Israel's murderous bloody attack yesterday, using US-supplied laser-guided missiles, represents a new low in subhuman depravity. The target was a residential building in the Lebanese village of Qana; 50 people were killed, more than half of them handicapped children. The barbarity of the attack shocked the world and Israel’s statement that it regretted the deaths but that Hezbollah fighters were known to operate from the village does nothing at all to justify such enormous loss of innocent civilian life.
The oft-repeated Israeli mantra — “We warned people to leave” — surely does not stand up to any form of humane scrutiny or to international humanitarian law. The much-vaunted Israeli intelligence that until today boasted it knew if buildings had people in them is now in shreds. What nonsense is the claim of Israeli technological superiority if it flattens a building full of innocent mothers and their children who were simply too poor to flee to safety? Israel hides behind the relative safety of bombing Lebanese towns instead of sending in ground troops to fight. If Israel were truly brave, it would have sent soldiers to find Hezbollah’s alleged missiles instead of slaughtering innocent women and children in cold blood! What has happened is nothing less than Lebanon’s own Holocaust. The descendants of those who fled the European Holocaust are ironically resorting to greater savagery than the Nazis. It is heartbreaking that an atrocity such as Qana should occur but the fact is that it will increase the pressure on Israel, the aggressor, and America, the abettor. Surely after the massacre, diplomatic efforts will pick up steam; a Security Council resolution could be reached in a few days before an international force is deployed. After all, it is America’s reputation and credibility, as much as Lebanon’s people and infrastructure, that are on the line.
There have now been unforeseen changes in the four days since Rome where US Secretary of State Rice refused to call for a cease-fire and decided that it was worth crippling a nascent Arab democracy with hundreds of civilian casualties and infrastructure damage running into billions of dollars. The greatest change is perhaps the extra time the US was willing to allow Israel to continue its decimation of Lebanon. Qana has surely changed that. In Rome, the US obstructed peace efforts, trading an immediate end to the war for a new Middle East, promised by Rice and currently being midwifed by Israel’s ruthless war machine. It was primarily thanks to Rice that there was no going back to the status quo and that Israel’s massacre of Lebanon was allowed to continue. Rice fiddled and Lebanon burned. If something had been done in Rome last week, yesterday’s Qana massacre — whose 1996 ghost still haunts the region’s memories — might not have happened. Had the US been an honest broker last week, the many killings prior to Qana, and Qana itself, might have been avoided. It is not that Washington was powerless to exert pressure or bring about a halt to the destruction of Lebanon by its ally. Because Washington did not want to do anything, it didn’t. What it wanted and sought was a new Middle East. The new Middle East is not about Qana but Qana is its inevitable consequence, one so terrible that Rice canceled a scheduled appearance in Beirut. It has taken the destruction in Qana — indeed of three Arab countries: Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq as well as of countless Arab lives for Rice’s new Middle East to be born. And the international community and the nations of the region have no choice but to bear the pain, no matter how severe, of the birth of this wonderful thing the United States calls the new Middle East.
