Fucking for Virginity!

Aus der UseNet Gruppe ch.soc.politics (Namen durch mich unkenntlich gemacht/ul)

Am 23.04.12 11:44, schrieb YYYY YYYY:

Am 23.04.12 10:46, schrieb XXX XXXXr:

Wollen wir wirklich eine Welt, in der die USA ihre Ansichten, was
richtig ist, jederzeit per Drohnen und Cruise Missiles mitteilen?

Spielt es eine Rolle, ob wir das wollen? Wir haben sie.

Nur wenn weiterhin beifällig genickt wird, wenn der eine oder andere Despot medienwirksam weggebombt wird, während man mit anderen Despoten fröhlich und lukrativ Handel treibt. Damit macht sich dann nämlich auch im Völkerrecht eine "legal-illegal-scheissegal"-Mentalität breit.


Nach dem 2. Weltkrieg war es eigentlich klar, dass Krieg kein akzeptables Mittel der Politik sein darf. Und vor allem, dass es unsinn ist, die Welt in Gut und Böse einzuteilen. Als die Sowjetunion in Afghanistan einmarschierte, hat die Welt sich emört. Daraufhin haben die USA die "guten" Taliban kräftig unterstützt, damit diese die bösen Russen wieder rausschmeissen. Danach wurden die guten Taliban dann zu den bösen Taliban.  In Persien dagegen unterstütze man den guten Schah gegen die bösen Kommunisten, bis Chomeini kam und nun plötzlich die bösen Mullahs an der Macht waren. Da unterstütze man den guten Saddam Hussein als Bollwerk gegen die bösen Islamisten. Allerdings wurde der gute Saddam zum bösen Saddam, als er die guten Oelliferanten in Kuweit angriff und das gute Autokratenregime in Saudi Arabien bedrohte.

Die einzigen, die wirklich immer gut sind, sind die Chinesen. Die sind einfach zu gute Handelspartner, um böse zu sein. Und die einzigen, die wirklich immer böse sind, sind die Nordkoreaner. Denn die haben weder Oel noch Kaufkraft.

Selbst Ghaddaffi pendelte in den Jahrzehnten seiner....

NYT: Roger Cohen - Israel Cries Wolf

The New York Times
April 9, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Israel Cries Wolf
By ROGER COHEN

ISTANBUL — “Iran is the center of terrorism, fundamentalism and subversion and is in my view more dangerous than Nazism, because Hitler did not possess a nuclear bomb, whereas the Iranians are trying to perfect a nuclear option.”

Benjamin Netanyahu 2009? Try again. These words were in fact uttered by another Israeli prime minister (and now Israeli president), Shimon Peres, in 1996. Four years earlier, in 1992, he’d predicted that Iran would have a nuclear bomb by 1999.

You can’t accuse the Israelis of not crying wolf. Ehud Barak, now defense minister, said in 1996 that Iran would be....

The New York Times
April 9, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Israel Cries Wolf
By ROGER COHEN

ISTANBUL — “Iran is the center of terrorism, fundamentalism and subversion and is in my view more dangerous than Nazism, because Hitler did not possess a nuclear bomb, whereas the Iranians are trying to perfect a nuclear option.”

Benjamin Netanyahu 2009? Try again. These words were in fact uttered by another Israeli prime minister (and now Israeli president), Shimon Peres, in 1996. Four years earlier, in 1992, he’d predicted that Iran would have a nuclear bomb by 1999.

You can’t accuse the Israelis of not crying wolf. Ehud Barak, now defense minister, said in 1996 that Iran would be producing nuclear weapons by 2004.

Now here comes Netanyahu, in an interview with his faithful stenographer Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, spinning the latest iteration of Israel’s attempt to frame Iran as some Nazi-like incarnation of evil:

“You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.”

I must say when I read those words about “the wide-eyed believer” my mind wandered to a recently departed “decider.” But I’m not going there.

The issue today is Iran and, more precisely, what President Barack Obama will make of Netanyahu’s prescription that, the economy aside, Obama’s great mission is “preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons” — an eventuality newly inscribed on Israeli calendars as “months” away.

I’ll return to the ever shifting nuclear doomsday in a moment, but first that Netanyahu interview.

This “messianic apocalyptic cult” in Tehran is, of course, the very same one with which Israel did business during the 1980’s, when its interest was in weakening Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. That business — including sales of weapons and technology — was an extension of Israeli policy toward Iran under the shah.

It’s also the same “messianic apocalyptic cult” that has survived 30 years, ushered the country from the penury of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, shrewdly extended its power and influence, cooperated with America on Afghanistan before being consigned to “the axis of evil,” and kept its country at peace in the 21st century while bloody mayhem engulfed neighbors to east and west and Israel fought two wars.

I don’t buy the view that, as Netanyahu told Goldberg, Iran is “a fanatic regime that might put its zealotry above its self-interest.” Every scrap of evidence suggests that, on the contrary, self-interest and survival drive the mullahs.

Yet Netanyahu insists (too much) that Iran is “a country that glorifies blood and death, including its own self-immolation.” Huh?

On that ocular theme again, Netanyahu says Iran’s “composite leadership” has “elements of wide-eyed fanaticism that do not exist in any other would-be nuclear power in the world.” No, they exist in an actual nuclear power, Pakistan.

Israel’s nuclear warheads, whose function is presumably deterrence of precisely powers like Iran, go unmentioned, of course.

Netanyahu also makes the grotesque claim that the terrible loss of life in the Iran-Iraq war (started by Iraq) “didn’t sear a terrible wound into the Iranian consciousness.” It did just that, which is why Iran’s younger generation seeks reform but not upheaval; and why the country as a whole prizes stability over military adventure.

Arab states, Netanyahu suggests, “fervently hope” that America will, if necessary, use “military power” to stop Iran going nuclear. My recent conversations, including with senior Saudi officials, suggest that’s wrong and the longstanding Israeli attempt to convince Arab states that Iran, not Israel, is their true enemy will fail again.

What’s going on here? Israel, as it has for nearly two decades, is trying to lock in American support and avoid any disadvantageous change in the Middle Eastern balance of power, now overwhelmingly tilted in Jerusalem’s favor, by portraying Iran as a monstrous pariah state bent on imminent nuclear war.

A semblance of power balance is often the precondition for peace. Iran was left out of the Madrid and Oslo processes, with disastrous results. But that’s a discussion for another day.

What’s critical right now is that Obama view Netanyahu’s fear-mongering with an appropriate skepticism, rein him in, and pursue his regime-recognizing opening toward Tehran, as he did Wednesday by saying America would join nuclear talks for the first time. The president should read Trita Parsi’s excellent “Treacherous Alliance” as preparation.

The core strategic shift of Obama’s presidency has been away from the with-us-or-against-us rhetoric of the war on terror toward a rapprochement with the Muslim world as the basis for isolating terrorists.

That’s unsustainable if America or Israel find themselves at war with Muslim Persians as well as Muslim Arabs, and if Netanyahu’s intense-eyed attempt to suck America into a perpetuation of war-on-terror thinking prevails.

The only way to stop Iran going nuclear, and encourage reform of a repressive regime, is to get to the negotiating table. There’s time. Those “months” are still a couple of years. What Iran has accumulated is low-enriched uranium. You need highly-enriched uranium for a bomb. That’s a leap.

Israeli hegemony is proving a kind of slavery. Passage to the Promised Land involves rethinking the Middle East, starting in Iran.

NYT: Muammar Qaddafi: The One-State Solution

The New York Times
January 22, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
The One-State Solution
By MUAMMAR QADDAFI

Tripoli, Libya

THE shocking level of the last wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence, which ended with this weekend’s cease-fire, reminds us why a final resolution to the so-called Middle East crisis is so important. It is vital not just to break this cycle of destruction and injustice, but also to deny the religious extremists in the region who feed on the conflict an excuse to advance their own causes.

The New York Times
January 22, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
The One-State Solution
By MUAMMAR QADDAFI

Tripoli, Libya

THE shocking level of the last wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence, which ended with this weekend’s cease-fire, reminds us why a final resolution to the so-called Middle East crisis is so important. It is vital not just to break this cycle of destruction and injustice, but also to deny the religious extremists in the region who feed on the conflict an excuse to advance their own causes.

But everywhere one looks, among the speeches and the desperate diplomacy, there is no real way forward. A just and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians is possible, but it lies in the history of the people of this conflicted land, and not in the tired rhetoric of partition and two-state solutions.

Although it’s hard to realize after the horrors we’ve just witnessed, the state of war between the Jews and Palestinians has not always existed. In fact, many of the divisions between Jews and Palestinians are recent ones. The very name “Palestine” was commonly used to describe the whole area, even by the Jews who lived there, until 1948, when the name “Israel” came into use.

Jews and Muslims are cousins descended from Abraham. Throughout the centuries both faced cruel persecution and often found refuge with one another. Arabs sheltered Jews and protected them after maltreatment at the hands of the Romans and their expulsion from Spain in the Middle Ages.

The history of Israel/Palestine is not remarkable by regional standards — a country inhabited by different peoples, with rule passing among many tribes, nations and ethnic groups; a country that has withstood many wars and waves of peoples from all directions. This is why it gets so complicated when members of either party claims the right to assert that it is their land.

The basis for the modern State of Israel is the persecution of the Jewish people, which is undeniable. The Jews have been held captive, massacred, disadvantaged in every possible fashion by the Egyptians, the Romans, the English, the Russians, the Babylonians, the Canaanites and, most recently, the Germans under Hitler. The Jewish people want and deserve their homeland.

But the Palestinians too have a history of persecution, and they view the coastal towns of Haifa, Acre, Jaffa and others as the land of their forefathers, passed from generation to generation, until only a short time ago.

Thus the Palestinians believe that what is now called Israel forms part of their nation, even were they to secure the West Bank and Gaza. And the Jews believe that the West Bank is Samaria and Judea, part of their homeland, even if a Palestinian state were established there. Now, as Gaza still smolders, calls for a two-state solution or partition persist. But neither will work.

A two-state solution will create an unacceptable security threat to Israel. An armed Arab state, presumably in the West Bank, would give Israel less than 10 miles of strategic depth at its narrowest point. Further, a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would do little to resolve the problem of refugees. Any situation that keeps the majority of Palestinians in refugee camps and does not offer a solution within the historical borders of Israel/Palestine is not a solution at all.

For the same reasons, the older idea of partition of the West Bank into Jewish and Arab areas, with buffer zones between them, won’t work. The Palestinian-held areas could not accommodate all of the refugees, and buffer zones symbolize exclusion and breed tension. Israelis and Palestinians have also become increasingly intertwined, economically and politically.

In absolute terms, the two movements must remain in perpetual war or a compromise must be reached. The compromise is one state for all, an “Isratine” that would allow the people in each party to feel that they live in all of the disputed land and they are not deprived of any one part of it.

A key prerequisite for peace is the right of return for Palestinian refugees to the homes their families left behind in 1948. It is an injustice that Jews who were not originally inhabitants of Palestine, nor were their ancestors, can move in from abroad while Palestinians who were displaced only a relatively short time ago should not be so permitted.

It is a fact that Palestinians inhabited the land and owned farms and homes there until recently, fleeing in fear of violence at the hands of Jews after 1948 — violence that did not occur, but rumors of which led to a mass exodus. It is important to note that the Jews did not forcibly expel Palestinians. They were never “un-welcomed.” Yet only the full territories of Isratine can accommodate all the refugees and bring about the justice that is key to peace.

Assimilation is already a fact of life in Israel. There are more than one million Muslim Arabs in Israel; they possess Israeli nationality and take part in political life with the Jews, forming political parties. On the other side, there are Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Israeli factories depend on Palestinian labor, and goods and services are exchanged. This successful assimilation can be a model for Isratine.

If the present interdependence and the historical fact of Jewish-Palestinian coexistence guide their leaders, and if they can see beyond the horizon of the recent violence and thirst for revenge toward a long-term solution, then these two peoples will come to realize, I hope sooner rather than later, that living under one roof is the only option for a lasting peace.

Muammar Qaddafi is the leader of Libya.

NZZ: Der grosse Verlierer heisst Mahmud Abbas

NZZ-Online
«Der grosse Verlierer heisst Mahmud Abbas»
Position des Palästinenserpräsidenten nach Gazakrieg geschwächt

Der grosse Verlierer im Gazakrieg ist Palästinenserpräsident Mahmud Abbas. Dieser Ansicht ist der Kenner der arabischen Welt, Abdel Mutttaleb El Husseini. Der Journalist und Autor, der in Deutschland lebt, erläutert im Gespräch mit NZZ Online, warum die EU eine Mitschuld an der Misere im Gazastreifen hat.

hoh. Abdel Mottaleb El Husseini ist 1952 in Libanon geboren und lebt als freier Journalist und Autor in Deutschland. Er beschäftigt sich mit den politischen, gesellschaftlichen und kulturellen Fragen der arabischen Welt. Husseini wird regelmässig vom deutschen Staatsfernehen als Experte beigezogen.

NZZ-Online
«Der grosse Verlierer heisst Mahmud Abbas»
Position des Palästinenserpräsidenten nach Gazakrieg geschwächt

Der grosse Verlierer im Gazakrieg ist Palästinenserpräsident Mahmud Abbas. Dieser Ansicht ist der Kenner der arabischen Welt, Abdel Mutttaleb El Husseini. Der Journalist und Autor, der in Deutschland lebt, erläutert im Gespräch mit NZZ Online, warum die EU eine Mitschuld an der Misere im Gazastreifen hat.

Bisher hat Ägypten die diplomatischen Fäden in diesem Konflikt zusammengesponnen. Wer dürfte Ihrer Ansicht in der vorläufigen Waffenruhe im Gazastreifen mit den Israeli verhandeln?

Wir können davon ausgehen, dass Präsident Abbas mit den Israeli wieder Verhandlungen aufnehmen wird. Er gehört aber zweifellos zu den grössten Verlierer in diesem Krieg. Abbas hat mit seinem Handeln reichlich an Legitimität eingebüsst. Die Hamas geht letztlich als Gewinnerin aus diesem Konflikt hervor, wenn man dann überhaupt von einem Sieger sprechen will. Die islamitische Organisation hat während des Verlaufs der Offensive bei vielen Palästinensern aber auch bei Arabern im Allgemeinen eine stärkere Rückendeckung erhalten. Man muss sich auch vor Augen führen, dass die Hamas vor Ausbruch des Krieges weitgehend isoliert war. Die zahlreichen internationalen Demonstrationen gegen den Krieg haben dem Ansehen der Organisation mehr genützt denn geschadet. Die Hamas wird inzwischen vielerorts als Widerstandskraft gegen die Besetzung Israels verstanden. Dem Kräfteverhältnis nach zu urteilen, kommt man um Verhandlungen mit der Hamas nicht mehr herum. Dies stellt für Israel eine riesige Herausforderung dar.

Demnach müssten die Europäer und die Amerikaner die Hamas von der Liste der terroristischen Organisationen streichen.

Das ist im Moment eher unwahrscheinlich. Die EU hat diesbezüglich einen grossen Fehler begannen, indem sie die Hamas isoliert haben und sie als terroristische Bewegung betracht. Ich glaube, dass sich die Europäer im Umgang mit der Hamas nicht einig sind. Es ist durchaus denkbar, dass Frankreich direkte Kontakte zur Führung der Hamas in Erwägung zieht. Deutschland hingegen wird eine Annäherung an die islamitische Organisation nicht riskieren wollen, steht doch das freundschaftliche Verhältnis mit Israel auf dem Spiel. Die deutsche Regierung versucht ihrerseits, die Berliner Position in der EU zu verankern. Wenn die Europäer im Nahen Osten wirksame Politik betreiben wollen, müssen sie ihre Strategie überdenken. Die arabische Welt ist gespalten. Durch den Krieg haben Staaten wie Syrien, der libanesische Hizbullah und die Hamas im Gazastreifen an Ansehen gewonnen. Deshalb ist es falsch, bloss auf eine Karte zu setzen und lediglich Länder wie Ägypten und Saudi Arabien zu unterstützen.

Welche Strömungen beobachten Sie bei der Hamas-Führung im Gazastreifen und in Damaskus?

Über einen Unterschied zur politischen Führung in Damaskus in der Regierung der Hamas im Gazastreifen wurde viel diskutiert. Eine Kluft zwischen den beiden Lagern ist trotz der Heftigkeit des Krieges nicht auszumachen. Im Grossen und Ganzen lässt sich festhalten, dass die Hamas in der verbalen Frage der Einheit der Palästinenser Einigkeit verströmt und auch willens ist, Verhandlungen zu führen und Politik zu betreiben. Schliesslich wurde die Waffenruhe der Hamas in Damaskus und nicht in Gaza-Stadt ausgerufen. Das zeigt, dass zwischen Khaled Mashaal, dem Leiter des Hamas-Politbüros und dem Ministerpräsidenten Ismail Hanyia im Gazastreifen, Einigkeit herrscht. Der Krieg hat die beiden Funktionäre noch stärker zusammengeführt.

Welchen Nutzen – sofern man davon sprechen darf – hat der Gazakrieg der Fatah und der Hamas letztlich gebracht?

Die Hamas hat die Rolle der Fatah bezüglich Widerstandsorganisation in der palästinensischen Frage übernommen. In dieser Hinsicht hat die Hamas deutlich an politischem Terrain gewonnen. Über die gesamte Dauer des Gazakriegs fand keine einzelne Protestaktion der palästinensischen Bevölkerung gegen die Regierung der Hamas statt. Daraus lässt sich ableiten, dass die Verankerung der Organisation im Volk gestärkt wurde. Die Lage der Fatah-Organisation hingegen ist katastrophal. Präsident Abbas hat sich in diesem Krieg nicht als Führer der Palästinenser verhalten, sondern als Gegner der Hamas-Bewegung. Seine Polizeikräfte haben im Westjordanland sogar antiisraelische Proteste verhindert. Selbst in Fatah-Kreisen hat dies zu Kritik an seinem Krisen-Management geführt. In diesem Krieg geht die Fatah mit ihrem Präsidenten Abbas als die grösste Verliererin hervor.

Es gibt Gerüchte, wonach die Fatah-Führung den Israeli «freie Hand» bei der Militäroperation im Gazastreifen bot.

Ich würde nicht gerade von «freier Hand» sprechen. Schliesslich hat die Fatah bis zur letzten Minute die Gazaoffensive durch Israel abgelehnt. Und der Hamas ging es bei diesem Krieg vor allem um eines: Ums Überleben. Die Israeli haben es nicht geschafft, die Organisation handlungsunfähig zu machen.

Präsident Abbas hat sich während der gesamten Militäroperation der Israeli zurückgehalten. Weshalb?

Das wirft ihm die gesamte arabische Welt vor. Am Gipfeltreffen von Kuwait haben sich rund zwei Dutzend Parlamentarier gegen die Teilnahme von Präsident Abbas ausgesprochen, weil er sich während des Gazakriegs nicht um das Wohl seines Volkes gekümmert hatte. Einige werfen ihm gar vor, er habe mit seiner Zurückhaltung der Kritik gegenüber Israel sein Volk verraten, weil er bloss am Rande des Geschehens gestanden habe. Dies ist eine Folge des Kräfteverhältnisses zwischen den Palästinensern. Die Hamas ist nun mal die stärkere Fraktion, obwohl sie keine unmittelbare politische Lösung für die Palästinenser bereit hält. Und Abbas ist auf der ganzen Linie gescheitert. Was haben beispielsweise seine Bemühungen für Reiseerleichterungen seiner Leute im Westjordanland gebracht? Der Bewegungsfreiheit wird durch die Strassensperren im Westjordanland noch immer verunmöglicht. Selbst der Präsident ist auf eine Bewilligung der israelischen Armee angewiesen, will er Ramallah verlassen. Auch der versprochene Staat für die Palästienser lässt nach wie vor auf sich warten.

Wie will Ägypten den Schmuggel von Waffen verhindern und die Schliessung der Tunnelsysteme vorantreiben?

Auch Ägypten zählt zu den Verlierern in diesem Konflikt. Kairo wurde von den Israeli und den Amerikanern im Stich gelassen. Die israelische Aussenministerin Tzipi Livni und ihre amerikanische Amtskollegin Condolleezza Rice haben in Washington eigenhändig ein Abkommen zur Unterbindung des Waffenschmuggels unterzeichnet, ohne Ägypten mithinzubeziehen. Kairo empfindet dies als grosse Beleidigung und Schwächung seiner eigenen Rolle. Aus diesem Grund werden die Ägypter wohl auch keine internationalen Beobachter an ihrer Grenze zum Gazastreifen zulassen. Und was die Bekämpfung des Waffenschmuggels in den Gazastreifen angeht, wird Kairo dies nur halbherzig zu verhindern versuchen. Ich bin der Ansicht, dass nicht der Schmuggel von Waffen das grösste Problem in der Region darstellt. Das wahre Problem ist das Fehlen einers politischen Lösung des israelisch-palästinensischen Konflikts. Deshalb bin ich davon überzeugt, dass wir in einigen Wochen zum Courant Normal wieder übergeben werden.

Interview: Andrea Hohendahl

NZZ: Sendungsbewusstsein mit Scheuklappen

Neue Zürcher Zeitung
Sendungsbewusstsein mit Scheuklappen
Jüdische Siedler in Hebron, von wo sie die Armee evakuieren will
22. Dezember 2008,
Die Mehrheit der jüdischen Siedler in Cisjordanien versteht nicht, wieso sie ihren biblischen Anspruch auf das Land der Verheissung aufgeben sollten. Mit biblisch verbrämten Argumenten klammern sie politische und völkerrechtliche Realitäten aus.

Von unserem Israel-Korrespondenten George Szpiro


22. Dezember 2008, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
Sendungsbewusstsein mit Scheuklappen
Jüdische Siedler in Hebron, von wo sie die Armee evakuieren will

Die Mehrheit der jüdischen Siedler in Cisjordanien versteht nicht, wieso sie ihren biblischen Anspruch auf das Land der Verheissung aufgeben sollten. Mit biblisch verbrämten Argumenten klammern sie politische und völkerrechtliche Realitäten aus.

Von unserem Israel-Korrespondenten George Szpiro


Kokhav Yaakov, im November

In Cisjordanien, dem seit dem Sechstagekrieg von Israel besetzten Gebiet, leben neben zwei Millionen Palästinensern mittlerweile über eine Viertelmillion jüdische Siedler. In den Augen grosser Teile der Weltöffentlichkeit und vieler Israeli stellen sie das grösste Hindernis für die Bestrebungen nach einem Frieden dar. In ihrem eigenen Selbstverständnis nehmen die Siedler hingegen nur ihr angeblich gottgegebenes Recht – ja ihre Verpflichtung – wahr, in allen Teilen des biblischen Israel zu leben. Wüstes Treiben jugendlicher Hooligans (wie unlängst im Zusammenhang mit der gerichtlich angeordneten Räumung eines von fanatischen Siedlern besetzen Hauses in Hebron) hat den in Cisjordanien lebenden Israeli einen besonders schlechten Ruf eingebracht. Aber auch gemässigte Siedler haben sich, scheinbar abgelöst von der Realität, einem religiösen Fanatismus verschrieben.

Die Politiker sind an allem schuld

Judith Tayyar, eine aus Amerika stammende religiöse, aber modern gebildete Frau, ist eine Sprecherin der Siedlerbewegung. In der Armee hatte sie als Patrouillenführerin gedient, und in ihrer Siedlung koordiniert sie nun die Sicherheitsvorkehrungen. Zwar ist sie kritische Fragen zweifelnder Journalisten gewohnt, doch ihre Ansichten klammern alles, was nicht in ihr Weltbild passt, aus. Wie viele ihrer Kollegen ist sie überzeugt, dass gewöhnliche Leute, auf israelischer wie auch auf palästinensischer Seite, heute in Frieden nebeneinander leben würden, wenn sich bloss Politiker nicht in die Beziehungen eingemischt hätten.

Andere Vertreter der Siedlerszene meinen, dass sich «muslimische Horden» nie mit der Präsenz Andersgläubiger abfinden würden und einzig die Vertreibung der Juden aus allen Teilen des Heiligen Landes im Sinne hätten. Ausserdem seien es nicht die israelischen Siedlungsaktivitäten, die ein Hindernis für den Frieden darstellten, denn arabischen Terror habe es auch zu einer Zeit gegeben, als noch keine Israeli auf besetztem Gebiet lebten.

Viele Siedler lehnen eine Zweistaatenlösung – Israel mit einer jüdischen Mehrheit, Palästinenser in einem in Cisjordanien und dem Gazastreifen zu gründenden Staat – ab. Sie hoffen auf einen jüdischen Staat sowohl im heutigen Israel als auch in den besetzten Gebieten, in dem Palästinenser, die bereit seien, die israelische Herrschaft anzuerkennen, geduldet würden. Fragen nach den demokratischen Rechten dieser Menschen, die bald zu einer Mehrheit würden, wird ausgewichen. Es ist kein Wunder, dass der innerisraelische Dialog ein Disput unter Gehörlosen ist. Während die Linke den Siedlern vorwirft, dass sie Scheuklappen trügen, behaupten die Siedler, dass naive Linke die allgegenwärtigen Bedrohungen einfach nicht wahrnehmen wollten.

In Kokhav Yaakov, einer 1984 gegründeten Ortschaft nördlich von Jerusalem, leben etwa 5000 Einwohner. Eine Sehenswürdigkeit der Siedlung ist die Talmud-Lehranstalt Hekhal Eliyahu, die 1923 in Montreux gegründet worden war und vor einigen Jahrzehnten mitsamt Rabbinern und Schülern von der Schweiz zuerst nach Jerusalem und dann hierher übersiedelte. Heute dient diese Yeshiva (Talmud-Schule) der Ausbildung religiöser Soldaten, die einen Teil ihres Militärdienstes mit dem Studium jüdischer Texte zubringen.

Eine lebhafte, humorvolle Frau namens Tamar Yona, die von ihrem Haus im Westjordanland aus eine bei jüdischen und christlichen Zionisten in Amerika populäre Radiosendung leitet, erwartet die Besucher beim Eingang zur Ortschaft. Ihre Kleidung – Kopftuch, langer Rock, zugeknöpfte, bis an die Handgelenke reichende Bluse – weist sie als streng religiöse Jüdin aus. Enthusiastisch, von Sendungsbewusstsein erfüllt, sprudeln ihr die Argumente für die jüdische Präsenz im Westjordanland nur so über die Lippen. Der Anspruch auf das Land wird jeweils durch biblische Zitate untermauert. Hinweise auf nationale Ansprüche der Palästinenser werden kurzerhand vom Tisch gewischt.

Vor Beginn des politischen Prozesses, der in die Verträge von Oslo mündete, hätten Juden und Araber gutnachbarliche Beziehungen gepflegt, sagt Tamar Yona. Die Palästinenser hätten Arbeit in den Siedlungen, Bewegungsfreiheit und Frieden gehabt. Probleme seien erst entstanden, als naive Gutmenschen eine irregeleitete Politik begonnen hätten. Und seitdem sich Unterrichts- und Bildungswesen in den Händen von Arafat und seinen Nachfolgern befänden, würden palästinensische Kinder und Jugendliche einzig zum Terror erzogen.

Patrioten statt Rowdys?

David Feld, ein hochgewachsener Rabbiner, diente vor seiner Einwanderung nach Israel im Range eines Obersten als Geistlicher bei den amerikanischen Streitkräften. Seine laute, alles übertönende Stimme zeigt, dass er es gewohnt war, auch unter Feldbedingungen Predigten zu halten. Ähnlich den biblischen Propheten duldet er keine Widerrede. Argumente werden apodiktisch vorgebracht, Gegenargumente einfach überhört. Das Argument, dass Palästinenser das nur etwa zehn Kilometer entfernte Jerusalem mit Raketen beschiessen würden, wenn er und seine Kollegen nicht hier lebten, entbehrt zwar nicht einer gewissen Logik. Aber Palästinenser, die gegen eine Enteignung ihres Bodens an israelische Gerichte appellieren, der Gewalt zu bezichtigen und im Gegenzug handfesten Widerstand, mit dem Siedler für den Fall ihrer Entfernung aus umstrittenen Niederlassungen drohen, als legitime Verteidigung zu bezeichnen, ist abstrus.

Yona und Feld behaupten, dass sich jüdische Nationalisten höchstens zivilen Ungehorsam zuschulden kommen lassen würden. Zu den vielfach dokumentierten, auf Fotos und Filmen festgehaltenen Missetaten von Rowdys aus der Siedlerszene befragt, erklären sie mit tiefer Überzeugung, dass dies patriotische junge Leute seien, die höchstens ihr Eigentum verteidigten. Von angezündeten Feldern, Vandalenakten an Gebäuden, Schmierereien an muslimischen Einrichtungen wüssten sie nichts. Überhaupt würden viele der notorischen Zusammenstösse bei Olivenernten von Palästinensern selber provoziert. Und dass die israelischen Behörden jedes Mal, wenn junge Leute auf einem Hügel ein Klubhaus erstellen, dieses als illegalen Aussenposten bezeichneten, beweise bloss, wie sehr die Regierung die jüdische Bevölkerung in Cisjordanien dämonisieren wolle. Dies tue sie, um das Land auf etwaige Siedlungsräumungen vorzubereiten.

«Wir haben schon immer hier gelebt»

Die Siedlung Eli existiert ebenfalls seit einem Vierteljahrhundert. 650 religiöse und säkulare Familien wohnen auf dem pittoresken Hügel, von dessen Gipfel die Aussicht in alle Richtungen des biblischen Landes reicht. Hier, auf halbem Weg zwischen Ramallah und Nablus, herrscht gute Luft, und ein komfortables Einfamilienhaus mit Umschwung kostet so viel wie ein einziges Zimmer in Tel Aviv oder Jerusalem. Ganz zuoberst auf dem Hügel lebt Eliana Passentin, die 35-jährige stellvertretende Direktorin der Mittelschule des Ortes. Von ihrem Garten weist sie zu den umliegenden Tälern und Anhöhen und erläutert biblische Begebenheiten, die sich dort zutrugen, als ob sie gestern geschehen seien. Jedes Mal, wenn sie sich der religiösen Bedeutung des Erzählten bewusst wird, scheint sie zu erschauern. «Wir haben schon immer hier gelebt», sagt sie und meint damit ihre jüdischen Vorfahren seit Jahrtausenden.

Auf die Frage, ob sie denn keine Angst habe, in unmittelbarer Nähe von Menschen zu wohnen, die sie selber für unverbesserliche Terroristen hält, stellt sie die Gegenfrage: «Wo soll ich denn sonst hingehen? Die schlimmsten Terrorattentate fanden in Jerusalem und Tel Aviv statt, nicht in Eli.

Wafa Sultan-Terrorism and Islam (New)

This was shown on Al Jazeera television. Quite a hard debate.
The lady is Wafa Sultan a syrian-born psychiatrist now living in the US.

Very interesting!

Gute Dienste, Work in Progress

Geschätzte Berner Geheimdiplomatie

Die Geheimgespräche zwischen Israel und Syrien haben jüngst für Schlagzeilen gesorgt. Erstmals spricht jetzt ein in die Verhandlungen involvierter israelischer Teilnehmer über die Rolle der Schweiz - und lobt sie in höchsten Tönen.


4. Februar 2007, NZZ am Sonntag
Geschätzte Berner Geheimdiplomatie

Die Geheimgespräche zwischen Israel und Syrien haben jüngst für Schlagzeilen gesorgt. Erstmals spricht jetzt ein in die Verhandlungen involvierter israelischer Teilnehmer über die Rolle der Schweiz - und lobt sie in höchsten Tönen.

Silke Mertins, Jerusalem

Die Schweiz hat sich so gute Beziehungen im Nahen Osten erarbeitet, dass sie nach Einschätzung des israelischen Unterhändlers Alon Liel inzwischen für syrisch-israelische Friedensgespräche unverzichtbar geworden ist. «Die Schweiz nimmt eine Schlüsselrolle ein, wenn es um den Zugang zum syrischen Präsidenten Bachar al-Asad geht», sagt Liel. Die «hochprofessionellen» Berner Diplomaten hätten «das volle Vertrauen der syrischen Regierung», so der ehemalige Generaldirektor des israelischen Aussenministeriums. «Sie können Dinge tun, die andere westliche Regierungen nicht tun können. Sie haben ständigen Kontakt zu Damaskus, ein sehr enges Verhältnis.»

Liel hat diese Erkenntnisse aus erster Hand gewonnen. Er führte auf israelischer Seite die unter Vermittlung und Beteiligung der Schweiz zustande gekommenen Geheimgespräche mit Syrien, deren Bekanntwerden vor zwei Wochen international für Schlagzeilen gesorgt hat. Die Delegationen aus den beiden verfeindeten Staaten haben sich dabei auf eine Lösung geeinigt, die die Rückgabe des Golan und eine politische Kehrtwende Syriens einschliesst. Der Schönheitsfehler des sensationellen Deals: Weder von israelischer noch von syrischer Seite nahm ein offizieller Vertreter teil. Liel hat zwar 30 Jahre im Aussenministerium gedient, doch seit 2001 engagiert er sich als Privatmann für Verhandlungslösungen.

Er selbst brachte die Schweiz ins Spiel, nachdem die Gespräche unter türkischer Vermittlung - die Türkei hatte den Kontakt auf syrischen Wunsch hergestellt - neun Monate lang auf der Stelle traten. «Die Türken bestanden darauf, dass ein offizieller Vertreter Israels teilnimmt», erzählt Liel. Vergeblich. «So wendete ich mich schliesslich an die Schweizer.»
Bundesrat traumatisiert

Die Regierung in Bern, die bis heute eine Vermittlungsrolle nur vage bestätigt hat, verhielt sich zunächst skeptisch. «Sie war noch von der Genfer Friedensinitiative traumatisiert», so Liel. Denn die Schweiz hat auch die Verhandlungen zwischen israelischen Linken und moderaten Palästinensern, die sogenannte Genfer Initiative, moderiert und teilweise auch finanziert. Sie sollte Ende 2003 den damaligen Ministerpräsidenten Ariel Sharon widerlegen, der behauptete, es gebe auf palästinensischer Seite keinen Partner für den Frieden. Der Schuss ging jedoch nach hinten los. Sharon reagierte säuerlich auf die mit grossem Medienrummel veröffentlichte Einigung. Er weigerte sich zunächst sogar, Schweizer Politiker zu empfangen.

Einen solchen Konflikt wollte die Schweiz nicht erneut provozieren und bestand dieses Mal darauf, dass die israelische Regierung ständig im Bild war über das, was zwei Jahre lang im Berner «Hotel Bellevue» besprochen wurde. Unter anderem auch deshalb waren die Schweizer immer mit bis zu fünf Diplomaten dabei, wenn Syrer und Israeli sich trafen.

Offiziell lehnt Israel derartige Gespräche entschieden ab. Zwischen dem israelischen Militär- und dem Auslandsgeheimdienst ist sogar ein Streit darüber entbrannt, wie ernst zu nehmen die syrischen Verhandlungsangebote sind. Doch namhafte Politiker, darunter auch James Baker, US-Aussenminister unter George Bush senior, sehen in einem Frieden mit Syrien eine Chance für den gesamten Nahen Osten. Denn längst geht es nicht mehr nur um Israel und Syrien. Inzwischen sind mit Irak, Libanon und Iran weitere Konflikte hinzugekommen, in denen das Regime in Damaskus eine nicht unerhebliche Rolle spielt. «Wenn es uns gelingt, Syrien aus dem islamistischen Lager herauszubrechen, ist das weitaus wichtiger als nur der Frieden mit Israel», sagt Liel deshalb. Folglich ist der Schweizer Draht nach Damaskus nicht nur für Israel bedeutend. Auch die Amerikaner, die Syrien nach wie vor als Teil der «Achse des Bösen» definieren, dürften aufhorchen.
Gemeinsam picknicken

Konkret sind für Israel aber auch die Einzelheiten des Abkommens interessant. Israel würde danach die syrische Souveränität über die 1967 eroberten Golanhöhen anerkennen, aber erst abziehen, wenn über einen Zeitraum von rund 15 Jahren deutlich geworden ist, dass Damaskus sich aussenpolitisch wirklich umorientiert hat. Im Gegenzug würde Syrien die Unterstützung der Hamas und des Hizbullah beenden.

«Die Vereinbarung enthält sehr kreative Ideen, wie etwa den Naturpark», sagt Akiva Eldar, Autor der Tageszeitung «Haaretz», an die man das Geheimabkommen zwischen Israel und Syrien hat durchsickern lassen. Auf dem grössten Teil des Golans soll ein Naturpark entstehen, der für Syrer wie für Israeli zugänglich sein soll. Israeli hätten weiter Zugang zu einem Areal, das als Urlaubsgebiet für viele nicht mehr wegzudenken ist. Es wäre für alle zugänglich ohne Visum, so dass Syrer und Israeli «vielleicht sogar einmal zusammen picknicken werden».

End of the strongmen

12/19/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- The era of the Middle East strongman, propped up by and enforcing Western policy, appears well and truly over. His power is being replaced with rule by civil war, apparently now the American Administration’s favoured model across the region.

End of the strongmen
Do America and Israel want the Middle East engulfed by civil war?

By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth

Fratricidal fighting is threatening to engulf, or already engulfing, the occupied Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Iraq. Both Syria and Iran could soon be next, torn apart by attacks Israel is reportedly planning on behalf of the US. The reverberations would likely consume the region.

Western politicians like to portray civil war as a consequence of the West’s failure to intervene more effectively in the Middle East. Were we more engaged in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or more aggressive in opposing Syrian manipulations in Lebanon, or more hands-on in Iraq, the sectarian fighting could be prevented. The implication being, of course, that, without the West’s benevolent guidance, Arab societies are incapable of dragging themselves out of their primal state of barbarity.

But in fact, each of these breakdowns of social order appears to have been engineered either by the United States or by Israel. In Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq, sectarian difference is less important than a clash of political ideologies and interests as rival factions disagree about whether to submit to, or resist, American and Israeli interference. Where the factions derive their funding and legitimacy from -- increasingly a choice between the US or Iran -- seems to determine where they stand in this confrontation.

Palestine is in ferment because ordinary Palestinians are torn between their democratic wish to see Israeli occupation resisted -- in free elections they showed they believed Hamas the party best placed to realise that goal -- and the basic need to put food on the table for their families. The combined Israeli and international economic siege of the Hamas government, and the Palestinian population, has made a bitter internal struggle for control of resources inevitable.

Lebanon is falling apart because the Lebanese are divided: some believe that the country’s future lies with attracting Western capital and welcoming Washington’s embrace, while others regard America’s interest as cover for Israel realising its long-standing design to turn Lebanon into a vassal state, with or without a military occupation. Which side the Lebanese choose in the current stand-off reflects their judgment of how plausible are claims of Western and Israeli benevolence.

And the slaughter in Iraq is not simply the result of lawlessness -- as is commonly portrayed -- but also about rival groups, the nebulous “insurgents”, employing various brutal and conflicting strategies: trying to oust the Anglo-American occupiers and punish local Iraqis suspected of collaborating with them; extracting benefits from the puppet Iraqi regime; and jockeying for positions of influence before the inevitable grand American exit.

All of these outcomes in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq could have been foreseen -- and almost certainly were. More than that, it looks increasingly like the growing tensions and carnage were planned. Rather than an absence of Western intervention being the problem, the violence and fragmentation of these societies seems to be precisely the goal of the intervention.

Evidence has emerged in Britain that suggests such was the case in Iraq. Testimony given by a senior British official to the 2004 Butler inquiry investigating intelligence blunders in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq was belatedly published last week, after attempts by the Foreign Office to hush it up.

Carne Ross, a diplomat who helped to negotiate several UN security council resolutions on Iraq, told the inquiry that British and US officials knew very well that Saddam Hussein had no WMDs and that bringing him down would lead to chaos.

“I remember on several occasions the UK team stating this view in terms during our discussions with the US (who agreed)," he said, adding: “At the same time, we would frequently argue, when the US raised the subject, that ‘regime change’ was inadvisable, primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos.”

The obvious question, then, is why would the US want and intend civil war raging across the Middle East, apparently threatening strategic interests like oil supplies and the security of a key regional ally, Israel?

Until the presidency of Bush Jnr, the American doctrine in the Middle East had been to install or support strongmen, containing them or replacing them when they fell out of favour. So why the dramatic and, at least ostensibly, incomprehensible shift in policy?

Why allow Yasser Arafat’s isolation and humiliation in the occupied territories, followed by Mahmoud Abbas’s, when both could have easily been cultivated as strongmen had they been given the tools they were implicitly promised by the Oslo process: a state, the pomp of office and the coercive means to impose their will on rival groups like Hamas? With almost nothing to show for years of concessions to Israel, both looked to the Palestinian public more like lapdogs rather than rottweilers.

Why make a sudden and unnecessary fuss about Syria’s interference in Lebanon, an interference that the West originally encouraged as a way to keep the lid on sectarian violence? Why oust Damascus from the scene and then promote a “Cedar Revolution” that pandered to the interests of only one section of Lebanese society and continued to ignore the concerns of the largest and most dissatisfied community, the Shia? What possible outcome could there be but simmering resentment and the threat of violence?

And why invade Iraq on the hollow pretext of locating WMDs and then dislodge its dictator, Saddam Hussein, who for decades had been armed and supported by the US and had very effectively, if ruthlessly, held Iraq together? Again from Carne’s testimony, it is clear that no one in the intelligence community believed Saddam really posed a threat to the West. Even if he needed “containing” or possibly replacing, as Bush’s predecessors appeared to believe, why did the president decide simply to overthrow him, leaving a power void at Iraq’s heart?

The answer appears to be related to the rise of the neocons, who finally grasped power with the election of President Bush. Israel’s most popular news website, Ynet, recently observed of the neocons: “Many are Jews who share a love for Israel.”

The neocons’ vision of American global supremacy is intimately tied to, and dependent on, Israel’s regional supremacy. It is not so much that the neocons choose to promote Israel’s interests above those of America as that they see the two nations’ interests as inseparable and identical.

Although usually identified with the Israeli right, the neocons’ political alliance with the Likud mainly reflects their support for adopting belligerent means to achieve their policy goals rather than the goals themselves.

The consistent aim of Israeli policy over decades, from the left and right, has been to acquire more territory at the expense of its neighbours and entrench its regional supremacy through “divide and rule”, particularly of its weakest neighbours such as the Palestinians and the Lebanese. It has always abominated Arab nationalism, especially of the Baathist variety in Iraq and Syria, because it appeared immune to Israeli intrigues.

For many years Israel favoured the same traditional colonial approach the West used in the Middle East, where Britain, France and later the US supported autocratic leaders, usually from minority populations, to rule over the majority in the new states they had created, whether Christians in Lebanon, Alawites in Syria, Sunnis in Iraq, or Hashemites in Jordan. The majority was thereby weakened, and the minority forced to become dependent on colonial favours to maintain its privileged position.

Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, for example, was similarly designed to anoint a Christian strongman and US stooge, Bashir Gemayel, as a compliant president who would agree to an anti-Syrian alliance with Israel.

But decades of controlling and oppressing Palestinian society allowed Israel to develop a different approach to divide and rule: what might be termed organised chaos, or the “discord” model, one that came to dominate first its thinking and later that of the neocons.

During its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel preferred discord to a strongman, aware that a pre-requisite of the latter would be the creation of a Palestinian state and its furnishing with a well-armed security force. Neither option was ever seriously contemplated.

Only briefly under international pressure was Israel forced to relent and partially adopt the strongman model by allowing the return of Yasser Arafat from exile. But Israel’s reticence in giving Arafat the means to assert his rule and suppress his rivals, such as Hamas, led inevitably to conflict between the Palestinian president and Israel that ended in the second intifada and the readoption of the discord model.

This latter approach exploits the fault lines in Palestinian society to exacerbate tensions and violence. Initially Israel achieved this by promoting rivalry between regional and clan leaders who were forced to compete for Israel’s patronage. Later Israel encouraged the emergence of Islamic extremism, especially in the form of Hamas, as a counterweight to the growing popularity of the secular nationalism of Arafat’s Fatah party.

Israel’s discord model is now reaching its apotheosis: low-level and permanent civil war between the old guard of Fatah and the upstarts of Hamas. This kind of Palestinian in-fighting usefully depletes the society’s energies and its ability to organise against the real enemy: Israel and its enduring occupation.

The neocons, it appears, have been impressed with this model and wanted to export it to other Middle Eastern states. Under Bush they sold it to the White House as the solution to the problems of Iraq and Lebanon, and ultimately of Iran and Syria too.

The provoking of civil war certainly seemed to be the goal of Israel’s assault on Lebanon over the summer. The attack failed, as even Israelis admit, because Lebanese society rallied behind Hizbullah’s impressive show of resistance rather than, as was hoped, turning on the Shia militia.

Last week the Israeli website Ynet interviewed Meyrav Wurmser, an Israeli citizen and co-founder of MEMRI, a service translating Arab leaders’ speeches that is widely suspected of having ties with Israel’s security services. She is also the wife of David Wurmser, a senior neocon adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Meyrav Wurmser revealed that the American Administration had publicly dragged its feet during Israel’s assault on Lebanon because it was waiting for Israel to expand its attack to Syria.

“The anger [in the White House] is over the fact that Israel did not fight against the Syrians … The neocons are responsible for the fact that Israel got a lot of time and space … They believed that Israel should be allowed to win. A great part of it was the thought that Israel should fight against the real enemy, the one backing Hizbullah. It was obvious that it is impossible to fight directly against Iran, but the thought was that its [Iran’s] strategic and important ally [Syria] should be hit.”

Wurmser continued: “It is difficult for Iran to export its Shiite revolution without joining Syria, which is the last nationalistic Arab country. If Israel had hit Syria, it would have been such a harsh blow for Iran that it would have weakened it and [changed] the strategic map in the Middle East.”

Neocons talk a great deal about changing maps in the Middle East. Like Israel’s dismemberment of the occupied territories into ever-smaller ghettos, Iraq is being severed into feuding mini-states. Civil war, it is hoped, will redirect Iraqis’ energies away from resistance to the US occupation and into more negative outcomes.

Similar fates appear to be awaiting Iran and Syria, at least if the neocons, despite their waning influence, manage to realise their vision in Bush’s last two years.

The reason is that a chaotic and feuding Middle East, although it would be a disaster in the view of most informed observers, appears to be greatly desired by Israel and its neocon allies. They believe that the whole Middle East can be run successfully the way Israel has run its Palestinian populations inside the occupied territories, where religious and secular divisions have been accentuated, and inside Israel itself, where for many decades Arab citizens were “de-Palestinianised” and turned into identity-starved and quiescent Muslims, Christians, Druze and Bedouin.

That conclusion may look foolhardy, but then again so does the White House’s view that it is engaged in a “clash of civilisations” which it can win with a “war on terror”.

All states are capable of acting in an irrational or self-destructive manner, but Israel and its supporters may be more vulnerable to this failing than most. That is because Israelis’ perception of their region and their future has been grossly distorted by the official state ideology, Zionism, with its belief in Israel’s inalienable right to preserve itself as an ethnic state; its confused messianic assumptions, strange for a secular ideology, about Jews returning to a land promised by God; and its contempt for, and refusal to understand, everything Arab or Muslim.

If we expect rational behaviour from Israel or its neocon allies, more fool us.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His book, “Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State” is recently published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

Robert Fisk: Who is running Lebannon?

Robert Fisk: Who's running Lebanon?
Devastated by Israel's bombs, threatened by the looming might of Iran and Syria, and divided from within by its own ethnic bloodletting - Lebanon is an unfolding tragedy with little hope of salvation. As the nation rushes headlong towards civil war, Robert Fisk, who has lived in Beirut for 30 years, picks through the city's wreckage to identify the agitators, military leaders and politicians who now wield the real power


Published: 15 December 2006

Some four years before his murder, when he was still Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri angrily told me a story of his struggle with Hizbollah. We were walking in the garden of his Beirut palace at Qoreitem - he reasoned that, even though his phones were all tapped, the Syrians had probably not bugged the flower beds with listening devices - and his hands were shaking with rage.

"They wanted to bring some of their 'martyrs' who had died fighting the Israelis and bury them in front of the Beirut international airport," he muttered. "Can you imagine what that would have meant? We want to show the world our new Beirut and the graves of Hizbollah members would be the first thing that every visitor to Lebanon would see. And once buried there, they could never be removed. I managed to stop it."

"How?" I asked. But Hariri just flicked his right hand in the air dismissively. There must have been some compromise with Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the chairman of Hizbollah. He wouldn't say.

Only Nasrallah now knows what that compromise was, because the airport is now renamed the Martyr Rafiq Hariri International Airport - for last year, he was to become the "martyr" associated with the gleaming new terminal and runways - and Nasrallah's own followers are camping out in the centre of Beirut, less than 100 metres from Hariri's grave, demanding the destruction of the elected government supported by Hariri's own son Saad. Nasrallah's son Hadi was killed in a suicidal attack on the Israelis before their withdrawal in 2000, and the Hizbollah leader - true to the necrology associated with his faith - insisted that he receive only congratulations, rather than condolences, for his son's death in battle.

You need to be in Martyrs' Square to understand the absolute conviction with which the Shiites of Lebanon - the largest religious sect in Lebanon, although not a majority - are protesting at the government led by Rafiq Hariri's former economic adviser and friend, Fouad Siniora. Hundreds of Hizbollah security men in white baseball caps cordon off roads so that there can be no contact with the Lebanese troops guarding Siniora's ancient Ottoman serail, in which the Prime Minister and his allies are eating, sleeping and - possibly - working.

They check all bags, like plain-clothes policemen (which, of course, is exactly what they think they are). But their Shiite ministerial colleagues have resigned; so the Sunni Muslims, Christians and Druze in the administration are now supposed to rule Lebanon without those cabinet members who may now represent up to 38 per cent of the population.

If Hizbollah's insistence that the government should resign is unconstitutional, so too, it seems, is Siniora's cabinet now that it no longer contains Shiites. Last Sunday's massive rally in Beirut ended in a peaceful return to their homes by hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, policed once again by Hizbollah. Many Lebanese unwisely concluded that this symbolised failure - that Hizbollah's supporters had not been emotionally roused enough to provoke violence - but they were wrong. The discreet ending of the day's rally showed Hizbollah's discipline, not its weakness.

Nor should the government forget how fiercely and how ruthlessly Hizbollah fought the Israelis for 34 days last summer. It may not have been the "divine victory" of which Nasrallah boasted, but it was certainly a defeat for the Israelis, who, when a few thousand of them did manage to fight their way into Lebanon, were appalled to find that some of the Hizbollah fighters possessed Israeli uniforms and - much more seriously - Israel's own aerial photo-reconnaissance pictures of Hizbollah's Lebanese positions, complete with their Hebrew markings.

Hizbollah is a strict and moralistic organisation, but it uses drugs as currency and the assumption in southern Lebanon is that Hizbollah men traded narcotics with Israeli border guards in return for the photographs. Some of the Hizbollah read Hebrew and quickly worked out which of their bunkers had been identified and which remained unknown to the Israelis. So when the war began on 12 July, Hizbollah had already evacuated the caves known to the Israelis and waited for its enemy in the concrete emplacements that it knew the Israelis had not discovered.

Whether you loathe or admire Hizbollah, this was a startlingly professional intelligence operation by the Middle East's most powerful army. And while the resistance was fighting within only a few hundred metres of the Israeli border - at one point attacking an Israeli Merkava tank whose crew simply ran for their lives, abandoning their vehicle and even leaving behind its heavy machine gun - Siniora was on television, wiping away his tears and pleading for a ceasefire. Hence Nasrallah's profound contempt for Siniora's current government, a repugnance that is leeching dangerously into the various religious sects that provide Lebanon with a political system so complex that even some members of the Lebanese parliament cannot understand it.

An opinion poll by Beirut's Centre for Research and Information, for instance, suggests that 73.1 per cent of the population support the creation of a national unity government - the very demand made by Hizbollah. But the breakdown of this figure into religious groups shows that 94 per cent of Shiites and 50 per cent of Christians believe Siniora's cabinet is no longer legitimate, while 83 per cent of Sunnis and 90 per cent of the Druze believe exactly the opposite.

Ex-general Michel Aoun is the quaint, frightening and messianic Maronite leader whose supporters provide the high number of Christians opposed to Siniora. Aoun, who spoke at Sunday's rally in a baseball cap and shirt of bright orange - the colour of his very odd Free Patriotic Movement - provides the essential multi-confessional element that permits Nasrallah to claim that the anti-government protests are not just Shiite. Many Sunni Muslims, Druze and pro-government Christians believe that Aoun's real reason for this pact with the "Party of God", which the US State Department calls "terrorist", is that he wants to become the president of Lebanon. Just why anyone wants to rule Lebanon remains a mystery to me and to many Lebanese, but under the country's hopeless sectarian pact, the president must be a Christian Maronite - which is what Aoun happens to be.

Several cabinet ministers think that Aoun has gone off his rocker. For almost two years - until the Syrians bombed him out of the presidential palace in east Beirut with American permission in 1990 - he deluded himself into believing that he was the president of Lebanon, ruling the country with just three ministers, all of them Christians and one of them an army general, after his would-be Muslim colleagues walked out.

All the while, another Lebanese government ruled in the west of Beirut, an administration that eventually turned out to be the real administration when Aoun fled his burning palace in an armoured vehicle - dressed only in his pyjamas - to plead for asylum at the home of the French ambassador. During this weird period of Lebanese history, Aoun was in the habit of regarding himself as a latterday Napoleon, referring to his "rival" prime minister, the saintly Selim el-Hoss, as Pontius Pilate. When I once suggested to Aoun that this really revealed that he thought he was Jesus Christ, he promptly banned me from Christian east Beirut - until he ended up fighting not only the Syrians but his right-wing Christian allies led by the militia killer Samir Geagea, who today supports the Siniora government.

Readers who find all this a little operatic can imagine the effect it has on the Lebanese. But it all made sense of Aoun's character trait on Sunday when he virtually demanded (with Hizbollah's acquiescence, of course) the setting up of a rival government - presumably led by himself as President - with Shiite ministers and a few Christian party faithful alongside to represent the Prime Minister and others.

This wouldn't be just déjà vu; it would suggest some deep flaw in Aoun's personality that drives him to demand national unity while constantly trying to divide the nation. He found no problem in trying to run Lebanon without Muslim ministers in 1990 - but is outraged at Siniora for trying to remain Prime Minister without Shiite cabinet members today.

In fact, Hizbollah is far more intelligent than to send "Napoleon" back to the Baabda palace. Aoun will be swiftly dispatched - in Lebanon, of course, you have to be careful of using words like this - and the presidency offered to some honourable figure such as Riad Salami who, like all governors of the Lebanese Central Bank, is colourless and boring enough to fulfil his role with due obedience.

Nasrallah is right when he deplores the confessional system in Lebanon, in which the Christian Maronites - perhaps 29 per cent of the country - must hold the presidency, while the Sunnis are prime ministers and the Shiites are given the job of speaker of parliament. As long as it is sectarian, Lebanon cannot become a modern state. The problem is that without being sectarian, Lebanon will no longer exist.

Anyone who has lived in Beirut as long as I have - just over 30 years - occasionally experiences an odd phenomenon which I refer to as the "obvious question" syndrome - the appalled realisation that some extraordinary fact of life here has never been seriously studied or received sufficient reflection.

How is it, I ask myself these days, that this tiny country of perhaps only 5 million people - less than the population of London in a state smaller than the Home Counties, with neither oil nor military power - can obsess and capture and alternatively torture or love the United States, Israel, Syria, Iran, UN forces from France, Italy, Germany, Spain, India, Fiji, China, Turkey, Ireland, Ghana, Poland, you name it - and repeatedly dominate entire weeks of UN Security Council business?

This week, the UN's top investigator into Hariri's murder will make yet another report to the UN Secretary General that may - or may not if George W Bush follows James Baker's advice of befriending Syria for help in Iraq - once more finger the assassins of Damascus for the crime.

Partly, Lebanon exerts its influence over far more dangerous and powerful nations because of its strategic geographical location in the Middle East. North of Beirut, on the wall of the Nahr el-Kelb - the Dog river - can still be found the commemorative plaques, steles, memorial tablets and carvings of other armies that have passed through Lebanon, often to disaster.

There are the remains of Roman, Phoenician, Crusader, Mameluke, Ottoman, French and British armies - along with the Australians, we "liberated" Beirut from Vichy France in 1941 - and even a modern inscription recording the Israeli army's retreat from this country in 2000, placed there by Siniora's nemesis and Syria's best friend, the current President Emile Lahoud of Lebanon.

But this cannot explain Lebanon's fascination. Its towering mountains - which give this country its epic, wide-screen quality - have been the curse of invaders, and the Crusaders themselves felt so threatened by the suicide killers of the "hashashin" - they came via Baghdad - that they preferred to travel along the coast by sea rather than risk the Muslim archers in the hills. That, by the way, is why each of Lebanon's Crusader castles - little "green zones" in Tripoli, Batroun, Byblos, Beirut, Sidon, Tyre - were built exactly a day's sailing from each other.

No, I think it is the Lebanese themselves and their ability to condense into their tiny nation all the contradictions - religious, cultural, political, social - of the massive and fearful region upon which Lebanon sits, in both senses of the phrase, on the edge. Every Middle East crisis will be reflected here in miniature, in ghostly but still disturbing form, by its highly intelligent, cosmopolitan people.

The Iranian Revolution? Why, many of its senior Iranian prelates once taught - or were taught - in the Shiite religious schools east of Tyre. The Israeli-Palestinian war? Well, between 200,000 and 360,000 Palestinian refugees live in cruel poverty in the slum camps of Lebanon, survivors - and sons and daughters and grandsons and grand-daughters of the survivors - of the great Arab exodus from Palestine when Israel came into existence in 1948.

When Israel wanted to crush Palestinian resistance in the occupied territories, it tried to wipe out the Palestinian guerrilla presence in Lebanon with a bloody and vain invasion in 1982, which ended in the frightful slaughter of Palestinians by Israel's allies in the Sabra and Chatila camps. When the Iran-Iraq war began, its rival supporters fought each other in the streets of Beirut. When the war ended, Saddam Hussein shipped many of his now idle tanks and armour to none other than General Aoun - because Aoun was fighting Iraq's Syrian Baathist enemies.

Lebanon almost destroyed the Reagan administration when Oliver North tried to purchase America's hostages in Lebanon in what was to become the Irangate scandal. When Iraq descended into anarchy after America's 2003 invasion, Sunni Lebanese and Palestinians left from Tripoli and Sidon to become suicide bombers against US forces in Iraq, while the sectarian conflict in Mesopotamia ran like an earthquake tremor through the Sunnis and Shiites of Lebanon.

Sayed Hussein Fadlallah, the most learned Shiite scholar in Lebanon - the Americans green-lighted a car bomb assassination attempt funded by the Saudis to kill him but only managed to massacre 72 innocent civilians - has both scholar-pupils and cousins in Iraq, one of whom was murdered two years ago.

The usual anonymous "senior US intelligence officials" were trotted out in the American press last month to claim that Hizbollah was training members of the Mahdi army of Moqtada el-Sadr in Iraq. It was nonsense, but proof that the US administration still sees a fanatic behind every beard in Lebanon; just as the Iranians believe that Lebanon is always on the brink of a US takeover - which is exactly what Nasrallah claims Siniora is now preparing for Washington.

Yet was it not Fadlallah who once announced that Lebanon was "the lung through which Iran breathed"? Were the Iranians not controlling the hostage-takers of Lebanon in the 1980s? I once ended up in a series of bizarre - and fearfully dangerous - attempts to secure the release of my American journalist friend Terry Anderson from seven years of captivity, and ended up lunching with a man who had flown from Tehran to offer me Terry in return for four Iranian government officials kidnapped in Lebanon, one of whom they claimed was in prison in Saddam's Iraq, the other in Israel. If they had been murdered, the Iranians would like their bodies.

So I embarked on a fruitless search for corpses before the same Iranian asked if I would like to persuade the Americans to send them some missiles instead - at which point I immediately walked out of the quicksand, not realising that Oliver North was already in the mud, up to his neck.

But Nasrallah's other ally, Syria, is the Arab state whose shadow falls most darkly over Lebanon. Syria's leadership is largely Alawite - a branch of Shiism - and Syria is also Iran's only Arab ally. I wrote in The Independent years ago that if the Syrian army ever left Lebanon, the civil war would restart - and that if it didn't, Syria would make sure it did. Which is exactly what the Lebanese now suspect Syria is threatening to accomplish via Hizbollah. This is why Siniora's men talk about an attempted Iranian-Syrian coup d'état. This is why the Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, is convinced that Syria's military retreat last year is now being reversed by a frightening neighbour which - through the murder of anti-Syrian figures in Lebanon - is now trying to return. A "national unity" government would provide more power to Syria's Lebanese allies.

Both Lebanon and Syria gained their independence from the French in 1946 and they share the same history and language. But as Hazem Saghieh pointed out in the Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat this month, Syria chose "unity" while Lebanon chose "liberty". The Syrian flag, with its governessy and ferocious eagle, rarely flew contentedly next to Lebanon's gentle cedar tree banner. Syria has always looked outwards, towards Arab brotherhood and nationalism, first imagined by King Faisel the First, the spiritual father of Syria who vainly sought an Arab version of the Turkish Ottoman empire.

Lebanon looked inwards, at its internal sectarian divisions, its divided cities. If Syria called itself the "beating heart of Arabism", Lebanon was content to be "the only democracy in the Middle East" - though both claims were happier on paper than they were on the ground. Syrian populism challenged Lebanese individualism. Saghieh claims that Syria was formed on the national model of Germany or Italy, while Lebanon was inspired by the political pacts that created Switzerland and Belgium. Syria has its own confessional divisions - I used to watch the pained expressions of its ministers whenever I mentioned the unmentionable: the Alawite faith of the President, the Kurds, the Sunni majority. But these divisions are to be ignored. Lebanon is Eve, the seducer. Syria is Adam. And Eve was once part of Adam's body.

But into the Middle East we have again sent our military forces, in unprecedented numbers, and given our Israeli allies weapons in unprecedented numbers. And the Muslims - you can see their faithful reflection in the lakes and rivers of Lebanon - appear to be winning the war. We have been engulfed in Iraq and are being crushed in southern Afghanistan. Israel was defeated by Hizbollah and cannot suppress the Palestinian intifada. Civil wars or near civil wars have broken out in the lands of our occupation.

And now the same fate taps Lebanon on the shoulder. Oh yes, America will stand firmly at the side of Siniora's democratically elected government against Iran's axis of evil and the devil-Baathists of Syria. But Siniora, "our man" in Lebanon, is in deep trouble.

What we are watching across the whole region is the steady but increasing collapse of American imperial power. It will not be a joyous event. It may prove to be terrifying. It will definitely be bloody. And Lebanon may now be the mirror that proves it all true.

Some four years before his murder, when he was still Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri angrily told me a story of his struggle with Hizbollah. We were walking in the garden of his Beirut palace at Qoreitem - he reasoned that, even though his phones were all tapped, the Syrians had probably not bugged the flower beds with listening devices - and his hands were shaking with rage.

"They wanted to bring some of their 'martyrs' who had died fighting the Israelis and bury them in front of the Beirut international airport," he muttered. "Can you imagine what that would have meant? We want to show the world our new Beirut and the graves of Hizbollah members would be the first thing that every visitor to Lebanon would see. And once buried there, they could never be removed. I managed to stop it."

"How?" I asked. But Hariri just flicked his right hand in the air dismissively. There must have been some compromise with Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the chairman of Hizbollah. He wouldn't say.

Only Nasrallah now knows what that compromise was, because the airport is now renamed the Martyr Rafiq Hariri International Airport - for last year, he was to become the "martyr" associated with the gleaming new terminal and runways - and Nasrallah's own followers are camping out in the centre of Beirut, less than 100 metres from Hariri's grave, demanding the destruction of the elected government supported by Hariri's own son Saad. Nasrallah's son Hadi was killed in a suicidal attack on the Israelis before their withdrawal in 2000, and the Hizbollah leader - true to the necrology associated with his faith - insisted that he receive only congratulations, rather than condolences, for his son's death in battle.

You need to be in Martyrs' Square to understand the absolute conviction with which the Shiites of Lebanon - the largest religious sect in Lebanon, although not a majority - are protesting at the government led by Rafiq Hariri's former economic adviser and friend, Fouad Siniora. Hundreds of Hizbollah security men in white baseball caps cordon off roads so that there can be no contact with the Lebanese troops guarding Siniora's ancient Ottoman serail, in which the Prime Minister and his allies are eating, sleeping and - possibly - working.

They check all bags, like plain-clothes policemen (which, of course, is exactly what they think they are). But their Shiite ministerial colleagues have resigned; so the Sunni Muslims, Christians and Druze in the administration are now supposed to rule Lebanon without those cabinet members who may now represent up to 38 per cent of the population.

If Hizbollah's insistence that the government should resign is unconstitutional, so too, it seems, is Siniora's cabinet now that it no longer contains Shiites. Last Sunday's massive rally in Beirut ended in a peaceful return to their homes by hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, policed once again by Hizbollah. Many Lebanese unwisely concluded that this symbolised failure - that Hizbollah's supporters had not been emotionally roused enough to provoke violence - but they were wrong. The discreet ending of the day's rally showed Hizbollah's discipline, not its weakness.

Nor should the government forget how fiercely and how ruthlessly Hizbollah fought the Israelis for 34 days last summer. It may not have been the "divine victory" of which Nasrallah boasted, but it was certainly a defeat for the Israelis, who, when a few thousand of them did manage to fight their way into Lebanon, were appalled to find that some of the Hizbollah fighters possessed Israeli uniforms and - much more seriously - Israel's own aerial photo-reconnaissance pictures of Hizbollah's Lebanese positions, complete with their Hebrew markings.

Hizbollah is a strict and moralistic organisation, but it uses drugs as currency and the assumption in southern Lebanon is that Hizbollah men traded narcotics with Israeli border guards in return for the photographs. Some of the Hizbollah read Hebrew and quickly worked out which of their bunkers had been identified and which remained unknown to the Israelis. So when the war began on 12 July, Hizbollah had already evacuated the caves known to the Israelis and waited for its enemy in the concrete emplacements that it knew the Israelis had not discovered.

Whether you loathe or admire Hizbollah, this was a startlingly professional intelligence operation by the Middle East's most powerful army. And while the resistance was fighting within only a few hundred metres of the Israeli border - at one point attacking an Israeli Merkava tank whose crew simply ran for their lives, abandoning their vehicle and even leaving behind its heavy machine gun - Siniora was on television, wiping away his tears and pleading for a ceasefire. Hence Nasrallah's profound contempt for Siniora's current government, a repugnance that is leeching dangerously into the various religious sects that provide Lebanon with a political system so complex that even some members of the Lebanese parliament cannot understand it.

An opinion poll by Beirut's Centre for Research and Information, for instance, suggests that 73.1 per cent of the population support the creation of a national unity government - the very demand made by Hizbollah. But the breakdown of this figure into religious groups shows that 94 per cent of Shiites and 50 per cent of Christians believe Siniora's cabinet is no longer legitimate, while 83 per cent of Sunnis and 90 per cent of the Druze believe exactly the opposite.

Ex-general Michel Aoun is the quaint, frightening and messianic Maronite leader whose supporters provide the high number of Christians opposed to Siniora. Aoun, who spoke at Sunday's rally in a baseball cap and shirt of bright orange - the colour of his very odd Free Patriotic Movement - provides the essential multi-confessional element that permits Nasrallah to claim that the anti-government protests are not just Shiite. Many Sunni Muslims, Druze and pro-government Christians believe that Aoun's real reason for this pact with the "Party of God", which the US State Department calls "terrorist", is that he wants to become the president of Lebanon. Just why anyone wants to rule Lebanon remains a mystery to me and to many Lebanese, but under the country's hopeless sectarian pact, the president must be a Christian Maronite - which is what Aoun happens to be.

Several cabinet ministers think that Aoun has gone off his rocker. For almost two years - until the Syrians bombed him out of the presidential palace in east Beirut with American permission in 1990 - he deluded himself into believing that he was the president of Lebanon, ruling the country with just three ministers, all of them Christians and one of them an army general, after his would-be Muslim colleagues walked out.

All the while, another Lebanese government ruled in the west of Beirut, an administration that eventually turned out to be the real administration when Aoun fled his burning palace in an armoured vehicle - dressed only in his pyjamas - to plead for asylum at the home of the French ambassador. During this weird period of Lebanese history, Aoun was in the habit of regarding himself as a latterday Napoleon, referring to his "rival" prime minister, the saintly Selim el-Hoss, as Pontius Pilate. When I once suggested to Aoun that this really revealed that he thought he was Jesus Christ, he promptly banned me from Christian east Beirut - until he ended up fighting not only the Syrians but his right-wing Christian allies led by the militia killer Samir Geagea, who today supports the Siniora government.

Readers who find all this a little operatic can imagine the effect it has on the Lebanese. But it all made sense of Aoun's character trait on Sunday when he virtually demanded (with Hizbollah's acquiescence, of course) the setting up of a rival government - presumably led by himself as President - with Shiite ministers and a few Christian party faithful alongside to represent the Prime Minister and others.

This wouldn't be just déjà vu; it would suggest some deep flaw in Aoun's personality that drives him to demand national unity while constantly trying to divide the nation. He found no problem in trying to run Lebanon without Muslim ministers in 1990 - but is outraged at Siniora for trying to remain Prime Minister without Shiite cabinet members today.

In fact, Hizbollah is far more intelligent than to send "Napoleon" back to the Baabda palace. Aoun will be swiftly dispatched - in Lebanon, of course, you have to be careful of using words like this - and the presidency offered to some honourable figure such as Riad Salami who, like all governors of the Lebanese Central Bank, is colourless and boring enough to fulfil his role with due obedience.

Nasrallah is right when he deplores the confessional system in Lebanon, in which the Christian Maronites - perhaps 29 per cent of the country - must hold the presidency, while the Sunnis are prime ministers and the Shiites are given the job of speaker of parliament. As long as it is sectarian, Lebanon cannot become a modern state. The problem is that without being sectarian, Lebanon will no longer exist.

Anyone who has lived in Beirut as long as I have - just over 30 years - occasionally experiences an odd phenomenon which I refer to as the "obvious question" syndrome - the appalled realisation that some extraordinary fact of life here has never been seriously studied or received sufficient reflection.

How is it, I ask myself these days, that this tiny country of perhaps only 5 million people - less than the population of London in a state smaller than the Home Counties, with neither oil nor military power - can obsess and capture and alternatively torture or love the United States, Israel, Syria, Iran, UN forces from France, Italy, Germany, Spain, India, Fiji, China, Turkey, Ireland, Ghana, Poland, you name it - and repeatedly dominate entire weeks of UN Security Council business?

This week, the UN's top investigator into Hariri's murder will make yet another report to the UN Secretary General that may - or may not if George W Bush follows James Baker's advice of befriending Syria for help in Iraq - once more finger the assassins of Damascus for the crime.

Partly, Lebanon exerts its influence over far more dangerous and powerful nations because of its strategic geographical location in the Middle East. North of Beirut, on the wall of the Nahr el-Kelb - the Dog river - can still be found the commemorative plaques, steles, memorial tablets and carvings of other armies that have passed through Lebanon, often to disaster.

There are the remains of Roman, Phoenician, Crusader, Mameluke, Ottoman, French and British armies - along with the Australians, we "liberated" Beirut from Vichy France in 1941 - and even a modern inscription recording the Israeli army's retreat from this country in 2000, placed there by Siniora's nemesis and Syria's best friend, the current President Emile Lahoud of Lebanon.

But this cannot explain Lebanon's fascination. Its towering mountains - which give this country its epic, wide-screen quality - have been the curse of invaders, and the Crusaders themselves felt so threatened by the suicide killers of the "hashashin" - they came via Baghdad - that they preferred to travel along the coast by sea rather than risk the Muslim archers in the hills. That, by the way, is why each of Lebanon's Crusader castles - little "green zones" in Tripoli, Batroun, Byblos, Beirut, Sidon, Tyre - were built exactly a day's sailing from each other.

No, I think it is the Lebanese themselves and their ability to condense into their tiny nation all the contradictions - religious, cultural, political, social - of the massive and fearful region upon which Lebanon sits, in both senses of the phrase, on the edge. Every Middle East crisis will be reflected here in miniature, in ghostly but still disturbing form, by its highly intelligent, cosmopolitan people.

The Iranian Revolution? Why, many of its senior Iranian prelates once taught - or were taught - in the Shiite religious schools east of Tyre. The Israeli-Palestinian war? Well, between 200,000 and 360,000 Palestinian refugees live in cruel poverty in the slum camps of Lebanon, survivors - and sons and daughters and grandsons and grand-daughters of the survivors - of the great Arab exodus from Palestine when Israel came into existence in 1948.

When Israel wanted to crush Palestinian resistance in the occupied territories, it tried to wipe out the Palestinian guerrilla presence in Lebanon with a bloody and vain invasion in 1982, which ended in the frightful slaughter of Palestinians by Israel's allies in the Sabra and Chatila camps. When the Iran-Iraq war began, its rival supporters fought each other in the streets of Beirut. When the war ended, Saddam Hussein shipped many of his now idle tanks and armour to none other than General Aoun - because Aoun was fighting Iraq's Syrian Baathist enemies.

Lebanon almost destroyed the Reagan administration when Oliver North tried to purchase America's hostages in Lebanon in what was to become the Irangate scandal. When Iraq descended into anarchy after America's 2003 invasion, Sunni Lebanese and Palestinians left from Tripoli and Sidon to become suicide bombers against US forces in Iraq, while the sectarian conflict in Mesopotamia ran like an earthquake tremor through the Sunnis and Shiites of Lebanon.

Sayed Hussein Fadlallah, the most learned Shiite scholar in Lebanon - the Americans green-lighted a car bomb assassination attempt funded by the Saudis to kill him but only managed to massacre 72 innocent civilians - has both scholar-pupils and cousins in Iraq, one of whom was murdered two years ago.

The usual anonymous "senior US intelligence officials" were trotted out in the American press last month to claim that Hizbollah was training members of the Mahdi army of Moqtada el-Sadr in Iraq. It was nonsense, but proof that the US administration still sees a fanatic behind every beard in Lebanon; just as the Iranians believe that Lebanon is always on the brink of a US takeover - which is exactly what Nasrallah claims Siniora is now preparing for Washington.

Yet was it not Fadlallah who once announced that Lebanon was "the lung through which Iran breathed"? Were the Iranians not controlling the hostage-takers of Lebanon in the 1980s? I once ended up in a series of bizarre - and fearfully dangerous - attempts to secure the release of my American journalist friend Terry Anderson from seven years of captivity, and ended up lunching with a man who had flown from Tehran to offer me Terry in return for four Iranian government officials kidnapped in Lebanon, one of whom they claimed was in prison in Saddam's Iraq, the other in Israel. If they had been murdered, the Iranians would like their bodies.

So I embarked on a fruitless search for corpses before the same Iranian asked if I would like to persuade the Americans to send them some missiles instead - at which point I immediately walked out of the quicksand, not realising that Oliver North was already in the mud, up to his neck.

But Nasrallah's other ally, Syria, is the Arab state whose shadow falls most darkly over Lebanon. Syria's leadership is largely Alawite - a branch of Shiism - and Syria is also Iran's only Arab ally. I wrote in The Independent years ago that if the Syrian army ever left Lebanon, the civil war would restart - and that if it didn't, Syria would make sure it did. Which is exactly what the Lebanese now suspect Syria is threatening to accomplish via Hizbollah. This is why Siniora's men talk about an attempted Iranian-Syrian coup d'état. This is why the Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, is convinced that Syria's military retreat last year is now being reversed by a frightening neighbour which - through the murder of anti-Syrian figures in Lebanon - is now trying to return. A "national unity" government would provide more power to Syria's Lebanese allies.

Both Lebanon and Syria gained their independence from the French in 1946 and they share the same history and language. But as Hazem Saghieh pointed out in the Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat this month, Syria chose "unity" while Lebanon chose "liberty". The Syrian flag, with its governessy and ferocious eagle, rarely flew contentedly next to Lebanon's gentle cedar tree banner. Syria has always looked outwards, towards Arab brotherhood and nationalism, first imagined by King Faisel the First, the spiritual father of Syria who vainly sought an Arab version of the Turkish Ottoman empire.

Lebanon looked inwards, at its internal sectarian divisions, its divided cities. If Syria called itself the "beating heart of Arabism", Lebanon was content to be "the only democracy in the Middle East" - though both claims were happier on paper than they were on the ground. Syrian populism challenged Lebanese individualism. Saghieh claims that Syria was formed on the national model of Germany or Italy, while Lebanon was inspired by the political pacts that created Switzerland and Belgium. Syria has its own confessional divisions - I used to watch the pained expressions of its ministers whenever I mentioned the unmentionable: the Alawite faith of the President, the Kurds, the Sunni majority. But these divisions are to be ignored. Lebanon is Eve, the seducer. Syria is Adam. And Eve was once part of Adam's body.

But into the Middle East we have again sent our military forces, in unprecedented numbers, and given our Israeli allies weapons in unprecedented numbers. And the Muslims - you can see their faithful reflection in the lakes and rivers of Lebanon - appear to be winning the war. We have been engulfed in Iraq and are being crushed in southern Afghanistan. Israel was defeated by Hizbollah and cannot suppress the Palestinian intifada. Civil wars or near civil wars have broken out in the lands of our occupation.

And now the same fate taps Lebanon on the shoulder. Oh yes, America will stand firmly at the side of Siniora's democratically elected government against Iran's axis of evil and the devil-Baathists of Syria. But Siniora, "our man" in Lebanon, is in deep trouble.

What we are watching across the whole region is the steady but increasing collapse of American imperial power. It will not be a joyous event. It may prove to be terrifying. It will definitely be bloody. And Lebanon may now be the mirror that proves it all true.

Oel / Oil oder Warum der Nahe Osten so bedeutend ist

Click pic to enlarge

Ein paar Graphiken der Ludwig-Bölkow-Systemtechnik GmbH Deutschland www.lbst.de zum Stand der weltweiten Oelförderung. Die Daten stammen aus "BP Statistical Review 2006" und wurden graphisch aufgearbeitet. Zwei Graphiken, die die Bedeutung der Opec-Länder bzw. des Nahen Osten aus geopolitischer Sicht unterstreichen, habe ich hier reinkopiert. Auf der - leider etwas reisserisch benammsten Website der LBST finden sich noch einige mehr.
Click pic to enlarge

Lebanon: Gemayel’s death

Syria is a convenient fallguy for Gemayel’s death

By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth

11/24/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- Commentators and columnists are agreed. Pierre Gemayel’s assassination must have been the handiwork of Syria because his Christian Phalangists have been long-time allies of Israel and because, as industry minister, he was one of the leading figures in the Lebanese government’s anti-Syria faction. President Bush thinks so too. Case, apparently, settled.

Unlike my colleagues, I do not claim to know who killed Gemayel. Maybe Syria was behind the shooting. Maybe, in Lebanon’s notoriously intrigue-ridden and fractious political system, someone with a grudge against Gemayel -- even from within his own party -- pulled the trigger. Or maybe, Israel once again flexed the muscles of its long arm in Lebanon.

It seems, however, as if the last possibility cannot be entertained in polite society. So let me offer a few impolite thoughts.

As anyone who watches TV crimes series knows, when there is insufficient physical evidence in a murder investigation for a conviction, detectives examine the motives of the parties who stood to benefit from the crime. Better detectives also consider whether the prime suspect -- the person who looks at first sight to be the guilt party -- is not, in fact, being turned into a fallguy by one of the other parties. The murderer may be the person who benefits most clearly from the crime, or the murderer may be the person who benefits from the prime suspect being fingered for the murder.

As most of our politicians and the media’s commentators have deduced, suspicion falls automatically on Syria because the Christian Phalangists are one of Syria’s main enemies in Lebanon. Partly as a result, they have opposed recent attempts by Syria’s main ally in Lebanon, the Shiite group Hizbullah, to win a greater share of political power.

They are also -- and this seems to clinch it for most observers -- part of the majority in the pro-American government of Fuad Siniora that supports a United Nations tribunal to try the killers of Rafik Hariri, an anti-Syria politician and leader of the Sunni Muslim community, who was blown up by a car bomb more than a year and a half ago.

After all six Shiite ministers walked out of the Siniora cabinet two weeks ago, and now with Gemayel’s assassination, the government is close to collapse, and with it the tribunal that everyone expects to implicate Syria in Hariri’s murder. If Syria can “bump off” another two cabinet ministers and the government loses its quorum, Syria will be off the hook -- or so runs the logic of Western observers.

But does this “evidence” make Syria the prime suspect or the fallguy? How will Syria’s wider interests be affected by the killing, and what about Israel’s interests in Gemayel’s death -- or rather, its interests in Hizbullah or Syria being blamed for Gemayel’s death?

In truth, Israel will benefit in numerous ways from the tensions provoked by the assassination, as the popular and angry rallies in Beirut against Syria and Hizbullah are proving.

First, and most obviously, Hizbullah -- as Syria’s main political and military friend in Lebanon -- has been forced suddenly on to the back foot. Hizbullah had been riding high after its triumph over the summer of withstanding the Israeli assault on Lebanon and routing an invasion force that tried to occupy the country’s south.

Hizbullah’s popularity and credibility rose so sharply that the leaders of the Shiite community had been hoping to cash in on that success domestically by demanding more power. That is one of the reasons why the six Shiite ministers walked out of Siniora’s cabinet.

Despite the way the Shiite parties’ political position has been presented in the West, there is considerable justification for their demands. The system of political representation in Lebanon was rigged decades ago by the former colonial power, France, to ensure that power is shared between the Christian and Sunni Muslim communities. The Shiite Muslims, the country’s largest religious sect, have been kept on the margins of the system ever since, effectively disenfranchised.

With their recent military victory, this was the moment Hizbullah hoped to make a breakthrough and force political concessions from the Sunnis and Christians, concessions that indirectly would have benefited Syria. With Gemayel’s death, the chances of that now look slim indeed. Hizbullah, and by extension Syria, are the losers; Israel, which wants Hizbullah weakened, is the winner.

Second, the assassination has pushed Lebanon to the brink of another civil war. With a political system barely able to contain sectarian differences, and with the various factions in no mood to compromise after the spate of recent assassinations, there is a real danger that fighting will return to Lebanon’s streets.

This will most certainly not be to the benefit of Lebanon or any of its religious communities, who will be dragged into another round of bloodletting. Hizbullah’s underground cadres who took on the Israeli war machine will doubtless have to come out of hiding and will pay a price against other well-armed militias.

The benefits for Syria are at best mixed. A possible benefit is that a bloody civil war may increase the pressure on the United States to talk to Syria, and possibly to invite it to take a leading role again in stabilising Lebanon, as it did during the last civil war.

But, given the continuing ascendancy of the hawks in Washington, it may have the opposite effect, encouraging the US to isolate Syria further.

Conversely, civil war may pose serious threats to Syrian interests -- and offer significant benefits to Israel. If Hizbullah’s energies are seriously depleted in a civil war, Israel may be in a much better position to attack Lebanon again. Almost everyone in Israel is agreed that the Israeli army is itching to settle the score with Hizbullah in another round of fighting. This way it may get the next war it wants on much better terms; or Israel may be able to fight a proxy war against Hizbullah by aiding the Shiite group’s opponents.

Certainly one of the main goals of Israel’s bombing campaign over the summer, when much of Lebanon’s infrastructure was destroyed, appeared to be to provoke such a civil war. It was widely reported at the time that Israel’s generals hoped that the devastation would provoke the Christian, Sunni and Druze communities to rise up against Hizbullah.

Third, Syria is already the prime suspect in Hariri’s murder and in the assasination of three other Lebanese politicians and journalists, all seen as anti-Syrian, over the past 21 months.

The US exploited Hariri’s death, and the widespread protests that followed, to evict Syria from Lebanon. Syria’s removal from the scene also paved the way, whether intentionally or not, for Israel’s assault this summer, which would have been far more dangerous to the region had Syria still been in Lebanon.

Despite the looming threat of the UN tribunal into Hariri’s death, from Syria’s point of view the accusations have grown stale with time and threatened to prove only what everyone in the West already believed. With the walk-out by the Shiite ministers from the Lebanese government, the investigations were looking all but redundant in any case.

Gemayel’s assassination, however, has dramatically revived interest in the question of who killed Hariri and brings Syria firmly back into the spotlight. None of this benefits Syria, but no doubt Israel will be able to take some considerable pleasure in Damascus’s discomfort.

Fourth, the Israeli government has been under international and domestic pressure to engage with Syria and negotiate a return of the Golan Heights, an area of Syrian territory it has been occupying since 1967.

With it would be resolved the fraught question of the Shebaa Farms, still occupied by Israel but which Hizbullah and Syria claim as Lebanese territory that should have been returned in Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. The status of the Shebaa Farms has been one of the main outstanding areas of dispute between Israel and Hizbullah.

President Assad of Syria has been hinting openly that he is ready to discuss Israel’s return of the Golan Heights on better terms for Israel than it has ever before been offered.

According to reports in the Israeli media, Assad is prepared to demilitarise the Golan and turn it into a national park that would be open to Israelis. He would probably also not insist on a precise return to the 1967 border, which includes the northern shoreline of the Sea of Galilee. Traditionally Israel’s leaders balked at this idea, and provoked popular fears by conjuring up the vision of Assad’s father, Hafez, dipping his feet in the lake.

But if negotations on the Golan are desperately sought by the young Assad, Israel shows no interest in exploring the option. The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, has repeatedly ruled out talking to Damascus. That is for several reasons:

* Israel, as might be expected on past form, is not in the mood for making territorial concessions;
* it does not want to end Syria’s pariah’s status and isolation by making a peace deal with it;
* and it fears that such a deal might suggest that negotiations with the Palestinians are feasible too.

Peace with Syria, in Israeli eyes, would inexorably lead to pressure to make peace with the Palestinians. That is most certainly not part of Israel’s agenda.

Gemayel’s death, and Syria being blamed for it, forces Damascus back into the fold of the “Axis of Evil”, and forestalls any threat of talks on the Golan.

Fifth, pressure has been growing in the US Administration to start talking to Syria, if only to try to recruit it to Washington’s “war on terror”. The US could desperately do with local local help in managing its occupation of Iraq. It is unclear whether Bush is ready to make such an about-turn, but it remains a possibility.

Key allies such as Britain’s Tony Blair are pushing strongly for engagement with Syria, both to further isolate Iran -- the possible target of either a US or Israeli strike against its presumed ambitions for nuclear weapons -- and to clear the path to negotiations with the Palestinians.

Gemayel’s death, and Syria’s blame for it, strengthens the case of the neoconservatives in Washington -- Israel’s allies in the Administration -- whose star had begun to wane. They can now argue convincingly that Syria is unreformed and unreformable. Such an outcome helps to avert the danger, from Israel’s point of view, that White House doves might win the argument for befriending Syria.

For all these reasons, we should be wary of assuming that Syria is the party behind Gemayel’s death -- or the only regional actor meddling in Lebanon.

Jonathan Cook is a journalist and writer based in Nazareth, Israel. His book “Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State ” is published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net