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When a gangster wants somebody dead he rarely pulls
the trigger himself. It is true that Hezbollah attacked Israel, but who really
attacked Israel? To answer this question, we need to understand who controls
Hezbollah, which requires a sense of Hezbollah’s place in Lebanese politics. In 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon to protect Israeli
civilians in northern Israel who were being murdered by PLO terrorists based
in southern Lebanon. Consistent with the
main pattern of US foreign policy over the years,
which has been to sabotage Israeli self-defense, the US forced the Israelis
to withdraw.[1] Then Israel
invaded again in 1982, because the terrorist violence coming from southern
Lebanon had become intolerable. The Israeli Defense Forces were poised to
destroy the PLO but once again the US intervened to stop the Israelis, and
provided the PLO with a US military escort to its new home in Tunis.[2]
One of the consequences of the 1982 invasion was an Israeli occupation of southern
Lebanon that lasted almost two decades, and this became the excuse for
Hezbollah: “Hezbollah was
‘inspired by the success of the Iranian Revolution’ and was formed primarily
to combat Israeli occupation following the 1982 Lebanon War.”[3] The Israeli occupation lasted until the year 2000,
when Israeli forces evacuated Lebanon, under Ehud Barak. And yet a terrorist
movement against Israeli civilians -- Hezbollah -- persists in southern
Lebanon. Why? The Israeli withdrawal should have put an end to terrorism
predicated on resisting the Israeli occupation. With Israel gone it remained to rid the country of
the other occupiers in order to make Lebanon an independent country again.
The other occupiers were the Syrians, lords of Lebanon since 1976-77, after
one of the factions in the Lebanese civil war had invited them in.[4]
Consistent with the goal to give back to the Lebanese their political
independence, “United
Nations Security Council Resolution 1559 [2 September 2004] …called upon
Syria to end its military presence in Lebanon by withdrawing its forces and
to cease intervening in internal Lebanese politics. The resolution also
called on all Lebanese militias (including Hezbollah) to disband.”[5] The same source informs me that, “On April 26,
2005, after 29 years of military action in Lebanon, the last Syrian troops
left Lebanon. Syrian military and intelligence facilities, after the
destruction of sensitive documents or the transportation of logistical
material, were turned over to Lebanese counterparts. This action left the
Lebanese government as the main violator of the resolution due to its refusal
to dismantle the pro-Syrian Palestinian and Hezbollah militias.” This is an act of war. If the Lebanese government
refuses to dismantle terrorist organizations publicly dedicated to the
destruction of Israeli civilians (the most important of which is Hezbollah),
and which the UN Security Council has asked Lebanon to dismantle, then
Lebanon declared war on Israel -- as far back as 2 September 2004. But is it really Lebanon that declared war on
Israel? There are reasons to doubt this. Notice what the UN News Service reported on
23 January 2006: “23 January
2006 -- The United Nations Security Council today called on the Government of
Lebanon to make more progress in controlling its territory and disbanding
militias [i.e. terrorist organizations], while also calling on Syria to
cooperate with those efforts. In a statement
read out by its January President, Augustine Mahiga
of Tanzania, the Council also called on Syria to take measures to stop
movements of arms and personnel into Lebanon that have been reported.”[6] So Syria, the country that for “29 years of military
action in Lebanon” was its true master, hasn’t really left Lebanon, nor has
it ceased to be its master. The UN weakly complains that Syrian troops are
back in Lebanon but capitulates to the facts when it requests Syrian
cooperation in the suppression of terrorist groups inside Lebanon.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559 therefore did not affect the
status quo (though it may have affected certain appearances): Syria owns
Lebanon. This has even been formalized in a Syrian-Lebanese Supreme
Council.[6a] Given this state of affairs, it is more proper to
interpret Lebanon's refusal to dismantle the anti-Israeli terrorist groups as
a Syrian declaration of war on Israel. This interpretation is well
supported by the manner in which the Lebanese government has replied to UN
resolution 1559: “In the slime
of what is happening in our Arabic region, and under the auspices of the
failure of the political solutions aiming to find a solution to the
Arabic-Israeli conflict because of Israel’s obstinacy and refusing to return
to the table of negotiations and giving free rein to the threats against
Lebanon and Syria by its leaders, and intensifying its aerial violations of
the Lebanese territories’ sanctity and executing terrorist acts and
assassination operations against the leaders of the Lebanese and Palestinian
resistance in both countries. In this context the resolution 1559 issued by
the security council on 3/9/2004 with all its ambiguity and contradictions,
is considered an unconventional precedent in the history of international
relations, constituting an interference in the
sovereignty and independence of Lebanon.”[7] Suppose you have UN resolution 1559, which is
designed to give Lebanon independence from the stranglehold that Syria’s
obsession to destroy Israel has placed on it. And suppose that Lebanon
decries this UN resolution as “interference in the sovereignty and
independence of Lebanon.” What is that? An absurdity. How can we resolve it?
Simple: it is Syria that is complaining above -- not Lebanon. And Syria controls Hezbollah. This is relatively
obvious to anybody not already comatose: in 2005 the New York Times reported
on a “massive pro-Syrian demonstration that the Hezbollah militia mounted on
the streets of Beirut.”[9a] US officials are happy with the total control
that Syria has over Lebanon, but they don't want the public noticing that
they are. The Middle East Intelligence Bulletin tells me that, “...successive
American administrations have been reluctant to openly push for an end to
Syrian protection of Hezbollah. In fact, the United States has been unwilling
even to publicly request that the Syrians end this protection. ...[there is a] long-standing American policy of avoiding
public statements which mention or suggest that Syria controls Lebanese
policy decisions.”[8] Of course, every once in a while a distracted
president may turn a private remark into a public one, giving us a peek into
what is really going on. This week, at the meeting of G-8 heads of state, “U.S.
President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair had a private
lunchtime conversation picked up by an open microphone. The chat started with the U.S. President giving a ‘Yo, Blair’ shout out to his British counterpart,
and spread over the Internet within hours. Bush expressed his frustration
over the current situation in the Middle East: ‘You see,
the ... thing is what they need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to
stop doing this shit and it’s over.’”[9] If Bush thinks the whole thing will be over the
minute Hezbollah ceases to attack Israeli civilians, then he recognizes that
the Israelis do not want a foreign war, and are merely defending themselves
from unprovoked, terrorist Hezbollah attacks. The question of who “they” are
is of course interesting and I will address it in a forthcoming piece, but
the above makes it clear that the US president sees Hezbollah as a Syrian
pet. We may conclude the obvious: It is Syria that
attacked Israel.
Now, what grievance does Hezbollah -- Syria’s
Lebanese tool against innocent Israeli civilians -- officially say that it
has against Israel? According to the same Lebanese Army document quoted
above, “The national
resistance which is confronting the Israeli occupation [i.e. Hezbollah] is
not a guerilla and it has no security role inside the country and its
activities are restricted to facing the Israeli enemy.”[10] But when that document was published, Israel had
already withdrawn from Lebanon some time before, had it not? Yes, it had. So
why was there still a large terrorist movement inside Lebanon -- Hezbollah --
that was claiming to be “confronting the Israeli occupation,” if this
occupation no longer existed? What land were they saying they were going to
liberate? The same document explains: “This
resistance led to the withdrawal of the enemy from the bigger part of our
occupied land and is still persistent to free the farms of Shebaa.” In other words, yes, Israel had evacuated Lebanon,
but what about the Shebaa Farms? Israel was still
in possession of the Shebaa Farms. What are the farms of Shebaa? “The Shebaa Farms lie at the borders of Lebanon, Syria and
Israel. Israel has occupied it since winning it from Syria in the six-day war
of 1967. The UN has ruled that the land belonged to Syria, but a majority of
Lebanese claim it as their own, including Hizbollah,
who use Israel’s occupation of the area as the logic behind their maintenance
of armed militia.”[11] Is your mind bending? The Hezbollah, in Lebanon,
claims as its reason for continuing its murders of Israeli civilians that it
is fighting for a piece of land that belonged to Syria before 1967.
But if before 1967 this land belonged to Syria, then when was this a
part of Lebanon? Never. Independent Lebanon begins in 1943.[12]
But we can go further back, because Shebaa Farms
was not even in pre-independence Lebanon.
The European colonialists who created entirely
arbitrary countries in the Middle East put Shebaa
Farms in the arbitrary country that became Syria, not the arbitrary country
that became Lebanon. The same wire reports,
Really? Syria bequeathed Shebaa
Farms to Lebanon? How strange, then, that the UN, as mentioned above, should
have ruled that this land, before 1967, belonged to Syria. The
UN is certainly no friend of Israel's, but it is constrained by the fact that
Shebaa Farms had never belonged to Lebanon, and by
the fact that it was Syria that lost Shebaa Farms
to Israel in the 1967 Six Day War. And yet despite all this, Syria -- too -- now
claims that Shebaa Farms is Lebanese territory![13] In
truth, however, “The Syrian government has yet to officially [my
emphasis] reverse its long-standing position that the area is part of Syria,
and every known map produced to date by the Syrian government shows the area
as part of Syria.”[14] In other
words, Syria is saying in public that Shebaa Farms
is Lebanese territory but it doesn't really mean it. But this nonsense is perfectly transparent. First, the farms of Shebaa
no longer rightfully belong to Syria because the Six Day War of 1967 was
provoked by the Arab states, including Syria, with the publicly stated goal
of seeking the destruction of the state and people of Israel.[15]
When you lose a piece of land trying to exterminate your neighbor, you don’t
have a right to get it back. Why are the farms of Shebaa
important? Though they constitute the tiniest piece of land in
the world,[15a]
the farms of Shebaa are part of the Golan Heights,
strategic high territory on the Syrian-Israeli border that Syria regularly
used to kill Israeli farmers, shelling them from above.[16] It is the Golan Heights that Syria lost in 1967. The Golan Heights are a big deal: a Pentagon study determined that
if Israel were to relinquish the Golan Heights it would commit suicide.[17] Since losing the Golan Heights,
Syria cannot kill Israeli civilians from positions in its own territory. This
helps explain why Syria subsequently took over Lebanon and has been
sponsoring terrorist attacks against Israel from there. The public
excuse for this Lebanon-based terrorism used to be opposition against the
Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon (which occupation had begun as an
attempt to eradicate anti-Israeli terrorism from southern Lebanon…). But then Israel evacuated southern Lebanon in 2000,
and in fact Israel
It was therefore impossible to claim, from this
point onwards, that there was an Israeli occupation to resist in southern
Lebanon. This is why, in order to continue the murder of innocent Israelis,
the Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon now claim that they want to
liberate the Shebaa Farms (which were once part of
Syria, and were never part of Lebanon). Not coincidentally, the earliest
Lebanese claim to Shebaa Farms that I can find is
from...the year 2000, the same year that Israel completely withdrew from
Lebanon.
Why are the Syrians endorsing Hezbollah's nonsense
claim? Because there is a real commitment, here, to the killing of Jews: any
absurdity will be tolerated, so long as it can be raised as a flag to justify
attacking innocent Jewish life. The entire circus is naturally a Syrian
concoction to attack Israel -- there is no real Lebanese grievance
here. If Syria were to regain the Shebaa Farms,
through Lebanon, it would be regaining a foothold on the strategic Golan
Heights, which will vastly enhance Syria’s ability to destroy Israel -- its
furious goal. Before closing, let me point out that if US
President George Bush is genuinely surprised that the Syrians unleashed
Hezbollah against Israel, forcing the Israeli government -- which had been
graciously collaborating with the US-ordered process of national
self-destruction -- to retaliate in self-defense, then Bush did not want this
particular war. His apparent displeasure is consistent with that. HIR will
soon publish an article examining this hypothesis.
_____________________________________________________ Footnotes and Further Reading [1] “In
June 1978, Prime Minister [Menachem] Begin, under
intense American pressure, withdrew Israel's Litani
River Operation forces from southern Lebanon… The withdrawal of Israeli troops
without having removed the PLO from its bases in southern Lebanon became a
major embarrassment to the Begin government…”
[2]
1982-1983 -- The US military rushed into Lebanon to protect the PLO from the
Israelis; from “IS THE US AN ALLY OF ISRAEL: A Chronological look at the
evidence”; Historical and Investigative Research; by Francisco Gil-White. [3] Hezbollah |
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. [4]
“Constitutionally guaranteed Christian control of the government had come
under increasing fire from Muslims and leftists, leading them to join forces
as the National Movement in 1969, which called for the taking of a new census
and the subsequent drafting of a new governmental structure that would
reflect the census results. Political tension became military conflict, with
full-scale civil war in April 1975. The Maronite
leadership called for Syrian intervention in 1976, leading to the presence of
Syrian troops in Lebanon, and an Arab summit in 1976 was called to stop the
crisis.”
[5] United
Nations Security Council Resolution 1559 | From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia [6] “Security
Council calls on Lebanon to assert control over all its territory”; UN News
Service; 23 January 2006. [6a] "The
Syrian-Lebanese Supreme Council held its first session here today ... formed
in accordance with a syrian-lebanese accord signed
in May ... both countries' prime ministers, deputy prime ministers, defense
ministers and parliament speakers attended the meeting ... "
[7] This was
taken from the Lebanese army website: According to Wikipedia, this was the Lebanese
government’s reply to UN resolution 1559.
[8] SOURCE:
"Hezbollah: Between Tehran and Damascus"; Middle East Intelligence
Bulletin; Vol. 4, No. 2; February 2002; by Gary C. Gambill
and Ziad K. Abdelnour [9] CHATTER WE
WON'T HEAR; EVER WONDER WHAT THOSE WORLD LEADERS MIGHT BE SAYING WHEN THE
MICROPHONES ARE OFF?, The Toronto Sun, July 20, 2006 Thursday,
FINAL EDITION, EDITORIAL/OPINION; Pg. 20, 513 words, BY RACHEL MARSDEN [9a] The Beirut
Tea Party, The New York Times, March 10, 2005 Thursday, Late Edition - Final,
Section A; Column 6; Editorial Desk; Pg. 27, 776 words, By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN [10] This was
taken from the Lebanese army website: According to Wikipedia, this was the Lebanese
government’s reply to the UN’s 23 January 2006 request that Lebanon comply
with UN resolution 1559.
[11] Israelis
exchange fire with Hezbollah in disputed area, The Independent
(London), February 4, 2006 Saturday, Second Edition, NEWS; Pg. 26, 475
words, By Hugh Macleod in Shebaa, south Lebanon [12] Lebanon |
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [12a] Israel Must
Return Shebaa Farms to Lebanon: PM, XINHUA GENERAL
NEWS SERVICE, May 4, 2000, Thursday, WORLD NEWS; POLITICAL, 243 words,
BEIRUT, May 4 [13] “Israel
finally withdrew from the "security zone" in 2000, during the Prime
Ministership of Ehud Barak. Israel continues to
control a small area called "Shebaa
Farms", which Lebanon and Syria claim to be Lebanese territory but
Israel insists to be former Syrian territory with the same status as the Golan
Heights, since they have captured it from the Syrians. The United Nations has
determined that Shebaa Farms is not part of
Lebanon. The UN Secretary-General had concluded that, as of 16 June 2000,
Israel had withdrawn its forces from Lebanon in accordance with UN Security
Council Resolution 425 of 1978, bringing closure to the 1982 invasion as far
as the UN was concerned.”
[14] Shebaa Farms | From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. [15] For the
genocidal intentions of Israel’s attackers in the run-up to the 1967 war,
read the following piece:
[15a] To see Shebaa Farms on a map, visit:
[16] 1964-67 --
Although Israel suffered terrorist attacks from its Arab neighbors
during these years, when they staged a full-scale military provocation, the
US refused to help; from “IS THE US AN ALLY OF ISRAEL: A Chronological look
at the evidence”; Historical and Investigative Research; by Francisco
Gil-White. [17] The
following piece discusses the Pentagon study in its political context, and
links to the original document (to go directly to the Pentagon study, see
below):
< PENTAGON
STUDY: »»
This Pentagon document was apparently declassified in 1979 but not published
until 1984. It was published by the Journal of Palestine Studies:
»»
And by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs: »»
And as an appendix in:
[18] Why
They Fight, The Washington Post, July 14, 2006 Friday, Final Edition,
Editorial; A21, 825 words, Charles Krauthammer |
Bush to Blair: “...what they need to
do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over.”
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Hezbollah Hizbollah Hizbu'llah Hizb'allah
What is
Hezbollah?
What is Hizbollah?
What is Hizbu'llah?
What is Hizb'allah?
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/hezbollah.htm
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