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The Fate of Lebanon and the Rest of Us On July 14 in the chamber of the United Nations Security Council, the permanent representative from Israel, Ambassador Dan Gillerman, paused to address his colleague, the ambassador from Lebanon. "You know that what we are doing is right, and if we succeed, your country will be the real beneficiary." That is the sad truth about Lebanon. What it has been unable or unwilling to do for itself, will be done by Israel when it shatters the strongholds of Hezbollah to end the rain of Iranian-made rockets on its cities. This time, Israel will withdraw to its borders, leaving Lebanon yet another opportunity to assert its sovereignty. Am. Gillerman recalled a sunnier time in Lebanon’s recent history, prior to 1975 "when the Lebanese began their long descent into oppression and terror. This is a country that has been held hostage for more than 32 years by tyrants from the north and terrorists from the south."
With the fall of the Ottoman Empire after WWI, Lebanon became a French protectorate, while Iraq and Jordan fell under the influence of the British who also oversaw affairs in desolate area to the south called Palestine. Following WWII, Jewish refugees from the Nazi Holocaust and earlier Jewish settlers would establish Israel in 1948. The "Cedar Revolution" that began on March 14, 2005 when more than a million Lebanese poured into the streets of Beirut to protest the February assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri was brief. Anger, frustration, and desperation had overcome the fear of Syrian repression. On April 26, 2005, the last of the Syrian army departed, but Hezbollah, a militant Islamic organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel, ruled southern Lebanon. The Syrians had moved into Lebanon obstensibly to bring an end to a 15-year civil war (1975-1990) that had been triggered by an influx of heavily armed Palestinian refugees, driven from Jordan after their failed effort to overthrow the Hashemite monarchy. Reduced to its simplest terms, it was a war between Christians and Muslims. It was, however, more complex because in Lebanon, everyone is defined by their religion and this includes whether one is Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Shia, Sunni, Druze or Maronite. The differences are exaggerated in the hothouse atmosphere of Islamic fantasies. Israel, in effect, accepted Syrian control of Lebanon in exchange for control over Hezbollah. Yes, some rockets might hit northern Israel from time to time, but that was a small price to pay. Too many rockets put an end to that compromise. In time, Israel moved troops into the southern part of Lebanon to create a security zone. In 2000 it withdrew, having suffered too many casualties among its forces from a low-intensity warfare against them. Israelis, weary from the endless attacks on their people, tried to secure peace by ceding land to the Palestinians in Gaza and promising to withdraw further from the West Bank. The Lebanese border to the north remained closely guarded against Hezbollah, a terrorist organization that had invented the suicide bomber and perfected the taking of hostages. Am. Gillerman called the Cedar Revolution Lebanon’s moment of truth. Would it take the opportunity to assert its sovereignty over southern Lebanon? It did not. In fact, in the elections that followed Syria’s withdrawal, Hezbollah candidates became a part of Lebanon’s reconstituted government. Lebanon remained hostage to a stateless organization that answered to both Syria and Iran. Syria’s desire to reclaim Lebanon and Iran’s desire to destroy Israel forced Hezbollah to demonstrate that the millions poured into it had been a good investment. In attacks coordinated with Hamas, both terror groups kidnapped Israeli soldiers. Suddenly the heat was off Iran as concerns about its ambition to acquire nuclear weapons gave way to the attention focused on events in Lebanon and Gaza. There was never any doubt of Israel’s response. Am. Gillerman told the Security Council that "Hezbollah, together with Hamas, Syria and Iran, comprise the world’s new and ominous Axis of Terror, an infamous club, the entry fee to which is the blood of innocents and the terrorizing of the entire world." "The real occupying power in Lebanon is terror—terror instigated by Hezbollah, but initiated, funded and perpetrated by Syria and Iran." If you want to see what the other nations of the Middle East will look like if there is no intervention and preemption, look at Lebanon. If you want to see what Europe will look like if subjected to a similar campaign of terror, look at Lebanon. The implications for the United States of America are huge. This is where we secure a large measure of the oil our economy and way of life requires. This is where we have put our troops in harm’s way to break the grip of fanatical Islam and replace it with a modern form of governance. Failure is not an option, but so far U.S. diplomacy has only encouraged its enemies. This is not just about tiny Israel fighting for its security and survival. This is not about restoring Lebanon to its former grandeur. This is about whether Western civilization has the guts to protect itself against a tyrannical enemy. We live in a world where hijackers, primarily from Saudi Arabia, can commandeer two airline jets to destroy the World Trade Center and, within hours, the word is spread that this heinous act was really the work of the Israeli Mossad and Jewish terrorists. We live in a world where, despite ceding Gaza to the Palestinians, a tunnel is built by Hamas to facilitate the killing of two Israeli soldiers and the kidnapping of a third, while rockets rain down daily, and yet Israel is ultimately blamed because it is the "occupier" and holds Palestinian terrorists in its jails. We live in a world where Hezbollah can take two Israeli soldiers hostage a few days later and flee back across the border into Lebanon. Apparently, Israel’s military withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 following a response to comparable outrages was insufficient. This brings us to the UN’s Division for Palestinian Rights, a branch of its Department of Political Affairs. Every year since 1977, it has organized a meeting in New York on November 29 to deplore the General Assembly’s 1947 Partition Plan that was accepted by the Israelis and unanimously rejected by Arab states. The meeting is a platform for speeches denouncing the existence of Israel, all paid for by the UN. When the body of the former UN Human Rights Commission stank so rankly of its own putrescence, it was rhetorically replaced with a Human Rights Council and on July 6, 2006 the Council ended its first-ever "special session" with a resolution condemning Israel for the latest problems in Gaza. A tally of United Nations Security Council resolutions condemning Israel totaled 59 between 1955 and 1992. From 1993 to 1995, the General Assembly churned out 18 resolutions about the rights of Palestinians and not a word about the rights of Israelis to live a single day without the threat of death from Fatah, Hamas, Hezbollah and any other group devoted to killing them. For a very long time the United Nations was on record equating Zionism with "racism." No other nation on Earth has been the subject of so much UN condemnation. Briefly, Gaza is a sliver of land adjacent to the Egyptian border from which Israel withdrew, forcing its own citizens who lived there to abandon their homes and communities. The hope was that by ceding Gaza to the Palestinians, it would lead to peace. It led to the election of Hamas, a terrorist organization solely dedicated to the destruction of Israel.
When Israel retaliated against the latest provocation, demanding the return of the young soldier, it was the considered opinion of the UN Human Rights Council that Israel was guilty of causing a humanitarian problem. The vote was 29-11 with five abstentions. The Council’s resolution included a call "to dispatch an urgent fact-finding mission headed by the Special Rapporteur" et cetera, et cetera. The man selected for this mission is John Dugard and, as UN Watch, an independent non-governmental organization noted, he has held this position since 2001 and has the dubious record of never finding a single Palestinian guilty of anything. Dugard is no fan of the Roadmap for Middle East Peace or Israel. Here’s how he sees members of the Israeli Defense force. After a pro forma expression of sympathy for Corporal Gilad Shalit, the Hamas hostage, he added that he felt the same "for all Israel’s young soldiers compelled to serve in the army of an occupying power." According to UN Watch, this same "occupying power" has, over the past four years, been subject to more than 140 separate suicide attacks and 13,730 shooting attacks. Dugard failed to mention them. The United States has been oddly silent of late regarding events in Gaza. Perhaps the State Department has concluded there is nothing that can be done to persuade the Palestinians to act in a sane fashion? The United Nations continues to be of no use with regard to the threat Israel has faced since the day it declared its independence over a half century ago. The UN has been Israel’s undeclared enemy and the United States has been, we are repeatedly told, its only real friend. The Israelis have tried every thing they could to mollify the Palestinians and the neighboring Arab states. They have done this despite having fought several wars that gained it the territories the Arabs want returned, along with all of the rest of Israel. There is a lesson here somewhere for the Israelis and for the rest of the world. It has something to do with punishing one’s enemies until they give up. It has something to do with the lesson the Holocaust should have taught them. You cannot negotiate with people who want to kill you. For the new collection of Alan Caruba’s commentaries, Right Answers, sign up to get your autographed copy when it comes off the press in September. And, if you feel like sending a donation to the Center, please do so. If you prefer, you can send a check to The Caruba Organization, 28 West Third Street, Suite 1321, South Orange, NJ 07079.
©
2006 Alan Caruba. |
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Carved out of the defeated Ottoman Empire after WWI by the French and English, Lebanon became a unique place where its large Christian population achieved a successful measure of governance in cooperation with Muslim citizens. The result was a place that was often called the Paris of the Middle East, a place that became a modern financial hub to the region. 
Those that keep telling us that democracy will solve problems in the Middle Eastcontinue to ignore the obvious fact that not one single nation in that region—with the exception of Israel—has anything that even imitates a modern democratic state; hopes for the current Iraqi government not withstanding.