The other night on one of the cable shows the currently ubiquitous Bibi Netanyahu (as the novelist Will Self observes, it's a nice jest that fate embedded the Swiftian 'yahoo' into Bibi's last name)was asked who bore responsibility for the civilian death toll in the Hezbollah-Israeli conflict. With a voice as deep as a gospel singer's but not nearly so soulful, Netanyahu rumbled from the cavernous depths that Hezbollah bore all of the responsibility for the civilian casualties--they were responsible for the Israeli deaths caused by their missile strikes (no argument there), and they were responsible for provoking an Israeli response that claimed the lives of Lebanese civilians. The Israelis were morally, ethically, politically, and socially responsible for none of the deaths resulting from this slaughter. The moral calculus of the Israeli position couldn't have been plainer. Bibi absolved the Israeli government of guilt for anything it had done, and anything it would do, in perpetuity. You had the impression that only thing Netanyahu regretted was that he was not prime minister, that he was not the one literally calling the shots.
"Israel regrets..., writes Alexander Cockburn at Counterpunch. "But no! Israel doesn't regret in the least. Most of the time it doesn't even bother to pretend to regret. It says, 'We reserve the right to slaughter Palestinians whenever we want. We reserve the right to assassinate their leaders, crush their homes, steal their water, tear out their olive groves, and when they try to resist we call them terrorists intent on wrecking the "peace process"'.
"Now Israel says it wants to wipe out Hezbollah. It wishes no harm to the people of Lebanon, just so long as they're not supporters of Hezbollah, or standing anywhere in the neighborhood of a person or a house or a car or a truck or a road or a bus or a field, or a power station or a port that might, in the mind of an Israeli commander or pilot, have something to do with Hezbollah.* In any of those eventualities all bets are off. You or your wife or your mother or your baby get fried.
"Israel regrets... But no! As noted above, it doesn't regret in the least. Neither does George Bush, nor Condoleezza Rice nor John Bolton who is the moral savage who brings shame on his country each day that he sits as America's ambassador (unconfirmed) at the UN and who has just told the world that a dead Israel civilian is worth a whole more in terms of moral outrage than a Lebanese one.
"None of them regrets. They say Hezbollah is a cancer in the body of Lebanon. Sometimes, to kill the cancer, you end up killing the body. Or bodies. Bodies of babies. Lots of them..."
*from an interview on Democracy Now! with Robert Fisk of the Independendent:
"We've already seen them smash up the runways of Beirut Airport and destroy part of the -- most of the lighthouse, the new Manara lighthouse, in Beirut. The Israelis today even attacked the factory which imports Procter & Gamble goods here. We've had an ambulance convoy, a convoy of new ambulances from the United Emirates, cross from Syria into Lebanon, got attacked from the air. It's an all-out war against the economy infrastructure of a country that was at last beginning to look modern again, after the 15 years of civil war, which cost 150,000 lives. And it's very sad to see.
"I think the massacre of the innocents must obviously apply to both sides. The Israeli dead have an equal right to that claim. But the scale -- I mean, 'disproportionate' is not the word for it -- the scale of the response is obscene. Even a small example, I'll give you. Yesterday, something fell out of the sky over a small area of Beirut called Qurashim [sic]. I think it was part of the wing, the wingtip of an F-16. The Israelis say it's not, but I think it probably was. And it crashed in a fiery volcano glow and burned trees, bushes, the roadway, and decapitated a young man in his car who was driving home to his family.
"I got there in about eight minutes. And there were three very friendly Lebanese soldiers. By chance, I knew one of them, the sergeant, who said, 'Mr. Robert, you must be very careful. The Israelis will come back and bomb again, but we'll take you into the fire and show you as much as we can.' And they stood around me and protected me as we went up the road for about a mile walking -- or running, to be very honest with you, because Mr. Fisk here is not a very brave warrior. And I saw parts of what appears to be a wing. I think it was burning fuel all over the road. I think it came out of whatever the aircraft was. I think what actually happened is a Hezbollah missile probably hit an F-16, and the Israelis didn't want to claim it. They said that it was part of a barrel containing propaganda pamphlets and leaflets, which -- well, I didn't see leaflets anyway, and I know they burn on fuel, but anyway, I saw what I could and got away afterwards and said, you know, waved at the soldiers and thanked them.
"And the Israelis did come back some hours later and bombed the barracks of these soldiers, which were members of a logistics unit. Their job was to repair bridges and electrical lines. They weren't combat soldiers. And they killed ten Lebanese soldiers, including the three young men who had protected me the previous day. This was outrageous, because the Israelis know what each individual Lebanese army unit is doing. They know if it's a combat unit, armored personnel carriers, helicopters, whatever.
"And they picked on this sole barracks to destroy those men, to exterminate them, because, of course, their job was to keep Beirut alive, to keep the power systems running, to repair the bridges which were being destroyed -- 46 bridges now, according to Minister of Finance, who told me this a few hours ago, have been destroyed in Lebanon. This is the inheritance, of course, of former prime minister, assassinated prime minister Rafik Hariri, who was murdered on the 14th of February last year. He rebuilt this country. He rebuilt the city of Beirut. Now, bit by bit the bridges, the lighthouse, the international airport are being destroyed."
And now comes news of Israeli tanks and troops massing along the Lebanese border. It's a pity Bill Kristol isn't there to serve as grand marshal. He could toss out the first grenade.
