Humiliation of Israel in South Lebanon: Unreported by Western Media

My friend Amer was commenting to me how the failed Israeli terrorist “commando” raid in South Lebanon did not receive much coverage in the Western press. It is true, failures of Israel don’t get reported in the Western media. But there are other reasons as to why this raid by Israel did not get coverage in the Western media: They don’t want to cover violations by Israel of UN Security Council Resolution 1701.

Imagine for a second that a commando unit of Hezbollah were to violate the ceasefire line and enter occupied Palestinian territory on a mission of violent/espionage nature. Can you imagine the international uproar? Can you imagine the statements by the White House and State Department spokespersons? Can you imagine the statements by EU officials? Can you imagine the reaction by the UN secretary general? Can you imagine the reactions by Western ambassadors in Lebanon? And can you imagine the reactions of the puppets of Saudi Arabia in Lebanon?

But Israel did not even hide the story although it did not reveal the nature of the terrorist mission. A terrorist state that has been accustomed to violating the Lebanese border since 1948, and which used to casually send death squads and hit-teams deep inside Beirut (and farther north), is now deterred by a volunteer resistance movement (and the ideology and foreign alliances of this movement is not relevant here). Israel was caught red-handed in the act of a terrorist violation of Lebanese territory, while UNIFIL stood by counting the stars in the skies over Lebanon. A force that was ostensibly sent to protect Lebanon from Israeli attacks (that is what they deceptively and falsely tell the Lebanese people) and to help implement Resolution 1701, did not bother to intervene and did not even make denunciatory statements or declarations. UNIFIL merely said that its role is to “identify” violations, but no more. If that is the case, why does UNIFIL need the weapons that it possesses?

Israel now operates in a different context. The Palestine Liberation Organization (for reasons largely related to Arafat’s unwillingness to create a formidable military force in Lebanon and for the collaborationist role that the Lebanese Army had played in the service of the Israeli enemy for decades prior to 1984) failed to pose a deterrent threat to Israel. Thus, the Israeli terrorist army never was reluctant to violate Lebanese air, territory, and sea in order to perpetrate espionage and terrorist attacks in Lebanon. The recent episode underlines a basic achievement of the Lebanese resistance movement (which was started – lest we forget – by communist organizations back in 1978): that Israel does not have the ability to roam freely in Lebanon, to kill and to spy. For the first time since 1948, Lebanon now has a force that protects it from Israeli aggression, and that force – shamefully for Lebanon – is not the Lebanese army, which has no heroism in its entire history, unless one counts its massacres in refugee camps or in the streets of Beirut against civilian demonstrators.

But what is quite appalling is that no Western government and no Western journalist bothered to inquire, even by raising token questions, about the purpose of the failed Israeli raid in South Lebanon. It is not related to the utter racism that lies (non-dormant) behind every Western policy in the Middle East. The potential victims of the Israeli terrorist raid would have been Arabs, while a Hezbollah raid in Israel would have resulted in the injury or death of precious Israelis. This is only one of the reasons why the failed raid did not generate media coverage (and it did not generate media coverage in the Arab oil and gas media either).

Willingly, Western media have been promoting for decades the myth of the invincible and infallible Mossad: all evidence that contradicts the propaganda myth of the Mossad has to be discarded.
But the fact remains: Israel once again was humiliated by a band of resistance volunteers (and their ideology and foreign policy alliances of their organization are totally irrelevant here) in South Lebanon. This little country with the failed state and incompetent army, and the country that Zionists always believed would be the weakest link in the Arab world, has been able to humiliate the Israeli army repeatedly on the battlefield. The country that was expected to be the first or second Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel now stands as the symbol of defiance and resistance against Israeli aggression and occupation. This – and not some silly gigantic hummus dishes or some illusory Lebanese “discoveries” of cures for cancer that an-Nahar keeps bragging about – should make the people of Lebanon proud, very proud.