This is just to show you a little part of what I've been seeing over and over as I've been growing up.

This is one heck of a fantastic article...

Mishal’s Luck

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n09/shtz01_.html

Adam Shatz

• Kill Khalid: The Failed Mossad Assassination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas by Paul McGeough

In early September 1997, Danny Yatom, the head of Mossad, arranged a special screening for Binyamin Netanyahu, who was then prime minister. The film, shot on the streets of Tel Aviv, presented the plan for the assassination of Khalid Mishal, the head of Hamas’s political bureau in Amman. Twenty-one Israelis had died in Hamas suicide attacks in the previous two months, and Netanyahu was eager for revenge. The peace process might be undermined, but that would be just as well: Netanyahu shared Hamas’s hostility to Oslo, and had compared trading land for peace to appeasement with Hitler. Mishal, Paul McGeough writes in Kill Khalid, his gripping account of the plot, was selected from a list of targets by Netanyahu not only because he was suspected of orchestrating the suicide bomb campaign, but because he made an articulate case for Hamas’s position, in a suit rather than clerical robes: ‘he was too credible as an emerging leader of Hamas, persuasive even. He had to be taken out.’

It was an extremely sensitive operation. Israel had signed a peace treaty with King Hussein in 1994, and the murder of a Palestinian leader in Amman would be sure to fuel speculation that Mossad had got the green light, and perhaps some helpful tips, from Jordan’s General Intelligence Department (GID). This was no way to treat a friend – at least not one you respected – and the Israelis knew it. Unlike the flamboyant assassinations of the PFLP spokesman Ghassan Kanafani (killed in 1972 in a car bomb in Beirut) and Arafat’s top aide Khalil al-Wazir (gunned down in 1988 in his home in Tunis by Israeli commandos), Mishal’s murder had to be discreet and, if possible, invisible.

The attack would take a matter of seconds – so quick he wouldn’t know it was happening. One agent would shake a can of Coke and pop it open to distract Mishal while another would spray levofentanyl, a chemically modified painkiller, in his ear. He would feel as if he’d been bitten by an insect; 48 hours later the drug would kill him, leaving no trace. Mossad agents rehearsed the assassination using water instead of poison on unsuspecting pedestrians in Tel Aviv. Netanyahu liked what he saw, and gave Yatom the go-ahead. He was not dissuaded by Hamas’s proposal for a 30-year hudna (truce), relayed by King Hussein on 22 September in a letter delivered by hand to the secret Mossad station at the Israeli embassy in Amman. Three days later, a pair of Mossad agents disguised as Canadian tourists – they were carrying passports borrowed from Canadian Jews living in Israel – waited for Mishal at 10 a.m. outside his office, where his driver was due to drop him off.

The plot unravelled almost as soon as it began. Mishal’s driver suspected that he’d been followed by a green Hyundai. When he saw a blond, bearded man in sunglasses approaching his boss as he stepped out of the car, with a ‘bizarre instrument’ in his hand, he pounced on him – though not before the poison had been squirted into Mishal’s ear from that instrument, a nebuliser. The attackers piled into the Hyundai, but they didn’t know their way around Amman, and were chased by Mishal’s bodyguard, who did. Eventually they jumped out of their car, but got stuck in a crowded marketplace, where Mishal’s bodyguard wrestled them into a taxi and took them to the nearest police station. Mishal seemed fine at first, but a few hours later he realised that something was wrong: his ear was ringing, he was shivering; he suddenly felt exhausted and nauseous. As his aides rushed him to hospital, he lost consciousness altogether.

Hamas’s claim that Mishal had been the target of an assassination attempt might have been squelched by the Jordanians, and Mishal might have died, had it not been for Randa Habib, a Lebanese journalist who broke the story to Agence-France Presse. General Samih Batikhi, head of the GID, insisted that nothing more than a fight between locals and tourists had taken place; another official suggested that Mishal’s driver had sparked the row by making unwelcome advances to the Canadians. The absence of a weapon wasn’t the only reason the Jordanians were sceptical. Why would Mossad place its special relationship with the GID at risk? Only a week earlier Danny Yatom had stopped by the headquarters in Amman – after a family holiday at the royal palace on the Red Sea – to chat with Batikhi. Now here was Hamas, accusing Israel of violating the peace treaty: a serious charge which, if true, would require a response.

Batikhi, who viewed Hamas as troublemakers, was inclined to dismiss the Agence-France Presse report until he received credible information that two men involved in the fight were seen running into the Israeli embassy (they would be joined by two other accomplices). When Netanyahu called King Hussein to say that Yatom was flying to Amman on urgent business that ‘could have bearing on the peace process’, Hussein assumed the visit was a response to Hamas’s offer of a hudna; but Batikhi knew better. He ordered the army to surround the Israeli embassy in Amman, and asked the Canadian ambassador to quiz the two men in Jordanian custody – ‘Shawn Kendall’ and ‘Barry Beads’ – on their ‘Canadian-ness’. It didn’t take long for them to be exposed as impostors.

‘We did it . . . We sprayed him with a chemical,’ Yatom confessed to Batikhi after landing in Jordan: ‘There’s nothing you can do about it . . . He’s been poisoned and all his bodily functions will deteriorate. There’ll be no apparent cause of death . . . We’d better deal with the consequences.’ But Hussein wasn’t prepared to deal with the consequences. He felt, he said, as if the Israelis had ‘spat on my face’. Despite – and partly because of – his friendship with Israel, Hussein had allowed Hamas to operate out of Amman. Hamas gave him leverage in negotiations with Israel and the US, and, as McGeough points out, they also ‘gave back something that Arafat and the PLO threatened – Hussein’s legitimacy’. The Jordanians had no love for Mishal: Batikhi regarded him as ‘shallow, brittle and unbending’, and Hussein had gone to great lengths to replace him, securing the release to Jordan four months earlier of the more pliable Mousa Abu Marzook, the former head of the Hamas political bureau, who had spent two years in an American prison awaiting extradition to Israel. But Marzook’s cosiness with Jordan’s security services, and his reputation for moderation (which had earned him the nickname Mr CIA), had cost him support inside Hamas; and he wasn’t helped now by rumours that the Jordanians had conspired with Israel to return him to his old job. Suddenly Hussein’s honour – if not his political survival – depended on saving Mishal.

The crisis offered Hussein a chance to settle scores with Netanyahu, who had treated him with undisguised contempt, and whom he suspected of seeking to ‘destroy all I have worked to build between our peoples’, as Hussein had written to Netanyahu in March. Netanyahu had approved a tunnel underneath the al-Aqsa Mosque, which led to rioting in which dozens of Palestinians and a number of Israelis died; he had also betrayed his promise to Hussein not to build new settlements in East Jerusalem, with his plan to encircle the neighbourhood of Jabal Abu Ghneim with Jewish apartment complexes. In Hussein’s view, the assassination was part of Netanyahu’s plan to sabotage Oslo and to destabilise his own regime, so that a Palestinian state could be established in Jordan – the old fantasy of the Israeli right. Refusing to speak to Netanyahu, he placed a call to Clinton. ‘If Mishal dies, peace dies with him,’ Hussein warned. The embassy would be stormed, the Israelis in Jordanian custody would hang, and relations would be broken off. Clinton agreed to pressure the Israelis to hand over the antidote to the poison used on Mishal, along with the formula. Forty-eight hours after Yatom landed in Amman, an Israeli doctor arrived at the same airport with the goods, just in time to save Mishal. Netanyahu even flew to Jordan to apologise to the king in person.

Hussein’s humiliation of Netanyahu did not end there. As the ‘father of the treaty’ with Hussein, Efraim Halevy, Israel’s envoy to the EU and Mossad’s former deputy director, recognised, the king needed a deal, not just the antidote; and if he didn’t get one, the Israelis now held in Jordan would never come home. The price, Halevy argued, should be the release of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the paraplegic cleric who had founded Hamas in Gaza, and was now serving his eighth year of a life sentence. This was ‘political dynamite’, in the words of an American official: Yassin’s return to Gaza was bound to raise the standing of Hamas among Palestinians, and to weaken Arafat, Israel’s ‘peace partner’. Arafat made an operatic display of joy over Yassin’s release, but privately he was furious: not only would King Hussein get the credit, but the sheikh would threaten his control of the national movement, and undermine his negotiations with Israel. ‘Why should I pay a price for this?’ he moaned to Clinton’s Middle East envoy, Dennis Ross.

Shortly after Mishal’s life was saved, a group of Jordanian officials discussed the affair with Clinton. ‘Though he was not present, the meeting was an extraordinary moment in the life of Khalid Mishal,’ McGeough writes: ‘Mishal and his movement had been acknowledged as key players.’ It was also an extraordinary reversal of fortune. Hamas, in the words of a senior American official, had been having ‘its worst year’ until ‘Mossad’s balls-up in Amman’. Marzook and Yassin had been behind bars, and hundreds of Hamas leaders had been jailed by Arafat’s Preventive Security Service, headed in Gaza by Mohammed Dahlan, whose methods had made some Hamas prisoners nostalgic for their Israeli jailers. Now Marzook was back in Amman, and Yassin was back in Gaza, a symbol of Palestinian defiance whose authority even Arafat found difficult to challenge.

The greatest beneficiary of the failed assassination, however, was its intended victim, whom Mossad had turned into a star of the Islamic resistance. Marzook campaigned to get his old job back but didn’t stand a chance against the ‘martyr who would not die’. Mishal’s insistence that only armed resistance would end the occupation, and that Arafat had nothing to show for his renunciation of violence (‘Where did it get him? Where’s his independent state?’), prevailed in Hamas’s shura, or decision-making council. ‘The day they tried to kill him was the day Mishal the leader was born,’ a Jordanian journalist told McGeough. ‘The man who died that day was Abu Marzook. Nobody wanted to talk to Abu Marzook after that – it was Mishal, Mishal, Mishal.’

McGeough tells the story of the Amman plot in the gritty, unsentimental style of a hard-boiled thriller. Kill Khalid is a reporter’s book, drawing plentifully on interviews with the important players, including Mishal. The Mishal affair may not be as much of a turning point in the conflict as McGeough claims, but its wider resonances are striking. More than a decade later, Mishal is Hamas’s political chief in Damascus, and Netanyahu, the man who ordered his assassination, is back in power in Jerusalem. The Islamic resistance movement, Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyah (hamas means ‘zeal’ in Arabic), now controls the Gaza Strip, having survived the prisons of the IDF and the Palestinian Authority, a pitiless blockade, international isolation, the ‘targeted’ assassinations of many of its leaders, an American-backed putsch and an Israeli invasion. And though neither the US nor the EU will speak to Mishal, on the grounds that Hamas is a ‘terrorist’ organisation, he has won the respect of a growing number of politicians in the West, including Jimmy Carter.

Mishal was born in 1956, into a peasant family in the Jordanian-ruled West Bank village of Silwad, 16 miles north of Jerusalem. His father, Abd al-Qadir, was a sheikh who had fought in the 1936 Arab Revolt and in the 1948 war with Israel; he had also been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the militant Islamist group founded in Egypt in 1928. Mishal, during his childhood in Silwad, saw little of his father: in 1957, Abd al-Qadir had taken a second wife and moved with her to Kuwait, where he established a new family. Ten years later, however, the Israeli army occupied Silwad, and Fatima Mishal and her children fled to Amman, then to Kuwait, where they were reunited with Abd al-Qadir.

The emirate was not without its difficulties for Palestinian refugees, who couldn’t buy property without a Kuwaiti partner, and were collectively viewed as a potential fifth column. But since in most of the Arab world Palestinians had a choice between the heroism of guerrilla warfare and the misery of the refugee camps, Kuwait offered the hope of a more or less normal life. Palestinians staffed Kuwait’s schools and civil service, and took great pride in their contribution to the country’s economy. Mishal’s father befriended a senior member of the royal family who admired his sermons, and rose to the position of mullah, no small achievement for a country preacher. Kuwait’s comparatively liberal ambience had also made it a centre of Palestinian politics. It was in Kuwait that Arafat and his comrades had founded Fatah; it was there, too, that young Palestinians in the national movement’s various factions – secular-nationalist, Marxist, Islamist – would fight over its future.

Khalid Mishal joined the Muslim Brotherhood at the age of 15. As McGeough emphasises, this was not a fashionable choice in the early 1970s, when the armed resistance to Israel was led by secular nationalists, and Islamists faced accusations of complacency, if not cowardice, for standing on the sidelines. But Mishal, like a growing number of pious Muslims in the diaspora, was convinced that the Palestinian struggle had to be grounded on Islamic principles; it was, they believed, the Arabs’ deviation from those principles that had led them to defeat in 1948 and 1967. They thought that Arafat was repeating the same error when, in the mid-1970s, he began to express support for a ‘transitional’ Palestinian state in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem – and hinted, implicitly, at an eventual rapprochement with the Jewish state.

For Mishal and his comrades, who called for the creation of an Islamic state in all of historical Palestine, this was treason; at a stroke Arafat was lending legitimacy to the state that had caused the Palestinian ordeal, and selling out the refugees. At Kuwait University, where he studied physics, Mishal founded the Islamic Association of Palestinian Students, a rival to the Arafat-controlled General Union of Palestinian Students, and became its president. When he graduated, he asked his mother to say ‘amen’ to his wish to become ‘a martyr for Palestine’. ‘My son, I can’t say “amen” to that,’ she replied. ‘It’s too difficult.’

She needn’t have worried: Khalid, a contemplative, bookish young man, a reader of Camus and Dostoevsky, was not in a hurry to become a martyr. Not only had he joined an organisation that had until this point kept its distance from the armed struggle; unlike many of his classmates, who were slipping out of Kuwait to join the fedayeen in southern Lebanon, he had decided that he could better serve the national cause by remaining a student. In McGeough’s words, he ‘was opting to live to fight another day’.

Mishal soon acquired the trappings of a quiet, middle-class life: a stable job as a high-school physics teacher, a wife and children. But in his spare time he was meeting behind closed doors with a group of Palestinian Muslim Brothers to develop what he called his ‘project’, the creation of an Islamic alternative to Fatah. The time had come, they believed, for Islamists to take part in the armed struggle, and to wrest control of the movement. They belonged to a new generation of Islamists who drew inspiration from the Iranian Revolution and the Afghan holy war; they pointed to the failure of secular Arab nationalists to govern effectively (or to confront Israel), and wanted to fuse the energies of nationalism and Islam. For them ‘there was no contradiction between fighting for Palestine and conducting a religious life.’ Mishal drew selectively on Palestinian history – including his father’s story – to argue that the Muslim Brotherhood, not Fatah, had launched the national resistance: ‘We’re the root; Fatah is a mere branch.’

To most observers, Mishal’s early efforts couldn’t have looked promising. Supporters of Fatah and the left far outnumbered Palestine’s Islamists, and Arafat controlled the purse strings of the PLO. But Arafat had little to show for his leadership of the PLO, apart from its survival. He had held it together thanks to his charisma and his flair for cutting deals, but he had involved the Palestinian movement, to disastrous effect, in Arab politics, above all in the Lebanese civil war. Though spartan in his own habits he had allowed corruption in the PLO to fester, since compromised allies were more easily controlled. And he governed in the style of the region, making decisions capriciously and without consulting anyone, as if his nickname, Mr Palestine, entitled him not to. Islamic opposition movements combining piety with political militancy were excoriating nationalist leaders throughout the region; what grounds were there for seeing the Palestinian movement as an exception? The main surprise, perhaps, is that it took so long.

In 1983, Mishal and his Kuwaiti allies presented their ‘project’ to a meeting of the Muslim Brotherhood in Amman. Arafat and his soldiers had recently been expelled from Lebanon, and the PLO, exiled to Tunis, had never seemed so far from achieving independence, or so directionless. Mishal, McGeough writes, gave a daring speech that amounted to a ‘full-frontal assault on the supremacy of Yasir Arafat’. His recommendations were adopted, and Mishal was made head of the Kuwait-based Jihaz Filastin – the Palestine Apparatus that would pay for military operations in the Occupied Territories. (McGeough, drawing uncritically on Mishal’s account, makes rather too much of this conference, claiming that it marks the founding of Hamas; in fact, Hamas was established four years later, at the Gaza home of Sheikh Yassin on 9 December 1987, the day the intifada broke out.) Mishal’s first assignment, as head of the Palestine Apparatus, was to raise money in the Gulf so that Yassin’s followers could undergo weapons training in Jordan. Tipped off by an informer, Israel jailed Yassin for plotting to destroy the Jewish state.

Yassin’s involvement in weapons training came as a shock to many Israelis; even today there are figures in Israeli intelligence who insist that his guns were pointed at Fatah. Ever since they occupied Gaza, the Israelis had been cultivating Yassin – a Muslim Brother who’d been jailed by Egypt – in their struggle against Palestinian nationalism, much as the Americans had supported the Afghan mujahedin. (McGeough suggests that some of the money raised by Muslims abroad in support of the mujahedin may have found its way to Palestine.) Yassin made no secret of his hatred of Israel, but, as a Muslim Brother, he believed that before taking up arms to recover their land, Palestinians would first have to undergo ‘ideological, spiritual and psychological re-education’. While secular nationalists mobilised against the occupation, in strikes and guerrilla attacks, Yassin promoted social works and religious instruction. Overlooking his belief that ‘re-education’ was only preparation for the impending jihad, the Israelis regarded him as a tactical ally against the PLO. In the early 1970s, while Israel repressed any stirrings of nationalist resistance, Yassin was permitted to open up the Islamic Centre, an umbrella organisation that included a mosque, a clinic, a kindergarten, a festival hall and a headquarters for an alms committee; with the occupier’s approval he was soon receiving considerable funds from the Gulf.

In the mid-1980s, the military governor of Gaza gave a succinct summary of Israel’s relationship to Yassin: ‘The Israeli government gives me a budget and the military government gives it to the mosques.’ After a trip to Gaza in 1985, Daniel Kurtzer, an official at the US embassy in Tel Aviv, barged into a meeting of Shimon Peres’s advisers and asked them: ‘Have you guys lost your minds? Do you ever learn from history? Do you know what you’re doing in Gaza as we speak? . . . You really think you can tame these guys?’ When Gazan Islamists wanted to cross over to the West Bank in support of their comrades in clashes with Fatah, the Israelis let them through. As one official explained to McGeough, ‘they’ll only be beating each other up.’

In fact, Yassin and other Islamists inside the Occupied Territories were drawing the same lessons from the revolutionary Islamic struggles in Iran, Afghanistan and Lebanon as Mishal and his comrades were in the diaspora: that the gradualist philosophy of the Brothers should give way to the rifle. In its 1988 charter, Hamas proclaimed its desire to ‘raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine’ and depicted the Zionist project as the latest chapter of a Jewish conspiracy for world domination that had begun with the French Revolution, and continued with the Russian Revolution and two world wars. Yet the Israelis continued to indulge Hamas during the first few years of the intifada, focusing their repression on the secular National Unified Leadership of the Uprising, and allowing the Islamists to receive substantial funds from abroad. With this money – raised by Hamas-affiliated charities in Europe, the US and the Gulf – Hamas expanded its influence, building a vast network of schools, daycare centres, hospitals and athletic clubs.

Mishal relocated to Amman in 1990, when he and his family were forced to flee Kuwait after Arafat gave his blessings to Saddam Hussein’s invasion, thereby jeopardising the security of the 400,000 Palestinians who’d made a decent life for themselves in the emirate – not to mention his ties to the Gulf Arabs who bankrolled the PLO. Arafat’s mistake was Hamas’s good fortune: Gulf rulers who had paid for the PLO’s operating budget now wrote their cheques to Hamas, which had denounced Saddam’s attack. Drained of funds and desperate to come in from the cold, Arafat scurried to Madrid and then to Oslo; ignoring the warnings of Palestinian leaders from the Occupied Territories, he signed a deal in September 1993 that made him Israel’s policeman, while providing no guarantee of a freeze on Israeli settlements, or the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state. In no small part thanks to disappointment with Oslo – and frustration with Arafat and the ‘Tunisians’ who returned to govern the PA – Hamas became the main opposition party in Palestine, attracting support not primarily for its Islamic piety, but for its lack of corruption, and its willingness to stand up to Israel. It also developed a substantial military wing, the Qassam Brigades, which would launch a ferocious campaign of suicide attacks inside Israel in 1994, following Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of 29 Palestinian worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs mosque in Hebron. There could be no balance of power with Israel, but perhaps, Mishal and his men reasoned, there could be a balance of fear. Arafat won praise from the US and Israel as a ‘partner in peace’ for his brutal crackdown on Hamas. But he soon discovered that he could repress Hamas only at prohibitive cost to his own legitimacy.

Working under Mousa Abu Marzook in Hamas’s political bureau, Mishal kept a low profile during the first intifada: ‘A little obscurity is good. My comrades and God know what I have been doing.’ But according to regional intelligence agencies, he had established an increasingly influential position inside Hamas, overseeing ‘funds, weapons and military infrastructure’; some Israeli officials referred to him as Hamas’s prime minister. Agents observed that he avoided public highways in Lebanon, preferring roads used by the Syrian army, and that he travelled frequently to Singapore, Pakistan and other Muslim countries. Though he did not make an official appearance as a leader of Hamas until 1995, he was now, as head of the Palestine Apparatus and a member of the three-man military committee which directed the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s single most powerful figure.

Mishal had a stroke of luck when, brushing aside the warnings of his colleagues, Marzook travelled to the US only six months after the Clinton administration declared Hamas a ‘terrorist’ organisation – and only a day after a suicide attack near Tel Aviv. He was arrested by the FBI at JFK airport and spent the next two years in prison, leaving Mishal to take over the political bureau. Marzook continued to think of himself as Hamas’s natural leader, but his visit to the US had infuriated his colleagues, and Mishal proved himself an adroit operator in the shura council. The rivalry between Mishal, a Kuwaiti Palestinian who’d never lived a day under occupation, and Marzook, a protégé of Yassin from a poor family in Gaza, was partly a reflection of the old tensions between Palestinians from the ‘inside’ and those from the diaspora. But matters of style and personality were just as important. Marzook was a gregarious, impulsive man who enjoyed an audience; Mishal was a careful, patient listener who won over his colleagues with his seriousness and with his rigorous adherence to the principles of shura. And so when Marzook returned to Jordan in 1997, he found himself out of a job.

The failed assassination gave Mishal a renewed sense of purpose: ‘I’ve been given a new life for a new role,’ he said. Two years later, he was deported by Hussein’s heir, King Abdullah, but soon found a home in Damascus, where, like Hizbullah, Hamas has given the Syrians a card to play in their efforts to recover the Golan Heights. In return, Syria has provided him with protection from Israel, which has assassinated dozens of Hamas militants since the second intifada, including Sheikh Yassin, killed by a helicopter gunship in March 2004. After Yassin’s death Mishal became Hamas’s undisputed leader. And in November of that year, another obstacle to Mishal – and to Hamas’s eclipse of Fatah – vanished when Arafat died. Without Arafat, and under Abbas’s impotent, feckless leadership, Fatah was rudderless. Hamas now dominated Palestinian politics.

Mishal is often portrayed as the ‘hardliner in Damascus’, in implicit (and unfavourable) contrast with Hamas ‘moderates’ in the Occupied Territories. But McGeough, who spent many hours talking to Mishal, situates him at Hamas’s ‘pragmatic centre’. He is a militant, but not a fanatic; a nationalist, not a proponent of transnational jihad. (An American analyst told McGeough: ‘I’ve met him three times now and I still have not heard him say the word “Islam”.’) It’s true that Mishal led the opposition inside the shura to participating in the 1996 parliamentary elections, arguing that to do so would be to admit the legitimacy of the Oslo Accords. But he also argued in favour of taking part in the 2006 elections, inspired by the example of Hizbullah in Lebanon, and led Hamas to a decisive victory. As McGeough points out, Hamas ran on a platform of reform, promising clean governance and transparency; it made no mention of an Islamic state in its electoral manifesto, and hardly spoke of violence, leaving Fatah to boast of its contribution to the armed struggle. During the campaign Mishal spoke to rallies from Damascus, through a mobile phone held to the microphone of a loudspeaker. Hamas’s victory was greeted with a diplomatic boycott by the powers that had urged democracy on the Palestinian people, along with efforts to ‘bolster’ Abbas and, ultimately, to foment civil war between Hamas and Fatah.

The West responded this way to the elected government of Hamas because it refuses to renounce violence, abide by previous agreements between Israel and the PA, and recognise the state of Israel. Mishal’s view is that if Hamas were to satisfy the Quartet’s three demands, there would be little to distinguish Hamas from Fatah, which renounced violence, repudiated its claim to 78 per cent of historical Palestine and accepted Israel’s legitimacy – and got very little in return except an interminable ‘peace process’. Israel, in Mishal’s view, would never have removed the settlers from Gaza had it not been for the Qassam rockets fired at Sderot. Hamas, he insists, will continue the armed struggle until the occupation ends. Yet his movement does not use force indiscriminately, and, as many Israeli officials acknowledge, he has honoured ceasefires more faithfully than Arafat did.

Mishal does not accept Israel’s ‘right to exist’ – this would be tantamount, in Hamas’s eyes, to legitimising their own dispossession – but de facto recognition is another matter, and he has on several occasions advocated a hudna of 20 to 30 years. At a summit in Mecca on 7 February 2007 he expressed Hamas’s support for continued negotiations based on a two-state deal along the 1967 border, a position that, McGeough suggests, brings him closer to Washington’s official position than Netanyahu, who advocates only a vague ‘economic peace’. Until a Palestinian state is established, and there is some parallel recognition by Israel of Palestinian rights to national self-determination – and some resolution of the refugees’ plight – Mishal is not going to recognise the Jewish state. And in Mecca he agreed only to ‘respect’ – not ‘abide by’ – earlier agreements with Israel. But he has also indicated that Hamas’s stated positions are far less important than its actions: ‘Watch what we do, not what we say.’

What this means is that Hamas is likely to continue calling for the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea, while at the same time seeking an end to the occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Mishal and his associates don’t view the two-state arrangement as anything like a long-term solution to the conflict, but they are realists, and they are willing to live with it – provided it doesn’t result in the cantonisation of Palestinian land, and provided it’s not a way of shutting them out, as Abbas and the West intend it. Hamas wants to be a part of the deal, and, as it demonstrated during the Oslo years, is in an ideal position to play the role of spoiler if it’s not.

As for the 1988 charter, with its luxuriant borrowings from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Hamas isn’t likely to repudiate it, particularly if it comes under pressure to do so: it was precisely Western calls for repudiation that led Hamas to suspend its efforts to revise it, and to eliminate the offending passages. But Mishal and other Hamas officials have indicated on several occasions that the charter is a historical document that long ago ceased to reflect their thinking. Mishal is reported to consider it an embarrassment, and has insisted that the conflict with Israel ‘is a political issue between us; it is not theological.’ Although he has authorised – and indeed praised – the use of suicide attacks against Israeli civilians, he has also emphasised that ‘we do not fight you because you belong to a certain faith or culture . . . We have no problem with Jews who have not attacked us.’ Unlike most of the secular nationalist factions, including Fatah, Hamas has never struck at targets outside the zone of conflict.

Mishal is not a charismatic leader in the mould of Arafat, or even of Yassin. He’s a good speaker, yet he has arrived at his position not by giving speeches, but rather, McGeough suggests, by patiently fielding the views of his colleagues inside Hamas’s shura. By promoting discussion and consensus, he’s been able to steer Hamas towards an implicit acceptance of coexistence with Israel. Despite his commitment to the armed struggle, he is not a hothead, and he is far less interested in martyrdom than in lifting the blockade, securing the release of Palestinian prisoners, and achieving recognition for Hamas on the international stage. Unlike some of Hamas’s leaders, particularly those who have spent their lives under occupation, Mishal has travelled widely, and he understands the way things work in the outside world. The world, in turn, has begun to take notice of him. He may be a ‘Specially Designated Global Terrorist’ in the eyes of the US Treasury, but he has been receiving an increasing number of visitors from the West, as well as a handful of Jewish leaders.

As the director of Hamas’s foreign policy, Mishal has forged a close alliance with Syria and Iran, the so-called resistance bloc; he has been a frequent guest in Tehran, which is reported to smuggle weapons to Gaza through Sudan and Cyprus. But he has been careful to preserve his movement’s independence, and has developed cordial relations with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and, increasingly, Turkey. ‘Hamas is not an Iranian tool,’ a former senior Israeli official told McGeough. ‘Hamas needs Tehran and Damascus, but it’s a balance that Mishal manages well.’ As Mishal points out, he wouldn’t have gone to Mecca in February 2007 or supported the Saudi peace plan – or backed the Sunni insurgents in Iraq – if he were simply a client of Tehran.

Will the Obama administration talk to Hamas? In a recent interview with La Repubblica, Mishal said that it was just ‘a matter of time’. In American think tanks close to the administration (and, one imagines, in the State Department), it’s understood that Hamas will have to be engaged sooner or later: Abbas simply does not command enough support among Palestinians to reach a deal on his own, and if Hamas is destroyed, it’s likely to be replaced not by Fatah, but by jihadi extremists. In March, a bipartisan group of senior American officials – including Paul Volcker, an economic adviser to Obama, the former Republican senators Chuck Hagel and Nancy Kassebaum, the former World Bank president James Wolfensohn and the former UN ambassador Thomas Pickering – urged Obama to talk to Hamas. But the power of the Israel lobby makes any direct overture risky. Legal restrictions, too, would have to be overcome: three years ago, the US Congress passed a law banning the use of funds for diplomatic contact with Hamas, and ended assistance to any Palestinian ministry connected to Hamas. Although Hamas has never attacked American interests, Obama may find it hard to authorise talks with the ‘specially designated global terrorists’ in its leadership. And while the administration is pursuing a thaw with Damascus, George Mitchell isn’t likely to stop by Mishal’s bunker. Just how Mitchell expects to reach a deal without talking to Hamas isn’t clear. As Mishal remarked to McGeough in a recent interview, ‘Would he have succeeded in Belfast if he was ordered to ignore the IRA?’

Isolating Hamas, however, remains the order of the day, and it was the unspoken subtext of the recent ‘donors conference’ at Sharm el-Sheikh, where leaders from the West and the Arab world came to pledge £3.2 billion in aid to the Palestinians. Hamas was not invited, since the purpose was to bolster Abbas and the PA. And though it was Gaza, not the West Bank, that was devastated during Israel’s offensive, most of the funds will go to the PA in Ramallah. (Of the $900 million the US has pledged, $600 million has been earmarked for the PA to ‘reorganise itself’.)

In an implicit concession to Hamas, Hillary Clinton recently said that Washington would not oppose the formation of a unity government between Fatah and Hamas, but she added that the US ‘will not deal with nor in any way fund’ a Palestinian government that fails to meet the Quartet’s three conditions: a demand it hasn’t imposed on the coalition government in Lebanon, in which Hizbullah has veto power; or indeed on such pro-Western Arab governments as Saudi Arabia that have yet to make peace with Israel. Meanwhile, Israel has prevented construction materials from entering Gaza, partly because of their alleged ‘dual use’ in arms production – but also as a means of pressuring Hamas to release Corporal Gilad Shalit – and even pasta and lentils have been turned away at the crossing.

None of this is going to turn Palestinians against Hamas, any more than America’s arming of Fatah or Israel’s attack on Gaza did. Hamas is part of the fabric of Palestinian politics, and neither force nor diplomatic isolation will make it go away. Its history is one of tenacity in the face of enormous odds: it has been nourished by the efforts to destroy it. No one is in a better position to appreciate this than Israel’s new prime minister who, once again, finds himself facing the martyr who would not die.

From the LRB letters page: [ 28 May 2009 ] Joe Palmer, Thom Townsend.

The Israeli New Historians

Exerpted from: http://azure.org.il/download/magazine/1546az9_editorial.pdf

It was scarcely a decade ago that books such as Benny Morris’ Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (1987) and Tom Segev’s The Seventh Million (1991) appeared, heralding the arrival of a cadre of young Israeli historians radically at odds with the way that previous scholars had recounted the story of Zionism. In particular, the new historians painted a highly unflattering picture of Israel’s founding, centered around the Zionist leadership’s mistreatment of the Arabs during and after the War of Independence (Morris) and its errors of omission and commission towards the victims and survivors of the Holocaust (Segev). At the time, the new perspective on Israel’s past was generally dismissed as a fringe phenomenon, and only a handful of names were associated with it. Since then, however, scholars openly identified with the new history—and with the similar treatment of Zionism in disciplines such as political science, sociology and philosophy—have grown appreciably in numbers and influence. Many of them have earned coveted tenure-track positions at Israeli universities, while their views have been widely disseminated by the Israeli media, especially in the daily Ha’aretz (Israel’s equivalent of The New York Times), and most spectacularly in Tekuma, Israel Television’s 1998 documentary miniseries on the Jewish state’s first fifty years.

In the past year, however, the new historians have taken a quantum leap towards acceptance by the cultural mainstream. In July 1999, the Israel Defense Forces, through its History Division, cosponsored the publication of The Struggle for Israel’s Security, a book which the daily Yedi’ot Aharonot described as “shattering a number of the most splendid myths on which we were raised” (August 4, 1999), and which was particularly harsh in assessing Israel’s security policy during the formative period of the 1950s. Two months later, the Ministry of Education introduced into ninth-grade classrooms across the country the first three textbooks about Israel that are part of a new curriculum aimed at teaching history from an expressly “universal” (as opposed to “nationalist”) perspective. The most radical of these texts is A World of Changes: History for Ninth Grade, edited by Danny Ya’akobi and published by the Ministry’s own Curriculum Division, which attributes the victory of Jewish forces over five Arab armies in the War of Independence to the Jews’ organizational and logistical edge rather than to determined leadership, brilliant military tactics or individual heroism, and suggests that Israel precipitated the Six Day War by acting aggressively against Syria in the months prior to the outbreak of fighting. The new history has captured the interest of a growing segment of the Israeli public as well: Tom Segev’s Days of the Anemones (1999), an account of the Mandate period that credits the Arabs rather than the Jews with driving the British out of Palestine, has been on the Ha’aretz national bestseller list for thirty-one weeks, and counting—a feat unparalleled by any historical work published in Israel in the last decade and a half. (See Yehoshua Porath’s article on Segev, p. 23.)

At least as impressive has been the new historians’ penetration of the American intellectual mainstream—which sets the trend for the way that Israel is viewed throughout the democratic world, and which until now has remained largely immune to the trends in Israeli academia. In September 1999, New York’s prestigious Knopf publishing house released Benny Morris’ Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999, a 750- page reinterpretation of Zionist history which suggests that Zionism was “tainted by a measure of moral dubiousness” from the outset, and argues that the Israeli leadership bears substantial responsibility for all the wars fought since 1948. The following month, W.W. Norton published The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World Since 1948, a 670-page tour of the last half-century authored by Avi Shlaim, an Israeli-born “new historian” who teaches at Oxford. Shlaim’s conclusions, though presented in a less scholarly manner than those of Morris, are similar in substance. Many of America’s leading opinionmaking publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Commentary, Foreign Affairs and The Weekly Standard, devoted lengthy reviews to these iconoclastic works, making them the most widely discussed books on Israel to appear in the English-speaking world in the past decade.

Stop the War Coalition - Hezbollah MP Hussein El Haj Hassan London 3 March 2009

Norman Finkelstein - Hezbollah, the Honour of Lebanon

This is the best and most current analysis of Hezbollah I've seen yet.

http://zionismkills.wordpress.com/2008/06/25/norman-finkelstein-hezbollah-the-honour-of-lebanon/

Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish American political scientist and author, specializing in Jewish-related issues and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular talks about the Lebanese militia Hezbollah and openly supports and praises their resistance: “They (Hezbollah) show courage, they show discipline, I respect that”

On Israeli defeat and consequential withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, Finkelstein says:”But the reality was — and everyone understood it — that the Israeli attitude was: We are going to knock out Hizbullah. They began planning for a new war right after they were forced to leave in 2000. They found their excuse, their pretext, in July 2006, but there is no question among rational people that Israel was never going to let the Hizbullah victory go by.”

Watch the video:

“There is no way that the United States and Israel are going to tolerate any resistance (to their hegemony) in the Arab world.”

On the damage caused to Lebanon as a result of the resistance: “It’s better to die on your feet than to walk crawling on your knees….how can I not respect those (Hezbollah) who say they would rather die on their feet? How can I not respect that?”

Finkelstein then goes on to slam the stances taken by some sell out Arabs who continue to admire George Bush like ‘Servants’ despite Bush being the man behind the carpet bombing of Lebanon and says that Bush should be classified as ‘persona non grata’:”Who (would) roll out the red carpet less than two years after your whole country was destroyed by them (the US)? “

“You (sell out-arabs) have NO self respect”

—————————————- ———–

How Hezbollah achieved victory over Israel

Part 1: The Intelligence War
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_E…

Part 2: The Ground War
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_E…

Part 3: The Political War
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_E…

Rabbi Weiss, Outside Annapolis Peace Confab, Rips Zionism

Israeli Captain Tells the Truth about Israeli Genocide in Gaza

Thousands of Israelis protest against the war in Gaza

An In-Depth BBC Report on Israel's Secret Nuclear Weapons Program

http://brasschecktv.com/page/13.html

Stunning!!

John Stewart on the Israeli attack strategy in Lebanon

Hezbollah - a primer

The word Hezbollah is composed of the two words hezb and allah, meaning "party" and "God" respectively, or simply "party of God". It is also commonly referred to as "the party" or el hezb.

Created in 1983, after Israel's invasion and occupation of Lebanon and it's capital, Beirut, in 1982 (the first ever occupation of an Arab capital by Israel,) its stated goal at that time was the creation of an islamic state in Lebanon, widely believed to be modeled after the Iranian revolution, but an alliance with a Christian party in Lebanon, Aoun's Free Patriotic Current, shows their tolerance to Lebanon's multi-sectarian culture. Its top priority historically however has been attacking Israeli soldiers on Lebanese soil.

Hezbollah's method of sustenance is unknown. The exact nature of this backing is presumed to be financial, technical, and military backing, with reports sometimes surfacing of Iranian Revolutionary Guards visiting Hezbollah in Lebanon to provide assistance. Military supplies had been shipped through the Syrian army supply lines when Syrian troops were stationed in Lebanon, yet Hezbollah's methods of rearmament now are through the black market.

As a way to remain popular with the local population mostly of the south, Hezbollah has involved itself in charity work, often compensating the families of fighters who have died and those whose homes had been destroyed by Israel. The lack of an equivalent system of providing help from the Lebanese government has been a key ingredient in remaining popular. Yet, the government is learning. Whilst Hezbollah will provide the rent of an apartment for a period of two years with furniture included (a sum amounting to US$12,000 per houshold), the government has decided to give LL50m (US$33,333) for every family that has lost a home. With 1500 lost homes during the war, that's the equivalent of the entire donation of Saudi Arabia, and of also the entire stated goal for the Stockholm donor's conference.

Finally Some Peace

This is why our country means so much to us

Half of Ramlet el Bayda was cleansed of most of the spilled oil on it's beach today and oil absorption pads were layed along the seafront which will absorb more oil that will come along it's shores. All that was needed was some heavy machienery, some shovels, buckets, and a few able-bodied men and women to clean the beach.

May this first "experiment" expand like a crystal to all the beaches in Lebanon, and to all the activists in Greenline and others... give yourselves a pat on the back.

State of Denial - The Abdication of Lebanese Leaders

http://www.hamrablues.com/archive/august_15_06_state_of_denial.html

by Michael Béhé, The New Republic

Beirut, Lebanon -The politicians, journalists and intellectuals of Lebanon have, of late, been experiencing the shock of their lives. They knew full well that Hezbollah had created an independent state in our country, a state including all the ministers and parallel institutions, duplicating those of Lebanon. What they did not know--and are discovering with this war, and what has petrified them with surprise and terror--is the extent of this phagocytosis.

In fact, our country had become an extension of Iran, and our so-called political power also served as a political and military cover for the Islamists of Teheran. We suddenly discovered that Teheran had stocked more than 12,000 missiles, of all types and calibers, on our territory and that they had patiently, systematically, organized a suppletive force, with the help of the Syrians, that took over, day after day, all the rooms in the House of Lebanon. Just imagine it: We stock ground-to-ground missiles, Zilzals, on our territory and the firing of such devices, without our knowledge, has the power to spark a regional strategic conflict and, potentially, bring about the annihilation of Lebanon.

We knew that Iran, by means of Hezbollah, was building a veritable Maginot line in the south, but it was the pictures of Maroun el Ras and Bint Jbail that revealed to us the magnitude of these constructions. This amplitude made us understand several things at once: that we were no longer masters of our destiny; that we do not possess the most basic means necessary to reverse the course of this state of things; and that those who turned our country into an outpost of their Islamic doctrine's combat against Israel did not have the slightest intention of willingly giving up their hold over us.

The national salvation discussions that concerned the application of Resolution 1559, and which included most of the Lebanese political movements, were simply for show. Iran and Syria had not invested billions of dollars on militarizing Lebanon in order to wage their war, simply to give in to the desire of the Lebanese and the international community for them to pack up their hardware and set it up back home.

And then, the indecision, the cowardice, the division and the irresponsible behavior of our leaders are such that they had no effort to make to show their talent. No need to engage a wrestling match with the other political components of the Land of Cedars. The latter showed themselves--and continue to show themselves--to be inconsistent.

Of course, our army, reshaped over the years by the Syrian occupier so it could no longer fulfill its role as protector of the nation, did not have the capacity to tackle the militamen of the Hezbollah. Our army, whom it is more dangerous to call upon--because of the explosive equilibrium that constitutes each of its brigades--than to shut up behind locked doors in its barracks. A force that is still largely loyal to its former foreign masters, to the point of being uncontrollable; to the point of having collaborated with the Iranians to put our coastal radar stations at the disposal of their missiles, that almost sunk an Israeli boat off the shores of Beirut. As for the non-Hezbollah elements in the government, they knew nothing of the existence of land-to-sea missiles on our territory ... that caused the totally justified destruction of all our radar stations by the Hebrews' army. And even then we are getting off lightly in these goings-on.

It is easy now to whine and gripe, and to play the hypocritical role of victims. We know full well how to get others to pity us and to claim that we are never responsible for the horrors that regularly occur on our soil. Of course, that is nothing but rubbish! The Security Council's Resolution 1559--that demanded that our government deploy our army on our sovereign territory, along our international border with Israel and that it disarm all the militia on our land--was voted on September 2, 2004.

We had two years to implement this resolution and thus guarantee a peaceful future to our children, but we did absolutely nothing. Our greatest crime--which was not the only one!--was not that we did not succeed, but that we did not attempt or undertake anything. And that was the fault of none else than the pathetic Lebanese politicians.

Our government, from the very moment the Syrian occupier left, let ships and truckloads of arms pour into our country. Without even bothering to look at their cargo. They jeopardized all chances for the rebirth of our country by confusing the Cedar Revolution with the liberation of Beirut. In reality, we had just received the chance--a sort of unhoped-for moratorium--that allowed us to take the future into our own hands, nothing more.

To think that we were not even capable of agreeing to "hang" Émile Lahoud--Al-Assad's puppet--on Martyrs' Square and that he is still president of what some insist on calling our republic. ... There is no need to look any further: We are what we are, that is to say, not much.
All those who assume public and communicational responsibilities in this country are responsible for this catastrophe. Except those of my colleagues, journalists, and editors, who are dead, assassinated by the Syrian thugs, because they were clearly less cowardly than those who survived. And Lahoud remained at Baadbé, the president's palace!

And when I speak of a catastrophe, I do not mean the action accomplished by Israel in response to the aggression against its civilians and its army, which was produced from our soil and that we did strictly nothing to avoid, and for which we are consequently responsible. Any avoiding of this responsibility--some people here do not have the minimal notions of international law necessary to understand!--means that Lebanon, as a state, does not exist.

The hypocrisy goes on: Even some editorialists of the respectable L'Orient Le Jour put Hezbollah's savagery and that of the Israelis on a par! Shame! Spinelessness! And who are we in this fable? Poor ad aeternumvictims of the ambitions of others?

Politicians either support this insane idea or keep silent. Those we would expect to speak, to save our image, remain silent like the others. And I am precisely alluding to General Aoun, who could have made a move by proclaiming the truth. Even his enemy, Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader, has proved to be less ... vague.

Lebanon a victim? What a joke!

Before the Israeli attack, Lebanon no longer existed, it was no more than a hologram. In Beirut, innocent citizens like me were forbidden access to certain areas of their own capital. But our police, our army, and our judges were also excluded. That was the case, for example, of Hezbollah's and the Syrians' command zone in the Haret Hreik quarter (in red on the satellite map). A square measuring a kilometer wide, a capital within the capital, permanently guarded by a Horla army, possessing its own institutions, its schools, its crèches, its tribunals, its radio, its television and, above all ... its government. A "government" that, alone decided, in the place of the figureheads of the Lebanese government--in which Hezbollah also had its ministers!--to attack a neighboring state, with which we had no substantial or grounded quarrel, and to plunge the United States into a bloody conflict. And if attacking a sovereign nation on its territory, assassinating eight of its soldiers, kidnapping two others and, simultaneously, launching missiles on nine of its towns does not constitute a casus belli, the latter juridical principle will seriously need revising.

Thus almost all of these cowardly politicians, including numerous Shia leaders and religious personalities themselves, are blessing each bomb that falls from a Jewish F-16 turning the insult to our sovereignty that was Haret Hreik, right in the heart of Beirut, into a lunar landscape. Without the Israelis, how could we have received another chance--that we in no way deserve!--to rebuild our country?

Each Irano-Syrian fort that Jerusalem destroys, each Islamic fighter they eliminate, and Lebanon proportionally starts to live again! Once again, the soldiers of Israel are doing our work. Once again, like in 1982, we are watching--cowardly, lying low, despicable, and insulting them to boot--their heroic sacrifice that allows us to keep hoping. To not be swallowed up in the bowels of the earth. Because, of course, by dint of not giving a damn for southern Lebanon, of letting foreigners take hold of the privileges that belong to us, we no longer had the ability to recover our independence and sovereignty. If, at the end of this war, the Lebanese army retakes control over its territory and gets rid of the state within a state--that tried to suffocate the latter--it will only be thanks to the Tsahal [Israeli Defense Force], and that, all these faint-hearted politicians, from the crook Fuad Siniora, to Saad Hariri, the son of Lebanon's plunderer, and general Aoun, all know perfectly well.

As for the destruction caused by the Israelis ... that is another imposture: Look at the satellite map! I have situated, as best I could, but in their correct proportions, the parts of my capital that have been destroyed by Israel. They are Haret Hreik--in its totality--and the dwellings of Hezbollah's leaders, situated in the large Shia suburb of Dayaa (as they spell it) and that I have circled in blue.

In addition to these two zones, Tsahal has exploded a nine-storied building that housed Hezbollah's command, in Beirut's city center, above and slightly to the left (to the north west) of Haret Hreik on the map. It was Nasrallah's "perch" inside the city, whereby he asserted his presence and domination over us. A depot of Syrian arms in the port, two army radars that the Shiite officers had put at Hezbollah's disposal, and a truck suspected of transporting arms, in the Christian quarter of Ashrafieh.

Moreover the road and airport infrastructures were put out of working order : they served to provide Hezbollah with arms and munitions. Apart from that, Tsahal has neither hit nor deteriorated anything, and all those who speak of the "destruction of Beirut" are either liars, Iranians, anti-Semites or absent. Even the houses situated one alley's distance from the targets I mentioned have not been hit, they have not even suffered a scratch; on contemplating these results of this workyou understand the meaning of the concept "surgical strikes" and you can admire the dexterity of the Jewish pilots. Beirut, all the rest of Beirut, 95 percent of Beirut, lives and breathes better than a fortnight ago. All those who have not sided with terrorism know they have strictly nothing to fear from the Israeli planes, on the contrary! One example: Last night the restaurant where I went to eat was jammed full and I had to wait until 9:30 p.m. to get a table. Everyone was smiling, relaxed, but no one filmed them: a strange destruction of Beirut, is it not?

Of course, there are some 500,000 refugees from the south who are experiencing a veritable tragedy and who are not smiling. But Jean Tsadik, who has his eyes fixed on Kfar Kileh, and from whom I have learned to believe each word he says, assures me that practically all the houses of the aforesaid refugees are intact. So they will be able to come back as soon as Hezbollah is vanquished.

The defeat of the Shia fundamentalists of Iranian allegiance is imminent. The figures communicated by Nasrallah's minions and by the Lebanese Red Cross are deceiving: firstly, of the 400 dead declared by Lebanon, only 150 are real collateral civilian victims of the war, the others were militiamen without uniform serving Iran. The photographic report "Les Civils des bilans libanais" made by Stéphane Juffa for the Metula News Agency constitutes, to this day, the unique tangible evidence of this gigantic morbid manipulation. Which makes this document eminently important.

Moreover, Hassan Nasrallah's organization has not lost 200 combatants, as Tsahal claims. This figure only concerns the combats taking place on the border and even then the Israelis underestimate it, for a reason that escapes me, by about a hundred militiamen eliminated. The real count of Hezbollah's casualties, that includes those dead in Beirut, the Bekaa Valley, Baalbek and their other camps, rocket and missile launchers and arms and munition depots amounts to 1,100 supplementary Hezbollah militiamen who have definitively ceased to terrorize and humiliate my country.

Like the overwhelming majority of Lebanese, I pray that no one puts an end to the Israeli attack before it finishes shattering the terrorists. I pray that the Hebrew soldiers will penetrate all the hidden recesses of southern Lebanon and will hunt out, in our stead, the vermin that has taken root there. Like the overwhelming majority of Lebanese, I have put the champagne ready in the refrigerator to celebrate the Israeli victory.

But contrary to them--and to paraphrase [French singer] Michel Sardou--I recognize that they are also fighting for our liberty, another battle "where you were not present"! And in the name of my people, I wish to express my infinite gratitude to the relatives of the Israeli victims--civilian and military--whose loved ones have fallen so that I can live standing upright in my identity. They should know that I weep with them.

As for the pathetic clique that thrives at the head of my country, it is time for them to understand that after this war, after our natural allies have rid us of those who are hindering us from rebuilding a nation, a cease-fire or an armistice will not suffice. To ensure the future of Lebanon, it is time to make peace with those we have no reason to go to war against. In fact, only peace will ensure peace. Someone must tell them because in this country we have not learnt what a truism is.

Michael Béhé is a writer for the Metula News Agency.

Oil Spill Cleanup time!

The time to clean our beaches has finally arrived. Unfortunately the effetcs of the oil spill will be felt for years to come, and we might see oil on our beaches forever. However the more we delay in cleaning the beaches the more difficult it becomes to clean it.

Starting on Thurs 17th Aug 2006, work will commence on cleaning the oil spill in two shifts per day
Shift 1 = 9:00am - 12:30pm
Lunch = 12:30pm - 1:30pm
Shift 2 = 1:30pm - 6:00pm

Location: Ramlet El Baida

Personal protective equipment that will be provided will be:
- Goggles
- Masks with filters (we're actually short of activated carbon masks so find some and get some with you)
- Gloves
- Plastic Boots
- Overalls

For coastal cleaning, shovels and buckets will be provided.
For personal cleaning, hot-spots will be allocated to wash gloves and boots between shifts.

Greenline is organising this cleanup with help from various groups and NGOs. For any questions don't hesitate to call the coordinator 03 782469, she's a real cool chick ;-)

Battle "one"

two hours and a bit into the first battle in the war for peace and it looks like the cease fire might hold, but i'll give it a full 24 hrs before i'll be too sure.

The only problem the Lebanese have is that we still have a blockade upon us. People, we need gas desperately!

Join us tonight for cease fire dinks, for tomorrow is a holiday here..

Peace.

Stuck between a Katyusha and a hard place

Bombing of Dahyeh this afternoon. People were hurt.

To many it seemed the beginning of the end scheduled for monday morning after everyone agreed in principle to UN res 1701, but hezbollah ended up refusing to discuss certain terms of resolution 1701 today (such as disarming), thus effectively cancelling the discussions that the lebanese gov't was supposed to engage in to finally end the war.

My intuition told me it was too good to be true. Looks like we have some more to endure.. We're stuck between the haters of the region and it continues to be only the innocent civillians of both Israel and Lebanon who pay the price. Noone, it seems, gives a shit about us enough to make a difference.

It's time to teach hate a lesson. The Lebanese people have dealt with 16 yrs of hate and there's NO reason why we can't deal with it again this time.

I just want to add that seeing pictures of smoke, and then seeing smoke rise live from buildings is a completely surreal experience..

Just got back from one of the most amazing parties we've had in a looong time... and it's in times of war!... unbelievable lebanon... Middle of the forest, EXCELLENT minimal electro all night.. dancing all night... that familiar smell in the air.. (hey we WERE in the forest) Music was great, crowd was great, setting was amazing.. the only thing is that i think the valet dude took my car out for a spin (bastard)

The CD up there cost 10thou and the proceeds of that as well as the tickets all went to helping refugees.

The party was held in the name of PEACE! Yeah people PEACE! ...to the whole world! now that's what i'm talking about...

Jamiroquai - Dynamite - (Don't) Give Hate a Chance

Why can't we be together?
Could you love me, don't hate me
I don't see (why can't we live together)
Maybe we could get it on.
Maybe we can get it on
Should be our destiny
There's a cold streak living inside us
There's no rainbows... just bullets and bombs
If you wanna rise up
We can make this hate stop
Now don't you wanna rise up

We've been giving hate a chance
(we've got all this love to give you know)
And the love will be running out for us
Can you feel the dreams of life
We're hoping we can still survive
As the wind carries every dove away

So why do we see these colours
It's only skin deep, don't mean a thing
So clear underneath this we're all brothers
Can't you see it's killing us.
can't you see it's killing us
Can't you see it's killing me
Trigger happy fantasy
So stand up and be, so strong now
Freedom is not so far away
If you know you wanna rise up
We can make this hate stop
Don't you wanna rise up

We've been giving hate a chance
(we've got all this love to give you know)
And the love will be running out for us
Can you feel the dreams of life
We're hoping we can still survive
As the wind carries every dove away

The wind, carries every dove away
The wind, carries every dove away
Every dove away
Dove Dove Dove Dove Dove Dove Dove

Now you've been taking our dignitiy for too long
I want to save this sanctity that we hold
And who's right and who's wrong
We're not so different anyway
Words are in this song
Can't we stop the fighting

We've been giving hate a chance
(we've got all this love to give)
And the love will be running out for us
Can you feel the veins of life
We're hoping we can still survive
As the wind carries every dove away

Don't give this hate a chance.
we've got this love to give you know
That this dream alive, will still survive.
untill no more people have to cry
Don't give this hate a chance.
we've got all this love to give you know
That this dream alive, will still survive.
untill no more people have to cry
And the love will be running out for us