The Donkey Carts of War

Common Sense
John Maxwell

When I heard they'd rocketed a donkey cart in Gaza and killed an old woman and her grandchild as well, I thought that it must have been a mistake.

That was about two weeks ago, so this week I was a little surprised to hear an Israeli spokesman saying that even donkey-carts were now military targets in Lebanon. And when, as I write this, I hear President Bush calling his enemies 'fascists' I know that the world has turned, perhaps in concert with my stomach. Or maybe not.

As Nicholas Kristof says in Thursday's New York Times, the killing of children, even when they lack geopolitical significance, is a tragedy. He was writing about Darfur and Arab genocide. I was also thinking about Haiti, which lacks geopolitical significance at this moment - if one concedes that justice and human rights are of no geopolitical significance.

In Nazareth, so dear to Christianity, an Israeli Arab forgave Hezbollah for the death of his sons from rocket fire, because, he said, it would not have been fired had Israel behaved itself.

People have forgotten, if they were ever conscious, of the suffering of the eight million Haitians, who have been for several years the victims of a slow-motion genocide; and in Gaza what looks remarkably like genocide is going almost entirely unnoticed.

The new Middle East, according to Dr Condoleezza Rice, is, as we speak, undergoing its bloody birth pangs in Lebanon, overshadowing all else.

There may in fact be a new Middle East a-borning, and perhaps even a new world, but there is the distinct possibility that the presumptive parents may well be disappointed in the newborn. It may be a 'jacket', as we say in Jamaica, or a 'throwback', as they used to claim in late nineteenth-century English novels, to explain children who didn't look at all like their fathers.

The intended birth certificate for the newborn was being prepared at the United Nations until the godparents were rudely interrupted by the news that there were interested parties who were apparently disputing paternity.

The document, a so-called ceasefire agreement, was an attempt to repartition the Middle East by slicing off part of Lebanon in a Solomonic judgment and giving it to Israel. That was not how it was described, of course, but that's what it would have been. The government of Lebanon and Hezbollah were among those who objected. Even France, one of the putative parents, realised that the original plan was a non-starter because it ignored Lebanese interests.

The problem really is that neither the Americans, British nor the Israelis, regard Lebanon as a serious country whose interests are of some import. The Lebanese army is laughable. With its 60,000 soldiers, it cannot do as much as Hezbollah can with 2,500 fighters.

And, since Hezbollah has prevented Israel from dismembering Lebanon and confined their advance to a few miles across the border, Hezbollah must certainly have an interest in the planning. But there is more.

Nearly 90% of Lebanese now support Hezbollah, somewhat more than support either the president or the prime minister. The fact that Hezbollah does not formally control the parliament may be a delicious merry-thought for the US but the facts on the ground, as the Israelis like to describe them, are that Hezbollah must be a major player in any settlement or attempted settlement of this crisis. The state, after all, is the party, which possesses a monopoly of armed force.

Hezbollah, backed by 87% of the Lebanese and blocking Israel's conquest of the country, must satisfy anyone who deals in facts. Only Hezbollah can disarm Hezbollah.

The West, including Israel, prefer to see Hezbollah as 'terrorists' rather than what they really are - a legitimate resistance to the occupation of their country by Israel. Their role is recognised by international law, custom, and practice. And they are a natural and predictable response to Israel's behaviour over the last half-century.

In Gaza too, Hamas is the homegrown response to Israeli oppression. It too is a resistance movement, termed terrorist by the US, Britain and much of the European Union. In Europe, partisan groups like Hamas and Hezbollah were crucial in driving the Germans out of France, Italy and other occupied countries. And the epic story of the (illegal?) Jewish resistance in Warsaw can still make your hair stand on end.

The Palestinians, like the Haitians, are not considered mature enough to govern themselves or perhaps, they happen to be standing just where the Christians are intending to shoot, in the words of the old 'joke'.

The Israeli establishment have it as an article of faith that Arabs and Muslims cannot be trusted. They are enormously grateful to Iran's President Ahmedinejab for his persistent imprecations against Israel and portray him as an anti-Semite, like Hitler and the Nazis, and he is presumed to want to wipe Jews off the face of the earth. This claim has enormous resonance among those Jews and non-Jews who believe that every politician says exactly what he means.

It is not frivolous to describe the Middle East as almost as much a semantic problem as a political and religious problem. One important question is, what is the difference between Jews, Israel, and Zionism?

Originally, Zionism was an idea to find a home for the Jews where they would be safe from persecution and employ their genius to provide a 'light for the world'. The nationalist movement was not originally religious although it was based on faith. Not all Jews can be described as ethnically Semitic, while Palestinians and most other 'Arabs' are considered Semitic.

The Iranians or Persians may be largely Muslim but they are neither Semitic, nor Arabs. The so-called Arabs of the Sudan seem to the naked eye to be black, whatever that signifies. This welter of conflicting definitions is fertile ground for anyone who wants to make trouble. It is not so productive for those who wish to make peace.

The current crisis may, paradoxically, provide a serious opportunity for peacemaking, particularly because the other possibilities are so potentially catastrophic.

The fact that Hezbollah has not only survived but fought off the world's fifth most powerful army is going to make life more dangerous for us all - at least initially - but it also has within it the seeds of a more peaceful world.

It is now freely admitted that Hassan Nasrallah has more authority in the Middle East at this time than any other Arab - including Mubarak and Assad. The example of Hezbollah is bound to suggest new strategies to the oppressed of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and the Maghreb. It really doesn't matter if the populations are Shia or Sunni. Hezbollah shows what can be achieved by commitment, discipline, and application and you may be sure that many in North Africa and the Middle East are absorbing that lesson.

This in turn signals serious trouble for the West and its oil companies, for a start, whose fortunes depend on the corrupt sheiks and princelings who share the wealth with them and not with their people.

Israel realises some of the danger in the present crisis. They need to get out of Lebanon quickly without further humiliation or casualties. Hezbollah has now sterilised nearly half of Israel for four weeks, with nearly a million people in bomb shelters and unable to work. At the same time, Israel's destruction of Lebanese infrastructure and wealth has the potential to create a really dangerous enemy right next door.

Wise statesmen should be able to realise that the current upheaval provides a huge and never to be repeated opportunity to encourage serious economic development in the whole region, beginning with the Palestinian state and Lebanon. Prosperous, autonomous states, no matter who governs them, are always more reliable neighbours than desperate, revenge-seeking paupers.

The Arabs have conceded Israel's right to exist. What is necessary is for the West and Israel to concede that the Arabs too, have the right to exist and to develop themselves in their own way, without interference and disruption.

The major problem is that the people of Palestine and the other Arab states neighbouring Israel are continually, incessantly and purposefully libelled as incompetent, shiftless good-for-nothings, only interested in blowing up things and in praying to Mecca several times a day.

It is more or less the same treatment dealt to black Americans openly up to the sixties and more discreetly since then. It is the same kind of treatment accorded to the Haitian people whose ancestors were the first in the world to promulgate universal human rights. Mathematics and writing may have evolved in North Africa and the Middle East, but the peoples of these areas, having lost imperial power, appear to have simultaneously lost their capacity to think.

The Olmecs of Mexico had the curious habit of carving monumental statues of black people - whom European scholars agree they obviously could never have seen - and managed to develop systems of writing and a calendar more accurate than any developed in the 'civilised world' for a thousand years after they went missing from history.

A cursory glance at the history of civilisation and power makes it apparent that theories of race, ethnicity and racism have been mainly developed as means for one set of people to assert their hegemony over another - especially important when both sets of people lay claim to the same resources.

Notwithstanding the effortless superiority of European civilisation, as represented by the Israelis, it seems clear from the events of this week that their hapless opponents, Hezbollah, have been observing what may be called more civilised practices in their war.

Hezbollah has apparently aimed its notoriously unreliable Katyushas at areas containing military targets and, possessed of an unknown but fearsome range of other rockets, have refrained from aiming them at major population centres.

Those aimed at Haifa, for instance, are mainly aimed at the port and the military installations round it, and not at households. Nasrallah has, however, threatened to aim them at Israel's capital Tel Aviv, if Israel attacks central Beirut.

And despite the Israelis' contention that they are engaging in precision destruction, they have managed to kill a thousand Lebanese, mainly civilians, and make a million refugees. In Gaza, precision armaments managed to destroy a donkey cart and kill an old woman and her granddaughter two weeks ago. They were of no geopolitical significance.

While Hezbollah's rockets have paralysed northern Israel, they have killed just over a hundred Israelis, about half of them soldiers killed in action.

To report these facts is dangerous, because people will say that doing so is anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist. But there must come a time for the truth, when avoidable conflict is creating so much grief, agony, anxiety, destruction and devastating the natural and cultural environment of the region and the world.

It is necessary to ask why, for instance, has Israel kidnapped half of the government of Palestine? Why has it since the defeat of Fatah, tried to starve the Palestinians into submission? Why has it been bombing the infrastructure of Gaza, including the power stations, and why does the Israeli army telephone people to inform them that their houses will be bombed in two hours and they had better get out? And what, pray, are targeted assassinations but state murder?

Tactics such as these would do enormous damage to the reputation of Israel and its sponsors if they ever became widely known. The problem is that the western Press, as it is called, conceals these facts in what is clearly a public relations exercise.

Finally, it was entertaining (I can't think of another word) to watch CNN as it discredited a photographer who had doctored a photograph of Beirut bombing to make it seem more dramatic. If the photographer had had any practice in doctoring photos he could simply have increased the contrast and decreased the brightness of the picture on his computer. Poor bastard. He is now an object of abject scorn.

What I don't understand though, is why the US Press has so far not acknowledged the deliberate and damaging doctoring of a video in 2004, which was widely used to discredit Howard Dean, then a presidential candidate. Dean was speaking in a large, noisy hall and had to shout to make himself heard.

The paragons of purity in the US Press used sophisticated techniques to strip out the noise and amplify Dean's voice, with the result that he appeared to be screaming and out of control. He didn't make the cut, of course.

Now, that's what I call terrorism.