http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?id=41685&mador=4
A View from the Arab World
What would Esther say about the occupation of South Lebanon?
By Rami G. Khouri
Ha'aretz, March 3, 1999
South Lebanon has become God's latest sacred killing
ground. Hundreds of Israelis and Lebanese die
annually there, with everyone claiming to be
fighting according to God's motivation, sanction,
rules, or promise.
The sudden escalation of military violence between
Israeli occupation forces and Lebanese resistance
fighters is neither novel nor unexpected. This
tortured land again reminds us that violence begets
violence, and occupation begets resistance. The
current round of fighting has led to the deaths of
several senior Israeli officers in the past week,
bringing to 1,539 the total number of Israeli troops
killed in South Lebanon since Israel invaded and
occupied that land in 1982. The number of Lebanese
dead and the pain to Lebanese civilians is much
higher.
Israel's occupation of South Lebanon is striking for
its stupidity and futility, for the perpetuation of
a failed and brutal policy. Successive Israeli
governments have kept up the simplistic lie that
Israel must remain in South Lebanon in order to
protect northern Israel from attack. The reality is
the opposite: The occupation of South Lebanon has
resulted in far more deaths and damage to Israel -
including moral and psychological damage - than were
inflicted before 1982. Israel gropes for a phantom
goal, a make-believe world of its own militaristic
hysteria, when it seeks security for north Israel
through the instrument of occupation. What it seeks
does not exist on the road it travels.
When I read the Israeli newspapers on the Internet
the other morning, I laughed quietly to myself at
the spectacle of grown men such as Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Arens
saying things like, "We have struck hard at
Hezbollah and will strike again, if necessary"; "The
situation on the northern border is intolerable";
and, "If we don't act, the situation will get much
worse."
I chuckled because of the transparent immaturity of
these two young-old warriors stubbornly trying to
project a face of resolute toughness and
determination when they were really just sending
more brave Israeli and Lebanese men to their deaths
in God's new killing ground.
The Israelis have attempted virtually every possible
policy in South Lebanon, including prolonged
occupation, repeated aerial bombings, massive
disruption of civilian life, depopulation of whole
areas, large-scale ground attacks using armor and
infantry, attacks against targets in other parts of
Lebanon, co-opting terrorized Lebanese civilians
into acting as surrogates and quisling accomplices
for Israel, and high-tech military wizardry of the
most sophisticated nature.
To what has all this led? This week alone, Lebanese
fighters killed the most senior Israeli officer in
the Israeli-occupied area and three officers of the
elite paratrooper reconnaissance unit, including the
unit commander. The blast that killed Brig. Gen.
Erez Gerstein, head of the Israeli "liaison unit" to
occupied South Lebanon, took place south of the
village of Kawka, which is inside the Israeli
"security zone." One wonders: What the hell kind of
ridiculous security zone is this, in which the top
Israeli officer in the area is blown up by a
roadside bomb in a stretch of land that was supposed
to make Israelis safe, not dead? This is not a
security zone; it is a killing zone - because it is
an occupation zone.
The Jewish festival of Purim recalls a noble and
timeless story about God's inevitable punishment of
the errant and the wicked. More specifically, it
tells us that those who plot evil or cruel deeds
against others may suffer the very fate they had
intended for their victims.
In the Esther story, the bad guy, Haman the Agagite,
wanted to kill all the Jews and built a 75-foot-high
gallows on which he planned to hang one of their
leaders, Mordechai the Jew. Instead, after Esther's
good work, King Xerxes ordered that Haman himself be
hung. Nice story, with a universal and eternal moral
that is still pertinent.
The Israeli policy of seeking to protect the land of
Jews by occupying the land of Lebanese has not
succeeded and will not succeed, because it is
morally and militarily flawed.
The failure is a grotesque and tragic consequence of
two mistakes: first, the mistake of thinking that
the security and rights of Jewish Israelis can be
ensured without simultaneously ensuring the rights
of all other people in the region; and, second, the
mistake of maintaining an exaggerated reliance on
military means to address security concerns that are
the consequences primarily of Israeli political and
national injustices inflicted upon Palestinians and
Lebanese.
The tragedy of South Lebanon is a consequence of the
Israeli occupation of Lebanese, Syrian and
Palestinian lands, and thus of the broader
Arab-Israeli conflict. Ending these Israeli
occupations and negotiating peace based on equal
rights and security for all is the route to
resolving the problem of South Lebanon. Reasonable
Israelis, and even their unreasonable prime and
defense ministers, should draw this simple lesson
from the history of peace-making with Egypt and
Jordan.
The Purim holidays may be an appropriate occasion to
reflect on these facts, when Israelis recall the
righteousness of Esther, and the self-inflicted
death of Haman
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