Last week I had the pleasure to appear on American radio, on the Laura Ingraham show, pitted against David Horowitz, a “Semite supremacist” who most recently made his name under the banner of Campus Watch, leading McCarthyite witch-hunts against American professors who have the impertinence to suggest that maybe, just maybe, Arabs have minds and feelings like the rest of us.
It was a revealing experience, at least for a British journalist rarely exposed to the depths of ignorance and prejudice in the United States on Middle East matters.
Horowitz’ response to every question, every development in the Middle East, whether it concerns Lebanon, the Palestinians, Syria or Iran, is the same: “They want to drive the Jews into the sea”. It’s as simple as that.
So Horowitz and the massed ranks of US apologists for Israel promote at least four myths regarding Hezbollah’s current rockets strikes on Israel. The first is that Israel was forced to pound Lebanon with its military hardware because Hezbollah began “raining down” rockets on the Galilee. But first we were told it was to rescue the two soldiers captured by Hezbollah on a border post on July 12.
And Hezbollah kept telling the world how keen it was to return the soldiers in a prisoner swap. Hundreds of dead in Lebanon, at least 1,000 severely injured and more than half a million refugees — all because Israel is not ready to sit down at the negotiating table.
So the chronology of war has been reorganized: Now we are being told that Israel was forced to attack Lebanon to defend itself from the barrage of Hezbollah rockets falling on Israeli civilians. But this is not how the latest “Middle East crisis”, as TV channels now describe it, started.
Early on July 12 Hezbollah launched a raid against an army border post, in what was in the best interpretation a foolhardy violation of Israeli sovereignty. Israel’s immediate response was to send a tank into Lebanon in pursuit of the Hezbollah fighters (its own foolhardy violation of Lebanese sovereignty). Rather than open diplomatic channels to calm the violence down and start the process of getting its soldiers back, Israel launched bombing raids deep into Lebanese territory the same day. Given Israel’s world view that it alone has a right to project power and fear, which might have been expected.
But the next day Israel continued its rampage across the south and into Beirut, where the airport, roads, bridges, and power stations were pummeled.
In contrast to the image of Hezbollah frothing at the mouth to destroy Israel, its leader Hassan Nasrallah held off from serious retaliation. He waited till late on June 13 before turning his guns on Haifa. It was another three days before Nasrallah hit Haifa again, including a shell that killed eight workers in a railway depot.
No one should have been surprised. Nasrallah was doing exactly what he had threatened to do if Israel refused to negotiate and chose the path of war instead. According to Horowitz and others, Hezbollah collected its armory with the sole intent of destroying the Jewish state.
According to figures supplied by the Israeli Army, at least 2,000 Hezbollah rockets have already been fired into Israel while the army’s bombardments have so far destroyed a further 2,000 rockets. In other words, northern Israel has already received a fifth of Hezbollah’s arsenal. As someone living in the north, and within range of the rockets, I have to say Israel does not look close to being expunged.
The third myth is that, while Israel is trying to fight a clean war by targeting only terrorists, Hezbollah prefers to bring death and destruction on innocents by firing rockets at Israeli civilians. So far some 400 Lebanese civilians are reported dead — at least a third of them children.
In the latest emerging news from Lebanon, human rights groups are accusing Israel of violating international law and using cluster grenades, which kill indiscriminately. There are reports too, so far unconfirmed, that Israel has been firing illegal phosphorus incendiary bombs.
Conversely, the breakdown of the smaller number of deaths of Israelis at the hands of Hezbollah — 42 at the time of writing — show that more soldiers have been killed than civilians. In fact, although no one is making the point, Hezbollah’s rockets have been targeted overwhelming at strategic locations. Hezbollah seems to have as little concern for the collateral damage of civilian deaths as Israel — each wants the balance of terror in its favor — but it is nonsense to suggest that Hezbollah’s goals are any more ignoble than Israel’s.
The fourth myth is a continuation of the third: Hezbollah has been endangering the lives of ordinary Lebanese by hiding among noncombatants.
We have seen this kind of dissembling by Israel and Horowitz before, though not repeated so enthusiastically by Western officials. The UN head of humanitarian affairs, Jan Egeland, who is in the region, accused Hezbollah of “cowardly blending” among the civilian population, and a similar accusation was leveled by the British Foreign Secretary Kim Howells when he arrived in Israel.
The implication of Egeland’s cowardly statement seems to be that any Lebanese fighter, or Palestinian one, resisting Israel and its powerful military should stand in an open field, his rifle raised to the sky, waiting to see who fares worse in a shootout with an Apache helicopter or F-16 fighter jet. Hezbollah’s reluctance to conduct the war in this manner, we are supposed to infer, is proof that they are terrorists.
Egeland and Howells need reminding that Hezbollah’s fighters are not aliens recently arrived from training camps in Iran, whatever Horowitz claims. They belong to and are strongly supported by the Shiite community, nearly half the country’s population, and many other Lebanese. They have families, friends and neighbors living alongside them in the country’s south and the neighborhoods of Beirut who believe Hezbollah is the best hope of defending their country from Israel’s regular onslaughts.
Given the indigenous nature of Hezbollah’s resistance, we should not be surprised at the lengths the Shiite militia is going to ensure their loved ones, and the Lebanese people more generally, are not put directly in danger by their combat.
If only the same could be said of the Israeli Army and air force. One need only look at the images of the victims of its strikes against residential neighborhoods, car, ambulances and factories to see why most of the dead being extracted from the rubble are civilians. And finally, there is a fifth myth I almost forgot to mention. That people like David Horowitz only want to tell us the truth.
— Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His book “Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State” is published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
