When Israel gets angry, try not to be Lebanese. It doesn’t seem to matter who provokes Israel’s wrath, its government cannot break the habit of taking it out on Lebanon. It used to get mad at the Palestine Liberation Organization, and, sure as shooting, it would bomb Lebanon. Now, when it loses patience with Syria, it considers carefully what to do, and you guessed it - it bombs Lebanon.
No one should be surprised to see warplanes dispatched over Lebanon because the Orthodox vigilantes in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim throw rocks at people for driving on the Sabbath.
Israel bombs Lebanon, north and south, up and down the coast, from the sky, the sea and the land. It hits houses and electricity plants, guerrilla bases and villages, houses and fields. In the latest bout of Israeli bellicosity, Lebanon lost three electricity-generating stations. Lebanese far from the frontlines of the Israeli-occupied south are, as a result, living most of their nights in darkness.
Lest anyone in Lebanon hit back at Israel, Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy issued a warning: “If Katysuha rockets fall on our settlements, the soil of Lebanon will burn.”
I’m trying to imagine what would make soil burn. In many years of covering wars in the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe, I’ve seen trees, office buildings and hospitals on fire, not to mention the bodies of people and animals. I’ve seen vineyards and grass go up in flames, leaving the earth scorched. But in all the lands that have been overrun by Iraqis, Somalis, Ethiopians, Israelis and Serbs, I’ve never seen dirt burn. Napalm might do it, I suppose, going deep into the soil the way its manufacuters intend it to penetrate human pores. Nuclear warheads could do the job, certainly, and Israel has those in abundance. Israeli military scientists, however, may have developed some new explosive that sets dirt on fire.
Codename: Topsoil Terminator, Dirt Devastator or Ground Greaser? If the new super-weapon proves effective, it would ignite not only the dry soil of the desert, but wet marshlands, riverbank and seabed.
There was a time when Israel wielded the mere threat to invade Lebanon. It was a fearsome prospect to the Lebanese, who went to war against the PLO in 1975 in large part to avoid seeing it carried out. The threat became useless once it was used in 1982. Lebanese Shiites introduced the Israelis to their weapon of choice, the suicide car bomb, and Israel began backing out.
Suddenly, the Lebanese confronted with live Israeli soldiers on their
unburned earth were no longer afraid of them. Israeli boys have been dying in Lebanon ever since, and Israel’s latest aerial adventure came in part because Shiite guerrillas killed six of them in Lebanon.
No matter how far south the military moved, they hung on tenaciously to the strip, about 10 percent of Lebanese territory, that they first occupied in March 1978. Israel invaded at that time to crush the PLO, which has subsequently become its collaborator in controlling the natives of the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
The United States, which would later go to war with Iraq over the principle that other countries should not be invaded and occupied, supplied Israel with weapons and diplomatic support while it set up camp on Lebanon’s fertile earth. The UN Security Council, however, passed one of its more muscular resolutions, calling for Israel to “immediately cease its military action against Lebanese territorial integrity and withdraw its forces from
all Lebanese territory.”
Some would accuse Israel of violating the resolution, cynically pointing out that Israeli forces are still there.
The destruction of south Lebanon is one of the saddest tales of modern
times, a 30-year war against peasants that began when the Palestinians moved their bases to Lebanon from Jordan. The bloody southern war displaced hundreds of thousands of Lebanese Shiites and created the slums of southern Beirut from which Hizbullah sprang during Israel’s big invasion of 1982.
Israel expelled the PLO from Beirut and found itself facing the newly
created Hizbullah, a more vicious and effective enemy. Hizbullah, which ungraciously kidnapped me and a lot of other Westerners in the 1980s, wants to attack Israel steadily until it leaves Lebanon. From time to time, Syria, which has made Lebanon its colony, will not allow it to do so. Then, for Syrian reasons, south Lebanon becomes tranquil. When negotiations over the Golan Heights broke down, Syria allowed Hizbullah to resume its favorite pastime, attacking Israeli occupation forces.
Yet Israel has not attacked Syria, whose army although it could not win a war could inflict damage on Israel far greater than anything Hizbullah is capable of.
We should know more about what’s going on in the south of Lebanon, but only a few reporters notably Britain’s David Hirst and Robert Fisk are around to keep an eye on it. Last September, the Israelis picked up a journalist in south Lebanon, a woman named Cosette Ibrahim and two friends of hers. They locked her up in the notorious Khiam prison. That should discourage other Lebanese, and possibly foreign, reporters from looking too closely.
So what is the solution? Lebanon’s prime minister, a mild academic named Salim Hoss, suggested: “We say that the solution, simply, would be to terminate the Israeli occupation.” The Israelis say they intend to leave Lebanon in July.
That’s one idea. But perhaps there’s a more useful one. The rest of the world could follow the Israeli example. Nearly every country is troubled by dissidence or external attack, and every country wants to know how to respond to violence and intimidation by drug dealers, religious fanatics and political malcontents.
Here’s my advice to them all. When Algeria is bothered by Islamic
fundamentalist bombers, when Canada can no longer cope with Quebecois
separatists, when Britain is beset by the IRA, when Spain is confronted by angry Basques, when Turkey wants to make a point with rebellious Kurds, when dear Mother Russia wants to teach a lesson to recalcitrant Chechens, they could do what Israel does: bomb Lebanon.
The Lebanese don’t mind. They’re used to it.
