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Current Developments + WB: The Clock is Running
(Billmon and I posted in parallel on the issue. So here is the novelty of a combined thread.)
Billmon:
The Clock is Running
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Bernhard:
After a preparing and devastating air campaign, Israel is now entering Lebanon with ground troops.
The strategic target seems to be to clear some 20 miles of Lebanese land of any Lebanese human and to establish and hold a line at the Litani River. This is a repetition of the 1978 Operation Litani which, at that time, was aimed against a Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) force in South Lebanon. Israel more or less did win that tactical move, but made no strategic gain and the costs on both sides were high.
Unlike the PLO, essentially refugees not really liked by the Lebanese, Hisbollah is an indigenous force. So the outcome may very well differ this time. In response to Israel’s action in 1978, the UN set out resolution 425, demanding a retreat of Israel behind the international accepeted border. Israel did fullfill that resolution’s demand – in June 2000 – except for giving up the Sheeba Farms. This, and Lebanese prisoners in Israel’s hands, gave/give Hisbollah a permanent issue to keep the struggle going.
(The Katami river, like the Sheeba farms area, is a major water source in the general arid area. It does have real strategic value. So maybe Lebanon will get it back in 2028.)
In May 2006 Israel assassinated two leaders of Islamic Jihad in Sidon, Lebanon. This led to a few small rockets being fired at Israeli military outposts and responding serious air attacks. The crisis was finally ended through UN mediation. It was, to my knowledge, the first open Israeli action in Lebanon since 2000 and the starting point for today’s hot conflict. (BTW: Did you see this mentioned in any recent MSM article?)
While watching the current developments, in horror, I am sure the big chessboard is set up for an even deadlier game. This is not about a two Israeli soldiers taken POW. This is not about Lebanon or Hizbollah at all.
The current war is a small proxy for the fight between the US and Iran, a third world county by any means, and even bigger, between the US and anybody else about the control of the most important world energy ressources, i.e. direct or indirect control over all of the Middle East.
I have no idea what the next steps in that war may be, but some incident that will lead to a near term involvement of a very, very weak Syria is likely. From there on, your guess is as good as mine.
“Billmon” linked to a picture of little Israeli girls writing love notes to Nasrallah on missiles. AFAIC, there’s nothing wrong with that–Nasrallah deserves no less. But there’s a story behind the photo that Billmon, who is a lazy bastard, and a liar, didn’t bother to get:
“The image above caused a huge storm of outrage in the Arab blogosphere. Huge. You wouldn’t believe how huge. The widely-read Gulf-based Palestinian blogger who was the first to post it received so much traffic that he had to move the photo to another server. Many others, including several I know personally, posted it and expressed their disgust. Israeli children taught to hate! Lebanese children are dying and they’re happy! They’re no better than… (fill in the blank, I don’t want to go there).
Below is the story behind the photo – from the source.
I phoned Sebastian Scheiner, the Israeli photojournalist who took the photo for Associated Press (AP), explained that the image had given a really terrible impression and asked for the context. He sketched it out quickly and fluidly, but asked me not to quote him. So I spoke with Shelly Paz, a Yedioth Ahronoth reporter who was also at the scene and agreed immediately to go on record. She was quite shocked to learn how badly the photo had been misinterpreted and misrepresented; and she told me the same story Sebastian did, but with more details and nuance.
The little girls shown drawing with felt markers on the tank missiles are residents of Kiryat Shmona, which is right on the border with Lebanon. And when I say “on the border,” I’m not kidding; there’s little more space between their town and Southern Lebanon than there is between the back gardens of neighbouring houses in a wealthy American suburb.
No, how close is it really?
Well, there’s a famous story in Israel, from the time when the Israeli army occupied Southern Lebanon: a group of soldiers stationed inside southern Lebanon used their mobile phones to order pizza from Kiryat Shmona and have it delivered to the fence that separates the two countries.
Anyway.
Kiryat Shmona has been under constant bombardment from South Lebanon since the first day of the conflict. It was a ghost town, explained Shelly. There was not a single person on the streets and all the businesses were closed. The residents who had friends, family or money for alternate housing out of missile range had left, leaving behind the few who had neither the funds nor connections that would allow them to escape the missiles crashing and booming on their town day and night. The noise was terrifying, people were dying outside, the kids were scared out of their minds and they had been told over and over that some man named Nasrallah was responsible for their having to cower underground for days on end.
On the day that photo was taken, the girls had emerged from the underground bomb shelters for the first time in five days. A new army unit had just arrived in the town and was preparing to shell the area across the border. The unit attracted the attention of twelve photojournalists – Israeli and foreign. The girls and their families gathered around to check out the big attraction in the small town – foreigners. They were relieved and probably a little giddy at being outside in the fresh air for the first time in days. They were probably happy to talk to people. And they enjoyed the attention of the photographers.
Apparently one or some of the parents wrote messages in Hebrew and English on the tank shells to Nasrallah. “To Nasrallah with love,” they wrote to the man whose name was for them a devilish image on television – the man who mockingly told Israelis, via speeches that were broadcast on Al Manar and Israeli television, that Hezbollah was preparing to launch even more missiles at them. That he was happy they were suffering.
The photograpers gathered around. Twelve of them. Do you know how many that is? It’s a lot. And they were all simultaneously leaning in with their long camera lenses, clicking the shutter over and over. The parents handed the markers to the kids and they drew little Israeli flags on the shells. Photographers look for striking images, and what is more striking than pretty, innocent little girls contrasted with the ugliness of war? The camera shutters clicked away, and I guess those kids must have felt like stars, especially since the diversion came after they’d been alternately bored and terrified as they waited out the shelling in their bomb shelters.
Shelly emphasized several times that none of the parents or children had expressed any hatred toward the Lebanese people. No-one expressed any satisfaction at knowing that Lebanese were dying – just as Israelis are dying. Their messages were directed at Nasrallah. None of those people was detached or wise enough to think: “Hang on, tank shell equals death of human beings.” They were thinking, tank shell equals stopping the missiles that land on my house. Tank shells will stop that man with the turban from threatening to kill us.
And besides, none of those children had seen images of dead people – either Israeli or Lebanese. Israeli television doesn’t broadcast them, nor do the newspapers print them. Even when there were suicide bombings in Israel several times a week for months, none of the Israeli media published gory photos of dead or wounded people. It’s a red line in Israel. Do not show dead, bleeding, torn up bodies because the families of the dead will suffer and children will have nightmares. And because it is just in bad taste to use suffering for propaganda purposes.
Those kids had seen news footage of destroyed buildings and infrastructure, but not of the human toll. They had heard over and over that the air force was destroying the buildings that belonged to Hezbollah, the organization responsible for shelling their town and threatening their lives. How many small children would be able to make the connection between tank shells and dead people on their own? How many human beings are able to detach from their own suffering and emotional stress and think about that of the other side? Not many, I suspect.
So, perhaps the parents were not wise when they encouraged their children to doodle on the tank shells. They were letting off a little steam after being cooped up – afraid, angry and isolated – for days. Sometimes people do silly things when they are under emotional stress. Especially when they fail to understand how their childish, empty gesture might be interpreted.
I’ve been thinking for the last two days about this photo and the storm of reaction it set off. I worry about the climate of hate that would lead people to look at it and automatically assume the absolute worst – and then use the photo to dehumanize and victimize. I wonder why so many people seem to take satisfaction in believing that little Israeli girls with felt markers in their hands – not weapons, but felt markers – are evil, or spawned by an evil society. I wonder how those people would feel if Israelis were to look at a photo of a Palestinian child wearing a mock suicide belt in a Hamas demonstration and conclude that all Palestinians – nay, all Arabs – are evil.
And I wonder why it is so difficult to think a little, to get it into our heads that television news and photojournalism manipulate our thoughts and emotions.
Links to anti-Israel websites with that photo placed prominently next to the image of a dead Lebanese child have been sent to me several times. Someone has been rushing around the Israeli blogosphere, leaving the link to one particularly abhorrent site in the comments boxes. And it makes me really sad that the emotional climate has deteriorated to this point.
The moderates of the Middle East are locked in a battle with the extremists. And look what they did to the moderates. Without blinking, without thinking, we fell victim to the classic “divide and conquer” technique. We work hard for months and years to build connections, develop our societies, educate ourselves, promote democracy and free speech… And they destroy it all, in less than a week. And we let them.”
LINK: http://ontheface.blogware.com/
Posted by: shira | Jul 21 2006 2:22 utc | 43
An elegant epigram of Serendib says that ‘two elephants cannot be tied to one post.’
The glimmer in this gem is as obvious — and subtle — as he who hears it.
Lifelong sarong and sari wearers among you, who have actually seen two elephants tied to one post know damn well that they will soon wander off with that post. It’s only a matter of time before they happen to pull together or happen to pull opposite — the post survives neither event.
This lesson is portable.
Many see our world’s rising tide of human woes, think it all through, and blame global capitalism.
Capital is widely respected and regarded; it is influential and omnipresent; it is slippery, solvent, and super sexy. Like water, it gets into everything. It can rinse away blood. It can feed millions. It can drown millions.
An Ism is most anything writ large, writ larger than life itself. Ideology is love of an idea. Ideology of every sort is Ism, is an idea taken to be larger than life itself.
An Ism will not blink or bend if polar bears are drowning, or babies are bleeding. That’s merely life — here is an eternal Idea. We must stay the course.
Capital is money. Money is debt. Usury on debt is the fuel of global capitalism. We extract compound interest from the beating hearts of human lives on every continent and island nowadays. Human sweat congeals into capital instruments that will burn reliably over measured fiscal periods.
Some of us have our lives. Some of us have basis points in other human lives.
When debt creation and servicing becomes our global culture and condition, we are pursuing Global Capital Ism. When that Idea of perpetually increasing debt service is larger than human life itself, when polar bears are drowning and babies are bleeding, we have tied two elephants to one post.
The post is civilization, the maypole, the base agreement between people that we will not kill each another on sight, that we will leave one another’s daughters and property alone in exchange for the same treatment. The post is the promise that people from one valley will not raid the fields of people in the next valley.
The post is the sum of how far we have come since our ancestors drew buffaloes and birds on the cave walls of rural France.
We’ve come all the way to Consumer Man, whose idea larger than life is to get more, to live better than well, and to see that the kids all get even further along the Capital Highway, at any and all collateral damage. Why? Because it’s all good. Because it’s super sexy to have the best and be the best. Elvis is in the building, baby. Hoo-yah!
This is one elephant tugging at the post.
The billions of bug-eaten bastards digging in the dirt all over the world, the filthy and filched in the factories and fisheries and foundries, the various victims of capitalism’s conquests who sometimes in death or crisis join the infinitesimally small percentage of human beings to ever have their picture taken — this faceless multitude is the other elephant tugging at the post.
There are so many people without anything at all. Just the day, and hunger, and the children. So unbelievably many with nothing but that. Human minds do not really count as high as the number of people scratching for edible things around the globe. A billion — is just a word to the human mind. Two billion — is just two words.
But all those lowly lives, and billions more living scarcely above their level, are tugging opposite to Consumer Man, who wants to own everything and run everything. When he comes to collect sweat from them they know not his language or his trade or his tools but they do know they have less when he leaves than they had before. Because he bought basis points in their lives.
He bought their government, he bought their laws, he bought their resources, he bought their property, he bought their lives.
Their sweat builds empires in far off countries. Their sweat congeals into debt instruments and derivatives and Dow Jones daily averages. What gave Consumer Man possession of their sweat is as much a mystery to them as where their lives will go from here. Consumer Man neither knows nor cares. His world does not work that way.
Most of the human race will never — ever — under any circumstances enjoy a tenth of what Consumer Man takes for granted and throws away. There is not enough planet to supply that standard of living for all of us, and not enough environment to hold the garbage. We would need several more Earths to reach that level. Global consumer civilization isn’t going to happen with these numbers. Ever.
So we have two elephants, and you cannot leave two elephants tied to one post. If you do, you must watch them all night and all day, keeping them from tugging together or tugging opposite, keeping them from wandering off with the maypole.
The rich and the poor could tug all together, and wander off with this civilization grounded in debt servicing. They could cease all usury of human lives, and everyone could have somewhat of the Earth’s available bounty, but not at any and all collateral cost to human creatures living and yet to live. The American lifestyle could become, actually, negotiable.
The rich and the poor could tug opposites, wandering off with the maypole shattered and broken, with no one’s daughters or harvest safe anymore. Start tossing nukes around, and Consumer Man will be drawing buffaloes and birds on the walls of caves. We’ll try again. We’ll start over. Maybe we’ll share this time.
One planet spinning through space. One global civilization based on debt servicing, based on the few harvesting from the many. Two elephants tied to that maypole, that civilization.
The sun will come up in an hour. I’ll be in my fields, getting the work done before the heat arrives. I can’t think of a billion, but I can think of one mother or one father somewhere waking up to the day, and hunger, and the children. I can think about elephants.
I don’t want this war, and I don’t want this civilization.
Posted by: Antifa | Jul 21 2006 8:37 utc | 58
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