Showing posts with label Lebanon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lebanon. Show all posts
Thursday, 15 January 2009
Robert Fisk's Theory on the War on Ghaza...the real story of the war in a less than 4 minutes video clip...
Robert Fisk: Tin-pot rockets won't open a second front
Thursday, 15 January 2009
The "Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command" – the quotation marks are necessary since this outfit controls at most 500 cadres – is responsible for all the tin-pot rockets fired into Israel from Lebanon this past week.
It is not the next "front". It is not the beginning of the "northern front". No one was injured when three rockets fired from southern Lebanon fell in open areas near the Israeli town of Kiryat Shemona yesterday. A blaze of outdated rockets on northern Israel – "about 1944, I date them", as one Palestinian put it in Beirut – is not going to ignite another conflict for Hamas in Gaza. In Lebanon, the guns are silent – and when they are not, the world will know about it.
The Hizbollah are not behind them – though it is strange that the Iranian-supplied militia failed a second time to prevent the PFLP-GC from firing over the border – and the organisation's preposterous attempt to ignite another conflict did little more than advertise the divisions within the Palestinian refugee community inside Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp east of Sidon.
For the West, the PFLP-GC is an unspeakable problem. Most Arabs suspect they were behind the Lockerbie bombing. Thus did most Western "analysts" believe, until the PFLP-GC's Syrian supporters were needed after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 – Syrian troops were sent to Saudi Arabia to help defend the kingdom – after which Libya and a certain Mr Megrahi became the culprits, and the PFLP-GC became the blameless boys of the Middle East.
The UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon should have spotted the latest attack – but, relying on Hizbollah to defend them from their "al-Qa'ida" enemies – they did not keep their eye on the ball. The Israelis know all this. Nor did they want to smear the UN yesterday (that will come later).
The Israelis do not want a second war right now. It's not the moment to claim that the PFLP-GC, with its nests around Sidon, is the "centre of world terror". That will be a surprise for the West's "analysts" – and for the Obama administration – in due course. (The Independent)
Read more...
The "Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command" – the quotation marks are necessary since this outfit controls at most 500 cadres – is responsible for all the tin-pot rockets fired into Israel from Lebanon this past week.
It is not the next "front". It is not the beginning of the "northern front". No one was injured when three rockets fired from southern Lebanon fell in open areas near the Israeli town of Kiryat Shemona yesterday. A blaze of outdated rockets on northern Israel – "about 1944, I date them", as one Palestinian put it in Beirut – is not going to ignite another conflict for Hamas in Gaza. In Lebanon, the guns are silent – and when they are not, the world will know about it.
The Hizbollah are not behind them – though it is strange that the Iranian-supplied militia failed a second time to prevent the PFLP-GC from firing over the border – and the organisation's preposterous attempt to ignite another conflict did little more than advertise the divisions within the Palestinian refugee community inside Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp east of Sidon.
For the West, the PFLP-GC is an unspeakable problem. Most Arabs suspect they were behind the Lockerbie bombing. Thus did most Western "analysts" believe, until the PFLP-GC's Syrian supporters were needed after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 – Syrian troops were sent to Saudi Arabia to help defend the kingdom – after which Libya and a certain Mr Megrahi became the culprits, and the PFLP-GC became the blameless boys of the Middle East.
The UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon should have spotted the latest attack – but, relying on Hizbollah to defend them from their "al-Qa'ida" enemies – they did not keep their eye on the ball. The Israelis know all this. Nor did they want to smear the UN yesterday (that will come later).
The Israelis do not want a second war right now. It's not the moment to claim that the PFLP-GC, with its nests around Sidon, is the "centre of world terror". That will be a surprise for the West's "analysts" – and for the Obama administration – in due course. (The Independent)
Read more...
Tuesday, 6 January 2009
Robert Fisk: Bring in the peacekeepers? It's not as easy as it sounds
Tuesday, 6 January 2009 (The Independent)
UN peacekeepers in Lebanon, where they have had mixed success
Do I hear the braying of the UN donkey in Gaza? On his Middle East tour, the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, may well be mentioning that well-known Eeyore figure on the East River, always so willing to send its peacekeepers on Mission Impossible. The Palestinians have been trying to internationalise their conflict with the Israelis ever since Yasser Arafat pleaded for UN forces to protect the Palestinians after the failure of the Oslo agreement.
Always the Israelis have refused. The very odd observer force which the EU installed in Hebron after Baruch Golstein had massacred Palestinians at the mosque – its patrols regularly interrupted by the Jewish settlers of this very odd city – simply faded away. And the United Nations Relief and Works Agency has been throwing tents and food and school classes at the slums of Palestinian refugee camps for generations. Can it be that yet another Israeli failure in Gaza will change the dynamics of "peacekeeping" in the Middle East, that at last the ghost of Arafat will watch the "internationalisation" of the Israeli-Palestinian war?
The cliché, in both senses of the word – both the tired phrase and the matrix for any future UN force – is, of course, UNIFIL, the so-called United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. It arrived in southern Lebanon in 1978 after Israel's hopeless "Operation Litani", which was supposed to "destroy" the Palestinian guerrilla forces north of the Israeli border. The UN mandate insisted that the Israelis retreat to their international frontier – which they refused to do – eventually leaving the UN with an Israeli occupation force to the south of them and Palestinian units with bases inside the UN force and to the north of them.
When Israel staged another hopeless invasion in 1982 – like its unrealistic Hamas operation in Gaza as well as the 1978 Lebanon invasion, it was supposed to "destroy" their Palestinian enemies – the UN found itself operating entirely within an Israeli occupation zone, even allowing Israel's intelligence officers to travel through UN checkpoints to arrest or assassinate members of the latest Lebanese militia to oppose the occupation in the south.
Only when Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, 22 years after the UN's first arrival, did the peacekeeping force – now largely from poorer African and Asian countries – operate independently, albeit with Hizbollah now installed in their midst. The 2006 Israeli-Hizbollah war ended with a larger UN force in southern Lebanon, this time commanded by Nato generals who patrolled an area free of Hizbollah weapons – but only because Hizballah's newer long-range rockets could be fired from north of the UN's area of operations.
The UN force, it should be added, was constantly abused by Israel. It was accused of being "pro-Palestinian" (whatever that is), in league with "terrorists" (it was never explained how), weak, anti-Israeli and – of course – anti-Semitic. Israelis even accused a local UN Fijian commander of spreading Aids. So could there be yet another UN force in the region? Originally, there was a UN observer force on the Lebanese-Israeli border.
It arrived in 1948 and still exists – unarmed, on the frontier to this day, within the UNIFIL zone – and this, in reality, could be the framework of a new UN force in Palestine. In other words, an unarmed observer group rather than a peacekeeping force, which could add an international voice to ceasefire violations between Israel and Hamas. But be sure, the Palestinians would then ask for the same institution to be placed on the West Bank-Israeli border – and therein lies the problem for both Israel and the UN.
For which "frontier" would the UN then patrol? The UN border of the 1940s, the pre-1967 ceasefire lines – in which a pre-annexed East Jerusalem belonged to the Arabs – or the post-1967 border in which Israel claimed "annexed" Jerusalem, or the massive walled "frontier" which now bites deeply into yet more Palestinian territory – illegally in international law? And would the UN also have to "observe" the equally illegal Jewish settlements built on Arab land within the West Bank?
Gaza sounds an easy option. The UN could place some international troops around Gaza. But it would only be a matter of time before they would be required around the West Bank. That would be a Palestinian dream – and, for those Israelis who wish to continue their expansion into Palestinian land – a nightmare.
Read more...
UN peacekeepers in Lebanon, where they have had mixed success
Do I hear the braying of the UN donkey in Gaza? On his Middle East tour, the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, may well be mentioning that well-known Eeyore figure on the East River, always so willing to send its peacekeepers on Mission Impossible. The Palestinians have been trying to internationalise their conflict with the Israelis ever since Yasser Arafat pleaded for UN forces to protect the Palestinians after the failure of the Oslo agreement.
Always the Israelis have refused. The very odd observer force which the EU installed in Hebron after Baruch Golstein had massacred Palestinians at the mosque – its patrols regularly interrupted by the Jewish settlers of this very odd city – simply faded away. And the United Nations Relief and Works Agency has been throwing tents and food and school classes at the slums of Palestinian refugee camps for generations. Can it be that yet another Israeli failure in Gaza will change the dynamics of "peacekeeping" in the Middle East, that at last the ghost of Arafat will watch the "internationalisation" of the Israeli-Palestinian war?
The cliché, in both senses of the word – both the tired phrase and the matrix for any future UN force – is, of course, UNIFIL, the so-called United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. It arrived in southern Lebanon in 1978 after Israel's hopeless "Operation Litani", which was supposed to "destroy" the Palestinian guerrilla forces north of the Israeli border. The UN mandate insisted that the Israelis retreat to their international frontier – which they refused to do – eventually leaving the UN with an Israeli occupation force to the south of them and Palestinian units with bases inside the UN force and to the north of them.
When Israel staged another hopeless invasion in 1982 – like its unrealistic Hamas operation in Gaza as well as the 1978 Lebanon invasion, it was supposed to "destroy" their Palestinian enemies – the UN found itself operating entirely within an Israeli occupation zone, even allowing Israel's intelligence officers to travel through UN checkpoints to arrest or assassinate members of the latest Lebanese militia to oppose the occupation in the south.
Only when Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, 22 years after the UN's first arrival, did the peacekeeping force – now largely from poorer African and Asian countries – operate independently, albeit with Hizbollah now installed in their midst. The 2006 Israeli-Hizbollah war ended with a larger UN force in southern Lebanon, this time commanded by Nato generals who patrolled an area free of Hizbollah weapons – but only because Hizballah's newer long-range rockets could be fired from north of the UN's area of operations.
The UN force, it should be added, was constantly abused by Israel. It was accused of being "pro-Palestinian" (whatever that is), in league with "terrorists" (it was never explained how), weak, anti-Israeli and – of course – anti-Semitic. Israelis even accused a local UN Fijian commander of spreading Aids. So could there be yet another UN force in the region? Originally, there was a UN observer force on the Lebanese-Israeli border.
It arrived in 1948 and still exists – unarmed, on the frontier to this day, within the UNIFIL zone – and this, in reality, could be the framework of a new UN force in Palestine. In other words, an unarmed observer group rather than a peacekeeping force, which could add an international voice to ceasefire violations between Israel and Hamas. But be sure, the Palestinians would then ask for the same institution to be placed on the West Bank-Israeli border – and therein lies the problem for both Israel and the UN.
For which "frontier" would the UN then patrol? The UN border of the 1940s, the pre-1967 ceasefire lines – in which a pre-annexed East Jerusalem belonged to the Arabs – or the post-1967 border in which Israel claimed "annexed" Jerusalem, or the massive walled "frontier" which now bites deeply into yet more Palestinian territory – illegally in international law? And would the UN also have to "observe" the equally illegal Jewish settlements built on Arab land within the West Bank?
Gaza sounds an easy option. The UN could place some international troops around Gaza. But it would only be a matter of time before they would be required around the West Bank. That would be a Palestinian dream – and, for those Israelis who wish to continue their expansion into Palestinian land – a nightmare.
Read more...
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