"This is not just a military operation. It is an attempt to smash a country"
Witnesses the Israeli attack that left 'a land without people'
By Robert FiskThe Independent, 15 April 1996
Mansuri, southern Lebanon -- It was heartbreaking. As the shells swished over the village, the last
of its people came walking in
tears through the long grass, out of basements, down the stone tracks from their poor cement
houses towards the United Nations soldiers.
One young woman carried her two-month-old baby and clutched it to
her breast in our car, her
tears splashing on to the child's shawl. The oldest woman in the village sat next to her, well over
80, her lips and cheeks tattooed in the way girls adorned their faces in the days of the Ottoman
empire. One man had wrapped his ears in bandages to deaden the crack of the Israeli artillery on
the hill above.
North of us, across the orange orchards and villages of southern
Lebanon on this beautiful
spring afternoon, sprouted mushroom clouds of white and grey smoke as the Israeli jets worked
over the little hamlets with their cheaply-built minarets and pot-holed
roads.
All of Tyre was to be evacuated by dusk, the Israelis had ordered.
This was to be a land
without people. As the shells whizzed over us, a French UN colonel led an elderly woman in a
bright blue "abaya" gown to our jeep. Once inside, she placed her front-door key on the fringe of
her scarf, knotted it safely inside the material, and tucked it into her dress. Then
she put her head in her hands.
All day, driving the hot,
frightening roads of southern
Lebanon, we had heard the
news from Beirut. The Israelis
had blown up the electricity
switching station at Hazmieh,
cutting electricity from much of
the capital. Their jets had raided the southern suburbs of the
city for the third time, attacking what the Israelis claimed --
and the word "claimed" needs
to be repeated these days -- were
Hizbollah offices. But the Israeli
jets sweeping across Lebanon
yesterday were on more than a
military operation.
For what is happening in
Lebanon today is a concerted
attempt by Israel to smash this
country, to enfeeble its government, to overwhelm its resources with up to half a million
refugees, to cut its electricity
supply system at the very moment when the nation is recovering from a horrific war in
which Israel itself had been involved. Israeli-controlled radios in southern Lebanon were
yesterday demanding further
evacuations from villages north
of Tyre and threatening to
bomb road bridges. They have
already closed Beirut port.
So Lebanon -- and the pattern
of attacks and threats against
the civilian population all point
in this direction -- is to be impoverished and, if the port
blockade continues, to be
starved. And why? To persuade,
as the Israelis claim, a vulnerable Lebanese government to
disarm the Hizbollah and thus
make more comfortable
Israel's occupation of southern
Lebanon? Or to make Lebanon
weak enough to make peace
with Israel, a separate peace
which would isolate Syria, a
peace made by a country that
would be as weak as the PLO
and Jordan were when they were brought to the table to talk
to the Israelis?
And in the real world of
Lebanon the simple question
has to be asked. Would the Israelis have embarked on such
a massive military operation at
such enormous cost (albeit at
the expense of the American
taxpayer), just to avenge the
wounding of five Israelis by
Katyusha rockets, an assault
that was itself retaliation for the
killing of a Lebanese youth?
For weeks now, there have
been hints from Israeli ministers
that Lebanon should make a
separate peace with Israel, that
it should ignore Syria, that Syria should be isolated for its supposed intransigence in peace
negotiations over the Golan
Heights. For this war is a message to the Syrian leader, President Assad, a demonstration in
its very backyard of what happens to those who do not want
to make peace with Israel.
In any event, the Hizbollah
are not beaten. Driving out to
Mansuri through the shellfire
yesterday, a clutch of Katyusha
rockets swished upwards to our
right from behind a stand of
pine trees, the missiles aimed at
the Israeli town of Nahariya.
Within minutes, two Apache helicopters appeared in the sky
above us like angry bees.
A pilotless drone reconnaissance aircraft buzzed ominously
over us as we pulled up at the
village to extract the last of its
inhabitants. "We don't like to
help the Israelis vacate the villages," Swedish UN Captain
Mikael Lindval said as an unshaven man poured animal feed
in a bucket in front of his tethered mule and patted the beast
goodbye.
"But when the people want
to leave because of the bombing, we try to help them."
In another country, with another UN convoy, I had
watched the same scene only
three years ago. Then, the UN
officers said they felt as if they were helping the Serbs to "ethnically cleanse" the land by taking
away the villagers.
Yesterday, in a village which boasts one mansion with a lawn
as meticulous as a golfing green
but with most of its homes
mere concrete shacks, its lanes
bordered by red roses and yellow flowers and trees of bitter-
tasting peaches, we loaded the
last of Mansuri's people aboard
the UN lorries and took them
from the village in which almost
all of them had been born.
And we were, of course, doing
exactly as the Israelis would
have wished.
