UK MP George Galloway in Beirut: Hizbullah's victory has transformed the Middle East
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Hizbullah's victory has transformed the Middle East
THE DEFEAT OF THE REGIONAL SUPERPOWER COULD YET OPEN THE WAY TO A WIDER SETTLEMENT OF THE ISRAEL-PALESTINE CONFLICT
By George Galloway in Beirut
08/31/06 "The Guardian" -- As the smoke clears from the battlefield of the 34-day war in Lebanon, it would be a mistake to count the cost only in fallen masonry and fresh graves. All is changed, changed utterly, by the defeat that the whole of Israel is now debating, from the cabinet through the lively press to the embittered reservists at the falafel stall. Practically the only person in the world who claims Israel won the war is George Bush - and we all know his definition of the words "mission accomplished".
Reports that the Hizbullah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, expressed regret this week at having underestimated Israel's reponse to the capture of two of its soldiers were misleading. In fact, Nasrallah thanked God that the attack came when the resistance movement was prepared, as he was convinced Israel would have otherwise invaded later in the year at a time of its choosing.
If the fierce thicket of the Iraqi resistance stopped the Bush war spreading to Syria then the extraordinary Hizbullah victory has surely made the world think again about an attack on Iran. But the main - and maybe the most welcome - shift in the 40-year-old paradigm of the Israeli-Arab conflict is the puncturing of the belief in a permanent and unchallengeable Israeli military superiority over its neighbours and the hubris this has induced in Israeli leaders - from the sleek Shimon Peres through the roughhouse of Binyamin Netanyahu to the stumbling Mr Magoo premiership of Ehud Olmert.
THE MYTH OF INVINCIBILITY IS A SOUFFLE THAT CANNOT RISE TWICE.
Over the past week I have picked my way through the rubble of Dahia in downtown Beirut, now resembling London's East End at the height of the blitz, and across the south of Lebanon in towns such as Bint Jbeil whose centres look as if they have been hit by an earthquake. Here the litter of banned weapons lies like a legal time bomb - evidence of war crimes alleged by the UN and Amnesty International that in a genuine system of international justice would put Israel in the dock at The Hague. This, together with the beating Israel has received in international public opinion, is the collateral damage suffered alongside military humiliation.
Israel announced the capture of Bint Jbeil several times, but in truth it never held the town - or anywhere else for that matter - throughout the war. Despite raining down thousands of tons of high explosive on homes, schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, ambulances, UN posts, oil storage depots, electricity plants and virtually every petrol station south of Beirut (the bombers seemed to have a crazed thirst for petrol stations, while telling the world that they were kindly inviting the residents of south Lebanon to get into their cars and leave their homes for a little while), the Israelis were given a severe mauling by Hizbullah fighters when it came to boots on the ground.
Paradoxically, some believe that all this has blown open a window in which it is possible to glimpse the possibility of a comprehensive settlement of the near-century-old conflicts which lie behind the recent war. Now that the status quo ante has been swept away, we may even see an FW de Klerk moment emerge in Israel (and among its indispensable international backers).
APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA
The leader of the white tribes of apartheid South Africa waited until the critical mass of opposition threatened to overwhelm the position of the previously invincible minority, and sold the transfer of power on the basis that a settlement later, under more severe duress, would be less favourable. Israel's trajectory is now heading towards such a moment.
A comprehensive settlement now would of course look much like it has for decades: Israeli withdrawal from land occupied in 1967; respect for the legal rights of Palestinian refugees to return; the emergence of a real Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital - a contiguous state with an Arab border, with no Zionist settlements and military roads, and with internationally guaranteed Palestinian control over its land, air, sea and water. In exchange there would be Arab recognition, normalisation and, in time, acceptance of Israel into the Middle East as something other than a settler garrison of the imperial west.
Just as you can't be a little bit pregnant, a settlement can't be a little bit comprehensive. Attempts - like the one more than a decade ago in Oslo - to obfuscate, shave and sculpt such a package to the point of unrecognisability will founder on the new reality.
THE ARAB WORLD IS WAKING UP TO ITS POTENTIAL POWER.
It has seen the Iraqis confound Anglo-American efforts to recolonise their country, the unbreakability, whatever the cost, of the Palestinian resistance, and now the success of Hizbullah. If there is no settlement there can only be war, war and more war, until one day it is Tel Aviv which is on fire and the Israeli leaders' intransigence brings the whole state down on their heads.
Nor is it only Israel that will pay the price for continued conflict: the enduring injustice of Palestinian dispossession has already poisoned western-Muslim relations and helped spill violence and hatred on to our own streets.
THERE IS STILL TIME TO CHOOSE PEACE.
BUT MAKE NO MISTAKE, WITH THE VICTORY OF HIZBULLAH, A TERRIBLE BEAUTY IS BORN.
George Galloway
George Galloway is the Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow - www.georgegalloway.com
Please do read the comments too - Story at - Url.:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14772.htm
* DEFINITION OF SEMITES from the Collins English Dictionary - [http://tinyurl.com/zj9y4] - "Semitic: a member of the group of Caucasoid people who speak a Semitic language, including the Jews and Arabs as well as the Ancient Babylonians (Iraqis), the Assyrians (Syria), and the Phoenicians (the Lebanese of today). Semitic: a branch or sub-family of languages that includes Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew.” - Palestinians and Lebanese for instance are semites. The JDL cliché: "anti semitism' has always been a fake accusation, abused to kill debates too in the past. Not anymore. What the US/Israeli war machine is doing is anti semitism on a global scale.
* RACE HOLOCAUST? - THIS IS A STATEMENT OVERTLY SUPPORTING GENOCIDE - Who said this? Hitler? Goebbels? Attila The Hun? Mussolini? Ivan The Terrible? - "...advanced forms of biological warfare that can target specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool." - This is not politics as usual. - Url.: http://www.freedomisforeverybody.org/PNAC.php
* DEFENDING ISRAELI GENOCIDES: ''During time of war, enemy has no innocents'' - the Israeli 'Yesha Rabbinical Council' announced in response to an IDF war crime in Kfar Qanna that killed 54 Lebanese civilians, including 37 children. - [http://tinyurl.com/rsw33] - "According to Jewish law, during a time of battle and war, there is no such term as 'innocents' of the enemy. - All of the discussions on Christian morality are weakening the spirit of the army and the nation and are costing us in the blood of our soldiers and civilians." the statement said. (Efrat Weiss) - Url.: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3283720,00.html
* ISRAELI WRITER URI AVNERY - JUNKIES OF WAR - Israel is conquering South Lebanon as flies conquer fly-paper - Indymedia Beirut/Lebanon - Url.: http://www.avnery-news.co.il/english/index.html
* NEWS FROM INDYMEDIA in LEBANON - BEIRUT - Url.: http://beirut.indymedia.org/en/
* PREPARING THE GENOCIDE FOR 'ERETZ ISRAEL' - 'A Clean Break: Strategy for Securing the Realm' - The new Israeli ''Pentagon Papers'' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/zksqh
* US/ISRAELI GENOCIDE NEWS: ''MORE TIME TO BOMB'' - ESSENTIAL 6 MINUTE VIDEO - We defy anyone to watch this 6 minute video, entitled MORE TIME TO BOMB, and not be enraged at the scale of Israel's atrocities in Lebanon and Gaza which 'they' are holocausting. - 6 minute video - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/k8mm5
* "THE ISRAELITE PEOPLE OF THE ENTIRE WORLD DECLARE ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL WAR ON GERMANY" - 24 MARCH 1933 - On the front page of the London Daily Express appeared the main headline: "JUDAEA DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY: JEWS OF ALL THE WORLD UNITE" - Url.: http://www.heretical.com/mkilliam/wwii.html
* MARCH 1933 - by the way - also was the month this same group in London knew about their 'Brethren in the jewish Faith' which were holocausting up to ten million people in Ukraine. Via the Sovjet Union, where they were in power too. In their Sovjet 'Gulag system' around 40 million human beings were killed. The New York Times Moscow 'correspondent' Walter Duranty even got a Pulitzer prize - dispensed by the same people - for his slander and inhuman silence, denying this holocaust. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/eqkgq
* REVENGE: THE MORGENTHAU HOLOCAUST PLAN - After the second WW Germany was holocausted by the 'Allies'. One of the 'London War Lords' - Morgenthau - presented his 'plan' together with US Gen. Eisenhower (Eisenhauer) and prescribed a dismantling and starvation treatment for Germany ''that would be good and hard." - There were protests against "this addlepated (stupid and confused) ... brutal and vicious Morgenthau Plan." which killed millions. Children, women and men again. - Url.: http://dc.indymedia.org/mod/comments/display/90027/index.php
* RELATED: BACKGROUND LINKS TO THOSE RESPONSIBLE - If after checking a factual error is found, pls. send an email so it can be corrected. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/fhln9
* The Dutch author this far has worked abroad for more than 4 decades for international media as an independent foreign correspondent, of which 10 years - also during Gulf War I - in the Arab World and the Middle East. Having practical experience of coups and the obscenity of war: seeing worldwide that every bullet and every bomb breeds more terrorism!
* FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 - any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information. Url.: http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/uscode/17/107.html
FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
Editor: Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/h3ft3
The Netherlands
fpf@chello.nl
-0-
Hizbullah's victory has transformed the Middle East
THE DEFEAT OF THE REGIONAL SUPERPOWER COULD YET OPEN THE WAY TO A WIDER SETTLEMENT OF THE ISRAEL-PALESTINE CONFLICT
By George Galloway in Beirut
08/31/06 "The Guardian" -- As the smoke clears from the battlefield of the 34-day war in Lebanon, it would be a mistake to count the cost only in fallen masonry and fresh graves. All is changed, changed utterly, by the defeat that the whole of Israel is now debating, from the cabinet through the lively press to the embittered reservists at the falafel stall. Practically the only person in the world who claims Israel won the war is George Bush - and we all know his definition of the words "mission accomplished".
Reports that the Hizbullah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, expressed regret this week at having underestimated Israel's reponse to the capture of two of its soldiers were misleading. In fact, Nasrallah thanked God that the attack came when the resistance movement was prepared, as he was convinced Israel would have otherwise invaded later in the year at a time of its choosing.
If the fierce thicket of the Iraqi resistance stopped the Bush war spreading to Syria then the extraordinary Hizbullah victory has surely made the world think again about an attack on Iran. But the main - and maybe the most welcome - shift in the 40-year-old paradigm of the Israeli-Arab conflict is the puncturing of the belief in a permanent and unchallengeable Israeli military superiority over its neighbours and the hubris this has induced in Israeli leaders - from the sleek Shimon Peres through the roughhouse of Binyamin Netanyahu to the stumbling Mr Magoo premiership of Ehud Olmert.
THE MYTH OF INVINCIBILITY IS A SOUFFLE THAT CANNOT RISE TWICE.
Over the past week I have picked my way through the rubble of Dahia in downtown Beirut, now resembling London's East End at the height of the blitz, and across the south of Lebanon in towns such as Bint Jbeil whose centres look as if they have been hit by an earthquake. Here the litter of banned weapons lies like a legal time bomb - evidence of war crimes alleged by the UN and Amnesty International that in a genuine system of international justice would put Israel in the dock at The Hague. This, together with the beating Israel has received in international public opinion, is the collateral damage suffered alongside military humiliation.
Israel announced the capture of Bint Jbeil several times, but in truth it never held the town - or anywhere else for that matter - throughout the war. Despite raining down thousands of tons of high explosive on homes, schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, ambulances, UN posts, oil storage depots, electricity plants and virtually every petrol station south of Beirut (the bombers seemed to have a crazed thirst for petrol stations, while telling the world that they were kindly inviting the residents of south Lebanon to get into their cars and leave their homes for a little while), the Israelis were given a severe mauling by Hizbullah fighters when it came to boots on the ground.
Paradoxically, some believe that all this has blown open a window in which it is possible to glimpse the possibility of a comprehensive settlement of the near-century-old conflicts which lie behind the recent war. Now that the status quo ante has been swept away, we may even see an FW de Klerk moment emerge in Israel (and among its indispensable international backers).
APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA
The leader of the white tribes of apartheid South Africa waited until the critical mass of opposition threatened to overwhelm the position of the previously invincible minority, and sold the transfer of power on the basis that a settlement later, under more severe duress, would be less favourable. Israel's trajectory is now heading towards such a moment.
A comprehensive settlement now would of course look much like it has for decades: Israeli withdrawal from land occupied in 1967; respect for the legal rights of Palestinian refugees to return; the emergence of a real Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital - a contiguous state with an Arab border, with no Zionist settlements and military roads, and with internationally guaranteed Palestinian control over its land, air, sea and water. In exchange there would be Arab recognition, normalisation and, in time, acceptance of Israel into the Middle East as something other than a settler garrison of the imperial west.
Just as you can't be a little bit pregnant, a settlement can't be a little bit comprehensive. Attempts - like the one more than a decade ago in Oslo - to obfuscate, shave and sculpt such a package to the point of unrecognisability will founder on the new reality.
THE ARAB WORLD IS WAKING UP TO ITS POTENTIAL POWER.
It has seen the Iraqis confound Anglo-American efforts to recolonise their country, the unbreakability, whatever the cost, of the Palestinian resistance, and now the success of Hizbullah. If there is no settlement there can only be war, war and more war, until one day it is Tel Aviv which is on fire and the Israeli leaders' intransigence brings the whole state down on their heads.
Nor is it only Israel that will pay the price for continued conflict: the enduring injustice of Palestinian dispossession has already poisoned western-Muslim relations and helped spill violence and hatred on to our own streets.
THERE IS STILL TIME TO CHOOSE PEACE.
BUT MAKE NO MISTAKE, WITH THE VICTORY OF HIZBULLAH, A TERRIBLE BEAUTY IS BORN.
George Galloway
George Galloway is the Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow - www.georgegalloway.com
Please do read the comments too - Story at - Url.:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14772.htm
* DEFINITION OF SEMITES from the Collins English Dictionary - [http://tinyurl.com/zj9y4] - "Semitic: a member of the group of Caucasoid people who speak a Semitic language, including the Jews and Arabs as well as the Ancient Babylonians (Iraqis), the Assyrians (Syria), and the Phoenicians (the Lebanese of today). Semitic: a branch or sub-family of languages that includes Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew.” - Palestinians and Lebanese for instance are semites. The JDL cliché: "anti semitism' has always been a fake accusation, abused to kill debates too in the past. Not anymore. What the US/Israeli war machine is doing is anti semitism on a global scale.
* RACE HOLOCAUST? - THIS IS A STATEMENT OVERTLY SUPPORTING GENOCIDE - Who said this? Hitler? Goebbels? Attila The Hun? Mussolini? Ivan The Terrible? - "...advanced forms of biological warfare that can target specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool." - This is not politics as usual. - Url.: http://www.freedomisforeverybody.org/PNAC.php
* DEFENDING ISRAELI GENOCIDES: ''During time of war, enemy has no innocents'' - the Israeli 'Yesha Rabbinical Council' announced in response to an IDF war crime in Kfar Qanna that killed 54 Lebanese civilians, including 37 children. - [http://tinyurl.com/rsw33] - "According to Jewish law, during a time of battle and war, there is no such term as 'innocents' of the enemy. - All of the discussions on Christian morality are weakening the spirit of the army and the nation and are costing us in the blood of our soldiers and civilians." the statement said. (Efrat Weiss) - Url.: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3283720,00.html
* ISRAELI WRITER URI AVNERY - JUNKIES OF WAR - Israel is conquering South Lebanon as flies conquer fly-paper - Indymedia Beirut/Lebanon - Url.: http://www.avnery-news.co.il/english/index.html
* NEWS FROM INDYMEDIA in LEBANON - BEIRUT - Url.: http://beirut.indymedia.org/en/
* PREPARING THE GENOCIDE FOR 'ERETZ ISRAEL' - 'A Clean Break: Strategy for Securing the Realm' - The new Israeli ''Pentagon Papers'' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/zksqh
* US/ISRAELI GENOCIDE NEWS: ''MORE TIME TO BOMB'' - ESSENTIAL 6 MINUTE VIDEO - We defy anyone to watch this 6 minute video, entitled MORE TIME TO BOMB, and not be enraged at the scale of Israel's atrocities in Lebanon and Gaza which 'they' are holocausting. - 6 minute video - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/k8mm5
* "THE ISRAELITE PEOPLE OF THE ENTIRE WORLD DECLARE ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL WAR ON GERMANY" - 24 MARCH 1933 - On the front page of the London Daily Express appeared the main headline: "JUDAEA DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY: JEWS OF ALL THE WORLD UNITE" - Url.: http://www.heretical.com/mkilliam/wwii.html
* MARCH 1933 - by the way - also was the month this same group in London knew about their 'Brethren in the jewish Faith' which were holocausting up to ten million people in Ukraine. Via the Sovjet Union, where they were in power too. In their Sovjet 'Gulag system' around 40 million human beings were killed. The New York Times Moscow 'correspondent' Walter Duranty even got a Pulitzer prize - dispensed by the same people - for his slander and inhuman silence, denying this holocaust. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/eqkgq
* REVENGE: THE MORGENTHAU HOLOCAUST PLAN - After the second WW Germany was holocausted by the 'Allies'. One of the 'London War Lords' - Morgenthau - presented his 'plan' together with US Gen. Eisenhower (Eisenhauer) and prescribed a dismantling and starvation treatment for Germany ''that would be good and hard." - There were protests against "this addlepated (stupid and confused) ... brutal and vicious Morgenthau Plan." which killed millions. Children, women and men again. - Url.: http://dc.indymedia.org/mod/comments/display/90027/index.php
* RELATED: BACKGROUND LINKS TO THOSE RESPONSIBLE - If after checking a factual error is found, pls. send an email so it can be corrected. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/fhln9
* The Dutch author this far has worked abroad for more than 4 decades for international media as an independent foreign correspondent, of which 10 years - also during Gulf War I - in the Arab World and the Middle East. Having practical experience of coups and the obscenity of war: seeing worldwide that every bullet and every bomb breeds more terrorism!
* FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 - any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information. Url.: http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/uscode/17/107.html
FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
Editor: Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/h3ft3
The Netherlands
fpf@chello.nl
-0-
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