This week
marks a year since the end of hostilities now officially called the Second
Lebanon war by Israelis. A month of fighting -- mostly Israeli aerial
bombardment of Lebanon, and rocket attacks from the Shia militia Hizbullah on
northern Israel in response -- ended with more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians and
a small but unknown number of Hizbullah fighters dead, as well as 119 Israeli
soldiers and 43 civilians.
When Israel
and the United States realised that Hizbullah could not be bombed into
submission, they pushed a resolution, 1701, through the United Nations. It
placed an expanded international peacekeeping force, UNIFIL, in south Lebanon to
keep Hizbullah in check and try to disarm its few thousand fighters.
But many
significant developments since the war have gone unnoticed, including several
that seriously put in question Israel's account of what happened last summer.
This is old ground worth revisiting for that reason alone.
The war
began on 12 July, when Israel launched waves of air strikes on Lebanon after
Hizbullah killed three soldiers and captured two more on the northern border. (A
further five troops were killed by a land mine when their tank crossed into
Lebanon in hot pursuit.) Hizbullah had long been warning that it would seize
soldiers if it had the chance, in an effort to push Israel into a prisoner
exchange. Israel has been holding a handful of Lebanese prisoners since it
withdrew from its two-decade occupation of south Lebanon in 2000.
The Israeli
prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who has been widely blamed for the army's failure
to subdue Hizbullah, appointed the Winograd Committee to investigate what went
wrong. So far Winograd has been long on pointing out the country's military and
political failures and short on explaining how the mistakes were made or who
made them. Olmert is still in power, even if hugely unpopular.
In the
meantime, there is every indication that Israel is planning another round of
fighting against Hizbullah after it has "learnt the lessons" from the last war.
The new defence minister, Ehud Barak, who was responsible for the 2000
withdrawal, has made it a priority to develop anti-missile systems such as "Iron
Dome" to neutralise the rocket threat from Hizbullah, using some of the recently
announced $30 billion of American military aid.
It has been
left to the Israeli media to begin rewriting the history of last summer. Last
weekend, an editorial in the liberal Haaretz newspaper went so far as to admit
that this was "a war initiated by Israel against a relatively small guerrilla
group". Israel's supporters, including high-profile defenders like Alan
Dershowitz in the US who claimed that Israel had no choice but to bomb Lebanon,
must have been squirming in their seats.
There are
several reasons why Ha'aretz may have reached this new assessment.
Recent
reports have revealed that one of the main justifications for Hizbullah's
continuing resistance -- that Israel failed to withdraw fully from Lebanese
territory in 2000 -- is now supported by the UN. Last month its cartographers
quietly admitted that Lebanon is right in claiming sovereignty over a small
fertile area known as the Shebaa Farms, still occupied by Israel. Israel argues
that the territory is Syrian and will be returned in future peace talks with
Damascus, even though Syria backs Lebanon's position. The UN's admission has
been mostly ignored by the international media.
One of
Israel's main claims during the war was that it made every effort to protect
Lebanese civilians from its aerial bombardments. The casualty figures suggested
otherwise, but increasingly so too does other evidence.
A shocking
aspect of the war was Israel's firing of at least a million cluster bombs, old
munitions supplied by the US with a failure rate as high as 50 per cent, in the
last days of fighting. The tiny bomblets, effectively small land mines, were
left littering south Lebanon after the UN-brokered ceasefire, and are reported
so far to have killed 30 civilians and wounded at least another 180. Israeli
commanders have admitted firing 1.2 million such bomblets, while the UN puts the
figure closer to 3 million.
At the
time, it looked suspiciously as if Israel had taken the brief opportunity before
the war's end to make south Lebanon -- the heartland of both the country's Shia
population and its militia, Hizbullah -- uninhabitable, and to prevent the
return of hundreds of thousands of Shia who had fled Israel's earlier bombing
campaigns.
Israel's
use of cluster bombs has been described as a war crime by human rights
organisations. According to the rules set by Israel's then chief of staff, Dan
Halutz, the bombs should have been used only in open and unpopulated areas --
although with such a high failure rate, this would have done little to prevent
later civilian casualties.
After the
war, the army ordered an investigation, mainly to placate Washington, which was
concerned at the widely reported fact that it had supplied the munitions. The
findings, which should have been published months ago, have yet to be made
public.
The delay
is not surprising. An initial report by the army, leaked to the Israeli media,
discovered that the cluster bombs had been fired into Lebanese population
centres in gross violation of international law. The order was apparently given
by the head of the Northern Command at the time, Udi Adam. A US State Department
investigation reached a similar conclusion.
Another
claim, one that Israel hoped might justify the large number of Lebanese
civilians it killed during the war, was that Hizbullah fighters had been
regularly hiding and firing rockets from among south Lebanon's civilian
population. Human rights groups found scant evidence of this, but a senior UN
official, Jan Egeland, offered succour by accusing Hizbullah of "cowardly
blending".
There were
always strong reasons for suspecting the Israeli claim to be untrue. Hizbullah
had invested much effort in developing an elaborate system of tunnels and
underground bunkers in the countryside, which Israel knew little about, in which
it hid its rockets and from which fighters attacked Israeli soldiers as they
tried to launch a ground invasion. Also, common sense suggests that Hizbullah
fighters would have been unwilling to put their families, who live in south
Lebanon's villages, in danger by launching rockets from among them.
Now Israeli
front pages are carrying reports from Israeli military sources that put in
serious doubt Israel's claims.
Since the
war's end Hizbullah has apparently relocated most of its rockets to conceal them
from the UN peacekeepers, who have been carrying out extensive searches of south
Lebanon to disarm Hizbullah under the terms of Resolution 1701. According to the
UNIFIL, some 33 of these underground bunkers or more than 90 per cent -- have
been located and Hizbullah weapons discovered there, including rockets and
launchers, destroyed.
The Israeli
media has noted that the Israeli army calls these sites "nature reserves";
similarly, the UN has made no mention of finding urban-based Hizbullah bunkers.
Relying on military sources, Haaretz reported last month: "Most of the rockets
fired against Israel during the war last year were launched from the 'nature
reserves'." In short, even Israel is no longer claiming that Hizbullah was
firing its rockets from among civilians.
According
to the UN report, Hizbullah has moved the rockets out of the underground bunkers
and abandoned its rural launch pads. Most rockets, it is believed, have gone
north of the Litani River, beyond the range of the UN monitors. But some,
according to the Israeli army, may have been moved into nearby Shia villages to
hide them from the UN.
As a
result, Haaretz noted that Israeli commanders had issued a warning to Lebanon
that in future hostilities the army "will not hesitate to bomb -- and even
totally destroy -- urban areas after it gives Lebanese civilians the chance to
flee". How this would diverge from Israel's policy during the war, when
Hizbullah was based in its "nature reserves" but Lebanese civilians were still
bombed in their towns and villages, was not made clear.
If the
Israeli army's new claims are true (unlike the old ones), Hizbullah's movement
of some of its rockets into villages should be condemned. But not by Israel,
whose army is breaking international law by concealing its weapons in civilian
areas on a far grander scale.
As a
first-hand observer of the fighting from Israel's side of the border last year,
I noted on several occasions that Israel had built many of its permanent
military installations, including weapons factories and army camps, and set up
temporary artillery positions next to -- and in some cases inside -- civilian
communities in the north of Israel.
Many of
those communities are Arab: Arab citizens constitute about half of the Galilee's
population. Locating military bases next to these communities was a particularly
reckless act by the army as Arab towns and villages lack the public shelters and
air raid warning systems available in Jewish communities. Eighteen of the 43
Israeli civilians killed were Arab -- a proportion that surprised many Israeli
Jews, who assumed that Hizbullah would not want to target Arab communities.
In many
cases it is still not possible to specify where Hizbullah rockets landed because
Israel's military censor prevents any discussion that might identify the
location of a military site. During the war Israel used this to advantageous
effect: for example, it was widely reported that a Hizbullah rocket fell close
to a hospital but reporters failed to mention that a large army camp was next to
it. An actual strike against the camp could have been described in the very same
terms.
It seems
likely that Hizbullah, which had flown pilotless spy drones over Israel earlier
in the year, similar to Israel's own aerial spying missions, knew where many of
these military bases were. The question is, was Hizbullah trying to hit them or
-- as most observers claimed, following Israel's lead -- was it actually more
interested in killing civilians.
A full
answer may never be possible, as we cannot know Hizbullah's intentions -- as
opposed to the consequences of its actions -- any more than we can discern
Israel's during the war.
Human
Rights Watch, however, has argued that, because Hizbullah's basic rockets were
not precise, every time they were fired into Israel they were effectively
targeted at civilians. Hizbullah was therefore guilty of war crimes in using its
rockets, whatever the intention of the launch teams. In other words, according
to this reading of international law, only Israel had the right to fire missiles
and drop bombs because its military hardware is more sophisticated -- and, of
course, more deadly.
Nonetheless, new evidence suggests strongly that, whether or not Hizbullah had
the right to use its rockets, it may often have been trying to hit military
targets, even if it rarely succeeded. The Arab Association for Human Rights,
based in Nazareth, has been compiling a report on the Hizbullah rocket strikes
against Arab communities in the north since last summer. It is not sure whether
it will ever be able to publish its findings because of the military censorship
laws.
But the
information currently available makes for interesting reading. The Association
has looked at northern Arab communities hit by Hizbullah rockets, often
repeatedly, and found that in every case there was at least one military base or
artillery battery placed next to, or in a few cases inside, the community. In
some communities there were several such sites.
This does
not prove that Hizbullah wanted only to hit military bases, of course. But it
does indicate that in some cases it was clearly trying to, even if it lacked the
technical resources to be sure of doing so. It also suggests that, in terms of
international law, Hizbullah behaved no worse, and probably far better, than
Israel during the war.
The
evidence so far indicates that Israel:
*
established legitimate grounds for Hizbullah's attack on the border post by
refusing to withdraw from the Lebanese territory of the Shebaa Farms in 2000;
* initiated
a war of aggression by refusing to engage in talks about a prisoner swap offered
by Hizbullah;
* committed
a grave war crime by intentionally using cluster bombs against south Lebanon's
civilians;
*
repeatedly hit Lebanese communities, killing many civilians, even though the
evidence is that no Hizbullah fighters were to be found there;
* and put
its own civilians, especially Arab civilians, in great danger by making their
communities targets for Hizbullah attacks and failing to protect them.
It is clear
that during the Second Lebanon war Israel committed the most serious war crimes.
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