This summer's Israeli invasion of Lebanon was merely the latest and biggest of a long series of invasions. Eric Laursen takes a look at the causes of this violence and what U.S. peace activists can do to end it.
In parts of Lebanon, life today is a lot like it was 30 years ago-and, at least in one respect, that's a good thing. In the aftermath of a murderous mid-1970s civil war, electricity went unrestored to much of the country. Thanks to the caution this helped engrain, many households still had generators when a massive, month-long Israeli invasion ended in August and it was time to rebuild homes and workplaces that had been pulverized from north to south by carpet bombings. Too bad many of the bomb shelters that the Lebanese constructed during the decades of civil war and foreign invasion had since been converted into stores and supermarkets. Perhaps they could have saved some of the 1,183 people who Amnesty International estimates were killed along with 4,054 wounded in the 7,000-plus raids the Israeli air force flew over Lebanon starting on July 13.
Ostensibly launched in retaliation for a raid by Hizbollah, the militant Lebanese-Shiite organization that had killed three Israeli soldiers and snagged two more as captives the day before, the Israeli invasion was sudden and savage. Electric utilities, water works, ports, bridges, roads, communication facilities, and other infrastructure were destroyed, thousands of homes were smashed. Almost a million persons were displaced. Many died on the roads leaving south Lebanon, victims of further Israeli airstrikes. Statements by Israeli military made it clear that anything and anyone in Lebanon was fair game-that the nation was, in effect, being collectively punished for Hizbollah's resistance.
Hizbollah surprised the world with a stiff resistance, including rocket attacks into northern Israel that killed 41 civilians, placing the country under genuine military siege for the first time since 1948.
Thirty-three days later
UN Security Council Resolution 1701, ending the conflict, was accepted by Lebanon, Israel, and Hizbollah on August 12 and 13, and the fighting ended-more or less. Since then, Lebanese have struggled to restore some semblance of normal life to their families and communities, despite an Israeli blockade that continued for weeks. Even though Israel had warned civilians not to return to their homes in the south until the Lebanese Army and U.N. troops had arrived, many thousands hit the road as soon as the truce was declared, in some cases driving over half-destroyed bridges to get back to their ruined villages, pitch a tent on their property, and start rebuilding.
Leading the way is Hizbollah, which has been supplying humanitarian aid to its constituency in south Lebanon, and in so doing, has spurred the Lebanese government to kick-start its own efforts to rebuild the country. Ironically, the group most widely blamed by western pundits for the latest Israeli invasion has rushed in to repair the calamity. This merely to underscores the fact that Hizbollah is both the focal point of the conflict and the key to understanding both the forces that brought it about, and those that could end it.
Not a proxy war
Mainstream reporters and political commentators generally portray the Lebanese violence as the fault of Islamic extremists bent on supporting Palestinian terrorists in their drive to destroy Israel. The conflict, according to this view, is actually a proxy war between Israel on one side, and Iran and Syria-represented by their puppet Hizbollah-on the other. The inevitable conclusion is that the road to peace lies not through Beirut, but through Tehran and Damascus, which could end the violence by simply withdrawing support from Hizbollah and pledging to no longer interfere in Lebanon.
In reality, Lebanese civil strife, which dates from the late 1950s, centers around the pecking order among the country's four sectarian communities: Christians, Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and Druze, who follow an offshoot of Ismaili Islam. A 60-year-old National Covenant divides public offices between Christians and Muslims, yet in actuality the country has long been run by a Christian and Sunni oligarchy, with input from Druze leaders. Shiites, the largest and poorest of the four groups, are disdained by the elite, and until recently, were virtually disenfranchised by the Lebanese political apparatus.
Concentrated in the south, the Shiites were hardest hit by the Israeli occupation that took over southern Lebanon in 1982. Hizbollah grew up both as an armed resistance to the occupation, but also as a grassroots movement dedicated to achieving economic and political progress for the Shiite community. In this, it's had a great deal of success: Within the last year, it gained representation in the government for the first time, although still not proportionate to its following. More and more, the other three factions are recognizing that they can no longer pretend that the Shiite community doesn't exist.
Critical defiance
This recognition is partly the payoff for Hizbollah's years of struggle against the Israeli occupation, which many other Lebanese considered humiliating, but that the Christian-and Sunni-dominated government never did much to contest. And while Hizbollah does receive crucial aid from Iran and Syria, the Shiite community doesn't regard it as their puppet. After Syria was forced to end its 15-year military occupation of Lebanon last year, Hizbollah actually grew stronger politically.
It's also important to note that while Hizbollah are commonly portrayed as terrorists, they've never turned their guns on any Lebanese-only against Israel-and have repeatedly declared that once Israel has stopped intervening in their country, they will end the conflict. The raid that prompted Israel to invade Lebanon was against military- not civilian-targets, yet Israel quickly targeted civilians and Lebanon's basic infrastructure. Hizbollah only started aiming rockets into Israel once their own country had been attacked, and avoided targeting infrastructure-such as oil refineries in Haifa-when they had the opportunity to do so.
By successfully resisting the latest invasion, Hizbollah has cemented its popularity within the Lebanese Shiite community and gained tremendous prestige in the Muslim Middle East generally. Yet Israel, the United States, and other western governments continue to regard it as a dangerous organization that must be disarmed.
Precarious "peace"
This creates an impasse that makes it unlikely the UN-brokered truce, by itself, will lead to long-term peace: Resolution 1701 calls for the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon except the Lebanese army. However, the United Nations indicated soon after that it was up to the Lebanese people, not the United Nations, to disarm Hizbollah, and that this should not be done by force.
Meanwhile, Israel took its time withdrawing its troops, and maintained its strangulating air and sea blockade of Lebanon for weeks after the truce. It continues to make military overflights and conduct military "operations" in Lebanese territory and continues to hold a sliver of Lebanese land called Shebaa Farms that it didn't relinquish when it ended its occupation in 2000. It still hasn't shared the positions, which it carefully mapped, of the landmines it sowed throughout south Lebanon during the occupation. Its air force continues daily overflights of Lebanese territory. Moreover, Israel has made clear that it doesn't feel bound by the resolution to not launch "defensive operations" in southern Lebanon, so long as Hizbollah is not disarmed.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government hopes that the Lebanese Army and UN peacekeepers will effectively take over his army's self-appointed job of disarming the resistance and protecting northern Israel from attack. But this is unlikely: The invasion greatly weakened the-never very robust-Lebanese government. The army itself includes many troops sympathetic to Hizbollah, and the group has proven very sophisticated about hiding its weapons caches in areas of the south where it has supporters. The bottom line: Neither Israel nor Hizbollah has given up any of its freedom of action as a result of the truce.
Resolution 1701 doesn't explicitly call for a prisoner exchange between Israel and Hizbollah, but UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in early September appointed a special envoy to negotiate one. This was the issue that precipitated the conflict to begin with: Israel had reneged on releasing some high-profile Lebanese prisoners as part of a comprehensive prisoner exchange brokered in 2004, which prompted Hizbollah's raid. To agree to a prisoner exchange after having launched a massive invasion of a neighboring country in order to avoid one, would be another humiliation for Israel and is therefore doubtful.
One powerful reason it might do so is that Lebanon has become a major distraction from Israel's top priority of completing the strangulation of the fledgling Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Although the army vastly stepped up its attacks on the Gaza after it began the Lebanese campaign, Olmert was forced to shelve a scheduled transfer of settlers within the West Bank-part of Israel's plan to complete the cutoff of Jerusalem from Palestinian areas. While the western press interprets this as a sign of stiffened Israeli resolve not to accommodate anyone who opposes them, it's also the act of a government that fears being pulled in too many directions at once. This perhaps provides an opening for peace activists to push a different agenda.
US activists
One country that has not yet been mentioned in this analysis is the United States. The origin of Lebanon's inability to determine its own destiny as a nation and a community has been its neighbors' appetite to intervene in its affairs. Left to themselves, it's possible that the country's sectarian groups could forge a new National Covenant-one that, to work, would have to eliminate the Shiites' second-class status. With Syrian troops and political influence no longer a major presence in Lebanon, Israel is the principal force standing in the way of such a deal. And Israel's ability to do so is crucially dependent on support from the United States-diplomatic as well as military. Without a major change in U.S. policy, therefore, the truce is unlikely to last. However, American peace activists can play an important role in restoring peace and self-determination to the country in six crucial ways:
1) An end to violence: Israel has consistently targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure in its destruction of Lebanon. This includes using cluster bombs, which scatter small "bomblets" over wide areas and which Israel purchases from the United States. One Israeli Defense Force commander said that in total, 1,800 cluster bombs containing over 1.2 million bomblets were scattered over Lebanon. Ninety percent of these were fired in the last 72 hours of the fighting, when a ceasefire was clearly on the horizon. The State Department has announced it's investigating Israeli violations of rules that cluster bombs not be used in civilian areas. Americans should demand that Israel be investigated, and punished, for any use of American-supplied materials against Lebanese civilians, and insist Israel share with the Lebanese authorities the locations of its landmines.
2) Freedom from foreign intervention: The Bush administration fully supported the Israeli invasion as long as Israel wanted to continue its offensive. Americans must demand that their government make it a policy to oppose all foreign intervention in Lebanon, including by Israel. This must include a comprehensive prisoner exchange, an end to Israeli overflights, the return of Shebaa Farms, and a firm agreement not to further violate Lebanese territory.
3) An end to a fundamentally unfair and oppressive political structure: Hizbollah is not the same as al-Qaeda. Yet the US has collaborated in the vilification of Hizbollah, which the State Department brands a "foreign terrorist organization," and the continued marginalization of Lebanon's Shiite community. For example, the Bush administration says it will prosecute any American who assists in Hezbollah's rebuilding efforts. Recently, a Brooklyn man was arrested for collecting fees and providing customer service to persons receiving satellite broadcasts from a TV station owned by Hizbollah. Americans must demand that their government end this policy and advocate full political and economic participation for Shiites in a free Lebanon.
4) An American public better educated about the role of religion in Middle East politics: It's ironic that a White House that frequently defers to Christian extremists, also uses the "extremist" label to deny the legitimacy of popular movements in the Muslim world. But leftists are just as prone as Bushites to apply ideological litmus tests to Islamic cultures. A clear case of cultural chauvinism is in play here: Leftists who support indigenous movements in Latin America, for example, seldom if ever make an issue about these cultures' attitudes towards abortion or women's status-yet they often become uncomfortable about such issues when Islamic communities are the focus. Activists concerned to stop violence in Lebanon-and the Middle East-must help other Americans to avoid this trap, which prevents them from taking an active stand against their own government's support of neocolonial oppression.
5) Curtailment of US aid to Israel: US aid to Israel is expected to total $2.6 billion this year, 85% for military purposes. All this is in cash, with no accounting required, and doesn't include the value of generous loan guarantees backed by the American taxpayer. Israel would not be able to maintain its vast military establishment without these generous subsidies. Unless Americans demand that Washington curtail these subsidies, Israel will continue to be able to act with impunity, in Lebanon as it does in Palestine.
6) Freedom for Palestine: Lebanon, meanwhile, hosts some 400,000 Palestinian refugees. It was in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps that Israel's proxies carried out one of the most notorious atrocities of the 1982 invasion. Without an Israeli-Palestinian settlement guaranteeing the rights of these refugees to return home, Lebanon will remain a target of foreign intervention. Americans must demand that their government press its ally to negotiate such a settlement, or see an end to all military and other aid.
The roots of Israeli intervention in Lebanon go back a long way, and it's far from certain that Israel won't again try to assert its power over the southern part of the country. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of refugees are rebuilding their homes and lives in the region. Lebanon needs allies, in the United States and elsewhere, who can put their minds to finding money and creative ways to assist in the reconstruction, and who can form a network of support to prevent future aggression.
