Rage of the Elephant: Israel in Lebanon By Ronnie Kasrils, MP

Rage of the Elephant: Israel in Lebanon

By Ronnie Kasrils, MP

Al-Jazeerah, September 5, 2006

Israel is like the elephants of the Kruger National Park, observed Ariel Sharon’s former spokesman, on a recent visit to South Africa. Ra’anan Gissin was speaking as guest of the country’s Zionist Federation: “We just want to be left alone,” he pleaded, “We seem docile but if you wound us we can go crazy because we are an endangered species”.

As the world has seen, Lebanon - half Israel’s size - has just experienced the wrath of the behemoth: its people, capital, towns, villages, highways, bridges, power and water utilities ground into the dust.

The apparent trigger of rage was the seizure by Hizbullah of two Israeli soldiers – one originally from Durban,.

For a similar Hamas attack two weeks previously, the people of Gaza paid a price of two hundred-to-one killed and vital infrastructure flattened. The death toll in Lebanon is over 1,200 to 150 Israeli dead - 120 of the latter are soldiers. One third of Lebanon’s dead are children. Thousands more have been mutilated; had their homes razed to the ground; one quarter of the population was displaced; the country is blockaded.

The Norwegian writer Joostein Gaarder responded: “We no longer recognize the state of Israel. We could not recognize the Apartheid regime…We call child murderers ‘child murderers’… We do not recognize the principle of a thousand Arab eyes for one Israeli eye”.

The world struggles to understand the cause of the conflict. Talk of Israeli Jews being an endangered species is the standard Zionist position: The Jews began returning to Palestine at the end of the 19th Century to reclaim their biblical homeland. As they acquired land they were met with increasingly violent opposition from the Arabs. The settlers were forced to defend themselves then, as now.

In fact from the onset Zionism aimed at the dispossession of the indigenous population so that Israel could become a wholly Jewish State. As the Palestinians became aware of these intentions they quite naturally began resisting. At Israel’s independence in 1948, based on the UN Partition Plan – approximately 56% of the land went to the Jewish state and 44% to the Palestinians – Israel acquired the power, aid and resources to expand to 78% of the former territory, expelled Palestinians and with American backing became regional superpower.

With the illegal Jewish Israeli settlements, security road network, and construction of the monstrous wall around the militarily occupied West Bank, the remaining Palestinians are ghettoized within 12% of their original territory. This dispossession is reminiscent of Apartheid and its 13% of Bantustan homelands. For many this is the fundamental cause of the conflict.

The Lebanon too has been a part of Zionist annexation plans. Israel regarded the Litany river to its north as its natural border; constantly sought to turn the country into a Christian bulwark against the Muslims; invaded in 1948, 1978 and 1982 and stayed until 2000, before being driven out by Hizbullah. In that period Israel provoked civil war; connived in massacres; created a proxy army in the south; still holds onto strategic farmland. No wonder a retreating Israeli soldier grumbled that Lebanon was a never ending story.

What lies behind Israel’s latest aggression? Could such disproportionate response really have been over the abduction of two soldiers? There have been constant border skirmishes. Israel could have responded with local action or the prisoner exchange Hizbullah sought. The dogs of war were let lose instead.

Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, was of course subject of a testosterone evaluation. Unlike most of his predecessors he is no former army general. As new bull elephant he had to prove his mettle, see off attacks from his right flank and teach the Arabs a lesson. But there is more to Israel’s backlash than that.

Noted Israeli peace activists had previously warned that the military were waiting to use any provocation in order to unleash “a possible combination of intensified state terror and mass killing” on Gaza - to protect Sharon’s “unilateral disengagement” strategy at all costs.

Significantly, Israel has positioned itself within the new strategy of counter-terrorism propounded by the Washington neo-conservatives in the post 9/11 world. Many commentators suggest that for the United States, the broader goal is to strangle the axis of Hizbullah, Hamas, Syria and Iran, which the Bush administration believes is pooling resources to change the strategic playing field in the Middle East. A senior Israeli official explained that the Hizbullah raid had provided “a unique moment with a convergence of interest.” For Israel this new paradigm is seen as most welcome for it shifts focus away from the Arab-Israeli conflict as the root cause of the problem. Some would argue that such “convergence” gave Israeli hawks the incentive for launching the Lebanon onslaught. Some would point out the grave risks of tying the destiny of Israel’s people to such an agenda.

People’s resistance in a just cause is not easily crushed. One reason for Gissin’s South African visit was to assure local Zionists that Israel did not lose the war to Hizbullah. They lost the war on the airwaves, he said, not on the ground. But clearly, they lost it both ways. Hizbullah, whom they declared they would eradicate, again taught them a lesson in the Litani valley, and again exposed the myth of Israeli invincibility. Repression has the habit of generating more resolute resistance – in Lebanon and Palestine.

Israel lost the battle for public opinion because the world saw the corpses of Arab children being dug out from the rubble of destroyed buildings.

Are people not saying: “Now Jews too have behaved like Nazis.”

Those were the words of Israel’s first minister of agriculture, Aharon Cizlang, in May 1948 after the Deir Yassin massacres. He added: “and my entire being has been shaken.”

How much longer will the world permit Israel to get away with land theft and child murder? The sieges and check-points; the collective punishment and targeted executions; the house demolitions and ethnic cleansing; the abduction of legally elected parliamentarians and government ministers…. When Israel’s new military chief, Dan Halitz, ordered a one ton bomb dropped on an apartment block in Gaza city to take out a Hamas leader, he said that his only feeling was the sensation of the bump of the plane as the device was released. No remorse for the women and children blown to smithereens with the target. He said he slept well at night.

Like Aharon Cizlang we are all shaken. We sorrow for those who died under rocket fire in Israel. But we do not blame Hizbullah or Palestinian resistance any more than we blamed South Africa liberation forces when civilians died. We blamed the racist policies of a corrupt government that cynically placed its own people in the firing line.

By bombing Beirut Israel’s leaders knew there would be retaliation, just as when they carry out assassinations to provoke reaction and wreck unwanted negotiations. To them the terror of their own citizens, fleeing south or hiding in bomb-shelters, is an acceptable part of their cynical calculations. As Tanya Reinhart, Israeli peace activist, observed: “ For the Israeli military leadership, not only the Lebanese and the Palestinians, but also the Israelis are just pawns in some big military vision.” And how telling when the missiles fell on Haifa that amongst the victims were Israeli Arabs whose government did not bother to provide them with shelters.

Like Joostein Gaarder we must call baby killers ‘baby killers’, and declare that those using methods reminiscent of the Nazis need to be told they are behaving like Nazis. May Israelis wake up and see reason, as happened in South Africa, and negotiate peace. Finally, let us learn from what helped open white South African eyes: the combination of a just struggle reinforced by international solidarity utilizing the weapons of boycott and sanctions.

(This article was published in the Mail and Guardian, Johannesburg, on 1st September 2006. Ronnie Kasrils is Minister for Intelligence, South African Government, writing in his personal capacity).

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

Apartheid Wall


The Israeli Land-Grab Apartheid Wall built inside the Palestinian territories, here separating Abu Dis from occupied East Jerusalem. (IPC, 7/4/04).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python. (Alquds,10/25/03).

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