Myth

Salon.com

July 28, 2006 | TYRE, SIDON and NABATIYA, South Lebanon -- The bombs came just as night fell, around 7 p.m. The locals knew that the 10-story apartment building had been the office, and possibly the residence, of Sheik Tawouk, the Hezbollah commander for the south, so they had moved their families out at the start of the war. The landlord had refused to rent to Hezbollah when they requested the top floors of the building. No matter, the locals said, the Hezb guys just moved in anyway in the name of the "resistance."
Everyone knew that the building would be hit eventually. Its location in downtown Tyre, which had yet to be hit by Israeli airstrikes, was not going to protect it forever. And "everyone" apparently included Sheik Tawouk, because he wasn't anywhere near it when it was finally hit.

Two guided bombs struck it in a huge flash bang of fire and concrete dust followed by the roar of 10 stories pancaking on top of each other, local residents said. Jihad Husseini, 46, runs the driving school a block away and was sitting in his office when the bombs struck. He said his life was saved because he had drawn the heavy cloth curtains shut on the windows facing the street, preventing him from being hit by a wave of shattered glass. But even so, a chunk of smoldering steel flew through the air, broke through the window and the curtain, and shot past his head and through the wall before coming to rest in his neighbor's home.

But Jihad still refuses to leave.

"Everything is broken, but I can make it better," he says, surrounded by his sons Raed, 20, and Mohammed, 12. "I will not leave. This place is not military, it is not Hezbollah; it was an empty apartment." Throughout this now 16-day-old war, Israeli planes high above civilian areas make decisions on what to bomb. They send huge bombs capable of killing things for hundreds of meters around their targets, and then blame the inevitable civilian deaths -- the Lebanese government says 600 civilians have been killed so far -- on "terrorists" who callously use the civilian infrastructure for protection. But this claim is almost always false. My own reporting and that of other journalists reveals that in fact Hezbollah fighters -- as opposed to the much more numerous Hezbollah political members, and the vastly more numerous Hezbollah sympathizers -- avoid civilians. Much smarter and better trained than the PLO and Hamas fighters, they know that if they mingle with civilians, they will sooner or later be betrayed by collaborators -- as so many Palestinian militants have been.
For their part, the Israelis seem to think that if they keep pounding civilians, they'll get some fighters, too. The almost nightly airstrikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut could be seen as making some sense, as the Israelis appear convinced there are command and control bunkers underneath the continually smoldering rubble. There were some civilian casualties the first few nights in places like Haret Hreik, but people quickly left the area to the Hezbollah fighters with their radios and motorbikes.But other attacks seem gratuitous, fishing expeditions, or simply intended to punish anything and anyone even vaguely connected to Hezbollah. Lighthouses, grain elevators, milk factories, bridges in the north used by refugees, apartment buildings partially occupied by members of Hezbollah's political wing -- all have been reduced to rubble. In the south, where Shiites dominate, just about everyone supports Hezbollah. Does mere support for Hezbollah, or even participation in Hezbollah activities, mean your house and family are fair game? Do you need to fire rockets from your front yard? Or is it enough to be a political activist? The Israelis are consistent: They bomb everyone and everything remotely associated with Hezbollah, including noncombatants. In effect, that means punishing Lebanon. The nation is 40 percent Shiite, and of that 40 percent, tens of thousands are employed by Hezbollah's social services, political operations, schools, and other nonmilitary functions. The "terrorist" organization Hezbollah is Lebanon's second-biggest employer.
People throw the phrase "ghost town" around a lot, but Nabatiya, a bombed-out town about 15 miles from the Lebanon-Israel border, deserves it. One expects the spirits of the town's dead, or its refugees, to silently glide out onto its abandoned streets from the ruined buildings that make up much of the town. Not all of the buildings show bomb damage, but those that don't have metal shutters blown out as if by a terrible wind. And there are no people at all, except for the occasional Hezbollah scout on a motorbike armed only with a two-way radio, keeping an eye on things as Israeli jets and unmanned drones circle overhead. Overlooking the outskirts of this town, which has a peacetime population of 100,000 or so -- mostly Shiite supporters of Hezbollah and its more secular rival Amal -- is the Ragheh Hareb Hospital, a facility that makes quite clear what side the residents of Nabatiya are on in this conflict. The hospital's carefully sculpted and trimmed front lawn contains the giant Red Crescent that denotes the Muslim version of the Red Cross. As we approach it, an Israeli missile streaks by, smashing into a school on the opposite hilltop. As we crouch and then run for the shelter of the hospital awning, that giant crescent reassures me until I look at the flagpole. The Lebanese flag and its cedar tree is there -- right next to the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It's safe to say that Ragheh Hareb Hospital has an association with Hezbollah. And the staff sports the trimmed beards and polite, if somewhat ominous, manner of the group. After young men demand press IDs and do some quick questioning, they allow us to enter. Dr. Ahmed Tahir recognizes me from a funeral in the nearby village of Dweir. An Israeli bomb dropped on their house killed a Hezbollah cleric and 11 members of his immediate family, mostly children. People in Lebanon are calling it a war crime. Tahir looks exhausted, and our talk is even more tense than the last time. "Maybe it would be best if the Israelis bombed your car on the road here," he said, with a sharp edge. "If you were killed, maybe the public outcry would be so bad in America that the Jews would be forced to stop these attacks." When I volunteered that the Bush administration cared little for journalists, let alone ones who reported from Hezbollah territory, he shrugged. "Maybe if it was an American bomb used by the Israelis that killed an American journalist, they would stop this horror," he said. The handful of people in the town include some from Hezbollah's political wing, as well as volunteers keeping an eye on things while the residents are gone. Off to the side, as we watch the Israelis pummel ridgelines on the outskirts of town, one of the political operatives explains that the fighters never come near the town, reinforcing what other Hezbollah people have told me over the years. Although Israel targets apartments and offices because they are considered "Hezbollah" installations, the group has a clear policy of keeping its fighters away from civilians as much as possible. This is not for humanitarian reasons -- they did, after all, take over an apartment building against the protests of the landlord, knowing full well it would be bombed -- but for military ones.

"You can be a member of Hezbollah your entire life and never see a military wing fighter with a weapon," a Lebanese military intelligence official, now retired, once told me. "They do not come out with their masks off and never operate around people if they can avoid it. They're completely afraid of collaborators. They know this is what breaks the Palestinians -- no discipline and too much showing off." Perhaps once a year, Hezbollah will hold a military parade in the south, in which its weapons and fighters appear. Media access to these parades is tightly limited and controlled. Unlike the fighters in the half dozen other countries where I have covered insurgencies, Hezbollah fighters do not like to show off for the cameras. In Iraq, with some risk taking, you can meet with and even watch the resistance guys in action. (At least you could during my last time there.) In Afghanistan, you can lunch with Taliban fighters if you're willing to walk a day or so in the mountains. In Gaza and the West Bank, the Fatah or Hamas fighter is almost ubiquitous with his mask, gun and sloganeering to convince the Western journalist of the justice of his cause. The Hezbollah guys, on the other hand, know that letting their fighters near outsiders of any kind -- journalists or Lebanese, even Hezbollah supporters -- is stupid. In three trips over the last week to the south, where I came near enough to the fighting to hear Israeli artillery, and not just airstrikes, I saw exactly no fighters. Guys with radios with the look of Hezbollah always found me. But no fighters on corners, no invitations to watch them shoot rockets at the Zionist enemy, nothing that can be used to track them.
Even before the war, on many of my trips to the south, the Lebanese army, or the ubiquitous guy on a motorbike with a radio, would halt my trip and send me over to Tyre to get permission from a Hezbollah official before I could proceed, usually with strict limits on where I could go. Every other journalist I know who has covered Hezbollah has had the same experience. A fellow journalist, a Lebanese who has covered them for two decades, knows only one military guy who will admit it, and he never talks or grants interviews. All he will say is, "I'll be gone for a few months for training. I'll call when I'm back." Presumably his friends and neighbors may suspect something, but no one says anything. Hezbollah's political members say they have little or no access to the workings of the fighters. This seems to be largely true: While they obviously hear and know more than the outside world, the firewall is strong. Israel, however, has chosen to treat the political members of Hezbollah as if they were fighters. And by targeting the civilian wing of the group, which supplies much of the humanitarian aid and social protection for the poorest people in the south, they are targeting civilians. Earlier in the week, I stood next to a giant crater that had smashed through the highway between Tyre and Sidon -- the only route of escape for most of the people in the far south. Overhead, Israeli fighters and drones circled above the city and its outlying areas and regular blasts of bombs and naval artillery could be heard. The crater served as a nice place to check up on the refugees, who were forced by the crater to slow down long enough to be asked questions. They barely stopped, their faces wrenched in near panic. The main wave of refugees out of the south had come the previous two days, so these were the hard-luck cases, the people who had been really close to the fighting and who needed two days just to get to Tyre, or who had had to make the tough decision whether to flee or stay put, with neither choice looking good. The roads in the south are full of the cars of people who chose wrong -- burned-out chassis, broken glass, some cars driven straight into posts or ditches. Other seem to have broken down or run out of gas on the long dirt detours around the blown-out highway and bridge network the Israeli air force had spent days methodically destroying even as it warned people to flee. One man, slowing his car around the crater, almost screams, "There is nothing left. This country is not for us." His brief pause immediately draws horns and impatient yells from the people in the cars behind him. They pass the crater but within two minutes a large explosion behind us, north, in the direction of Sidon, rocks us.

As we drive south toward Tyre, we soon pass a new series of scars on the highway: shrapnel, hubcaps and broken glass. A car that had been maybe five minutes ahead of us was hit by an Israeli shell. Three of its passengers were wounded, and it was heading north to the Hammound hospital at Sidon. We turned around because of the attack and followed the car to Sidon. Those unhurt staked out the parking lot of the hospital, looking for the Western journalists they were convinced had called in the strike. Luckily my Iraqi fixer smelled trouble and we got out of there. Probably nothing would have happened -- mostly they were just freaked-out country people who didn't like the coincidence of an Israeli attack and a car full of journalists driving past. So the analysts talking on cable news about Hezbollah "hiding within the civilian population" clearly have spent little time if any in the south Lebanon war zone and don't know what they're talking about. Hezbollah doesn't trust the civilian population and has worked very hard to evacuate as much of it as possible from the battlefield. And this is why they fight so well -- with no one to spy on them, they have lots of chances to take the Israel Defense Forces by surprise, as they have by continuing to fire rockets and punish every Israeli ground incursion. And the civilians? They see themselves as targeted regardless of their affiliation. They are enraged at Israel and at the United States, the only two countries on earth not calling for an immediate cease-fire. Lebanese of all persuasions think the United States and Israel believe that Lebanese lives are cheaper than Israeli ones. And many are now saying that they want to fight.

Robert Fisk from Qana

Robert Fisk: 'How can we stand by and allow this to go on?'

Published: 31 July 2006

They wrote the names of the dead children on their plastic shrouds. " Mehdi Hashem, aged seven ­ Qana," was written in felt pen on the bag in which the little boy's body lay. "Hussein al-Mohamed, aged 12 ­ Qana", "Abbas al-Shalhoub, aged one ­ Qana.'' And when the Lebanese soldier went to pick up Abbas's little body, it bounced on his shoulder as the boy might have done on his father's shoulder on Saturday. In all, there were 56 corpses brought to the Tyre government hospital and other surgeries, and 34 of them were children. When they ran out of plastic bags, they wrapped the small corpses in carpets. Their hair was matted with dust, most had blood running from their noses.

You must have a heart of stone not to feel the outrage that those of us watching this experienced yesterday. This slaughter was an obscenity, an atrocity ­ yes, if the Israeli air force truly bombs with the " pinpoint accuracy'' it claims, this was also a war crime. Israel claimed that missiles had been fired by Hizbollah gunmen from the south Lebanese town of Qana ­ as if that justified this massacre. Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, talked about "Muslim terror" threatening " western civilisation" ­ as if the Hizbollah had killed all these poor people.

And in Qana, of all places. For only 10 years ago, this was the scene of another Israeli massacre, the slaughter of 106 Lebanese refugees by an Israeli artillery battery as they sheltered in a UN base in the town. More than half of those 106 were children. Israel later said it had no live-time pilotless photo-reconnaissance aircraft over the scene of that killing ­ a statement that turned out to be untrue when The Independent discovered videotape showing just such an aircraft over the burning camp. It is as if Qana ­ whose inhabitants claim that this was the village in which Jesus turned water into wine ­ has been damned by the world, doomed forever to receive tragedy.

And there was no doubt of the missile which killed all those children yesterday. It came from the United States, and upon a fragment of it was written: "For use on MK-84 Guided Bomb BSU-37-B". No doubt the manufacturers can call it "combat-proven" because it destroyed the entire three-storey house in which the Shalhoub and Hashim families lived. They had taken refuge in the basement from an enormous Israeli bombardment, and that is where most of them died.

I found Nejwah Shalhoub lying in the government hospital in Tyre, her jaw and face bandaged like Robespierre's before his execution. She did not weep, nor did she scream, although the pain was written on her face. Her brother Taisir, who was 46, had been killed. So had her sister Najla. So had her little niece Zeinab, who was just six. "We were in the basement hiding when the bomb exploded at one o'clock in the morning,'' she said. "What in the name of God have we done to deserve this? So many of the dead are children, the old, women. Some of the children were still awake and playing. Why does the world do this to us?"

Yesterday's deaths brought to more than 500 the total civilian dead in Lebanon since Israel's air, sea and land bombardment of the country began on 12 July after Hizbollah members crossed the frontier wire, killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two others. But yesterday's slaughter ended more than a year of mutual antagonism within the Lebanese government as pro-American and pro-Syrian politicians denounced what they described as " an ugly crime".

Thousands of protesters attacked the largest United Nations building in Beirut, screaming: "Destroy Tel Aviv, destroy Tel Aviv," and Lebanon's Prime Minister, the normally unflappable Fouad Siniora, called US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and ordered her to cancel her imminent peace-making trip to Beirut.

No one in this country can forget how President George Bush, Ms Rice, and Tony Blair have repeatedly refused to call for an immediate ceasefire ­ a truce that would have saved all those lives yesterday. Ms Rice would say only: "We want a ceasefire as soon as possible,'' a remark followed by an Israeli announcement that it intended to maintain its bombardment of Lebanon for at least another two weeks.

Throughout the day, Qana villagers and civil defence workers dug through the ruins of the building with spades and with their hands, tearing at the muck until they found one body after another still dressed in colourful clothes. In one section of the rubble, they found what was left of a single room with 18 bodies inside. Twelve of the dead were women. All across southern Lebanon now, you find scenes like this, not so grotesque in scale, perhaps, but just as terrible, for the people of these villages are terrified to leave and terrified to stay. The Israelis had dropped leaflets over Qana, ordering its people to leave their homes. Yet twice now since Israel's onslaught began, the Israelis have ordered villagers to leave their houses and then attacked them with aircraft as they obeyed the Israeli instructions and fled. There are at least 3,000 Shia Muslims trapped in villages between Qlaya and Aiteroun ­ close to the scene of Israel's last military incursion at Bint Jbeil ­ and yet none of them can leave without fear of dying on the roads.

And Mr Olmert's reaction? After expressing his "great sorrow", he announced that: "We will not stop this battle, despite the difficult incidents [sic] this morning. We will continue the activity, and if necessary it will be broadened without hesitation." But how much further can it be broadened? Lebanon's infrastructure is being steadily torn to pieces, its villages razed, its people more and more terrorised ­ and terror is the word they used ­ by Israel's American-made fighter bombers. Hizbollah's missiles are Iranian-made, and it was Hizbollah that started this war with its illegal and provocative raid across the border. But Israel's savagery against the civilian population has deeply shocked not only the Western diplomats who have remained in Beirut, but hundreds of humanitarian workers from the Red Cross and major aid agencies.

Incredibly, Israel yesterday denied safe passage to a UN World Food Programme aid convoy en route to the south, a six-truck mission that should have taken relief supplies to the south-eastern town of Marjayoun. More than three quarters of a million Lebanese have now fled their homes, but there is still no accurate figure for the total number still trapped in the south. Khalil Shalhoub, who survived amid the wreckage in Qana yesterday, said that his family and the Hashims were just too "terrified" to take the road out of the village, which has been attacked by aircraft for more than two weeks. The seven-mile highway between Qana and Tyre is littered with civilian homes in ruins and burnt-out family cars. On Thursday, the Israeli Army's Al-Mashriq radio, which broadcasts into southern Lebanon, told residents that their villages would be "totally destroyed" if missiles were fired from them. But anyone who has watched Israel's bombing these past two weeks knows that, in many cases, the Israelis do not know the location in which the Hizbollah are firing missiles, and ­ when they do ­ they frequently miss their targets. How can a villager prevent the Hizbollah from firing rockets from his street? The Hizbollah do take cover beside civilian houses ­ just as Israeli troops entering Bint Jbeil last week also used civilian homes for cover. But can this be the excuse for slaughter on such a scale?

Mr Siniora addressed foreign diplomats in Beirut yesterday, telling them that the government in Beirut was now only demanding an immediate ceasefire and was not interested any longer in a political package to go with it. Needless to say, Mr Jeffrey Feltman, whose country made the bomb which killed the innocents of Qana yesterday, chose not to attend.

They wrote the names of the dead children on their plastic shrouds. " Mehdi Hashem, aged seven ­ Qana," was written in felt pen on the bag in which the little boy's body lay. "Hussein al-Mohamed, aged 12 ­ Qana", "Abbas al-Shalhoub, aged one ­ Qana.'' And when the Lebanese soldier went to pick up Abbas's little body, it bounced on his shoulder as the boy might have done on his father's shoulder on Saturday. In all, there were 56 corpses brought to the Tyre government hospital and other surgeries, and 34 of them were children. When they ran out of plastic bags, they wrapped the small corpses in carpets. Their hair was matted with dust, most had blood running from their noses.

You must have a heart of stone not to feel the outrage that those of us watching this experienced yesterday. This slaughter was an obscenity, an atrocity ­ yes, if the Israeli air force truly bombs with the " pinpoint accuracy'' it claims, this was also a war crime. Israel claimed that missiles had been fired by Hizbollah gunmen from the south Lebanese town of Qana ­ as if that justified this massacre. Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, talked about "Muslim terror" threatening " western civilisation" ­ as if the Hizbollah had killed all these poor people.

And in Qana, of all places. For only 10 years ago, this was the scene of another Israeli massacre, the slaughter of 106 Lebanese refugees by an Israeli artillery battery as they sheltered in a UN base in the town. More than half of those 106 were children. Israel later said it had no live-time pilotless photo-reconnaissance aircraft over the scene of that killing ­ a statement that turned out to be untrue when The Independent discovered videotape showing just such an aircraft over the burning camp. It is as if Qana ­ whose inhabitants claim that this was the village in which Jesus turned water into wine ­ has been damned by the world, doomed forever to receive tragedy.

And there was no doubt of the missile which killed all those children yesterday. It came from the United States, and upon a fragment of it was written: "For use on MK-84 Guided Bomb BSU-37-B". No doubt the manufacturers can call it "combat-proven" because it destroyed the entire three-storey house in which the Shalhoub and Hashim families lived. They had taken refuge in the basement from an enormous Israeli bombardment, and that is where most of them died.

I found Nejwah Shalhoub lying in the government hospital in Tyre, her jaw and face bandaged like Robespierre's before his execution. She did not weep, nor did she scream, although the pain was written on her face. Her brother Taisir, who was 46, had been killed. So had her sister Najla. So had her little niece Zeinab, who was just six. "We were in the basement hiding when the bomb exploded at one o'clock in the morning,'' she said. "What in the name of God have we done to deserve this? So many of the dead are children, the old, women. Some of the children were still awake and playing. Why does the world do this to us?"

Yesterday's deaths brought to more than 500 the total civilian dead in Lebanon since Israel's air, sea and land bombardment of the country began on 12 July after Hizbollah members crossed the frontier wire, killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two others. But yesterday's slaughter ended more than a year of mutual antagonism within the Lebanese government as pro-American and pro-Syrian politicians denounced what they described as " an ugly crime".

Thousands of protesters attacked the largest United Nations building in Beirut, screaming: "Destroy Tel Aviv, destroy Tel Aviv," and Lebanon's Prime Minister, the normally unflappable Fouad Siniora, called US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and ordered her to cancel her imminent peace-making trip to Beirut.

No one in this country can forget how President George Bush, Ms Rice, and Tony Blair have repeatedly refused to call for an immediate ceasefire ­ a truce that would have saved all those lives yesterday. Ms Rice would say only: "We want a ceasefire as soon as possible,'' a remark followed by an Israeli announcement that it intended to maintain its bombardment of Lebanon for at least another two weeks.

Throughout the day, Qana villagers and civil defence workers dug through the ruins of the building with spades and with their hands, tearing at the muck until they found one body after another still dressed in colourful clothes. In one section of the rubble, they found what was left of a single room with 18 bodies inside. Twelve of the dead were women. All across southern Lebanon now, you find scenes like this, not so grotesque in scale, perhaps, but just as terrible, for the people of these villages are terrified to leave and terrified to stay. The Israelis had dropped leaflets over Qana, ordering its people to leave their homes. Yet twice now since Israel's onslaught began, the Israelis have ordered villagers to leave their houses and then attacked them with aircraft as they obeyed the Israeli instructions and fled. There are at least 3,000 Shia Muslims trapped in villages between Qlaya and Aiteroun ­ close to the scene of Israel's last military incursion at Bint Jbeil ­ and yet none of them can leave without fear of dying on the roads.

And Mr Olmert's reaction? After expressing his "great sorrow", he announced that: "We will not stop this battle, despite the difficult incidents [sic] this morning. We will continue the activity, and if necessary it will be broadened without hesitation." But how much further can it be broadened? Lebanon's infrastructure is being steadily torn to pieces, its villages razed, its people more and more terrorised ­ and terror is the word they used ­ by Israel's American-made fighter bombers. Hizbollah's missiles are Iranian-made, and it was Hizbollah that started this war with its illegal and provocative raid across the border. But Israel's savagery against the civilian population has deeply shocked not only the Western diplomats who have remained in Beirut, but hundreds of humanitarian workers from the Red Cross and major aid agencies.

Incredibly, Israel yesterday denied safe passage to a UN World Food Programme aid convoy en route to the south, a six-truck mission that should have taken relief supplies to the south-eastern town of Marjayoun. More than three quarters of a million Lebanese have now fled their homes, but there is still no accurate figure for the total number still trapped in the south. Khalil Shalhoub, who survived amid the wreckage in Qana yesterday, said that his family and the Hashims were just too "terrified" to take the road out of the village, which has been attacked by aircraft for more than two weeks. The seven-mile highway between Qana and Tyre is littered with civilian homes in ruins and burnt-out family cars. On Thursday, the Israeli Army's Al-Mashriq radio, which broadcasts into southern Lebanon, told residents that their villages would be "totally destroyed" if missiles were fired from them. But anyone who has watched Israel's bombing these past two weeks knows that, in many cases, the Israelis do not know the location in which the Hizbollah are firing missiles, and ­ when they do ­ they frequently miss their targets. How can a villager prevent the Hizbollah from firing rockets from his street? The Hizbollah do take cover beside civilian houses ­ just as Israeli troops entering Bint Jbeil last week also used civilian homes for cover. But can this be the excuse for slaughter on such a scale?

Mr Siniora addressed foreign diplomats in Beirut yesterday, telling them that the government in Beirut was now only demanding an immediate ceasefire and was not interested any longer in a political package to go with it. Needless to say, Mr Jeffrey Feltman, whose country made the bomb which killed the innocents of Qana yesterday, chose not to attend.

The truth of Blair's 'urgent diplomacy'

Robert Fisk: The truth of Blair's 'urgent diplomacy'
Blair and his masters regard ceasefires as a weapon, a means to a political end
Published: 29 July 2006

I dropped by the hospital in Marjayoun this week to find a young girl lying in a hospital bed, swathed in bandages, her beauty scarred for ever by some familiar wounds; the telltale dark-red holes in her skin made by cluster bombs, the weapon we used in Iraq to such lethal effect and which the Israelis are now using to punish the civilians of southern Lebanon.

And, of course, it occurred to me at once that if George Bush and Condoleezza Rice and our own sad and diminished Prime Minister had demanded a ceasefire when the Lebanese first pleaded for it, this young woman would not have to spend the rest of her life pitted with these vile scars.

And having seen the cadavers of so many more men and women, I have to say - from my eyrie only three miles from the Israeli border - that the compliant, gutless, shameful refusal of Bush, Rice and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara to bring this bloodbath to an end sentenced many hundreds of innocent Lebanese to death. As I write this near the village of Blat, which has its own little list of civilian dead, it's quite clear that many more innocent Lebanese are being prepared for the slaughter - and will indeed die in the coming days.

What was it Condoleezza Rice said? That "a hasty ceasefire would not be a good thing"? What was Blair's pathetic excuse at the G8 summit? That it was much better to have a ceasefire that would last than one which might break down? Yes, I entirely understand. Blair and his masters - we shall give Rice a generic title to avoid the obvious - regard ceasefires not as a humanitarian step to alleviate and prevent suffering but as a weapon, as a means to a political end.

Let the war last longer and the suffering grow greater - let compassion be postponed - and the Lebanese (and, most laughably, the Hizbollah) will eventually sink to their knees and accept the West's ridiculous demands. And one of those famous American "opportunities" for change - ie for humbling Iran - will have been created.

Hence, in the revolting words of Lord Blair's flunky yesterday, Blair will "increase the urgency" of diplomacy. Think about that for a moment. Diplomacy wasn't urgent at the beginning. Then I suppose it became fairly urgent and now this mendacious man is going to "increase" the urgency of diplomacy; after which, I suppose, it can become super-urgent or of "absolutely" paramount importance, the time decided - no doubt - by Israel's belief that it has won the war against Hizbollah or, more likely, because Israel realises that it is an unwinnable war and wants us to take the casualties.

Yet from the border of Pakistan to the Mediterranean - with the sole exception of the much-hated Syria and Iran, which might be smothered in blood later - we have turned a 2,500-mile swath of the Muslim world into a hell-disaster of unparalleled suffering and hatred. Our British "peacekeepers" in Afghanistan are fighting for their lives - and apparently bombing the innocent, Israeli-style - against an Islamist enemy which grows by the week. In Iraq, our soldiers - and those of the United States - hide in their concrete crusader fortresses while the people they so generously liberated and introduced to the benefits of western-style democracy slash each other to death. And now Lord Blair and his chums - following Israeli policy to the letter - are allowing Israel to destroy Lebanon and call it peace.

Blair and his ignorant Foreign Secretary have played along with Israel's savagery with blind trust in our own loss of memory. It is perfectly acceptable, it seems, after the Hizbollah staged its reckless and lethal 12 July assault, to destroy the infrastructure of Lebanon and the lives of more than 400 of its innocents. But hold on a moment. When the IRA used to cross the Irish border to kill British soldiers - which it did - did Blair and his cronies blame the Irish Republic's government in Dublin? Did Blair order the RAF to bomb Dublin power stations and factories? Did he send British troops crashing over the border in tanks to fire at will into the hill villages of Louth, Monaghan, Cavan and Donegal? Did Blair then demand an international, Nato-led force to take over a buffer zone - on the Irish, not the Northern Ireland side, of the border?

Of course not. But Israel has special privileges afforded to no other civilised nation. It can do exactly what Blair would never have done - and still receive the British Government's approbation. It can trash the Geneva Conventions - because the Americans have done that in Iraq - and it can commit war crimes and murder UN soldiers like the four unarmed observers who refused to leave their post under fire.

And what of the Hizbollah, faithful servants of Syria and Iran, and its leader Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, God's first servant, perhaps, but that of Damascus and Tehran a close second? I have long believed that its attack across the Israeli border was planned months in advance. But I've now come to realise that Israel's assault on Lebanon was also planned long in advance - as part of the American-Israeli project to change the shape of the Middle East. The idea that Nasrallah is going to kneel before a Nato general and hand over his sword - that this disciplined, ruthless, frightening guerrilla army is going to surrender to Nato - is a folly beyond self-delusion.

But Blair and Bush want to send a combat force into southern Lebanon. Well, I shall be there, I suppose, to watch its swift destruction in an orgy of car and suicide bombings by the same organisation that yesterday fired another new longer-than-ever range missile that landed near Afula in Israel.

The Lebanese government - democratically elected and hailed by a US administration which threw roses at its prime minister after the US state department claimed a "cedar revolution" - has just caught the Americans off guard, producing a peace package to which the Hizbollah has reluctantly agreed, starting with an immediate ceasefire. Can Washington ignore the decision of a democratic government? Of course it can. It is encouraging Israel to continue its destruction of the democratically elected Hamas government in Gaza and the West Bank.

So stand by for an "increase" in the "urgency" of diplomacy - and for more women with their skin torn open by cluster bombs.

Robert Fisk

Robert Fisk: Israeli missiles had clearly pierced the very centre of the red cross on the roof of each ambulance

From Qlaya, Southern Lebanon

Published: 26 July 2006

The battle for Southern Lebanon is on an epic scale but from the heights above Khiam, the Israelis appear to be in deep trouble. Their F-16s turn in the high bright sun - small silver fish whose whispers gain in volume as they dive - and their bombs burst over the old prison where the Hizbollah are still holding out; but beyond the frontier, I can see livid fires burning across the Israeli hillside and the Jewish settlement of Metullah billowing smoke.

It was not meant to be like this, 13 days into Israel's assault on Lebanon. The Katyushas still streak in pairs out of Khiam, white contrails that thump into Israel's hillsides and border towns. So is it frustration or revenge that also keeps Israel's bombs falling on the innocent? In the early hours of yesterday morning, a tremendous explosion woke me up, rattling the windows and shaking the trees outside and a single flash suffused the western sky over Nabatea. The lives of an entire family of seven had just been extinguished.

And how come - since this now obsesses the humanitarian organisations working in Lebanon - that the Israelis bombed two ambulances in Qana, killing two of the wounded inside and wounding the third civilian for the second time in a day. All the crews were injured - one with a piece of shrapnel in his neck - but what worried the Lebanese Red Cross was that the Israeli missiles had clearly pierced the very centre of the red cross painted on the roof of each vehicle. Did the pilots use the cross as their aiming point?

The bombardment of Khiam has set off its own brushfires on the hillside below Qlaya, whose Maronite Christian inhabitants now stand on the high road above like spectators at a 19th century battle. Khiam is - or was - a pretty village of cut stone doorways and tracery windows but Israel's target is the notorious prison in which - before its retreat from Lebanon in 2000 - hundreds of Hizbollah members and in some cases their families were held and tortured with electricity by Israel's proxy South Lebanon Army militia.

This was the same prison complex - turned into a 'Museum of Torture' by the Hizbollah after the Israeli retreat that was visited by the late Edward Said shortly before his death. More important, however, is that many of the Hizbollah men originally held prisoner here were captives in cells built deep underground below the old French mandate fort. These same men are now fighting the Israelis, almost certainly sheltering from their firepower in the same underground cells in which they once languished, perhaps even storing some of their missiles there.

In Marjayoun next to Qlaya - once the SLA's headquarters - Lebanese troops are desperately trying to present Hizbollah guerrillas using the streets of the Greek Catholic town to fire yet more missiles at Israel. Seven-man army patrols are moving through the darkened alleyways of both towns at night in case Hizbollah brings yet more Israel bombs down on our heads.

In war, all one's senses are quickened. Dawn, birds, music, flowers acquire a new meaning. A family is still living in the little villa opposite my house and I watched a woman at dusk, picking vegetables in her garden for supper, ignoring the howl of Israeli aircraft in the sky above her and the sinister changes in air pressure from their bombs.

In Beirut, one observes the folly of western nations with amusement as well as horror but sitting in these hill villages and listening to how US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice plans to reshape Lebanon is clearly a lesson in human self-delusion.

According to American correspondents accompanying Ms Rice on her visit to the Middle East, she is proposing the intervention of a NATO-led force along the Lebanese-Israeli border for between 60 and 90 days to assure that a ceasefire exists, the deployment after this of an enlarged NATO-led force throughout Lebanon to ensure the disarmament of Hezbollah, and then the retraining of the Lebanese Army before it too deploys to the border. This plan - which like all American proposals on Lebanon is exactly the same as Israel's demands - carries the same depth of delusional conceit as that of the Israeli consul-general in New York who said last week that 'most Lebanese appreciate what we are doing.'

Does Ms Rice think the Hizbollah want to be disarmed, albeit it under the terms of UN Security Council resolution 1559? By NATO? Wasn't there a NATO force in Beirut which fled Lebanon after a group close to the Hizbollah bombed the US marine base at Beirut airport in 1983, killing 241 US servicemen, and dozens more French troops a few seconds later? Does anyone believe that Shiite Muslim forces will not do the same again to any NATO 'intervention' force. The Hizbollah have been waiting and training and dreaming of this war for years, however ruthless we may regard their actions. They are not going to surrender the territory they liberated from the Israeli Army in an 18-year guerrilla war, least of all to NATO at Israel's bidding.

The problem, surely, is that the United States sees this bloodbath as an 'opportunity' rather than a tragedy, a chance to humble Hizbollah's supporters in Tehran and help to shape the 'new Middle East' of which Ms Rice spoke so blandly yesterday. In fact it will more likely to prove to be Syria's attempt to humble Israel and the United States in Lebanon.

Of course, the Hizbollah have brought catastrophe to their coreligionists. All the way down the Beka'a Valley to Southern Lebanon, the long, dangerous, bomb-cratered roads I had to travel to reach Qlaya were deserted save for cars driven by panicking men, crammed with families, trailing white sheets out of the windows in the forlorn hope - after all the Israeli air attacks on civilians - that this would provide them with protection.

The only civilian walking these frightening roads was a goatherd, shepherding his animals around the huge craters. Talking to him, it emerged that he was almost stone deaf and could not hear the bombs. In this, it seemed, he had a lot in common with Condoleezza Rice.

The battle for Southern Lebanon is on an epic scale but from the heights above Khiam, the Israelis appear to be in deep trouble. Their F-16s turn in the high bright sun - small silver fish whose whispers gain in volume as they dive - and their bombs burst over the old prison where the Hizbollah are still holding out; but beyond the frontier, I can see livid fires burning across the Israeli hillside and the Jewish settlement of Metullah billowing smoke.

It was not meant to be like this, 13 days into Israel's assault on Lebanon. The Katyushas still streak in pairs out of Khiam, white contrails that thump into Israel's hillsides and border towns. So is it frustration or revenge that also keeps Israel's bombs falling on the innocent? In the early hours of yesterday morning, a tremendous explosion woke me up, rattling the windows and shaking the trees outside and a single flash suffused the western sky over Nabatea. The lives of an entire family of seven had just been extinguished.

And how come - since this now obsesses the humanitarian organisations working in Lebanon - that the Israelis bombed two ambulances in Qana, killing two of the wounded inside and wounding the third civilian for the second time in a day. All the crews were injured - one with a piece of shrapnel in his neck - but what worried the Lebanese Red Cross was that the Israeli missiles had clearly pierced the very centre of the red cross painted on the roof of each vehicle. Did the pilots use the cross as their aiming point?

The bombardment of Khiam has set off its own brushfires on the hillside below Qlaya, whose Maronite Christian inhabitants now stand on the high road above like spectators at a 19th century battle. Khiam is - or was - a pretty village of cut stone doorways and tracery windows but Israel's target is the notorious prison in which - before its retreat from Lebanon in 2000 - hundreds of Hizbollah members and in some cases their families were held and tortured with electricity by Israel's proxy South Lebanon Army militia.

This was the same prison complex - turned into a 'Museum of Torture' by the Hizbollah after the Israeli retreat that was visited by the late Edward Said shortly before his death. More important, however, is that many of the Hizbollah men originally held prisoner here were captives in cells built deep underground below the old French mandate fort. These same men are now fighting the Israelis, almost certainly sheltering from their firepower in the same underground cells in which they once languished, perhaps even storing some of their missiles there.

In Marjayoun next to Qlaya - once the SLA's headquarters - Lebanese troops are desperately trying to present Hizbollah guerrillas using the streets of the Greek Catholic town to fire yet more missiles at Israel. Seven-man army patrols are moving through the darkened alleyways of both towns at night in case Hizbollah brings yet more Israel bombs down on our heads.

In war, all one's senses are quickened. Dawn, birds, music, flowers acquire a new meaning. A family is still living in the little villa opposite my house and I watched a woman at dusk, picking vegetables in her garden for supper, ignoring the howl of Israeli aircraft in the sky above her and the sinister changes in air pressure from their bombs.

In Beirut, one observes the folly of western nations with amusement as well as horror but sitting in these hill villages and listening to how US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice plans to reshape Lebanon is clearly a lesson in human self-delusion.

According to American correspondents accompanying Ms Rice on her visit to the Middle East, she is proposing the intervention of a NATO-led force along the Lebanese-Israeli border for between 60 and 90 days to assure that a ceasefire exists, the deployment after this of an enlarged NATO-led force throughout Lebanon to ensure the disarmament of Hezbollah, and then the retraining of the Lebanese Army before it too deploys to the border. This plan - which like all American proposals on Lebanon is exactly the same as Israel's demands - carries the same depth of delusional conceit as that of the Israeli consul-general in New York who said last week that 'most Lebanese appreciate what we are doing.'

Does Ms Rice think the Hizbollah want to be disarmed, albeit it under the terms of UN Security Council resolution 1559? By NATO? Wasn't there a NATO force in Beirut which fled Lebanon after a group close to the Hizbollah bombed the US marine base at Beirut airport in 1983, killing 241 US servicemen, and dozens more French troops a few seconds later? Does anyone believe that Shiite Muslim forces will not do the same again to any NATO 'intervention' force. The Hizbollah have been waiting and training and dreaming of this war for years, however ruthless we may regard their actions. They are not going to surrender the territory they liberated from the Israeli Army in an 18-year guerrilla war, least of all to NATO at Israel's bidding.

The problem, surely, is that the United States sees this bloodbath as an 'opportunity' rather than a tragedy, a chance to humble Hizbollah's supporters in Tehran and help to shape the 'new Middle East' of which Ms Rice spoke so blandly yesterday. In fact it will more likely to prove to be Syria's attempt to humble Israel and the United States in Lebanon.

Of course, the Hizbollah have brought catastrophe to their coreligionists. All the way down the Beka'a Valley to Southern Lebanon, the long, dangerous, bomb-cratered roads I had to travel to reach Qlaya were deserted save for cars driven by panicking men, crammed with families, trailing white sheets out of the windows in the forlorn hope - after all the Israeli air attacks on civilians - that this would provide them with protection.

The only civilian walking these frightening roads was a goatherd, shepherding his animals around the huge craters. Talking to him, it emerged that he was almost stone deaf and could not hear the bombs. In this, it seemed, he had a lot in common with Condoleezza Rice.

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Etude de cas

Les enfants rapporteurs font des adultes conservateurs
Le petit copain de maternelle pleurnichard, timoré et rapporteur,
vous vous souvenez ? Eh bien, il y a de fortes chances qu’il
vote aujourd’hui à droite. C’est en tout cas ce qu’ont pu
observer les sociologues qui ont suivi pendant vingt ans
95 enfants de la région de Berkeley. La plupart
des enfants débrouillards, confiants et autonomes étudiés par
l’équipe ont quant à eux grossi les rangs de la gauche libérale
une fois devenus adultes. Avec cette étude, publiée dans
The Journal of Research into Personality, John Block,
professeur de sociologie à Berkeley, ne se fera pas beaucoup
d’amis chez les conservateurs. Elle mérite toutefois qu’on
s’y attarde. Dans les années 1960, le chercheur entreprend
de suivre plus d’une centaine d’élèves de maternelle dans
le cadre d’une étude globale sur la personnalité. Les instituteurs,
qui connaissent leurs élèves depuis des mois, sont chargés
d’évaluer leur personnalité. Rien ne permet de penser que ces
travaux soient biaisés : à l’époque, les chercheurs ne
s’intéressaient pas à la question de l’orientation politique,
et eût-ce été le cas qu’ils auraient été bien en peine de
définir les sympathies politiques de marmots de 3 ou 4 ans.
Quelques décennies plus tard, Block revient voir
comment la personnalité de ses sujets a évolué, en s’intéressant
cette fois-ci à leurs préférences politiques. Et il découvre
qu’une fois adultes les gnangnans d’hier sont généralement
devenus conservateurs, très attachés aux rôles traditionnels
de l’homme et de la femme, et aisément déstabilisés par les
situations équivoques. Les enfants bien dans leur peau d’hier
penchent quant à eux à gauche et sont des esprits ouverts,
curieux, brillants, épris de liberté et non conformistes.
Contrairement aux filles, qui n’ont rien perdu de leur sociabilité,
les garçons de ce groupe affichent toutefois une légère tendance
à l’introspection. L’enclave libérale de Berkeley n’est
pas nécessairement représentative de l’ensemble des
Etats-Unis, concède Block, qui insiste toutefois sur la cohérence
de ses résultats : un enfant mal dans sa peau, explique-t-il,
cherche à se raccrocher à l’autorité et à la tradition,
et c’est précisément ce qu’il trouve dans le conservatisme.
Le modèle progressiste attire davantage des individus
qui ont suffisamment d’assurance pour remettre en question
l’ordre établi et explorer d’autres voies.
“C’est un travail bâclé, tendancieux et qui n’a pas grand-chose
de scientifique”, assène quant à lui Jeff Greenberg, de
l’université d’Arizona. Selon ce spécialiste de psychologie sociale,
les personnalités peu assurées, sur la défensive et rigoristes
peuvent selon lui être aussi sensibles aux arguments de la gauche
qu’à ceux de la droite. En Chine, estime-t-il, des individus
de ce type feraient de fervents partisans du Parti communiste.
Kurt Kleiner