BY MARTÍN KOPPEL
The governments of Israel, Lebanon, and Syria agreed April 26 to a cease-fire between the Israeli military and Lebanese resistance fighters. The unsigned "understanding," patched together with Washington's intervention, came after Israeli forces waged a 16-day bombing campaign that left much of southern Lebanon in rubble and displaced almost half a million people.
Despite overwhelming air power, Tel Aviv was unable to crush Hezbollah and other groups fighting the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. Armed skirmishes flared up days after the cease-fire began.
Under the agreement, Hezbollah and other armed groups in Lebanon are not to launch rockets into Israel, and Tel Aviv's forces will not fire weapons at civilians in Lebanon. The two sides in the conflict are not to target civilians or to launch armed attacks from residential and industrial areas - a charge the Israeli government made against Hezbollah. In an admission it will not end the fighting in Israeli-occupied south Lebanon, the understanding allows "self-defense" by either side.
The U.S., French, Israeli, Syrian, and Lebanese governments constituted a "monitoring group" to supervise the cease-fire. The agreement also calls for resuming negotiations between Tel Aviv and Damascus and starting Israeli-Lebanese talks.
"This agreement is going to break down eventually," remarked one Israeli official quoted in the Wall Street Journal. "The question is how quickly?"
"This is a short-term agreement. It will solve problems for maybe the next three months if we're lucky," said Lebanese foreign minister Fares Bouez. He emphasized that the Hezbollah-led resistance will continue to fight "as long as Israel remains in part of Lebanon." Tel Aviv has occupied a nine-mile-wide swath across southern Lebanon since its bloody 1982 invasion.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said his organization would abide by the cease-fire. But "what was decided today won't stop the resistance," he declared. "We have the right to defend our country."
According to an April 26 Wall Street Journal report, "Israeli officials conceded that despite over two weeks of intense shelling of Lebanese cities that drove 400,000 civilians out of their homes, the army had failed to greatly damage either Hezbollah's firing capability or its military infrastructure."
What's more, Hezbollah fighters have gained enormous stature throughout the country for standing up to Tel Aviv. "Hezbollah is fighting for our land," said Hussein Nehli, a resident of the southern town of Nabatiye. "We are all Hezbollah." Journalist Sarkis Naoum noted, "People see a sign of Lebanese dignity and Arab dignity in Hezbollah. Nobody else is fighting but them."
Hezbollah was formed in response to the 1982 invasion when thousands of revolutionary volunteer fighters from Iran went to Lebanon to help combat the Zionist army. The guerrilla organization is based largely among the Shiite Muslim peasantry in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah, whose declared purpose is to drive Israeli forces out of Lebanon, has also won support because of its broad network of hospitals and low-cost social services in the country. The party has eight members in Parliament.
The Israeli onslaught and the resistance to it have forged a heightened Lebanese solidarity cutting across deep religious and political divisions. As thousands of people streamed back to their demolished homes in the south following the cease-fire, funerals for victims of the Israeli attacks turned into angry political demonstrations uniting Sunni and Shiite Muslims as well as Christians.
At the April 30 funeral procession for 90 people killed in the Israeli bombing of a United Nations refugee camp in Qana, in the south, thousands of mourners marched behind Muslim clergymen and Catholic bishops. They chanted "Death to Israel" and "Death to America" as the bodies were lowered into a mass grave.
"Now we have a common enemy," Assad Deab, president of the Lebanese University in Beirut, told a reporter.
The government of Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres is seeking to portray its military assault and the cease-fire agreement as a victory. However, as New York Times reporter Serge Schmemann commented in an April 27 news analysis, "Israel emerged with its image tarnished by the terrible carnage at the United Nations camp and the impression that it waged a deliberate campaign against civilians and economic targets."
Inside Israel, the government and big-business media have whipped up a patriotic campaign to garner public support for the war. Some Israeli Jews, however, were repulsed by the government's actions. "We're not supposed to make war on women and children," an elderly woman in Tel Aviv told a Times reporter.
Washington moved in to demonstrate its support for the Peres government and negotiate a cease-fire. The Clinton administration has barely bothered to hide its effort to boost Peres and help him win the close-fought May 29 elections, contested by the conservative opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu. Clinton toasted Peres April 30 in Washington, where they signed an "antiterrorist" accord. The U.S. government agreed to provide the Israeli military with an early warning system to detect Katyusha rockets fired from Lebanon.
Syndicated columnist William Safire applauded Clinton for being even more pro-Israeli than his Republican predecessor. "The unwavering support shown by the United States after Israel was drawn into shelling Hezbollah rocket launchers near a U.N. compound stands in welcome contrast to the condemnation routinely heaped on Israel by Bush administration Arabists," Safire stated, referring to Clinton's refusal to criticize Tel Aviv for the massacre of civilians at Qana.
Meanwhile, the sniping between Washington and Paris over their intervention in the Mideast crisis continued after the cease-fire, which both imperialist rivals took credit for. U.S. secretary of state Warren Christopher was infuriated with French foreign minister Hervé de Charette's competing negotiating efforts. While Peres was clinking glasses in Washington, French prime minister Jacques Chirac invited Lebanese president Elias Hrawi to Paris.
The assault on Lebanon sparked deep outrage among Palestinians, including within Israel. In Nazareth cops fired tear gas to disperse hundreds of demonstrators who blocked the main street to protest the bombing. Residents pelted police with bottles and stones.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian group Hamas rejected the move by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leadership to change its founding charter, as it had agreed to do in the 1993 peace accords at the insistence of Washington and Tel Aviv. At an April 24 meeting in Gaza City, the Palestine National Council voted 504- 54 to remove clauses in its charter that call for a revolutionary struggle to overthrow the Zionist state and establish a united, democratic Palestine.
"The Zionists are fooling themselves if they think the process of resistance and the struggle against the occupation will cease," said Hamas spokesman Ibrahim Ghosheh. Hamas called for "an intensified resistance against the Zionist occupation."