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 riasen 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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UN special rapporteur and SOAS graduate Francesca Albanese:
“there is no doubt that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza”
[the camp breakout of 7 Oct 2022] “in no way justifies the genocide committed by Israel.”
Elsewhere in her remarks, Albanese said continuing to trade arms with a state or entity that is committing genocide is a violation of the UN Charter.
She called for the next step to be “severing all military, academic and diplomatic relations with Israel.”
https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2024/11/19/737542/albanese-gaza-israel-genocide
You can’t get much clearer than that. Let’s run through it again. The UN special rapporteur (with page here) has said:
1) Israel is committing genocide
2) its enemies’ actions don’t justify genocide
3) trading arms with such criminals is against the UN Charter
4) countries should break off diplomatic, military, and academic relations with Israel.
Just to be clear: 4) means (inter alia) shutting down Israeli embassies and consulates everywhere.
Clearly words are cheap in the aforementioned organisation headquartered in New York. Every decent person agrees with Albanese. But what she is saying appears to be having no effect whatsoever. The terrorists called Israel are continuing the genocide they are committing.
“a key step on the path to Israeli annexation of Southern Lebanon.”
But, we all know that annexation of the south is just the beginning, because then you’ll have Israeli ‘settlers’ setting up in the south and for their safety they’ll require annexation of the north.
This started out as providing security for Israeli settlers in Northern Israel, it will, unless stopped, lead to the complete take over of Lebanon. One step on the way to greater Israel. Whose next ? Syria or Jordan. Trump will allow the take over of the West bank (for $100Mn reasons), so my money is on Jordan.
Yes. The big picture is that the Zionist mentality needs a Base, a Prison, and an Edge.
The Prison is where they keep their servants.
The Edge is where they are fighting, murdering, and thieving – and where they train the younger generation to keep on murdering, just like their parents and grandparents before them.
These aren’t exactly defined because, hey, it’s practice that counts, not words.
At the moment the West Bank is a Prison, while Gaza and part of Lebanon are in the Edge.
Planned for the near future is an advance of the front lines. This could involve turning the largest of the 1967 occupied territories, i.e. the West Bank, into something similar to the 1948 occupied territories – or, in short, mass expulsions and formal annexation, bringing the West Bank into the Base. The only place in practice to expel the surviving population to is Jordan.
Then turn southern Lebanon into part of the new Prison, cf. the old West Bank.
And situate the new Edge possibly in Syria, Jordan, and northern Lebanon…
…with details to depend on the response by Iran and the response (or non-response) by Saudi, Turkey, and even possibly Egypt when the Zionists “cleanse” Jerusalem, smash up the Al-Aqsa mosque, and de-Islamicise the Dome of the Rock.
I say “non-response”, but the term “Arab street” is not entirely orientalist, so doing absolutely eff-all may not be an option in Riyadh and Cairo.
Which leaves Gaza. The plan for Gaza is probably to murder much of the population, let the rest flee on ships to Cyprus, and resettle as part of the Base.
One question is whether an influx of ubermenschen will be needed from outside the region. I suspect yes, and that France, and perhaps also some other European countries with smaller Jewish populations, may be the source. Possibly Britain too.
“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.”
Obviously, there aren’t many fools reading you. Why would they? Now, another question is, isn’t it a little bit too late to put the blame on the easy target, the Biden/Kamala duet? Do you have any reason to believe the Trump/Musk administration can be any more favorable to the Palestinian people? It actually doesn’t seem very likely. Almost the opposite…
I am commenting on what has been done by Biden/Harris. I will comment on Trump’s doings when he does them.
He already has. It’s clearly upon his personal permission that Hochstein went to the Middle East with a so-called ‘peace plan’. But we shall certainly read with great interest your comments in later episodes.
Nobody gets to be presidential candidate for either of the major US parties without being confirmed as Zionist property. This has been true since Kennedy and the arrangement by which Zionist agencies wouldn’t really be treated as foreign agents under FARA.
(Nixon in his very very last days in the White House did say privately he was going to reverse policy on Israel but look what happened to him next. Carter meanwhile has tried his best since he left the presidency, but to little effect given that he holds no public office. These are just footnotes.)
US politics within the confines in which it operates isn’t anywhere near as globally significant as the NYT and most of the media in the global US-bumsniffer region – media which follows in the footsteps of the NYT, including the BBC – seeks to portray it. Whoever is US president does what the Israelis want. For evidence, see the last 60 years and more. Pretty much everyone in the Middle East knows this.