Lebanon and Kosovo: an instructive comparison

[Karmadillo]

An interesting comparison, although I don't know enough about NATO's efforts in Kosovo to say whether it's a fair one. Certainly Israel's assault on the Lebanese people is excessive and it doesn't seem unfair for the article to bring up to Bill Clinton's quote regarding the actions of the Serbs: “Are we, in the last year of the twentieth century, going to look the other way as entire peoples in Europe are forced to abandon their homelands or die, or are we going to impose a price on that kind of conduct and seek to aid it.” The United States should be working to end the slaughter, not encourage it.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/aug2006/koso-a07.shtml

With hundreds dead, many of them slaughtered in their own homes, hundreds of thousands take flight, terrified of suffering the same fate at the hands of a regime possessed of vastly superior military force, which claims that its ongoing war against a terrorist force gives it a mandate to expel an entire population.. The mass exodus is deliberately encouraged by the propaganda of the regime, which publicizes the atrocities to stampede the population. The ultimate goal: ethnic cleansing, and the replacement of the local population with settlers mobilized by the regime.

That was the scenario in Kosovo in March-April 1999—and that is what is beginning to take place in southern Lebanon in July-August 2006. The difference, of course, is that in the first case the US government used ethnic cleansing as a pretext for war, while in the second case, the ethnic cleansing is a joint US-Israeli project.

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All of these statements apply with equal or greater force to the policies of the Israeli government. Israeli warplanes have dropped hundreds of thousands of leaflets across south Lebanon demanding that the entire population leave or be targeted as part of Hezbollah. Children, the elderly, the mentally ill, the sick, the disabled—all face death from aerial bombardment if they do not abandon their homes and cross the Litani River going north.

Piling war crime upon war crime, the Israelis have then bombed convoys of refugees set into motion by their own demands for mass evacuations—something Milosevic never attempted. And there are reports that leaflets threatening the civilian population have been dropped over the largely Shiite-populated southern suburbs of Beirut.

In other words, the stated goal of the Israeli Defense Forces is the physical removal of the entire population of the south, whether Shiite, Sunni or Christian, as well as the Shiite population of Beirut—all told, about 50 percent of the Lebanese people. If any other government but that of Israel (and the United States) were making this demand, the American media would call it what it is: ethnic cleansing on a monstrous scale.

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[Tom Joad]

1. Israel's assault is a war crime.

[Lerkfish]

2. agreed. as is US torturing and detaining of prisoners contrary to the

Geneva Convention.

here's to someone, somewhere on the planet recognizing them as such and charging them forthwith.:patriot:

[Tom Joad]

3. It's not the first time either. Israel was founded on ethnic cleansing.

That it is not the first such State to do that is not the point. Are we going to keep allowing such things because it has been done in the past?

[cali]

4. The blanket statement

that Israel was founded on ethnic cleansing, is not truer than the statement that the U.S. was founded on ethnic cleansing. Both countries engaged in ethnic cleansing, but the entire picture- in both cases- is far more complex than such an absolutist statement.

[Tom Joad]

5. As i said, the fact that it was not the only nation-state founded on

ethnic cleansing is no excuse. What we should examine is where do we go from here.
For starters, ending the destruction of Lebanon & Gaza would be a good idea.

[cali]

6. You misunderstand

me. Ethnic cleansing happened. It's a bad thing, but it is not, imo, the only thing that either the U.S. or Israel is founded on. Again, you're being "gumpish".

[Tom Joad]

7. It's happening this week, too.

[Karmadillo]

8. It would be helpful

if the facts were simply part of the debate. Most Americans don't have a clue of the violence that accompanied Israel's founding. As you and cali note, ethnic cleansing is hardly unique to Israel, but a greater knowledge of the facts might keep us from falling into the trap of Good versus Evil.

Imagine CNN abandoning the umpteenth repeat of Inside Hezbollah, the Terrorist Evil People, for a documentary giving a more balanced view of the orgins of the troubles in the Middle East. Not only would people have a clearer understanding of how we got where we are, they might have a better idea of how to get somewhere better.

http://www.zmag.org/content/Mideast/pilger_june19.cfm

Ethnic Cleansing And The Establishment Of Israel
by John Pilger
The New Statesman
June 19, 2002

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Behind the turbulent news from Israel, a struggle for historical truth has passed almost unnoticed outside academic circles; yet its wider significance is epic. In May 1948, more than 200 Palestinians were killed by the advancing Jewish militia in the coastal village of Tantura, south of Haifa. According to the recorded testimony of 40 witnesses, both Arab and Jewish, half the civilians were shot in a "rampage". The rest were marched to the beach, where the men were separated from the women and children. They were taken to a wall near the mosque where they were shot in the back of the head.

The "cleansing" of Tantura (a term used at the time) was a well-kept secret. When they were interviewed four years ago, several Palestinian witnesses said they feared for their lives if they spoke out. One survivor, who as a child witnessed the murder of his entire family in Tantura, said to the interviewer: "But believe me, one should not mention these things. I do not want them to take revenge against us. You are going to cause us trouble . . ."

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Professor Ilan Pappe is one of the few to have read all the transcripts of more than 60 hours of Katz's taping of eyewitness evidence. "They include," he wrote, "horrific descriptions of executions, of the killing of fathers in front of children, of rape and torture." He describes Katz's thesis "as a solid and convincing piece of work whose essential validity is in no way marred by its shortcomings". The shortcomings, he says, come down to four minor mistakes. But the importance of the Katz research is its illumination of Israel's history in terms of "the expulsion, direct and indirect, of some 750,000 Palestinians, the systematic destruction of more than 400 villages and scores of urban neighbourhoods, as well as the perpetration of some 40 massacres of unarmed Palestinians."

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