The Daily Background
| Gut-wrenching: Did the Israeli military use American clusterbombs on civillians?
by Arlen Parsa
I know I haven’t written about the middle east in a few days (a week?) but that’s just because a lot of really interesting mostly pre-election stories have been going on right here in America. I thought I’d take a moment however to write a bit on the situation with regard to Israel. Reuters reports on a startling (and I believe positive) new poll:
Sixty-three percent of Israelis want Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to resign, a newspaper poll showed on Friday.
Olmert’s popularity has declined sharply amid criticism of Israel’s failure to crush Hizbollah in the war in Lebanon that ended on Aug 14.
Wow. If only Americans reacted that way to mismanagement of failed and unneeded wars. Cough cough, you know what war I’m talking about.
Another report, this one from the New York Times today, hits a lot closer to home.
The State Department is investigating whether Israel’s use of American-made cluster bombs in southern Lebanon violated secret agreements with the United States that restrict when it can employ such weapons, two officials said.
The investigation by the department’s Office of Defense Trade Controls began this week, after reports that three types of American cluster munitions, anti-personnel weapons that spray bomblets over a wide area, have been found in many areas of southern Lebanon and were responsible for civilian casualties.
I was absolutely outraged that the Bush Administration decided to ship bombs to Israel in the middle of the illegal conflict. But I was under the impression at the time, as I think a lot of other people also were, that these were “smart” or precision-guided bombs.
The Israeli military kept saying that they were using laser-guided “smart” bombs to ensure that civilians weren’t hit. You know, like the kind of “smart” bombs that destroyed a Qana refugee shelter holding dozens of children, leaving 56 dead and no survivors.
But now, we learn that the weapons that the Bush Administration shipped to them to use in the illegal conflict were actually cluster bombs which are used to kill large groups of people. I do not think that anything whatsoever will become of this “investigation” that the State Department says it’s going to conduct, but this is absolutely horrid. Cluster bombs, landmines, chemical weapons, and nuclear warheads, serrated bayonets: all of these are horribly, horribly immoral weapons.
Not that any type of weapon can be moral, but these have been internationally banned for good reason. They are designed to people in horrible and the most painful of ways, meant to disfigure people but not leave them dead, meant to kill masses of people and inevitably masses of civilians. The thought of any of these being used today is absolutely gut-wrenching.
Illegal conflict? What do you propose Israel should have done when they were under constant attack from Hizbollah?
Okay, I don’t know if you understand how the war began.
Israel illegally sent troops into southern Lebanon, as they had been doing for several months, a skirmish erupted, soldiers were killed and two of them were kidnapped by Hezbollah militants. The Israeli military then proceeded to drop quite literally dozens of tons of bombs, including American-made cluster bombs, on densely populated civilian areas, claiming that they were targeting Hezbollah militants who lived among Shiite majority of Lebanese.
However, they also bombed bridges, oil refineries, airports, power plants, tissue factories, refugee camps, damaged hospitals and schools, carpet-bombed almost exclusively Christian areas of Beirut which nobody claimed was harboring Hezbollah militants.
By the end of the war, Israeli soldiers were accusing their commanders of war crimes, and calling off bombing missions when they realized they had been sent to bomb civilians.
A recent (yesterday) poll revealed that vast majority of Israelis now want their Prime Minister to resign for what happened during the war.
One of the world’s most respected investigative journalists, a Pulitzer-prize winner (Sy Hersh; look him up- the guy who cracked the My Lai massacre and Abu Ghraib prison scoops), has reported that the entire war was co-planned by the Bush Administration as a test-run for tactics to be used against Iran.
It has been reported that the Israeli military had been trying to provoke a conflict with Hezbollah for months and used the two kidnappings as a pretext to launch the massive bombing campaign which they did. Hezbollah militants then began to weakly respond with small inaccurate Katyusha rockets.
In my view– and I think the facts handily back this up– both sides targeted civilians, and committed war crimes. Both sides are guilty, but only one side has been blamed.
Which side killed hundreds upon hundreds of civilians, and which side managed only to kill a few dozen? Both sides had intent to harm, but in the end, which side instigated the conflict? Which side did ten times the amount of damage to the other? Which side targeted ambulances and refugee convoys, in violation of the Geneva convention? Which side repeatedly bombed the United Nations killing unarmed observers?
All of this happened in reaction to the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers who had illegally entered southern Lebanon. Proportionate reaction? I don’t think so.
The only innocent people in this conflict were the civilians. Neither military force is innocent.