[DEBATE] : Premeditated

[Hein Marais]

Israel responded to an unprovoked attack by Hizbullah, right? Wrong 

The assault on Lebanon was premeditated - the soldiers' capture simply
provided the excuse. It was also unnecessary 

George Monbiot
Tuesday August 8, 2006
The Guardian 

Whatever we think of Israel's assault on Lebanon, all of us seem to agree
about one fact: that it was a response, however disproportionate, to an
unprovoked attack by Hizbullah. I repeated this "fact" in my last column,
when I wrote that "Hizbullah fired the first shots". This being so, the
Israeli government's supporters ask peaceniks like me, what would you have
done? It's an important question. But its premise, I have now discovered, is
flawed.

Since Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000, there have been
hundreds of violations of the "blue line" between the two countries. The
United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) reports that Israeli
aircraft crossed the line "on an almost daily basis" between 2001 and 2003,
and "persistently" until 2006. These incursions "caused great concern to the
civilian population, particularly low-altitude flights that break the sound
barrier over populated areas". On some occasions, Hizbullah tried to shoot
them down with anti-aircraft guns.

In October 2000, the Israel Defence Forces shot at unarmed Palestinian
demonstrators on the border, killing three and wounding 20. In response,
Hizbullah crossed the line and kidnapped three Israeli soldiers. On several
occasions, Hizbullah fired missiles and mortar rounds at IDF positions, and
the IDF responded with heavy artillery and sometimes aerial bombardment.
Incidents like this killed three Israelis and three Lebanese in 2003; one
Israeli soldier and two Hizbullah fighters in 2005; and two Lebanese people
and three Israeli soldiers in February 2006. Rockets were fired from Lebanon
into Israel several times in 2004, 2005 and 2006, on some occasions by
Hizbullah. But, the UN records, "none of the incidents resulted in a
military escalation".

On May 26 this year, two officials of Islamic Jihad - Nidal and Mahmoud
Majzoub - were killed by a car bomb in the Lebanese city of Sidon. This was
widely assumed in Lebanon and Israel to be the work of Mossad, the Israeli
intelligence agency. In June, a man named Mahmoud Rafeh confessed to the
killings and admitted that he had been working for Mossad since 1994.
Militants in southern Lebanon responded, on the day of the bombing, by
launching eight rockets into Israel. One soldier was lightly wounded. There
was a major bust-up on the border, during which one member of Hizbullah was
killed and several wounded, and one Israeli soldier wounded. But while the
border region "remained tense and volatile", Unifil says it was "generally
quiet" until July 12.

There has been a heated debate on the internet about whether the two Israeli
soldiers kidnapped by Hizbullah that day were captured in Israel or in
Lebanon, but it now seems pretty clear that they were seized in Israel. This
is what the UN says, and even Hizbullah seems to have forgotten that they
were supposed to have been found sneaking around the outskirts of the
Lebanese village of Aita al-Shaab. Now it simply states that "the Islamic
resistance captured two Israeli soldiers at the border with occupied
Palestine". Three other Israeli soldiers were killed by the militants. There
is also some dispute about when, on July 12, Hizbullah first fired its
rockets; but Unifil makes it clear that the firing took place at the same
time as the raid - 9am. Its purpose seems to have been to create a
diversion. No one was hit.

But there is no serious debate about why the two soldiers were captured:
Hizbullah was seeking to exchange them for the 15 prisoners of war taken by
the Israelis during the occupation of Lebanon and (in breach of article 118
of the third Geneva convention) never released. It seems clear that if
Israel had handed over the prisoners, it would - without the spillage of any
more blood - have retrieved its men and reduced the likelihood of further
kidnappings. But the Israeli government refused to negotiate. Instead -
well, we all know what happened instead. Almost 1,000 Lebanese and 33
Israeli civilians have been killed so far, and a million Lebanese displaced
from their homes.

On July 12, in other words, Hizbullah fired the first shots. But that act of
aggression was simply one instance in a long sequence of small incursions
and attacks over the past six years by both sides. So why was the Israeli
response so different from all that preceded it? The answer is that it was
not a reaction to the events of that day. The assault had been planned for
months.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that "more than a year ago, a senior
Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an
off-the-record basis, to US and other diplomats, journalists and thinktanks,
setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail". The
attack, he said, would last for three weeks. It would begin with bombing and
culminate in a ground invasion. Gerald Steinberg, professor of political
science at Bar-Ilan University, told the paper that "of all of Israel's wars
since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared ... By 2004,
the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we're seeing
now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it's been
simulated and rehearsed across the board".

A "senior Israeli official" told the Washington Post that the raid by
Hizbullah provided Israel with a "unique moment" for wiping out the
organisation. The New Statesman's editor, John Kampfner, says he was told by
more than one official source that the US government knew in advance of
Israel's intention to take military action in Lebanon. The Bush
administration told the British government.

Israel's assault, then, was premeditated: it was simply waiting for an
appropriate excuse. It was also unnecessary. It is true that Hizbullah had
been building up munitions close to the border, as its current rocket
attacks show. But so had Israel. Just as Israel could assert that it was
seeking to deter incursions by Hizbullah, Hizbullah could claim - also with
justification - that it was trying to deter incursions by Israel. The
Lebanese army is certainly incapable of doing so. Yes, Hizbullah should have
been pulled back from the Israeli border by the Lebanese government and
disarmed. Yes, the raid and the rocket attack on July 12 were unjustified,
stupid and provocative, like just about everything that has taken place
around the border for the past six years. But the suggestion that Hizbullah
could launch an invasion of Israel or that it constitutes an existential
threat to the state is preposterous. Since the occupation ended, all its
acts of war have been minor ones, and nearly all of them reactive.

So it is not hard to answer the question of what we would have done. First,
stop recruiting enemies, by withdrawing from the occupied territories in
Palestine and Syria. Second, stop provoking the armed groups in Lebanon with
violations of the blue line - in particular the persistent flights across
the border. Third, release the prisoners of war who remain unlawfully
incarcerated in Israel. Fourth, continue to defend the border, while
maintaining the diplomatic pressure on Lebanon to disarm Hizbullah (as
anyone can see, this would be much more feasible if the occupations were to
end). Here then is my challenge to the supporters of the Israeli government:
do you dare to contend that this programme would have caused more death and
destruction than the current adventure has done? 

www.monbiot.com

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