Consortium News, October 11, 2024
Israel’s bombing of Beirut mirrors its harsh attacks on Gaza
and symbolises the disdain for human life that characterises both
Israeli and U.S. warfare.
Ayman Baalbaki, Lebanon, Untitled, 2020.
By Vijay Prashad
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
On Oct. 1, U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee issued a statement
urging U.S. President Joe Biden to “place maximum pressure on Iran and
its proxies, rather than pressure Israel for a ceasefire. We need to
expedite arms transfers to Israel that this administration has delayed
for months, including 2,000-pound bombs, to ensure Israel has all the
tools to deter these threats.”
McCaul’s belligerent call came days after Israel used over 80
U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs and other munitions on Sept. 27, to strike a
residential neighbourhood in Beirut and kill – amongst hundreds of
civilians – Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah
(1960–2024), the leader of Hezbollah. In this one bombing raid, Israel
dropped more of these “bunker buster” bombs than the United States
military used in its 2003 invasion of Iraq.
A former U.S. aviator, Commander Graham Scarbro of the U.S. Navy,
reviewed the evidence of the Israeli strikes for the U.S. Naval
Institute. In a very revealing article,
Scarbro notes that Israel “seems to have taken a notably different
approach to collateral damage than U.S. forces over the past few
decades.”
While the U.S. has never demonstrated any significant concern for
civilian casualties or “collateral damage,” it is worth noting that even
senior U.S. military officials have raised their eyebrows at the degree
of Israel’s disregard for human life. Israel’s military, Scarbro
writes, “seems to have a higher threshold for collateral damage… meaning
they strike even when chances are higher for civilian casualties.”
Bassim al-Shaker, Iraq, “Symphony of Death 1,” 2019.
Despite Washington’s knowledge that the Israelis have been bombing
Gaza, and now Lebanon, with complete abandon — and even after the
International Court of Justice ruled
that it is “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide against the
Palestinians in Gaza — the United States has continued to arm the
Israelis with deadly weaponry.
On Oct. 10, 2023, Biden said, “We’re surging additional military assistance,” which has amounted to a record-level of at least $17.9 billion during the past year of genocide. In March, The Washington Post reported
that the U.S. had “quietly approved and delivered more than 100
separate foreign military sales to Israel that amounted to ‘thousands of
precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters, small
arms and other lethal aid.”
These “small” sales fell below the minimum threshold under U.S. law
which requires the president to approach Congress for approval (which
anyway would not have been denied). These sales amounted to the transfer of at least 14,000 of the 2,000 pound MK-84 bombs and 6,500 500-pound bombs that Israel has used in both Gaza and Lebanon.
In Gaza, the Israelis have routinely used
the 2,000-pound bombs to strike areas populated by civilians — who had
been told to take refuge at these locations by the Israeli authorities
themselves.
“In the first two weeks of the war,” The New York Times reported, “roughly 90 percent of the munitions Israel dropped in Gaza were satellite-guided bombs of 1,000 or 2,000 pounds.”
In March, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) tweeted,
“The US cannot beg Netanyahu to stop bombing civilians one day and
the next send him thousands more 2,000 lb. bombs that can level entire
city blocks. This is obscene.”
A 2016 report by Action on Armed Violence offered the following assessment of these weapons of mass destruction:
“These are extremely powerful bombs, with a large destructive
capacity when used in populated areas. They can blow apart buildings and
kill and injure people hundreds of metres from the point of detonation.
The fragmentation pattern and range of a 2,000lb MK 84 bomb are
difficult to predict, but it is generally said that this weapon has a
‘lethal radius’ (i.e. the distance in which it is likely to kill people
in the vicinity) of up to 360m.
The blast waves of such a weapon can create a great concussive
effect; a 2,000lb bomb can be expected to cause severe injury and damage
as far as 800 metres from the point of impact.”
Ismail Shammout, Palestine, “Guardian of the Fire,” 1988.
I have several times walked around the Beirut neighbourhood of Haret
Hreik in Dahiyeh, which was struck by Israeli bombs in the attack on the
Hezbollah leadership. This is a highly congested area, with barely a
few metres between high-rise residential buildings. To strike a complex
of these buildings with over 80 of these powerful bombs cannot be called
“precise.”
Israel’s bombing of Beirut mirrors its harsh attacks on Gaza and
symbolises the disdain for human life that characterises both Israeli
and U.S. warfare. On Sept. 23, Israel bombarded
Lebanon at a rate of more than one airstrike per minute. In days,
Israel’s “intense airstrikes” displaced over a million people, a fifth
of the entire population of Lebanon.
The first bomb to ever fall from an aircraft was a Haasen hand
grenade (Denmark) dropped by Lieutenant Giulio Cavotti of the Italian
Air Force on Nov. 1, 1911, onto the town of Tagiura, near Tripoli,
Libya. A hundred years later, in a grotesque commemoration of sorts,
French and U.S. aircraft bombed Libya once more as part of their war to
overthrow the government of Muammar Gaddafi.
The ferocity of aerial bombing was understood from the very outset, as Sven Lindqvist documented in his book, A History of Bombing
(2003). In March 1924, U.K. Squadron Leader Arthur “Bomber” Harris
authored a report (later expunged) about his bombings in Iraq and the
“real” meaning of aerial bombardment:
“Where the Arab and Kurd had just begun to realise that if they could
stand a little noise, they could stand bombing … they now know what
real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they now know that within
forty-five minutes a full-sized village … can be practically wiped out
and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five
machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as
warriors, no effective means of escape.”
A hundred years later, these words of “Bomber” Harris aptly describe
the kind of ruthlessness inflicted on both Palestine and Lebanon.
André Masson, France, “There Is No Finished World,” 1942
You might ask: what about the rockets fired on Israel by Hezbollah
and Iran? Are they not part of the brutality of war? Certainly, these
are part of the ugliness of warfare, but an easy parallel cannot be
drawn.
Iran’s ballistic missiles followed Israel’s attack on an Iranian
diplomatic facility in Syria in April, the assassination of Hamas leader
Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran following the inauguration of Iranian
President Masoud Pezeshkian in July, the assassination of Nasrallah in
Beirut in September, and the killing of several Iranian military
officials.
Significantly, whereas Israel has launched countless strikes
targeting civilians, medical personnel, journalists, and aid workers,
Iran’s missiles exclusively targeted Israeli military and intelligence
facilities and not civilian areas. Hezbollah, meanwhile, targeted
Israel’s Ramat David Airbase, east of Haifa, in September.
Neither Iran nor Hezbollah have fired their munitions into congested
neighbourhoods of Israeli cities. Since Oct. 8, 2023, Israeli airstrikes
against Lebanon have far outnumbered Hezbollah’s strikes against Israel.
Before the current wave of hostilities, by Sept. 10, Israel had killed
137 Lebanese civilians and displaced hundreds of thousands of Lebanese
from their homes; meanwhile, Hezbollah rockets had by then killed 14
Israeli civilians, with their rockets leading to the evacuation of
63,000 Israeli civilians.
There has been not only a quantitative difference in the number of
strikes and death toll, but a qualitative difference in the use of
violence. Violence that is directed largely at military targets, is
permissible in certain conditions under international law; violence that
is indiscriminate, such as when massive bombs are used against
civilians, violates the laws of war.
Etel Adnan, Lebanon, Untitled, 2017.
Etel Adnan (1925–2021), a Lebanese poet and artist, grew up in Beirut
after her parents fled the collapsing Ottoman Empire that became modern
day Turkey. She dug deep into the soil of conflict and pain, the
ingredients for her poetry. Her voice resonated from the balcony of her
apartment in Ashrafieh, the “little mountain,” from where she could see
the ships come in and out of the port.
When Etel Adnan died, the novelist Elias Khoury (1948–2024), who himself died just before Beirut was again bombarded, wrote
that he mourned a woman who would not die, but he feared for his city
which was suffering alone. Here are a few extracts from Etel’s poem,
“Beirut, 1982,” to remind us that we are as angry as a storm.
I never believed
that vengeance
would be a tree
growing in my garden
*
Trees grow in all directions
So do Palestinians:
uprooted
and unlike butterflies
wingless,
earthbound,
heavy with love
for their borders and their
misery,
no people can go forever behind
bars
or under the rain.
…
We shall never cry with tears
but with blood.
…
It is not on cemeteries that we shall
plant grain
nor in the palm of my hand
We are as angry as a storm.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist.
He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an
editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of U.S. Power.
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