Qana, the aftermath

I have thought this over and after more than a week since the Qana incident I suppose I am less angry right now. I have seen the tapes and I am convinced now that Hezbollah was probably launching rockets near that place and maybe the house was the refuge of a Hezbollah activist. But I still don’t consider the Israeli action justifiable. Knowing the Israeli powerful High Technology, I refuse to believe this to be a mistake, or maybe that the Israelis didn’t know there would be no civilians there. That’s absurd! I am convinced that they knew there were civilians there but they wanted to eradicate the activists, so they took this military risk, they thought they’d just remind the world that Hezbollah’s being unethical and using civilians as human shields, and then apologise for this mistake and it’ll pass. And to be totally honest it did pass, they lost some of their international support, but still nothing dangerous, they are still able to continue their assault on Lebanon.


I would like to clarify my position about this. I am not saying that the Israelis were as criminal or monstrous as the Arab media likes to portray them… It is just war…

In war, there is no clean war, there is no honour in war, there is just pain and death, lots of it, more than the modern mind is willing to accept. Generals and War Lords know this. Believe me people; they all knew this would happen it is inevitable. This is why no war is admissible, this is why war is never a solution, it might be the prelude of peace, and it might result in a solution to a certain conflict. But eventually war is just the easy way to do so. In war you have to win, you have to inflict so much pain to your enemy that he would beg you to stop, or better, die. In order to do so you have to kill civilians, because warriors are well prepared to die (Hezbollah sure is!) civilians are relying on military units to protect them and that’s what keeps the warrior going forward, he believes that many are relying on him for protection, he can’t fail them, he has to kill the enemy before the enemy kills his family. And if the enemy manages to kill many civilians then their protectors consider themselves to have failed there mission, they often lose the will to fight.

Needless to specify that all wars that were won included massive civilian losses. When one party wins the war it rewrites history and talks about the angelic war that he had led, on one condition: the losing party must have no representatives capable of contradicting the master piece (either kill them all or prevent them from talking).

I am not, in any cases, trying to deny the necessity of techniques, or implying that it’s enough to massacre civilians in order to win a war. You have to paralyse the economic, a siege is usually a good idea, and the culminating point is when you enter the capitol as a conqueror. But if you don’t kill the will to fight, then resistance will strike you again and never stop till you retreat humiliatingly.

In this war, as in any other one, civilians are paying high prices. People are dying and many of them are children (that’s demographically inevitable because of the very high percentage of kids in the Shiite South, every house contains more than 70% kids). And Israel is constantly facing this dilemma; rockets are being launched from the roofs of civilian buildings. Everybody’s fully aware of this (well the media and Hezbollah’s still insisting on denying, but who are they kidding?)

In many cases the Israelis are choosing to shoot the civilians. On one hand, they kill the Hezbollah members, on the other hand they send a message to Hezbollah saying that they will kill the Moojahideen even if that meant to kill them with all there kids. In war times this is allowed, but then again I never believed in war. The fact that they are going through this war is actually there fault just as much as it is Hezbollah’s fault. They are responsible for this and there is no justification for there action.

I am a Lebanese human being, I am not going to sit down and justify the massacre of babies, just because the fighting parties saw that these lives were not precious enough to defend. I believe that those kids were important enough and the word I’m sorry is simply not enough.