Lies, ignorance and racism: 34 days of humiliation for Israel

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I finished yesterday during flying and waiting at airports the book 34 Days: Israel, Hizbollah, and the War in Lebanon by Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff.

I am reviewing it for the Journal of Palestine Studies so I will unload there but I will say a few things. Where do I begin. It is fair to say that Israeli writings on the Arab world (we need not to never refer to it as Israeli Orientalism because I do have respect for classical Orientalism, notwithstanding its political and methodological problems--I mean it would be insulting to knowledge and scholarship to compare Raphael Patai or Itamar Rabonovich to Ignaz Goldziher or Maxime Rodinson or Louis Massignon, etc) is characterized by:

1) utter racism for Arabs;

2) ignorance on basic facts and realities and the collection of large number of errors and mistakes in one book;

3) horrible language skills;

4) the ease in which authors lie and fabricate to serve Israeli propaganda interests;

5) conflation between the pseudo-scholarship and the stance of the Israeli government--whichever it is.

This is a book that should have carried the stamp of the Israeli Ministry of Offense and may be distributed for free by Israeli embassies. I can't imagine Arab intellectuals (the ones with standing and I am not talking about the servants of the House of Saud) having this subservience to the ministry of defense of their country. It would be discrediting for them. And to lie with such ease?

Every encounter in which the Israeli terrorist troops were humiliated is made into a heroic stance by the Israelis, including the battles of Marun Ar-Ras and Bin Jubayl. At Bint Jubayl, the ambush is not an ambush, according to these two authors. And the entire account is replete with references to Arabs comparable to references to blacks in books in the US in the 19th century. They even justify the murder of Arab civilians:

"The killing of innocent people, it would seem, is part of the price of war." (p. 161). Notice they said the killing and not the accidental killing. But this book really portrays a fight between Israelis and animals. And how they lie. Remember when Edward Said threw a rock at Israel from south Lebanon?

The two authors described the incident as follows: "Professor Edward Said went to the Fatma Gate to be photographed, seated in his wheelchair, tossing a stone at an Israeli soldier."(p. 39) (The picture of the stone throwing appears above--do you see a wheelchair?)

Their account of Lebanese politics and Hizbullah is so ill-informed. But they make it clear that they are covering only one side. They have no intention to cover a war from both sides: they refer to a few MEMRI translations of Nasrallah's speeches to account for the lack of balance in coverage. Oh, no: they did to the other side; they interviewed Arab journalist "N.", as they called him, because he visited Lebanon.

Their accounts of the heroism of the Israeli soldiers is rather laughable but only if you forget that those soldiers are famous for killing women and children. And to justify the killing of women and children those two authors simply invent and lie and fabricate: On Qana massacre they say that "Convincing evidence was available that Hizbullah had brought in bodies of victims of other bombings in order to intensify the impact.(p. 162).

They don't tell you that the evidence is and the book does not bother with documentation of the lies and fabrication. Of course, journalists and international relief workers were at the scene right away and Hizbullah would not have had the chance to do what they say they did. But there are funny bits in the book: funny if you are into killing of civilians, as the authors and the bulk of the Israeli public is. In cabinet meeting, the Israeli Attorney General Meni Mazuz was asked about killing civilians, and his Zionist legal opinion was that: "international law allowed harming civilians..." (p. 86) And the book is so propagandistic that it omits all the embarrassing episodes of Israeli terrorist operations, like the kidnapping of a farmer because his name was Hasan Nasrallah, or the claim that three Iranian soldiers were found in South Lebanon. And you read the book and confirm to yourself that the Israeli media (and much of scholarship--hence the necessity of the boycott--complete and unconditional) are mere arms of the state military/intelligence apparatus.

Look here: "The Northern Command decided to turn to the [Israeli] media" (p. 7), i.e., to use them to plant stories. Lebanese and Arabs should read this book: there are important revelations. The Saudis urging for a continuation of the war, Saudi Arabia and UAE sending love messages to Israel, Sanyurah sending messages through the French to the Israelis during the war, the utmost concern in the US and Israel for the status of Sanyurah, the clear symmetry between Sanyurah's seven points and Israeli goals during the war, etc. And the mistakes in names and places can fill pages: Husayn Rahhal (a media official in Hizbullah) is identified as "Hussein Rachel" (p. 102), and did you know that a Lebanese politician by the name of "Bashar Gemayel" was "liquidated" during the Batata Revolution (p. 266); they keep referring to a village in South Lebanon by the name of "Randoria" and there is no such village by that name there, unless they mean Ghanduriyyah; and did you know that the Supreme Leader in Iran is called "Haminai" (p. 257). Kid you not. Israel will not go down in one blow: the chance existed and missed back in 1948 and 1967.

The defeat of Israel will be cumulative: one military humiliation after the other. You read the book and conclude: that Hizbullah really knew how to skillfully fight, humiliate, and outsmart the Israeli war machine in this war, and you confirm to yourself that, as Avi Shlaim (with whom I disagree on several things, like his support for Oslo and his love affair with the Hashemites of Jordan) described it in his new book, Israel and Palestine, "Israel has become “a rogue state”: it “habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism—the use of violence against civilians for political purposes.”

Posted by As'ad at 7:48 AM