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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 February 2000 Issue No. 468 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 February 2000 Issue No. 468
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Focus Profile Travel Books Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters 'Lebanon will burn'
Less than two months after US President Bill Clinton's 8 December announcement that Israeli-Syrian negotiations would resume from "the point they had stopped" in February 1996, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak shed the mantle of the peace maker and donned the iron mask of the general. The final settlement to which the peace process appeared to be heading as the century dawned now seems as elusive as ever."A hard war under difficult conditions is being fought in south Lebanon," declared Barak on Tuesday, while Israeli cabinet minister and former army chief-of-staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak was quoted by army radio calling for the bombing of Syrian interests in Lebanon. Meanwhile Barak, who presided over a meeting of his security cabinet yesterday, was criticised by several ministers for failing to force Damascus to rein in Hizbullah, AFP quoted Israeli radio as saying.
On Monday night Israel had dramatically upped the ante in its on-going confrontation with Hizbullah resistance forces in south Lebanon, launching surface to air and airforce missile strikes on a Hizbullah "command base" and on power plants in Tripoli, Baalbeck and Jamhour near Beirut. According to Lebanese reports, these alone inflicted an estimated $200 million worth of infrastructural damage and left 20 civilians, including 10 children, injured, besides plunging most Lebanese cities into darkness.
The attacks were in blatant breach of the unwritten April Understanding of 1996 which, coming in the wake of the Qana massacre in which 200 Lebanese civilians were killed by Israeli shelling, banned the targeting of civilians in the fighting between Israeli occupation forces and the Lebanese resistance in south Lebanon.
Israeli officials felt no apparent contradiction, however, in issuing dire warnings to Hizbullah against doing what Israel had just done. "The soil of Lebanon will burn" if Hizbullah guerrillas fired Katyusha rockets at northern Israel, warned Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy in statements to the diplomatic corp in Jerusalem yesterday.
Hizbullah, on the other hand, continued to uphold its side of the April Understanding, confining its attacks to Israeli occupation forces and their client SLA in south Lebanon. The killing of an Israeli soldier and an SLA militiaman on Tuesday brought to six each the toll of Israeli soldiers and their allied militiamen killed by Hizbullah during the past two weeks.
Meanwhile, Israeli warplanes continued to bomb alleged Hizbullah positions in south Lebanon for the second day yesterday. According to Reuters, four civilians were wounded in Israeli strikes on the city of Tyre and two villages southeast of Nabatiyeh. Israeli warplanes also hit the Ad-Dahar hills in the eastern sector of south Lebanon, and witnesses said Israeli planes fired about eight rockets on Zawatar and Maysadoun villages, wounding a civilian woman.
CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: Two-year-old Nour Ezzeddin, wounded in an Israeli helicopter attack, is recovering in a hospital in Tyre. In Israeli logic Nour, and ten other children wounded in its Tuesday attacks on civilian installations in Lebanon, will remain legitimate targets so long as the Lebanese government fails to "rein in" Hizbullah.
(photo: AP)
Barak's dramatic change of posture has not been confined to the Syrian/Lebanese track of the peace process. His meeting with Yasser Arafat at Erez on 3 February was a humiliating blow to the Palestinian president. Even a person endowed with as much patience as the PLO chairman must have been taken aback by Barak's proposal to postpone the Framework Agreement on Oslo's final status issues for six months and move back the deadline for an overall settlement until June 2001.
Nor was this the only surprise. On 2 February Barak finally unfurled the map of the third phase of Israel's second West Bank redeployment. It was identical to the one he had approved in early January. Despite weeks of nods and winks from Israeli officials to the contrary, the map did not include Abu Dis, Azzariyyah or any other area bordering Jerusalem. Rather, it was the usual archipelago of disconnected cantons stretching from Jenin in the north of the West Bank to Hebron in the south but with no territorial contiguity between them and none anywhere near Jerusalem. The fact that Barak had shown the map to West Bank settler groups and the Israeli media before he deigned to hand it to the Palestinians merely added insult to injury.
Arafat left Erez in a huff and vowed again (this time with the blessing of the PLO's Central Council then in session in Gaza) that he would declare a state by September 2000 with or without Israel's agreement. He has since frozen all negotiations with Israel, released Hamas leader Aziz Rantisi after 21 months in prison without charge or trial and called on "international intervention" to rescue the peace process from its "unprecedented crisis".
Neither Hizbullah's restraint nor Arafat's patience seems to have impressed Washington, however. US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, rather than condemn the Israeli attack on Lebanese civilian targets, actually justified them. "The Israelis have hit the infrastructure and the power plants. I don't think that they are going after civilians, but they did want to send a very strong message," Albright told CNN.
Meanwhile, it was announced that US special envoy to the Middle East, Dennis Ross, will be returning to the region next week, and that Washington has joined Syria and France in calling for an urgent meeting of the five-state International Truce Monitoring Committee (ITMC) in south Lebanon. The ITMC is co-chaired by the US and France. She also said that she had urged Syrian Foreign Minster Farouq Al-Sharaa, in a telephone conversation on Tuesday, for Damascus to use its influence with Hizbullah to reduce and eliminate its guerrilla attacks on Israeli forces.
Damascus, for its part, has continued to show restraint. Strongly condemning Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilian targets, and citing them as proof that Barak does not want peace with the Arabs, Damascus -- according to the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper yesterday -- issued an unprecedented statement in which it asserted joint Syrian-Lebanese concerns that "civilians on both sides of the [Lebanese-Israeli] border should be saved from any losses of either life or property."
In Cairo, Foreign Minister Amr Moussa lashed out at Israel's targeting of civilians, sharply criticising the double standards revealed by Israel's warnings against any possible Hizbullah retaliation against north Israel. "Whether or not Israel is trying to explode the peace process, Israel has no right whatsoever to attack civilians or civilian interests in Lebanon," Moussa said on Tuesday. He added: "Israel has no right to think that its civilians in northern Israel should be protected while civilians in Lebanon should suffer military aggression."
Graham Usher in Jerusalem;
Ranwa Yehia in Beirut
Dina Ezzat in Cairo
wire services
