more recent thoughts on israel/lebanon

The BBC has a chart of facts relating to the Israel-Lebanon conflict, the numbers for which were most recently updated August 8th. The number of deaths and injuries, are of course, appalling, given that Israel’s initial attack was supposedly over a few military deaths (nearly 1,000 Lebanese have now died, predominately civilians, compared with around 100 combined civilian/soldier Israeli deaths.) But what perhaps is more striking is the details on the damage done to the Lebanese infrastructure. Here’s the list of the various buildings and other public structures which have been destroyed:

6,900 houses/apartments

160 factories, markets, farms and other commercial buildings

29 airports, ports, water- and sewage-treatment plants, dams and electrical plants

23 fuel stations

145 bridges and over-passes

600km of roads

While the structural damage has not happened in such a great extent in Israel, they have also lost around 300 buildings.

I think the U.S. originally said that Israel should try to avoid doing any harm that would jeopardize Lebanon’s government; how is the destruction of this many public structures going to help their government, or anything else in the country, function? But note that it’s our country who is providing the majority of the weaponry causing this above damage, anyway. I don’t think that many of our leaders have any real interest in actually seeing an end to the conflict. The callousness of leaders like Condoleezza Rice has been highlighted quite a bit on other blogs and websites recently. This includes, of course, the oft-quoted “birth pangs” statement:

What we’re seeing here is, in a sense, the growing—the birth pangs of a new Middle East, and whatever we do, we have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old Middle East.

Does this mean that the U.S. is some sort of midwife to death, war, and militarization in the Middle East? That’s what it feels like. Perhaps Rice thinks of us as midwives of democracy, but our establishment of ‘democracy’ in Iraq should have us questioning that. (There’s a recent column from Martin Marty’s Sightings that raises some good points about what the so-called democracy in Iraq says about the current state of our own ‘democracy’ here.)

Why do our leaders assume allowing more violence, or creating that violence ourselves, will help anything? Rice’s metaphor just seems so twisted to me; she’s using images of birth, of life, to justify death. It’s awful.

I admit to having avoided the news recently because I know that reading about all of this regularly will just make me increasingly angry and bitter. So doing the reading for this post has been part of my attempt at getting a little more up-to-date and not completely ignoring the issue, because to do so would, essentially, to become callous and apathetic myself. But I don’t think knowing every last detail about such conflicts is ultimately worth it, because it seems to just make one more angry and frustrated, and anything but peaceful, when ultimately what we want to see brought about is peace. I was reflecting on this recently when I attended a peace rally in remembrance of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima this last Sunday. The whole event was very geared to current conflicts in the Middle East, including Iraq, Israel-Lebanon, and the tensions between the U.S. and Iran; the idea being that we should remember the atrocities of previous actions and be spurred to prevent current violence. Matthew Rothschild, the editor of the magazine The Progressive, was the featured speaker, and I kept thinking how inappropriate his speech was. It was your average bit of progressive politicking: shouting about what we know our country has currently done wrong, about our mistakes in Iraq, and generally Bush-bashing, without really saying anything about how anyone was going to actually change anything. I realized that for someone speaking at a peace rally, he was anything but peaceful; does he even know what it is, what it would be to have it? I think that I really subscribe to the notion that in order to bring about peace – or justice, or goodness, or any of the most worthwhile things – one has to embody such things oneself, one brings them into being by being them onself. So in order not to fall into the apathetic trap, or the average politically-involved-and-angry trap, I’ve been trying to make sure to read something more than just the news, something that will help me remain peaceful, and keep my thinking clear as well as informed. The current choices have been W.S. Merwyn’s Migration and Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac.

So to finish this with more than mere criticism and outrage at current events, here are some real examples of how people are working to influence others against the current violence, and also making sure they don’t fall into the more hateful mindsets divisive conflicts can so easily cause:

Parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Defense steps down over Lebanon

(What’s cool about this guy is that he’s not someone really high up, with a whole lot of weight; but his decision is still gaining a large amount of attention and making an impact.)

Citizens Against Racism and Discrimination – Israeli Children Signing Bombs

(This writer challenges some of the immediate, hateful responses that have arisen from photos published of Israeli children writing on bombs to be sent to Lebanon. The pictures are pretty difficult to swallow, I admit – especially when placed next to photos of dead Lebanese children, as they often have been – but we still need to be wary of letting the media sway our emotions so much as to cause us to lose perspective on a situation.)