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Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 July 1999 Issue No. 436 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 July 1999 Issue No. 436
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Special Interview Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters The Kiryat Shmona alibi
By Graham UsherOn 25 June Kiryat Shmona's city hall stood as eloquent testimony to Israen. Struck by a Katyusha rocket the night before, the northern town's municipal headquarters was a tangle of blasted window frames, charred brick and shattered glass.
For those few of Kiryat Shmona's 20,000 or so inhabitants who dared to emerge from their underground bunkers that day, City Hall was the memorial where two of their number paid with their lives for smoking a cigarette in the wrong place at the wrong time. For the Lebanese government and the families of nine Lebanese citizens killed in the name of the town's "security", it is the latest in a long list of pretexts used to justify Israel's long, murderous occupation of their country. For Ronan, born and bred in the city and a veteran of three years military service in south Lebanon, City Hall and the empty streets around it are another day of life in Israel's most lethal border town. Yet even he is starting to show symptoms of defeat.
"I don't know how much more I can take of this," he said. How did he think the Lebanese felt? "I don't know how much more they can take of it either," he added.
The Lebanese resistance movement, Hizbullah, targeted Kiryat Shmona after Israeli warplanes had killed several Lebanese civilians and taken out a power station in Beirut in retaliation for two earlier waves of Katyusha rockets that had landed in northern Israel causing minimal damage and injury. Those salvos had been in response to Israel's proxy South Lebanon Army's wounding of four Lebanese civilians in Kabrikha, a village north of Israel's self declared "security zone" and whose shelling by the SLA was thus in deliberate violation of the 1996 "Grapes of Wrath" understandings that supposedly govern the rules of war in occupied south Lebanon. Hizbullah's consistent line is to meet Israeli violations, and death or injury to Lebanese civilians, with violations of their own.
And Israel's consistent line is to then violate to a "disproportionately" greater extent. In reply to Hizbullah's 60 Katyusha rockets in northern Galilee, the Israeli airplanes flew 34 sorties over Lebanon which, by their close on 25 June, had wrecked two power stations, a sports stadium, a communications centre and three bridges on Lebanon's southern coastal road. The human toll was similarly asymmetrical. Israel suffered the deaths of two of its civilians and the injury of ten, one of them seriously. Lebanon lost eight civilians, injury to 62 others and costs to its slowly recovering economy that will run into hundreds of millions of dollars. It was, commented Israel's chief of staff, Shaul Mofaz, "an appropriate response".
In fact, it was restrained, opined Israel's outgoing defence minister, Moshe Arens. Should Hizbullah continue to pitch Katyushas into Israel, he warned, the onslaught of 24-25 June was merely "the tip of the tip" of what Israel would do. Damascus, Beirut and Hizbullah know he is not bluffing, which may account for why hostilities in occupied south Lebanon have been relatively quiet since the latest stand-off. That, and the enormous diplomatic effort that has been expended to spare the blushes of Israel's prime minister-elect, Ehud Barak.
Barak's spokespeople were at pains to impress that Israel's latest military adventure in Lebanon was the last act of the old government rather than the first act of the new. Binyamin Netanyahu had "informed" his successor of the raids but not "consulted" him about them; the "sole responsibility" for Israel's first strikes on Beirut in three years was that of the outgoing Israeli cabinet alone, they said.
This may be seen as so much bluster for diplomatic consumption. Very few Israeli commentators doubt that Barak's response would have been much different to Netanyahu's given the circumstances that prevailed last week, especially as the main thrust for the attacks came less from Likud than for the Israeli army. As Israeli correspondent Ze'ev Schiff put it in Haaretz on 27 June, Barak was "in the loop" of the decision to hit Lebanon's civilian infrastructure and could have "expressed his dissatisfaction" with it "if he had wanted to".
Barak and his people's discomfort arose less from the nature of Israel's response than from its timing. Less than 24 hours before the first sorties took off for Beirut, the Israeli public had been regaled with media accounts of a virtual love-in between their new leader and Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad. In an interview with the London based Al-Hayat newspaper, Barak said the "only way to build a comprehensive and lasting peace in the Middle East is by means of an agreement with Syria". Assad replied in kind, describing Barak as "a strong and honest man" who "can accomplish whatever he decides to do". The prospect of peace between Israel and Syria appeared faintly on the horizon. It took less than a day to fade, and not only because of what happened in south Lebanon.
Barak is probably genuine in his desire for an agreement with Syria, if only to realise his sole election pledge to "bring our boys home from south Lebanon" within a target period of one year. His problem is that the means he wants to bring this about are conditioned by the domestic Israeli consensus rather than by any Arab or international one. This insists that any deal on the Golan Heights must follow, rather than precede, an agreement on Israel's "staged" and "quiet" departure from south Lebanon. It is an Oslo-like formula in which peace is predicated not on Israel's full and unconditional withdrawal from occupied Syrian and Lebanese territory, but on Damascus and Beirut guaranteeing Israel's security in the process of that withdrawal. It is a formula that Syria and Hizbullah have always rejected in the past and, given the Palestinians' experience with Oslo, there is absolutely no reason to believe they would accept it in the future, no matter how many sweet nothings are whispered between Assad and Barak.
If so, the future scenario is likely to be less smiles and handshakes on the White House lawn than the smouldering ruins of the Jahmour power plant in Beirut and, to a "disproportionately" lesser extent, of course, City Hall in Kiryat Shmona.
