Many prayers
Attacks on Lebanon continue… with no voice of dissent from the US government. Instead, headlines read ‘Bush: Israel has right to defend itself, eluding to the idea that the situation began only after Lebanon kidnapped two Isaeli soldiers.
Merkel, standing alongside Bush in a hall overlooking the town square, echoed the American’s sentiment, noting that escalating violence started with a kidnapping: “We can only urge all parties to stop, to seize violence and also release the kidnapped soldier and stop this firing of missiles into Israeli territory.”
But what was the motivation behind Hezbollah in kidnapping Israeli soliders? What happened before that incident that brought it to that level in the first place? Here’s an excerpt from an interview with As’ad AbuKhalil, a poli-sci professor at UC Berkeley:
“_This particular conflict, and Israel’s act of aggression on Lebanon, did not take place in a vacuum, and Israel did not act in some spontaneous fashion.
Hezbollah did not surprise Israel with the capture of the two Israeli occupation soldiers. Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah has repeatedly warned that if Israel does not release its Lebanese prisoners, he will be compelled to take Israeli soldiers as bargaining chips.
And Israel has not been sitting idly by since its partial withdrawal from South Lebanon in 2000. It has not only continued to occupy parts of South Lebanon, but also has been violating Lebanese sovereignty, by air, sea, and land.
Israel has also been kidnapping innocent Lebanese citizens: fishermen and shepherds. And one fisherman from Tyre – my hometown – is still missing, and at least one shepherd was killed last year.
Furthermore, Israel has adamantly refused to give to Lebanon a map of the more than 400,000 land mines that it left behind in South Lebanon, and which continue to kill Lebanese children in the region.
The recent crisis, as the article in the Washington Post by Robin Wright pointed out yesterday, is an international/regional conspiracy to implement United Nations Security Council resolution 1559 ._”
As with many situations that the government tries to frame as two-sided, this issue goes much, much further back than the incident of two Isaeli soldiers being captured that we’re led to believe started the whole incident. Israel has a history of abusing its power at the expense of whoever happens to be in their way, be them civilians, or not, and this is just another example. Lebanon shouldn’t have resorted to violence to resolve conflict, but they shouldn’t have felt like they had to either.
And it seems like the US is trying to make parallels with 9/11 and Hezbollah’s missile attacks on Israel, by saying that that Israel has a right to “defend itself against terrorists who don’t want peace,” which is hardly a fair comparison, and again ignores the actions of abusive power-controlling nations.
Sometimes I feel like this s—’s never gonna end…