami returned to swamp the city and kill them all. So savagely was the old Beirut damaged that the Emperor Justinian sent gold from Constantinople as compensation to every family left alive.
Some cities seem forever doomed. When the Crusaders arrived at Beirut on their way to Jerusalem in the 11th century, they slaughtered every man, woman and child in the city. In the First World War, Ottoman Beirut suffered a terrible famine; the Turkish army had commandeered all the grain and the Allied powers blockaded the coast. I still have some ancient postcards I bought here 30 years ago of stick-like children standing in an orphanage, naked and abandoned.
An American woman living in Beirut in 1916 described how she "passed women and children lying by the roadside with closed eyes and ghastly, pale faces. It was a common thing to find people searching the garbage heaps for orange peel, old bones or other refuse, and eating them greedily when found. Everywhere women could be seen seeking eatable weeds among the grass along the roads..."
How does this happen to Beirut? For 30 years, I've watched this place die and then rise from the grave and then die again, its apartment blocks pitted with so many bullets they looked like Irish lace, its people massacring each other.
I lived here through 15 years of civil war that took 150,000 lives, and two Israeli invasions and years of Israeli bombardments that cost the lives of a further 20,000 of its people. I have seen them armless, legless, headless, knifed, bombed and splashed across the walls of houses. Yet they are a fine, educated, moral people whose generosity amazes every foreigner, whose gentleness puts any Westerner to shame, and whose suffering we almost always ignore.
They look like us, the people of Beirut. They have light-coloured skin and speak beautiful English and French. They travel the world. Their women are gorgeous and their food exquisite. But what are we saying of their fate today as the Israelis - in some of their cruellest attacks on this city and the surrounding countryside - tear them from their homes, bomb them on river bridges, cut them off from food and water and electricity? We say that they started this latest war, and we compare their appalling casualties - 240 in all of Lebanon by last night - with Israel's 24 dead, as if the figures are the same.
And then, most disgraceful of all, we leave the Lebanese to their fate like a diseased people and spend our time evacuating our precious foreigners while tut-tutting about Israel's "disproportionate" response to the capture of its soldiers by Hizbollah.
I walked through the deserted city centre of Beirut yesterday and it reminded more than ever of a film lot, a place of dreams too beautiful to last, a phoenix from the ashes of civil war whose plumage was so brightly coloured that it blinded its own people. This part of the city - once a Dresden of ruins - was rebuilt by Rafiq Hariri, the prime minister who was murdered scarcely a mile away on 14 February last year.
The wreckage of that bomb blast, an awful precursor to the present war in which his inheritance is being vandalised by the Israelis, still stands beside the Mediterranean, waiting for the last UN investigator to look for clues to the assassination - an investigator who has long ago abandoned this besieged city for the safety of Cyprus.
At the empty Etoile restaurant - best snails and cappuccino in Beirut, where Hariri once dined Jacques Chirac - I sat on the pavement and watched the parliamentary guard still patrolling the façade of the French-built emporium that houses what is left of Lebanon's democracy. So many of these streets were built by Parisians under the French mandate and they have been exquisitely restored, their mock Arabian doorways bejewelled with marble Roman columns dug from the ancient Via Maxima a few metres away.
Hariri loved this place and, taking Chirac for a beer one day, he caught sight of me sitting at a table. "Ah Robert, come over here," he roared and then turned to Chirac like a cat that was about to eat a canary. "I want to introduce you, Jacques, to the reporter who said I couldn't rebuild Beirut!"
And now it is being un-built. The Martyr Rafiq Hariri International Airport has been attacked three times by the Israelis, its glistening halls and shopping malls vibrating to the missiles that thunder into the runways and fuel depots. Hariri's wonderful transnational highway viaduct has been broken by Israeli bombers. Most of his motorway bridges have been destroyed. The Roman-style lighthouse has been smashed by a missile from an Apache helicopter. Only this small jewel of a restaurant in the centre of Beirut has been spared. So far.
It is the slums of Haret Hreik and Ghobeiri and Shiyah that have been levelled and "rubble-ised" and pounded to dust, sending a quarter of a million Shia Muslims to seek sanctuary in schools and abandoned parks across the city. Here, indeed, was the headquarters of Hizbollah, another of those "centres of world terror" which the West keeps discovering in Muslim lands. Here lived Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Party of God's leader, a ruthless, caustic, calculating man; and Sayad Mohamed Fadlallah, among the wisest and most eloquent of clerics; and many of Hizbollah's top military planners - including, no doubt, the men who planned over many months the capture of the two Israeli soldiers last Wednesday.
But did the tens of thousands of poor who live here deserve this act of mass punishment? For a country that boasts of its pin-point accuracy - a doubtful notion in any case, but that's not the issue - what does this act of destruction tell us about Israel? Or about ourselves?
In a modern building in an undamaged part of Beirut, I come, quite by chance, across a well known and prominent Hizbollah figure, open-neck white shirt, dark suit, clean shoes. "We will go on if we have to for days or weeks or months or..." And he counts these awful statistics off on the fingers of his left hand. "Believe me, we have bigger surprises still to come for the Israelis - much bigger, you will see. Then we will get our prisoners and it will take just a few small concessions."
I walk outside, feeling as if I have been beaten over the head. Over the wall opposite there is purple bougainvillaea and white jasmine and a swamp of gardenias. The Lebanese love flowers, their colour and scent, and Beirut is draped in trees and bushes that smell like paradise.
As for the huddled masses from the powder of the bombed-out southern slums of Haret Hreik, I found hundreds of them yesterday, sitting under trees and lying on the parched grass beside an ancient fountain donated to the city of Beirut by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid. How empires fall.
Far away, across the Mediterranean, two American helicopters from the USS Iwo Jima could be seen, heading through the mist and smoke towards the US embassy bunker complex at Awkar to evacuate more citizens of the American Empire. There was not a word from that same empire to help the people lying in the park, to offer them food or medical aid.
And across them all has spread a dark grey smoke that works its way through the entire city, the fires of oil terminals and burning buildings turning into a cocktail of sulphurous air that moves below our doors and through our windows. I smell it when I wake in the morning. Half the people of Beirut are coughing in this filth, breathing their own destruction as they contemplate their dead.
The anger that any human soul should feel at such suffering and loss was expressed so well by Lebanon's greatest poet, the mystic Khalil Gibran, when he wrote of the half million Lebanese who died in the 1916 famine, most of them residents of Beirut:
My people died of hunger, and he who
Did not perish from starvation was
Butchered with the sword;
They perished from hunger
In a land rich with milk and honey.
They died because the vipers and
Sons of vipers spat out poison into
The space where the Holy Cedars and
The roses and the jasmine breathe
Their fragrance.
And the sword continues to cut its way through Beirut. When part of an aircraft - perhaps the wing-tip of an F-16 hit by a missile, although the Israelis deny this - came streaking out of the sky over the eastern suburbs at the weekend, I raced to the scene to find a partly decapitated driver in his car and three Lebanese soldiers from the army's logistics unit. These are the tough, brave non-combat soldiers of Kfar Chim, who have been mending power and water lines these past six days to keep Beirut alive.
I knew one of them. "Hello Robert, be quick because I think the Israelis will bomb again but we'll show you everything we can." And they took me through the fires to show me what they could of the wreckage, standing around me to protect me.
And a few hours later, the Israelis did come back, as the men of the small logistics unit were going to bed, and they bombed the barracks and killed 10 soldiers, including those three kind men who looked after me amid the fires of Kfar Chim.
And why? Be sure - the Israelis know what they are hitting. That's why they killed nine soldiers near Tripoli when they bombed the military radio antennas. But a logistics unit? Men whose sole job was to mend electricity lines? And then it dawns on me. Beirut is to die. It is to be starved of electricity now that the power station in Jiyeh is on fire. No one is to be allowed to keep Beirut alive. So those poor men had to be liquidated.
Beirutis are tough people and are not easily moved. But at the end of last week, many of them were overcome by a photograph in their daily papers of a small girl, discarded like a broken flower in a field near Ter Harfa, her feet curled up, her hand resting on her torn blue pyjamas, her eyes - beneath long, soft hair - closed, turned away from the camera. She had been another "terrorist" target of Israel and several people, myself among them, saw a frightening similarity between this picture and the photograph of a Polish girl lying dead in a field beside her weeping sister in 1939.
I go home and flick through my files, old pictures of the Israeli invasion of 1982. There are more photographs of dead children, of broken bridges. "Israelis Threaten to Storm Beirut", says one headline. "Israelis Retaliate". "Lebanon At War". "Beirut Under Siege". "Massacre at Sabra and Chatila".
Yes, how easily we forget these earlier slaughters. Up to 1,700 Palestinians were butchered at Sabra and Chatila by Israel's proxy Christian militia allies in September of 1982 while Israeli troops - as they later testified to Israel's own court of inquiry - watched the killings. I was there. I stopped counting the corpses when I reached 100. Many of the women had been raped before being knifed or shot.
Yet when I was fleeing the bombing of Ghobeiri with my driver Abed last week, we swept right past the entrance of the camp, the very spot where I saw the first murdered Palestinians. And we did not think of them. We did not remember them. They were dead in Beirut and we were trying to stay alive in Beirut, as I have been trying to stay alive here for 30 years.
I am back on the sea coast when my mobile phone rings. It is an Israeli woman calling me from the United States, the author of a fine novel about the Palestinians. "Robert, please take care," she says. "I am so, so sorry about what is being done to the Lebanese. It is unforgivable. I pray for the Lebanese people, and the Palestinians, and the Israelis." I thank her for her thoughtfulness and the graceful, generous way she condemned this slaughter.
Then, on my balcony - a glance to check the location of the Israeli gunboat far out in the sea-smog - I find older clippings. This is from an English paper in 1840, when Beirut was a great Ottoman city. "Beyrouth" was the dateline. "Anarchy is now the order of the day, our properties and personal safety are endangered, no satisfaction can be obtained, and crimes are committed with impunity. Several Europeans have quitted their houses and suspended their affairs, in order to find protection in more peaceable countries."
On my dining-room wall, I remember, there is a hand-painted lithograph of French troops arriving in Beirut in 1842 to protect the Christian Maronites from the Druze. They are camping in the Jardin des Pins, which will later become the site of the French embassy where, only a few hours ago, I saw French men and women registering for their evacuation. And outside the window, I hear again the whisper of Israeli jets, hidden behind the smoke that now drifts 20 miles out to sea.
Fairouz, the most popular of Lebanese singers, was to have performed at this year's Baalbek festival, cancelled now like all Lebanon's festivals of music, dance, theatre and painting. One of her most popular songs is dedicated to her native city:
To Beirut - peace to Beirut with all my heart
And kisses - to the sea and clouds,
To the rock of a city that looks like an old sailor's face.
From the soul of her people she makes wine,
From their sweat, she makes bread and jasmine.
So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire?