Justice "Comes to qana"

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5407.shtml

Justice" Comes to Qana
Patrick McGreevy writing from Beirut, Live from Lebanon, 4 August 2006

"Qana" by Mazen Kerbaj. View more of his work.

The attacks of 11 September 2001 gave many ordinary Americans a palpable experience of injustice. Addressing both houses of Congress nine days later, President Bush proclaimed: "Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done." By nearly conflating justice and revenge, the President - and, alas, the vast majority of Americans who applauded him - lost an opportunity to see with new clarity, justice itself cast into relief by the very experience of injustice. Instead, the United States launched an endless war, the first stage of which was to be called Operation Infinite Justice.

This week "justice" came to the Lebanese Village of Qana. The United States had blocked every attempt to end the violence, and, before the attack, Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon had announced that "everyone who is still in south Lebanon is linked to Hizbullah." The Anglo-American-Israeli juggernaut had brought "justice" to "our enemies."

Reacting to the horrors of World War II, the bold-thinking Max Horkheimer suggested that we finally make social progress from the experience of the opposite of justice. We learn about the value of the individual life, for instance, from the experience of a world that treads mercilessly on human lives and bodies, treating them as so much soulless stuff. Though a European Jew, Horkheimer was a dialectical materialist, and therefore no kind of theist. Yet he believed that the notion that each human is equally and, in a sense, infinitely valuable, was a religious innovation. "The very concept of the soul as the inner light, the dwelling place of God," he wrote, "came into being only with Christianity, and all antiquity has an element of emptiness and aloofness by contrast." To our modern sensibilities, he observed, "some of the Gospel teachings and stories about the simple fishermen and carpenters of Galilee seem to make the Greek masterpieces mute and soulless - lacking that very 'inner light' - and the leading figures of antiquity roughhewn and barbaric." For Horkheimer, this insight came from the painful experience of its negation, and any hope of justice lay, paradoxically, in the deep experience of injustice. Hence, "the anonymous martyrs of the concentration camps are the symbols of the humanity that is striving to be born," and we could expect insight from those "who have gone through the infernos of suffering and degradation in their resistance to conquest and oppression."

Hassan Nasrallah speaks to the Arab world and the Muslim World about their common experience of injustice. Do not doubt its deep resonance, its truth. Qana is just the latest, and one of the clearest, and most globally visible, examples. Can those who launched the endless war finally recognize the infinitely valuable "inner light" so callously snuffed out of each of those dusty child corpses? Will Nasrallah, and those now fixated on his voice, see justice, against the background of injustice, any more clearly than did Bush and those fixated on his voice? Can we expect such magnanimity, given the asymmetry of the suffering?

In human affairs, cycles of violence and revenge, cascades of injustice, are not inevitable. Our sole hope is that we have not only an inner light but an ability to choose and act, to consider not only means, but ends, with what Horkheimer called reason - that having lived through hell, we might see not only the injustice done to us, but the horror of injustice no matter who is the victim. A simple thing. We know the alternative.
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Hezbollah surprises its enemy

8/7/2006

Yesterday Hezbollah’s rockets killed 15 Israelis, mostly soldiers, the deadliest barrage of the Lebanese resistance’s attacks in nearly a month of fighting against the Israeli occupying army.

Three years ago, when a powerful quake hit the Iranian city of Bam, killing 35,000 people, transport planes carrying aid poured in from everywhere, including Syria. Those planes, the Israeli military intelligence alleges, returned to Damascus carrying sophisticated weapons, including long-range Zelzal missiles, which Israel claims Syrians passed on to the Lebanese resistance movement in southern Lebanon, stated a New York Times editorial.

Israel’s claims that those weaponry shipments were passed on to Hezbollah, bitter foe of Israel, “are just one indication of how — with the help of its main sponsors, Iran and Syria”, the Lebanese resistance’s military might and arsenal have majorly improved over the past six years, since Hezbollah forced the Israelis out of southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah, a Lebanese umbrella organization of groups and organizations rejecting the Israeli presence in Lebanon and the Middle East, is a significant force in Lebanon’s politics and a major provider of social services, operating schools, hospitals, and agricultural services, for thousands of Lebanese.

The group’s fighters are well trained like an army.

“They are nothing like Hamas or the Palestinians,” admitted a soldier who just returned from Lebanon.

“They are trained and highly qualified”, with flak jackets, night-vision goggles, good communications and sometimes Israeli uniforms and ammunition. “All of us were kind of surprised.”

Hezbollah, known for its close links to Iran and Syria, was founded in 1982 to confront the Israeli army and end its illegitimate presence and occupation of Lebanon.

Hezbollah’s stockpile of what some experts describe as Syrian- and Iranian-made missiles, 3,000 of which have hit Israeli towns, received much attention from the media recently, specially with the great losses inflicted upon the Israelis since the conflict broke last month.

The New York Times put the number of Israelis killed since Lebanon’s offensive began at 48, but officials say they’re over 70.

Also during the past six years, both Tehran and Damascus provided satellite communications and some of the world’s best infantry weapons, including Russian-made antitank weapons and Semtex plastic explosives.

They also provided training on how to use such weapons against the Israelis.

But the credit should be given to Hezbollah’s fighters’ talent and skillful use of such weapons, specially the wire-guided and laser-guided antitank missiles, with double, phased explosive warheads and a range of about two miles.

With Russian-made antitank missiles, capable of penetrating armor, Hezbollah fighters managed to destroy many Israeli vehicles, including its most modern tank, the Merkava, on about 20 percent of their hits, according to Israeli tank commanders at the front.

“They use them like artillery to hit houses,” said Brig. Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, until recently the Israeli Army’s director of intelligence analysis.

“They can use them accurately up to even three kilometers, and they go through a wall like through the armor of a tank.”

Hezbollah fighters also use tunnels so as to quickly emerge from the ground, fire a shoulder-held antitank missile, and vanish immediately.

“We know what they have and how they work,” General Kuperwasser said.

“But we don’t know where all the tunnels are. So they can achieve tactical surprise.”

They also use antitank missiles, which Israelis consider their “main fear”, said David Ben-Nun, 24, an enlisted man in the Nahal brigade who just returned from a week in Lebanon.

Although the Israelis admit that Hezbollah’s fighters are few, between 2,000 and 4,000, Timur Goksel, who was the senior political adviser to Unifil, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, which monitors the border until 2003.

Mr Goskel, who says he knows Hezbollah well and holds true admiration for its commitment and organization, describes its fighters as much as the Israelis do: “careful, patient, attuned to gathering intelligence, scholars of guerrill

a warfare from the American Revolution to Mao and the Vietcong”.

“Hezbollah has studied asymmetrical warfare,” Mr. Goksel said.

“They have staff work and they do long-term planning, something the Palestinians never do,”

“They watch for two months to note every detail of their enemy. They review their operations — what they did wrong, how the enemy responded. And they have flexible tactics, without a large hierarchical command structure.”

“Hezbollah has much better weapons than before,” he said, noting that military confrontation with the Israeli army for 18 years, made Hezbollah fighters “not afraid of the Israeli Army anymore”.

Goskel, speaking during a telephone interview from Beirut, further stated that Hezbollah’s ability to attack Israelis and study their flaws, gave its fighters confidence that the Israeli Army “is a normal human army, with normal vulnerabilities and follies.”

Hezbollah’s tactics focus on trying to draw Israeli ground forces farther into Lebanon, according to Mr. Goksel.

“They want to draw them in to well-prepared battlefields,” like Aita al Shaab.

“They know the Israelis depend too much on armor, which is a prime target for them. And they want Israeli supply lines to lengthen, so they’re easier to hit.”

The Hezbollah fighters “are not just farmers who have been given weapons to fire,” he said. “They are persistent and well trained.”

Hezbollah,the Party of God, emerged in Lebanon in the early 1980s and soon became the region's leading resistance and anti Israeli movement, determined to drive Israeli occupiers out from Lebanon and the Middle East region.

In 2000 the group witnessed one of its main aims being achieved. Hezbollah fighters defeated the well equi

pped Israeli army, forcing it end its two-decade occupation of south Lebanon.

The movement now serves as an inspiration to Palestinian resistance groups fighting to liberate their occupied lands.

http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=12372

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