A Lebanese man shows a poster of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah amid the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in Beirut, July 23. (AFP File Photo)

A rally of well-dressed middle-class ladies, perhaps 40 in all, protested outside the UN’s offices in Beirut on Wednesday, calling for a ceasefire. Representing the Lebanese Council of Women, they handed out leaflets appealing to Kofi Annan to get something done.
They were fewer in number than the recent anti-war demonstrators in Tel Aviv, but more representative. While today’s peaceniks in Israel are a lonely, though perhaps slowly growing, minority, the cry for a ceasefire is overwhelming in Lebanon. Why bother to demonstrate when the issue is so obvious?
So my strongest impression of the rally came from Lamia Osseiran, one of its organisers: “The Israelis are radicalising Lebanon, even liberal democrats like me. I took part in last year’s demonstrations against Syria. I was a critic of Hezbollah. Now I cannot help but support Hezbollah’s fighters who are defending our country.“ What about Hezbollah’s rocket attacks on Haifa? “It’s right,“ she replied. “It’s not only Lebanese who should have to suffer. Are human rights available only to Israelis? You can’t have winter and summer on the same roof.“
Similar views can be heard from many Shias. They have closed ranks behind Hezbollah under the weight of Israeli bombing. Among Sunnis the mood is more complex. The port town of Sidon, south of Beirut, is 90% Sunni. Over the past week it has taken in 70,000 Shia refugees, most of them militant supporters of Hezbollah. They are eager to convince their new Sunni neighbours of the justice of the Hezbollah cause. Whether they have succeeded will not be known until the bombing stops, but every new day of Israel’s air strikes on the south lessens the force of the argument that it is all Hezbollah’s fault.
The stronghold of anti-Hezbollah feeling is in Lebanon’s Christian areas. They have suffered little bombing, and many people argue that Hezbollah is reaping what it sowed. As Youssef Haddad, a young teacher at the American University of Beirut, put it: “If you want a war with Israel, you have to pay the price. I didn’t take the decision to attack Israel.“
Yet what counts most for now is not the popular reaction but what is happening inside the Lebanese government. Condoleezza Rice seems to have little understanding of the country’s political forces. Last year’s so-called cedar revolution, with its simplistic “people power“ image and the election victory of anti-Syrian parties, apparently led Washington, and alarmingly Downing Street as well, to believe that Lebanon has a radically new and pro-western government.
In fact, Lebanon has a government of national unity in which Hezbollah has two ministers. Being anti-Syrian is not the same as being anti-Hezbollah, and the election winners from the March 14 movement, which developed after the car-bomb murder of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri, wisely recognised that the party is an authentic part of Lebanese society. It was better to have it in the government rather than outside.
Demonising Hezbollah as terrorists or Iranian and Syrian agents confuses the picture. Moreover, the only party that declined to take part in government, the Maronite Christians led by Michel Aoun, made a tactical alliance with Hezbollah. Since the Israeli attacks Aoun has been one of Hezbollah’s most vocal defenders.
While accepting Hezbollah’s political weight, no Lebanese politician believes that its military wing can be disarmed against its will. Their view has to be the starting point for any discussion of an international force for southern Lebanon, whether it is a beefed-up version of the current UN force, Unifil, or some sort of “coalition of the willing“.
Jonathan Steele
GUARDIAN.CO.UK

Televised contemporary events marginalize the role of history. TV broadcasts death from Lebanon, Gaza and Israel, but paid scant attention to the 53rd anniversary of Cuba’s revolutionary beginning. On July 26, 1953, Fidel Castro led 150 plus men to capture the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. This act of nationalist voluntarism failed. The revolutionaries had hoped the heroic act would catalyze an island wide uprising. In January 1959, however, Fidel’s guerrilleros took control of the island.
As Cubans celebrated the 53rd anniversary of the Moncada attack, they again confronted Fidel Castro’s famous words. “History will absolve me,“ he concluded his defense. His accomplishments more than absolve him. But the age of revolutionary innocence that fostered the Cuban revolution has ended, as 9/11 dramatized.
Fidel remains a larger than life leader who never relied on TV spots or political “handlers“ to preach his messages to Cubans and millions of others around the world. People listen because he has something to say. His agenda ð justice, equality, ending poverty, facing the perils of environmental erosion ð retains urgent cogency. Compare his presentation to the “lite ideas“ offered by major power heads of state!
From the 1960s on, critics have ignored Fidel’s noble ideas and focused their barbs at Cuba’s rationing system and chronic shortages. The anti-Castroites systematically neglect to compare the island’s life with that of its neighbors, whose health, and living standards rank far worse. Unlike residents of other South American countries, post Batista era Cubans did not fear death squads or “disappearances.“
Cuba does not have a free press or political parties. But they have led to problems that Cuba faces today--the absence of critical public dialogue. These deficiencies, however, do not detract from the accomplishments.
The revolution converted an informal US economic colony (until 1958) into a proud nation whose citizens danced on the stage of contemporary history. In the heady days of the 1960s and 70s, students returned from studying abroad to join those at home in building hospitals, schools, roads and day care centers. The revolution also gave Cubans rights only dreamed of by other third world people. Not just education and health care, the right to a job and pension, but the chance to change history.
In 1993, at Nelson Mandela’s inauguration after the demise of the apartheid system, the new South African President embraced Fidel Castro: “You made this possible,“ he whispered audibly, referring to the 1987-8 Cuban military defeating of the apartheid South African forces at the battles of Cuito Cuanavale.
In Africa, from the 1960s through the 1980s, Cuban troops played historical roles in safeguarding Algerian, Angolan and Ethiopian integrity. In solidarity, Cuba sent 1,500 soldiers to fight alongside Syrian troops in the 1973 Middle East War. Cuban doctors and technicians offered aid to Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s. Cuban doctors are the first to volunteer to help earthquake and other disaster victims all over the world. Indeed, Pakistanis will remember the contribution Cubans made to their recent earthquake victims.
Cuban artists, intellectuals, writers, athletes and scientists have also engraved their works and feats in the annals of many countries throughout the world. Cuba has more doctors abroad than the entire World Health Organization. Its doctor-patient ratio is similar to that of Beverly Hills.
Cuba’s good fortune, having a veritable insurance company ready to write a long-term development policy, meant the Soviet Union would provide for infrastructure and the know how necessary for development. For the hideous warts of the Soviet system, it worked. Cuban infant mortality and life expectancy reached first world levels. Cuba has a literacy rate equal or better than the United States.
The Cuban Revolution was a success.
COUNTERPUNCH.COM

This is a moment of acute shame for British people of conscience. Last week’s 50th anniversary of the “Suez crisis“--the botched neoimperialist attempt by Britain, France and Israel, to invade Egypt in 1956--would have been cause enough for shame by itself. That shame has, however, been hugely compounded by the fact that Britain is once again displaying extraordinary moral shabbiness in its dealings with the Middle East.
It could be said that British foreign policy was a shambles at the time of Suez. It is certainly a shambles now. In recent days, it has been hard to make out just what Britain’s official stance is in relation to the Lebanon conflict and the question whether Israel’s response to Hezbollah’s provocation rates as proportionate. To begin with, it seemed the Foreign Office was echoing the line of Prime Minister Tony Blair as Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett likewise effectively endorsed the pro-Israel US position and declined to say anything that could be construed as criticism of the Jewish state. But then Beckett’s deputy, Kim Howells, adopted a somewhat different approach.
After scorning those who called for an immediate cease-fire, Howells conceded that Israel’s wholesale bombing of the Lebanon was indeed disproportionate and even voiced something like indignation over Israel’s indiscriminate attacks on civilians.
The impression of Foreign Office incoherence was overwhelming and was hardly lessened by Howell’s impulsive comparison of the evacuation of British people from Lebanon with “Dunkirk“, the episode early in World War II when British troops were evacuated from Nazi-occupied France.
It often seems that under Tony Blair the British Foreign Office has been de-commissioned as an independent entity. All the signs are that its erstwhile role has been usurped by the prime minister who has in turn subcontracted foreign policy-making to the US.
The Foreign Office’s pathetically diminished status was illustrated last week when it became apparent that it was not the foreign secretary herself, let alone the prime minister, but the lowly Howells by whom Britain was being represented in Israel and in Lebanon. Little wonder if there has been mounting frustration among old Foreign Office hands, with their long tradition of informed engagement with the Arab world.
It may be that something of that frustration was finding expression in Howell’s garbled statements. Not that the junior minister deviated from the official British line for long; within days, he was emphasizing Israel’s right to defend itself, leaving no one in any doubt that he had been swiftly brought to heel by his political masters.
Still, it was remarkable that the Foreign Office came near to adopting an independent posture. For the New Labour government of Tony Blair has made a fetish of party discipline, with punitive consequences for those who breach it. From the very moment Blair became party leader in 1994, he and his colleagues went to extreme lengths to appear united, striving at all times to stay “on message“.
Many suspected that the former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was relieved of his office for dismissing a possible Anglo-American attack on Iran as inconceivable--an outburst unwelcome to Blair, who seems far from ruling out the possibility of such an attack, and positively offensive to Washington’s neoconservative warmongers, with their determination to remake the entire Middle East.
It has been suspected, too, that in replacing Straw with Margaret Beckett, Blair was anxious to placate Washington, while also ensuring that the Foreign Office would henceforth be occupied by a minister whose commitment to his own agenda was beyond question.
ARABNEWS.COM

Five peace activists this July in Dublin were put on trial for disarming a U.S. warplane parked on the tarmac of Ireland’s Shannon airport.
In February, 2003, with the U.S. completing its build-up for “Shock and Awe“, these five activists broke into an airport hangar which the U.S. was using as a “pit stop“ for planes en route to the war zone. They had dubbed themselves the “Pitstop Ploughshares“ and, following the biblical injunction to hammer their weapons into plowshares, they took a hammer to the nosecone of a C48 U.S. Navy supply plane and disabled it.
At that time, the world was witnessing the largest movement ever in history formed to call for the end of a war before the war had started. The “Ploughshares“ had heard me speak in Kildare, Ireland, five days before they disarmed the plane. They’ve called on me as a defense witness during each of their trials, claiming that evidence I presented motivated them to take responsibility for stopping U.S. use of Shannon airport for refueling “pit stops.“
Ireland is a neutral country. Under international law and in accord with its own constitution, it would seem unlikely that Ireland could participate in U.S. war plans. But, by January 2003, 36,000 U.S. troops had passed through Shannon airport, en route to the Persian Gulf area. The plane which the Pitstop Ploughshares disarmed was a U.S. Navy C48 supply plane, designated to give logistical support to the U.S. Navy’s 6th fleet in the Mediterranean.
The five defendants were represented by three of the most talented barristers in Ireland. The final summations of each defense counsel urged jurors not only to ask whether the defendants were right to take action, but also ask why it is that the rest of us haven’t acted.
Mr. Nix, praised by the prosecutor as “the last of the great orators,“ noted that the prosecutor had characterized the action of the defendants “political“ as if that were a bad thing. “I’ll tell you of someone who made a great political speech,“ said Mr. Nix, “the greatest political speech of all time and that’s Jesus Christ.“ He went on to quote the Sermon on the Mount to the jury. I could hear the pencils stop scratching, see the jaws drop all around the courtroom. It was an awe-inspiring moment. The shock was yet to come.
Mr. Nix told us he had recently been in a park where he’d listened to children laugh and shout as they happily chased ducks and each other around on the green grass. He thought a sound of universal happiness must be the sound of children playing.
But now his tone darkened. “Now Lebanon is burning,“ he thundered. “Today, children swimming in a pool were bombed. A swimming pool is now filled with burning children. This is war.“
From the The Guardian that morning (7/18/06, p.4):
“Whatever the Israelis’ intended target, the bomb fell on a small water canal next to the Qasmia refugee camp [near Tyre, in southern Lebanon], home to about 500 Palestinians. Its victims were 11 children taking an afternoon swim in the canal. The first blast left a crater nearly four metres deep, burying many of the swimmers deep under the orange earth. Seven of the children were injured, three critically. Three others have not been found.
’The scene was littered with small plastic sandals, several caked in blood.“ Ismael, the father of one of the children, sat on the edge of the crater, his head in his hands weeping. “Children! Children!“ he roared through his tears, “Children here! My son here.“ He stood and looked down into the crater: “Is Hizbullah here? Only children here,“ he said.’“
When he had finished his talk, Mr. Nix asked the jurors and all of us present: “What would rise you to action?
And that’s a question we all need to think about.
Kathy Kelly
ZMAG.ORG