Antony Loewenstein

Lebanon is a fractured society partly controlled by Hizbollah. Many in the public back this reality and yet:

Lebanon’s prime minister-designate Najib Mikati describes the powerful Hezbollah, whose backing was key to his nomination, as a “tumour,” in a 2008 US diplomatic cable revealed by a Lebanese daily on Tuesday.

The billionaire businessman, who was appointed premier in January, is quoted as telling US officials that the Iranian- and Syrian-backed militant party was a “tumor that must be removed”, according to the Arabic-language Al-Jumhuriya.

The newspaper was citing a WikiLeaks cable filed by the US embassy in Lebanon on January 12, 2008.

“Mikati, speaking as a ‘statesman’, argued Lebanon could not survive with a Hezbollah mini-state,” according to the cable.

“Regardless of his personal views on the group, Mikati said he was expecting Hezbollah to bring Lebanon to a ‘sad ending,’” it added.

“He assessed that Hezbollah was just like a tumour that, whether benign or malignant, must be removed.”

Mikati’s office released a statement saying the comments did not “reflect his convictions” and had political motives, without specifying.

“The prime minister will not get involved in debates with any party, especially over … words and positions that are in part untrue, in part inaccurate and most of which go back years,” read the statement.

Mikati’s criticism of Hezbollah surfaces at a sensitive time as he struggles to form a government amid bitter rivalry between opposing camps in Lebanon.

Hezbollah toppled the Western-backed government of caretaker premier Saad Hariri in January over his refusal to disavow a UN-backed court probing the 2005 assassination of his father, ex-premier Rafiq Hariri.

The Netherlands-based tribunal is expected to indict members of the Shiite group in the case.

John Pilger has sent the following message to Marrickville councillors:

“Sometimes, looked at from the outside, Australia is a strange place. In other ‘western democracies’ the ‘debate’ about the enduring injustice dealt the Palestinians and Israel’s  lawlessness has moved forward to the point where the cynical campaign of anti-Semitism smears is no longer effective — in the UK, much of Europe and even the United States.

If Israel’s bloody assault on Lebanon was not the turning point, the criminal attack on the imprisoned population of Gaza certainly was. The same is true of the BDS movement. This eminently reasonable, decent and necessary campaign enjoys a respectability across the world, not least in South Africa, where it’s backed by the likes of Desmond Tutu and especially those Jews who fought the apartheid regime. The University of Johannesburg, one of the biggest universities in South Africa, has just broken all ties with Israel. Justice for Palestine, said, Mandela, is ‘the greatest moral issue of our time’. That’s the company those Marrickville councillors who have stood up for this ‘greatest moral issue’, keep. And those who have wavered and walked away should think again – remembering other waverers who, long ago, walked away from speaking out against what was being done to Jews. The scale is very different; the principle is the same. Do not be intimidated by Murdoch vendettas or by anyone else. All power to you.”

John Pilger

Wikileaks shows us more:

Mohammed Tantawi, the head of Egypt’s ruling generals, was an obstacle to Israeli efforts to stop arms smuggling within the Gaza strip, according to Israeli security forces. The assessment was privately delivered to US diplomats, alongside praise for former intelligence chief Omar Suleiman’s efforts to stop weapons trafficking, according to the WikiLeaks embassy cables.

The revelations come in a tranche of the most militarily sensitive cables from the US embassy in Tel Aviv. They have been handed over to Israeli newspapers by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The Hebrew-language paper Yediot this week announced a deal under which it will print an interview with Assange, who has recently had to defend WikiLeaks from accusations of antisemitism.

The cables show intimate co-operation between US and Israeli intelligence organisations. Israel’s preoccupation with Iranian nuclear ambitions is well known and the US cables detail the battering on the subject that diplomats repeatedly receive from Tel Aviv.

They also shed detailed and sometimes unexpected light on Israel’s military analyses of its other enemies and friends in the region.

Egypt is the primary route for weapons and munitions into the Gaza strip, and the US has been facilitating co-operation between Israel and Egypt to tackle this for several years.

On arms smuggling across the Egyptian border to Hamas in Gaza, Israeli intelligence chiefs described as “supportive” Omar Suleiman, who was Egypt’s intelligence minister, but said defence minister Mohammed Hussein Tantawi was “an obstacle” in a November 2009 cable.

…

The cables also shed light on Israel’s assessment of Hezbollah’s mounting capability to strike directly at Tel Aviv with an arsenal of more than 20,000 missiles.

Israeli intelligence chiefs briefed their US counterparts during a regular Joint Political Military Group (JPMG) session on 18 November 2009 about the scale of potential Hezbollah attacks from Lebanon.

Washington was told: “Hezbollah possesses over 20,000 rockets … Hezbollah was preparing for a long conflict with Israel in which it hopes to launch a massive number of rockets at Israel per day. A Mossad official estimated that Hezbollah will try to launch 400-600 rockets and missiles at Israel per day – 100 of which will be aimed at Tel Aviv. He noted that Hezbollah is looking to sustain such launches for at least two months.”

Other cables detail regular secret talks between the US and Yuval Diskin, head of Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Beth, over the role of Hamas in Gaza. On 12 November 2009 the embassy reported the views of the general responsible for Gaza and southern Israel, Major General Yoav Galant, that Hamas needed to be “strong enough to enforce a ceasefire”.

He told the Americans: “Israel’s political leadership has not yet made the necessary policy choices among competing priorities: a short-term priority of wanting Hamas to be strong enough to enforce the de facto ceasefire and prevent the firing of rockets and mortars into Israel; a medium priority of preventing Hamas from consolidating its hold on Gaza; and a longer-term priority of avoiding a return of Israeli control of Gaza and full responsibility for the wellbeing of Gaza’s civilian population.”

Galant was to be made Israel’s chief of defence staff earlier this year but the appointment was cancelled due to scandal.

There was an intentional Israeli policy of collective punishment against the Gazan people. Mondoweiss co-owner Adam Horowitz tells Democracy Now!:

…The Dahiya Doctrine is the war doctrine that Israel first used in the 2006 attack on Lebanon, which basically said that any area that they were receiving fire from, they would consider the entire area to be a military target. Dahiya is a neighborhood in Beirut that was absolutely flattened. Leading up to Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, the Israeli military and political command was very clear that they were going to recreate Dahiya in Gaza. And many people, including Judge Goldstone and the Goldstone Report, say that’s exactly what happened. And that’s one of the most damning charges of the Goldstone Report, which Goldstone does not address in this op-ed, that there was an intentional policy of collective punishment, of attacking the civilian infrastructure, the electricity, the food, the people of Gaza, to punish them for having elected Hamas. And that’s a charge that still stands.

One of its authors, Steve Walt, reflects on a tumultuous period and his work’s undoubted influence.

One of the great personal successes, in my view, has been the increasing number of Jews who recognise the devastating result of simply allowing the pro-settler, anti-Palestinian Zionists solely taking the floor. Judaism simply cannot be about backing never-ending colonisation of Arab land.

Here’s Walt:

When we wrote the book, we also hoped that our work would provoke some soul-searching among “pro-Israel” individuals and groups in the United States, and especially those found in the American Jewish community. Why? Because interest-group politics are central to American democracy, and the most obvious way to shift U.S. policy on this issue would be to alter the attitudes and behavior of the interest groups that care most about it and exert the greatest influence over U.S. behavior.

Indeed, we explicitly said in the book that what was needed was a “new Israel lobby,” one that would advocate policies that were actually in Israel’s long-term interest (and would be more aligned with U.S. interests too). The problem, we emphasized repeatedly, was not the existence of a powerful interest group focused on these issue; the problem was that it was dominated by individuals and organizations whose policy preferences were wrongheaded. A powerful “pro-Israel” interest group that favored smart policies would be wholly desirable.

It is therefore gratifying to observe the emergence of J Street, to see groups like Americans for Peace Now and Jewish Voice for Peace become more vocal, and to see writers like Peter Beinart and David Remnick take public stances that are substantially different from ones they might have expressed a few years ago.

Needless to say, these shifts weren’t our doing. Events in the region — especially the 2006 Lebanon war of 2006, the 2008-2009 Gaza war, the continued expansion of Israeli settlements, and the worrisome rightward drift in Israeli domestic politics — also inspired the effort to create a “pro-Israel” organization that would favor smarter policies and be more representative of American Jewish opinion than hard-line groups like AIPAC, the Israel Project, or the Zionist Organization of America, to say nothing of Christian Zionist organizations like John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel.

Our greatest disappointment, however, has been the lack of movement in U.S. Middle East policy.

While parts of Libya begin to imagine a life without Gaddafi – wonderful quote in this typically incisive Anthony Shadid piece in the New York Times: “There is no call for the overthrow of the government; only Colonel Qaddafi is mentioned, as lackey, tyrant and the man with really bad hair” – Western powers are scrambling.

Robert Fisk on Washington asking its brutal buddies to lend a hand (anybody still wondering why nobody in the Arab world seriously believes America when it talks about democracy?):

Desperate to avoid US military involvement in Libya in the event of a prolonged struggle between the Gaddafi regime and its opponents, the Americans have asked Saudi Arabia if it can supply weapons to the rebels in Benghazi. The Saudi Kingdom, already facing a “day of rage” from its 10 per cent Shia Muslim community on Friday, with a ban on all demonstrations, has so far failed to respond to Washington’s highly classified request, although King Abdullah personally loathes the Libyan leader, who tried to assassinate him just over a year ago.

Washington’s request is in line with other US military co-operation with the Saudis. The royal family in Jeddah, which was deeply involved in the Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, gave immediate support to American efforts to arm guerrillas fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan in 1980 and later – to America’s chagrin – also funded and armed the Taliban.

But the Saudis remain the only US Arab ally strategically placed and capable of furnishing weapons to the guerrillas of Libya. Their assistance would allow Washington to disclaim any military involvement in the supply chain – even though the arms would be American and paid for by the Saudis.

More Wikileaks cables seem to suggest that the US once feared (rightly or wrongly?) Islamists in the ranks of anti-Gaffafi rebels:

Leaked diplomatic cables obtained by the WikiLeaks website and passed to The Daily Telegraph disclose fears that eastern Libya is being overrun by extremists intent on overthrowing Colonel Gaddafi’s regime.

Former jihadi fighters who underwent “religious and ideological training” in Afghanistan, Lebanon and the West Bank in the 1980s have returned to eastern towns in Libya such as Benghazi and Derna to propagate their Islamist beliefs, the cables warn.

Derna has become a particular stronghold for the former fighters and conservative imams who have shut down “un-Islamic” social and cultural organisations such as sports leagues, theatres and youth clubs, the cables report.

Local sources blame deliberate government efforts to “keep the east poor” for growing extremism in towns such as Derna.

One cable sent to Washington in February 2008 reports a conversation with a local businessman who described the increasingly incendiary rhetoric at backstreet mosques in Derna, where coded talk of “martyrdom operations” had become commonplace.

Here’s to small blessings. A rather good editorial in today’s Sydney Morning Herald that calls for a re-thinking of years of imperial attitudes in the Arab world and an opening to Islamists who get elected. Bravo:

The patronising orientalism that the Arabs or even Muslims in general are somehow culturally conditioned to political slavery is being ripped up in front of our eyes. It is a time of great upheaval, partly the result of an open information age that perhaps ironically one of the Gulf’s autocrats, Qatar’s emir, embraced with his sponsorship of the pan-Arab satellite network Al Jazeera. It will be hard to put the genie back in the bottle.

The West is left looking flat-footed by developments. Britain has been shamelessly cosying up to Gaddafi. America has relied on regimes now facing popular uprisings. Even Australia has its substantial military presence at the Al Minhad Air Base in Dubai.

The situation demands a steady stand on principles by our governments, firmly supporting the right to free expression. We should be ready to accept, as the West hasn’t always done (as in Algeria, Gaza and Lebanon), that free elections sometimes may not bring the results we want.

You can smell the fear in this Haartez editorial. Israel is a democratic state that should be saved? Who thinks this? Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza?

Juan Cole brings news of yet more Wikileaks cables that show the threat Israel poses to world peace:

The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten has summarized an Israeli military briefing by Israeli Chief of Staff Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi of a US congressional delegation a little over a year ago and concludes that

“The memo on the talks between Ashkenazi and [Congressman Ike] Skelton, as well as numerous other documents from the same period of time, to which Aftenposten has gained access, leave a clear message: The Israeli military is forging ahead at full speed with preparations for a new war in the Middle East.”

The paper says that US cables quote Ashkenazi telling the US congressmen, “I’m preparing the Israeli army for a major war, since it is easier to scale down to a smaller operation than to do the opposite.”

The general’s plans are driven by fear of growing stockpiles of rockets in Hamas-controlled Gaza and in Hizbullah-controlled Southern Lebanon, the likely theaters of the planned major new war. Ashkenazi does not seem capable of considering that, given a number of Israeli invasions and occupations of those regions, the rockets may be primarily defensive.

…

The memos reveal that none of the goals of Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon and its 2008-9 war on little Gaza were achieved, and that both Hamas and Hizbullah have effectively re-armed. What makes Ashkenazi think things would be different this time? Israel hawks have doomed themselves to the particular hell of Sisyphus, forced to roll the same stone up the hill over and over again with no hope of ever balancing it on the summit.

Enough with the conspiracy theories (aka Israel colluding with Wikileaks). The group will soon unload on Israel and it won’t be pretty:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Wednesday that his website is due to release thousands of documents related to Israel, particularly dealing with the Mabhouh assassination in Dubai and the Second Lebanon War, Channel 10 reported Thursday.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Assange said that only very few files related to Israel were published so far and that WikiLeaks intends on releasing many more documents over the next six months.

Assange, who was recently released from a British prison, said that he holds 3,700 more files related to Israel, and the main source of them is the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv.

Assange said in the interview that WikiLeaks plans on releasing cables that were classified as top secret regarding Israel’s month-long war with Hezbollah militants in Lebanon in the summer of 2006.

Moreover, he also claimed he holds documents indicating Mossad involvement in the assassination of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai in January.

Assange said that WikiLeaks had not had any direct or indirect relations with Israel, but said he was sure Israeli intelligence is monitoring WikiLeaks’ activities closely.

What emerges from the litany of Wikileaks cables is the ineptitude of American foreign policy, either jumping at shadows or trying to impose its bullying ways on the world, often unsuccessfully.

One:

Saudi Arabia proposed creating an Arab force backed by US and Nato air and sea power to intervene in Lebanon two years ago and destroy Iranian-backed Hezbollah, according to a US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.

The plan would have sparked a proxy battle between the US and its allies against Iran, fought in one of the most volatile regions of the world.

The Saudi plan was never enacted but reflects the anxiety of Saudi Arabia – as well as the US – about growing Iranian influence in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East.

The proposal was made by the veteran Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, to the US special adviser to Iraq, David Satterfield. The US responded by expressing scepticism about the military feasibility of the plan.

It would have marked a return of US forces to Lebanon almost three decades after they fled in the wake of the 1983 suicide attack on US marine barracks in Beirut that killed 299 American and French military personnel.

Faisal, in a US cable marked secret, emphasised the need for what he referred to as a “security response” to the military challenge to the Lebanon government from Hezbollah, the Shia militia backed by Iran and, to a lesser extent, Syria.

The cable says: “Specifically, Saud argued for an ‘Arab force’ to create and maintain order in and around Beirut.

“The US and Nato would need to provide transport and logistical support, as well as ‘naval and air cover’. Saud said that a Hezbollah victory in Beirut would mean the end of the Siniora government and the ‘Iranian takeover’ of Lebanon.”

Two:

Syrian officials were stunned by the mysterious assassination of a senior Hezbollah operative in Damascus two years ago, triggering a blame game between rival security services and frenzied speculation across the Middle East about who did it.

US reports from February 2008, revealed by WikiLeaks, described how the regime of President Bashar al-Assad was shocked when Imad Mughniyeh was murdered by a sophisticated bomb planted in his car. Mughniyeh, a founder member of the militant Lebanese Shia movement, was wanted by the US, Israel, France and other governments. Hezbollah is backed by Iran and Syria.

“Syrian military intelligence and general intelligence directorate officials are currently engaged in an internecine struggle to blame each other for the breach of security that resulted in Mughniyeh’s death,” the US embassy reported.

Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Lebanon, the well-connected Abdel Aziz Khoja, told US diplomats in Beirut that Hezbollah believed the Syrians were responsible for the Damascus killing. No Syrian official was present at Mughniyeh’s funeral in Beirut’s southern suburbs the following day. Iran was represented by its foreign minister, who, the Saudi envoy said, had come to calm down Hezbollah and keep it from taking action against Syria.

Another rumour, Khoja said, was that Syria and Israel had made a deal to allow Mughniyeh to be killed, an Israeli objective. No one has ever claimed responsibility for the assassination, though Israel has been widely blamed for it.

US diplomats reported that the killing led to tensions between Syria and Iran, perhaps because Tehran shared Khoja’s suspicion of Syrian complicity in the affair.

Three:

Washington has worked discreetly to block the supply of Iranian and Syrian weapons to Islamist groups in the Middle East amid evidence showed Scud-D missiles had been supplied to Hezbollah, according to U.S. diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.

The United States, in many cases using secret intelligence provided by Israel, had pressured Arab governments not to cooperate with arms smuggling to Palestinian group Hamas or Lebanon’s Hezbollah, said a report in the Guardian.

This is mainstream media reporting. Anonymous voices advocating war and chaos in the Middle East, courtesy of Israel and the US:

Syria’s fresh interference in Lebanon and its increasingly sophisticated weapons shipments to Hezbollah have alarmed American officials and prompted Israel’s military to consider a strike against a Syrian weapons depot that supplies the Lebanese militia group, U.S. and Israeli officials say.