The Iranian Regime Has Demonstrated That It Is A Paper Tiger – Its Rhetoric in Inverse Proportion to its Actions
Last
week’s pager
attack on Lebanon signalled the beginning of the Lebanon war. It exposed
the hypocrisy behind Western denunciations of terrorism. The triggering of
explosives in 5,000 pagers, irrespective of whether the target is Hezbollah,
fits every definition of terrorism. It killed dozens of civilians, including
children.
As Michael Walzer, author of “Just and Unjust Wars” and co-editor of “The Jewish Political Tradition” wrote in the New York Times,
the explosions on Tuesday and Wednesday were also very likely war crimes
— terrorist attacks by a state that has consistently condemned terrorist
attacks on its own citizens....
the
attacks, which killed at least 37 people
and wounded thousands of others, came when the operatives were not operating;
they had not been mobilized and they were not militarily engaged. Rather, they
were at home with their families, sitting in cafes, shopping in food markets —
among civilians who were
randomly killed and injured.
Terrorism is
the calculated
use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby
to bring about a particular political objective.
The
definition in Britain’s Terrorism Act 2000 is all but useless.
1.
serious violence against a person;
2.
serious damage to property;
3.
endangering a person's life (other than that of the
person committing the action);
4.
creating a serious risk to the health or safety of
the public or a section of the public; and
5. action
designed to seriously interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic
system.
No. 1
could be applied to the Metropolitan Police whose violence is a matter of
record. No. 4 could be applied to the
‘reforms’ to the NHS proposed by Keir Starmer and equally to the privatisation
of the NHS by previous Tory governments for the sake of profit. But of course western governments never think
of their actions as ‘terrorist’. If endangering a person’s life is the
definition then we should have no standing army! Not in itself a bad idea.
I would
define ‘terrorism’ as the use of violence and terror against a population, for
political reasons. The classic non-state terrorist groups are ISIS and Al
Qaeda. Groups which have a substantial political base such as the IRA, the ANC
and PLO were not terrorist though all of them were called that at the time.
Terrorists don’t win elections and don’t have a mass base.
Amnesty
International posted
this report of Israel’s pager attack:
Another witness who was shopping in the southern
Beirut suburb of Borj al-Barajne when she saw women and children screaming and
running, described the scenes as apocalyptic. “People were running all around me, but my legs couldn’t move,” she
said. She later saw young men lying on the ground and dozens of ambulances
arriving.
People were running all around me, but my legs
couldn’t move
A witness to a pager explosion in
Beirut
Amnesty
International’s Evidence Lab analyzed 12 videos showing the pagers exploding in
crowded civilian areas, such as residential streets and grocery stores, as well
as in people’s homes. A verified video of the skyline of Beirut show large
smoke plums over at least 10 locations in residential areas.
Lebanon’s
Minister of Health, Dr. Firas Abiad, described the attacks as “the epitome of indiscriminate attacks”
adding many caused “life-changing
injuries”.
Israel's Bombing of Lebanon - same old story
One
witness confirmed to Amnesty International media reports stating the pagers
beeped before detonating causing some people to bring them up to their faces to
check the screens. A mechanic in Sour described how a friend’s pager started
beeping:
He took
it in his hands, I was looking at it, and it said ERROR. I turned around to get
my cigarettes, and I was still right next to him, and then the pager exploded.
He lost his hand and both his eyes.
It is not
only Hezbollah fighters who were killed and injured but civilian employees of
Hezbollah including health workers. Not that there is any justification for
targeting Hezbollah members in this indiscriminate way.
The
silence of the world’s leaders – Biden, Starmer, Scholtz etc, is deafening. International
law only applies to the enemies of the West, never its friends. Because there is no doubt that the planting
of booby traps is explicitly outlawed.
The
use against civilians of booby traps is prohibited by the Protocol on Mines,
Booby-Traps and Other Devices. Article 2 of the 1980 Protocol II
to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons provides
that a “Booby-trap” means
any device or material which is
designed, constructed or adapted to kill or injure, and which functions
unexpectedly when a person disturbs or approaches an apparently harmless object
or performs an apparently safe act”
It is
understandable therefore that Lebanese Resistance, taken by surprise with many
of its members injured and killed, has not yet been able to co-ordinate its
response to Israel’s savage bombing.
As is
normally the case, Israel’s bombing has primarily
focused on and killed civilians. Only today the United States announced
a further $8.7 aid to Israel. There is no war, no act of aggression, no war
crime or atrocity by Israel that the United States will not support.
US
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken simply lied to Congress about reports
from the U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on
humanitarian assistance, which concluded that Israel had deliberately blocked
deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza.
The U.S.
Agency for International Development delivered its assessment and the State
Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known in late April. Because U.S.
law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries that
prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid, the U.S should have cut
off military aid. In fact it expanded it.
Blinken and
Biden did not accept either finding. On May 10 Blinken stated to Congress that:
“We do not currently assess that the Israeli
government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of
U.S. humanitarian assistance.”
USAID had
sent Blinken a detailed 17-page memo which described instances of Israeli
interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing
agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply
depots and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.
Despite
the ruling
of the International Court of Justice that Israel was ‘plausibly’ committing
genocide and its later order
to Israel to halt its offensive in Rafah and the ICJ’s later ruling that Israel’s
occupation of Gaza and the West Bank were illegal Israel has ignored the
rulings of the world’s highest court. International Law has been shown to be
completely useless when it comes to preventing genocide because it has no
effective mechanism to implement its decisions.
In
Lebanon we can also assume that whatever war crimes Israel is planning will
also be ignored. Israel’s launching of an aggressive war against Lebanon is a
war crime. This issue was considered by The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg
to be the ‘supreme
international crime’. It led the Court to issue 12 death
sentences against the major Nazi war criminals in 1947.
To date
the Lebanese Resistance, which opened a
second front on the border with Israel in solidarity with the Palestinian
resistance in Gaza, has been careful to limit its attacks to Northern Israel
and military targets whereas Israel has deliberately targeted civilians in
South Lebanon as a way of creating a buffer zone.
To date
the response of the Lebanese Resistance has been cautious and hesitant given
its reported stockpile of 200,000 missiles. Of course it is difficult to know what effect
the pager attack has had but it is likely that the resistance is calibrating
its response to Israel’s attacks. If this is true it may prove a costly
mistake. The longer Israel carries out its bombing campaign the likelier it
will be that it destroys the missiles and their launchers.
What is
more likely to bring Israel’s military to heel will be the launching of 1,000
or 2,000 missiles a day. The Iron Dome missile defence system would be overwhelmed.
Targets need to be widened to cover economic infrastructure such as oil
refineries, energy and airports.
The Lebanese Resistance also needs to
make it clear that if Israel continues to target civilians then it will not
consider itself bound by the Geneva Convention on war. In Gaza Israel has attacked
hospitals, schools, churches, mosques – indeed every facet of civilised life. The
Resistance cannot afford to show restraint when the word doesn’t even appear in
the Zionist dictionary.
Thousands
of mosques, churches, homes, restaurants, colleges and other buildings have been
turned to rubble across the Gaza Strip as the Israel-Hamas war continues.
What will
be crucial also will be the assistance of other Arab groups. With the exception
of the Houthis, all
Arab states to one degree or another wish to please or come to terms with U.S.
imperialism. This includes Iran and Syria. Although Iran’s’ support for
Hezbollah in terms of weapons supply has been crucial to their ability to
continue to fight Israel, this has been done, not because of solidarity with
Lebanon and the Palestinian people but because Iran wishes to extend its
influence in the Middle East. Iran has attempted on numerous occasions to try
and reach an agreement with the United States, most notably the Nuclear
Agreement with President Obama that Trump tore up. It has
already made its peace with Saudi Arabia.
Iran’s
problem has always been that Israel wants to be the unchallenged hegemon in the
region. Because Israel is the United States’ attack dog, whose purpose is to
intimidate any radical Arab group or movement, there will never be a chance
that the US will agree to its peace feelers. The US harbours a desire to return
to the days of the Shah of Iran, who was the US’s favourite dictator.
The
Iranian regime is not therefore interested in solidarity for its own sake. It
is not a revolutionary or even a progressive regime. On the contrary it has waged a campaign of
terror and oppression against its own people: women,
workers,
national
and religious
minorities (Jews are the only exception to this, thus proving the
accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ against it are nonsense).
Ayatollah
Khomeini came to power in Iran in 1979 with
the US’s blessing because the alternative was a revolutionary workers
regime. The CIA actually enabled
Khomeini at the time although later they fell out. Under Reagan Iran became
embroiled in the Iran
Contra Scandal when Iran paid for arms the US supplied it with knowing full
well that some of the money would fund the Contras, the US-backed terrorists who
were then fighting the Sandanistas in Nicargua. Israel too supplied
captured PLO weapons to the US in order that the Contras could be armed.
It is
therefore no surprise that the Iranian regime has made it clear that it will
not be taking part in any attacks on Israel. It has not responded to the assassination
of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas chief in Tehran despite its threats
at the time.
The one
thing that the US does not want is a region wide war because in such a war the
complicity of its own Arab client states will become all too clear. Jordan and
Saudi Arabia have been supplying
Israel with goods bypassing the Houthis blockade on the Red Sea. The
involvement of Iraqi Hezbollah, who would almost certainly find themselves in
confrontation with King Hussein’s forces might pose a threat
to an already unpopular regime. At the same time it will bring into even
sharper focus US bases in Jordan and Northern Syria.
The
Middle East is dotted with unpopular, repressive dictators and regimes that are
in alliance with Israel. A war that sucks in forces across the region cannot
but help destabilise those regimes.
In order
to defeat Hezbollah Israel needs to wage a ground
war as Israeli generals are already threatening. The problem with this is
that the Israeli army has already proved wanting in the war against Hamas.
Hezbollah fighters are vastly more experienced than Hamas fighters having
fought in Syria’s civil war in aid of Syrian dictator, Assad.
In 2006
Israel troops were forced
to withdraw from Lebanon when they launched a ground offensive. There is no
reason to believe they will fare any better this time around.
Before
the war on the Palestinians in Gaza Israel’s military had an undeservedly high
reputation as an effective fighting force. But its main role in the past two
decades has not been in armed combat but in maintaining a repressive military
dictatorship in the West Bank.
Israel
is very good at killing civilians but it finds armed opponents a much more
difficult proposition. In Gaza the claim that it has lost some 370 soldiers and
a few thousand injured are ludicrous. On December 2023 Israel’s claim that 1593
soldiers had been injured was shown to be a lie when Ha’aretz discovered
that at the Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon alone 1,949 soldiers had been
treated for injuries. Given that most of its tanks and armoured personnel
carriers have been put out of action the figures
for Israeli military deaths, 346 are ludicrous. It is likely
that the Israeli military has lost at least 3,000 and probably more dead and up
to 10,000 injured.
Israel’s
army is already battle worn. Its reservists are now refusing
further call-ups, hence the attempt to draft the Ultra-Orthodox who prefer
studying the Talmud to taking part in military adventures to secure the
Promised Land.
Others, like Michael Ofer Ziv have refused to fight at the horror of what he has seen. He described to CNN how
One
minute, he was looking at soundless footage of airstrikes he ordered; the next,
he was on his phone watching unfiltered videos of Palestinians shrieking,
carrying their loved ones who had been killed because of the Israeli
military.
“This is happening in real
life and has an actual effect on those people… at some point, your brain kind
of cannot disconnect those two things anymore,” he said.
Once he connected those dots, there was no going back.
Asked for comment, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) told CNN that Ofer
Ziv’s claims around targeting were “baseless, unfounded, and misrepresent the
sensitivity, precaution, and strict obligation to international law with which
the IDF selects and pursues its targets.”
If the
Lebanese war does turn into a fully fledged war it could bring the very
existence of Israel, as the United States’ settler colonial watchdog, into
question. The genocide in Gaza, conducted in the full glare of the
international media has destroyed the moral argument for Israel’s existence as
a Jewish supremacist state. Our leaders may repeat clichés about ‘Israel’s
right to defend itself’ but when pictures of murdered children enter peoples’
living rooms only the brain dead still accept that Gaza’s children pose a
threat to a nuclear armed state.
Tony
Greenstein
