I could not tell the easy, comforting lie.
“No”, I told the woman, her traumatised children clinging to her legs, “I can’t say you are safe here; not one of us is safe. The Israelis are genocidal. But in Lebanon so far, I don’t think they have bombed a school”.
I was with one of 67 families, with 215 children, living as refugees in a small school at Ain Rumaila in Southern Beirut. The area borders the evacuated suburb of Dahiya which the Israelis are systematically demolishing, and bombings rattle the windows of the school every day.
This woman is a school teacher when at home in Southern Lebanon, and her husband a retired soldier. They had to leave their small town with no notice, through an intense air raid, as Israeli bombs destroyed buildings and killed and maimed people all round them.
They got out only with what they could carry. Their home was destroyed behind them.
Israel has targeted refugees all over Lebanon. Just the day before, we had been at the site of a refugee aid centre in central Beirut, which had been targeted for missile attack. The death toll on that attack has now risen to five, with seventeen seriously injured.
I reached that site before I could establish exactly what the target was:
My aim in visiting the school was to let a few refugees tell to camera their own stories about their daily pre-war lives and their communities, so that people might see them as individuals, and not just a huddled mass of misery.
I think that worked. Within 48 hours the resulting video will be available. But what this woman urgently wanted me to tell her was that now they are safe.
And I couldn’t. If the children understood English, then I might perhaps have lied for their sake and replied that everything is OK. But the situation is too serious for self-serving false cheer.
Before I left, one of the families we met who have lost everything and are struggling with basic provision, absolutely insisted we sat and shared their meal of salad and lentils, cooked on a single burner ring directly on top of a gas bottle.
It was a deeply humbling experience to experience their graciousness and warmth to strangers.
Yesterday Amos Hochstein, the US Middle Eastern Envoy, flew in to Beirut to “negotiate” a peace deal between Lebanon and Israel.
Over 3,500 Lebanese have been killed, the majority of them women and children. The bombs that killed them were not only made in the USA, they were supplied by the USA for the purpose. As were the aircraft that dropped them.
The Americans are arrogant enough to send Amos Hochstein, born in the terrorist state to Israeli parents and himself a former member of the IDF, as their “peace envoy”.
And it says everything about America’s real interest in the region that Hochstein’s official position in the Biden Administration is actually Energy Security Adviser.
As I explained in my last article, Israel’s intensified bombing campaign is designed to terrify Lebanon into signing a peace deal that is actually a surrender. It guarantees Israeli armed forces access at will into Southern Lebanon, and military overflight of the entire country.
The access to Southern Lebanon in the latest draft has been supposedly toned down and phrased as “in pursuit of Israel’s right of self-defence”.
As the entire world has seen this last year and more that “Israel’s right to self-defence” is interpreted by both Israel and the United States as the right to commit genocide, Lebanon would be utterly mad to sign this document.
Similarly Lebanon is supposed to be reassured by insertion of the USA as the “guarantor” of the agreement.
You read that right; the county which is currently funding and supplying the genocidal bombing of Lebanon is going to be the guarantor of its safety.
As always in such negotiations, neither side wishes to be seen to be standing in the way of a deal, so the Lebanese were polite to Hochstein and he is now shuttling off to Tel Aviv to seek Israeli agreement to little linguistic tweaks that make it all sound better.
I worry for Lebanon. In another post I will try to outline the myriad ways in which the USA and Israel are attempting to re-open the old divisions of the civil war to undermine the resistance.
One of those ways is of course to convince factions that Israel really wants peace and Hezbollah is blocking a reasonable deal. It is plainly not a reasonable deal, but people made desperate by Israel’s state terror inflicted on their country, may see what they wish to believe.
Should Lebanon accept the deal in the interest of preserving unity, as the US connive, then I have no doubt whatsoever that this deal will shortly be understood to have been a key step on the path to Israeli annexation of Southern Lebanon.
Because it is essential to understand that Greater Israel has been the goal all along of both Israel and the United States.
If you have not by now seen through the Biden administration’s pretence of “trying to restrain” Israel, whilst providing ever greater funding and weapons for the genocide, then you are such a fool that I cannot help you.
Reporting from Lebanon
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“Look, I remind myself that very many people didn’t vote Labour at the last election. I’m not surprised that many of them want a rerun. That isn’t how our system works.”
^ From Genocide Starmer. Is this guy a moron, or is he just obeying orders to make himself look like one? You would have thought they could have got a lackey to say this, perhaps at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport. But nope, it’s Genocide himself who’s saying it.
Hasn’t he got anything better to do than tell everyone who wants rid of him that “that’s not how our system works”?
He’s publicising this petition.The number of signatories will probably shoot up now.
Starmer got fewer votes than Tories + Reform less than five months ago. And now he’s practically Ratnering his brand. It’s almost as if….as if he didn’t get where he is by skill alone. Shocked, I tell you!
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/700143
As of 3.49pm, British regime time, 2.24m people have signed this petition at the British parliament’s website calling for a general election. The prime minister has told the signatories they can all sniff his freebie jockstrap for all he cares.
The words of the petition are these:
“I would like there to be another General Election. I believe the current Labour Government have gone back on the promises they laid out in the lead up to the last election.”
Starmer won the election with a majority of >170 five months ago…on 34% of the vote because the Tory and Reform voteshare (38%) was divided between two parties.
The petition was opened five days ago.
It won’t surprise me if it has 10 million signatories by this time next week.
The Tories lost the election because many white Powellite racist boneheads (who form a large part of the British population, especially of the over-40s) voted Reform rather than for the Tories under a non-white leader. But this petition isn’t saying vote Tory. It’s saying, in effect, vote against Starmer. I’d watch out if I were Starmer.
If the west will not act it is up to the non-western world to put a nail in the coffin now, Enough of this charade!
This important order by the ICC cannot just be ignored and forgotten. It is now evidently clear to everyone that Israel engage in murder, starvation. Why then is there then no momentum, effort, campaign being built from this landmark decision?
The useless genocidal-enabler called the Arab League paying lipservice as usual. One wonder if there is any intellectual trait whatosever in the Arab regimes considering their total lack of interest in this subject. While they kicked out Hamas, Israeli embassies and business are free to expand in the arab world.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/arab-countries-welcome-icc-arrest-warrants-for-netanyahu-gallant/3400606
Arab populations need to rid themselves of these “leaders”, they would save themselves and palestinians in the mix.
Video: Egypt’s Foreign Minister demands accountability for Hamas’ interruption of peace
https://www.instagram.com/middleeastmonitor/reel/C3fzRm-p_-T/
Yes Jack what he did not mention was that Hamas was financed by Netanyahu/s government who used Hamas to split the Palestinian people, this has been well documented.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry says Hamas was financed to perpetuate a division between existing mainstream Palestinian peacemaking entities. Shoukry labels Hamas as an outsider to the accepted majority of the Palestinian people. Shoukry is in a line of Egyptian US boot licking vassals and a complete POS.
If he’s in the Egyptian government, he’ll certainly be a bootlicker of the USA, the same as if he were in the British government. By “interruption of peace”, he means “interruption of maximal profitmaking opportunities for Israel’s friends in Egypt”. What “peace” would this be? The “peace” of the refugee camps with “only” a few thousand, and sometimes up to 30,000, Palestinians injured by Zionists every year since 2008? See the graph here:
https://www.statista.com/chart/16516/israeli-palestinian-casualties-by-in-gaza-and-the-west-bank/
No doubt Hamas can be fairly criticised, but only by those who support the Palestinians’ struggle – and now is not the time. Even the Fatah political leadership recognise that now is not the time! This guy is no friend of the Palestinians and doubtless the US embassy think he’s a very good boy but hardly anybody else will. He has no right to say who is or isn’t external to the Palestinians.
The Egyptian government only joined the ICJ case against Israel after Israel sent soldiers to the Rafah crossing. A case of “Hey, we were making money out of keeping our boot on the Palestinians’ throats to help you, and this is the disrespect you show us!” ?
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/16/why-egypt-backed-south-africas-genocide-case-against-israel-in-the-icj