The Obliteration of a Country

The following are compiled from Armen Kouyoumjian's article:

PROGRESSIVE TREND
On December 27, 1968, Israeli commandos flew into Beirut airport and blew up in cold blood the 13-strong fleet of its once proud Middle East Airlines. Hey, I thought, this is not war, this is vandalism.
The following four decades have given plenty more ammunition. The 1978 invasion of the South, the 1982 occupation of half the country with the resulting destruction, and the Sabra and Chatila massacres. Menachem Beguin stopped Armenian scholars from attending seminars on Genocide in Israel, after which followed repeated denials of the Armenian Genocide by various top Israeli officials, finally culminating in an unholy alliance with Turkey. They even instructed Jewish organizations worldwide to shamefully collaborate in the negation campaign. Begin's real name was actually Wolfovitch (hey, just like that guy at the White House).

THE TARGET
Lebanon which Israel has decided to obliterate is not just any country. It is the cradle of the ancient Phoenician civilisation that gave the world its first modern alphabet, and pioneered international commerce. It has been the home of great artists and thinkers. It has given birth to some of the world's most brilliant business brains, and at least half a dozen countries in Latin America have had presidents from among the ranks of the large Lebanese Diaspora.
This country, whose modern independence is recent, is built on a fragile equilibrium which cannot easily take traumas. It is not the solid balance of the cement-less vault of medieval cathedrals, but the delicate one of a pyramid of Chinese acrobats. Mess around with one and the whole thing collapses, as happened several times over the past half century. To expect its authorities and modest armed forces to do other people's dirty work in as unrealistic as it is unjust. If the genesis of the Hezbollah problem is Iran and Syria, supposedly card-carrying members of the Axis of Evil, how come their territory is not being attacked, whereas poor Lebanon is obliterated? The answer is: the cowardly bully always targets the weak and defenceless.

THE PERPETRATOR AND HIS ACTS
To call Israel a Terrorist State would be an undeserved compliment. Terrorists at least have an ulterior motive, however warped it may sometimes be. Israel is a Vandal State. Vandals just destroy for the sheer pleasure of causing harm. Within a few days, this trading country's transport and energy infrastructure is in ruins, and half a million of its population are refugees. Its painful recovery from a long and also foreign-induced internal conflict has been wiped out at a stroke.


TIRED ARGUMENTS
The main argument presented by Israel to justify its actions is Self Defence. This does not stand any scrutiny. Both national and international laws restrict your field of action in this respect. If you are a private individual and someone throws stones at your house, you can try to stop them and nobody will blame you for it. However, you have no legal nor moral right to go to his house, kill his family, set fire to his possessions, and then go on to do the same with his neighbours, the whole town where he came from and the whole country it is situated in. Articles 33 and 147 of the Geneva Convention are very clear about banning collective punishment and destroying targets of no military relevance.

It is amazing that a state with a secret service and armed forces that carry such a high reputation, could not seek out the Hezbollah culprits who "kidnapped" two of its soldiers (whatever happened to the concept of prisoners of war, aren't they part and parcel of a military conflict?). Instead, not just areas known to be used as Hezbollah hideouts, not just the country's entire infrastructure, but residential areas of both Muslims & Christians, not to mention United Nation posts and more have been struck.

The territory of Lebanon will not only accumulate understandable additional hatred against Israel, but will become a place of unrest which cannot be of any comfort to its neighbour. Their old claim to annex Lebanon up to the Litani river may be fulfilled, but it will only increase the pressure in the overpopulated remainder of the country.

Let me get on to a more controversial argument, that of Israel's Right to Exist. I think by its behaviour as a Rogue State, it has long lost this right. Having a right to a country is not divine, even for God's chosen people. It is a capricious gift of history. Some have it, others have it for a while, and others never get it. Nobody has the right to mess up the whole of humanity every few years, in order to "guarantee" their own geographical survival. The Kurds are a nation that never managed to have a country, but they are not responsible for the 1973 start of the long rise in oil prices, which were multiplied by 30x in the following 33 years. The Poles have been in and out of having a country for most of their history, and though France and Britain went to war for them in 1939, they were sold down the river as soon as WWII ended. The Kashmiri are fighting for a country. Armenians were without one for the best part of a thousand years. Did they go out and steal anybody else's country as a result?

If it is anything but a small consolation, everyone I have spoken to in recent days has been highly critical of Israel. It is understandable that the US administration has done nothing to prevent or stop this outrage, but the indifference of the Europeans is harder to fathom. In any case, the damage is done. A wonderful country has been willfully destroyed. It might recover, one day. There is a spot just north of Beirut, a gorge through which flows the Nahr el Kalb. From Antiquity, it became a tradition for conquerors passing through Lebanon to carve their names on the stony walls of the river bank. Assyrian kings, Egyptian Pharaohs, Greek and Roman generals and the more modern armies. Tourist guides loved to show them to visitors and say: "they all came, they all went, but we are still here").