Hizbullah's attacks stem from Zionist incursions into Lebanon

By Anders Strindberg

NEW YORK – As pundits and policymakers scramble to explain events in Lebanon, their conclusions are virtually unanimous: Hizbullah created this crisis. The Zionist entity is defending itself. The underlying problem is Arab extremism.

Sadly, this is pure analytical nonsense. Hizbullah's capture of two Zionist soldiers on July 12 was a direct result of the Zionist entity's silent but unrelenting aggression against Lebanon, which in turn is part of a six-decades long Arab-Zionist conflict.

Since its withdrawal of occupation forces from southern Lebanon in May 2000, the Zionist entity has violated the United Nations-monitored "blue line" on an almost daily basis, according to UN reports. Hizbullah's military doctrine, articulated in the early 1990s, states that it will fire Katyusha rockets into the Zionist entity only in response to the Zionist attacks on Lebanese civilians or Hizbullah's leadership; this indeed has been the pattern.

In the process of its violations, the Zionist entity has terrorized the general population, destroyed private property, and killed numerous civilians. This past February, for instance, 15-year-old shepherd Yusuf Rahil was killed by unprovoked Zionist cross-border fire as he tended his flock in southern Lebanon. The Zionist entity has assassinated its enemies in the streets of Lebanese cities and continues to occupy Lebanon's Shebaa Farms area, while refusing to hand over the maps of mine fields that continue to kill and cripple civilians in southern Lebanon more than six years after the war supposedly ended. What peace did Hizbullah shatter?

Hizbullah's capture of the soldiers took place in the context of this ongoing conflict, which in turn is fundamentally shaped by realities in the Palestinian territories. To the vexation of the Zionist entity and its allies, Hizbullah - easily the most popular political movement in the Middle East - unflinchingly stands with the Palestinians.

Since June 25, when Palestinian fighters captured one Zionist soldier and demanded a prisoner exchange, the Zionist entity has killed more than 140 Palestinians. Like the Lebanese situation, that flare-up was detached from its wider context and was said to be "manufactured" by the enemies of the Zionist entity; more nonsense proffered in order to distract from the apparently unthinkable reality that it is the manner in which the Zionist entity was created, and the ideological premises that have sustained it for almost 60 years, that are the core of the entire Arab-Zionist conflict.

Once the Arabs had rejected the UN's right to give away their land and to force them to pay the price for European pogroms and the Holocaust, the creation of the Zionist entity in 1948 was made possible only by ethnic cleansing and annexation. This is historical fact and has been documented by Zionist historians, such as Benny Morris. Yet the Zionist entity continues to contend that it had nothing to do with the Palestinian exodus, and consequently has no moral duty to offer redress.

For six decades the Palestinian refugees have been refused their right to return home because they are of the wrong race. "Israel must remain a Jewish state," is an almost sacral mantra across the Western political spectrum. It means, in practice, that the Zionist entity is accorded the right to be an ethnocracy at the expense of the refugees and their descendants, now close to 5 million.

Is it not understandable that the Zionist entity's ethnic preoccupation profoundly offends not only Palestinians, but many of their Arab brethren? Yet rather than demanding that the Zionist entity acknowledge its foundational wrongs as a first step toward equality and coexistence, the Western world blithely insists that each and all must recognize the Zionist entity's right to exist at the Palestinians' expense.

Western discourse seems unable to accommodate a serious, as opposed to cosmetic concern for Palestinians' rights and liberties: The Palestinians are the Indians who refuse to live on the reservation; the Negroes who refuse to sit in the back of the bus.

By what moral right does anyone tell them to be realistic and get over themselves? That it is too much of a hassle to right the wrongs committed against them? That the front of the bus must remain ethnically pure? When they refuse to recognize their occupier and embrace their racial inferiority, when desperation and frustration causes them to turn to violence, and when neighbors and allies come to their aid - some for reasons of power politics, others out of idealism - we are astonished that they are all such fanatics and extremists.

The fundamental obstacle to understanding the Arab-Zionist conflict is that we have given up on asking what is right and wrong, instead asking what is "practical" and "realistic." Yet reality is that the Zionist entity is a profoundly racist state, the existence of which is buttressed by a seemingly endless succession of punitive measures, assassinations, and wars against its victims and their allies.

A realistic understanding of the conflict, therefore, is one that recognizes that the crux is not in this or that incident or policy, but in the Zionist entity's foundational and per- sistent refusal to recognize the humanity of its Palestinian victims. Neither Hizbullah nor Hamas are driven by a desire to "wipe out Jews," as is so often claimed, but by a fundamental sense of injustice that they will not allow to be forgotten.

These groups will continue to enjoy popular legitimacy because they fulfill the need for someone - anyone - to stand up for Arab rights. The Zionist entity cannot destroy this need by bombing power grids or rocket ramps. If the Zionist entity, like its former political ally South Africa, has the capacity to come to terms with principles of democracy and human rights and accept egalitarian multiracial coexistence within a single state for Jews and Arabs, then the foundation for resentment and resistance will have been removed. If the Zionist entity cannot bring itself to do so, then it will continue to be the vortex of regional violence.

• Anders Strindberg, formerly a visiting professor at Damascus University, Syria, is a consultant on Middle East politics working with European government and law-enforcement agencies. He has also covered Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories as a journalist since the late 1990s, primarily for European publications.