Does Anybody Seriously Believe that Hezbollah Is Not Targeting Non-Combatants?

Does Anybody Seriously Believe that Hezbollah Is Not Targeting Non-Combatants?

by John Spritzler [http://spritzlerj.blogspot.com/]

In my previous post I asked, "Does Hezbollah TARGET Non-Combatants, Or Not?" I asked the question because I did not know the answer.

The importance of this question has nothing to do with deciding whether Israel is justified in any of its military actions (of course it is not, since their purpose is to enforce ethnic cleansing.) The question is important because, as I said in another earlier post, "Whoever is Ordering Rocket Attacks on Israeli Civilians is Objectively Collaborating with the Israeli Ruling Class."

Based on what I have read and seen recently (including a news report from July 21 of this year as well as accounts of more recent developments in the last few days) it seems evident that Hezbollah is targeting Jewish Israeli non-combatants. At least it is hard to believe they aren't, and nobody that I am aware of has presented compelling evidence that they aren't.

For example, CNN reports July 21 that,

"Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah apologized for an attack that killed two Israeli Arab children in northern Israel, saying the youngsters were "martyrs for Palestine."

In a Thursday interview with Arabic-language news network Al-Jazeera, Nasrallah accepted responsibility for the Wednesday attack, while conceding that an apology to the family was not sufficient.

"To the family that was hit in Nazareth -- on my behalf and my brothers', I apologize to this family," he said.

"Some events like that happen. At any event, those who were killed in Nazareth, we consider them martyrs for Palestine and martyrs for the nation. I pay my condolences to them."

Hezbollah rockets have killed two categories of non-combatants: Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. If none of these deaths were intended, and if they were truly only collateral consequences of attacks on military targets, then apologies would be equally appropriate and forthcoming for both the Jewish and non-Jewish victims. But as far as I can tell (please inform me if I am wrong, I would love to be proved wrong here!) Nasrallah apologized only for the latter, strongly implying that he intended his rockets to kill the former.

On July 28, CNN reported:

Thursday evening, at least five rockets struck various targets in the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona, causing several fires.

A Katyusha rocket caused a major blaze at the warehouse of a laundry detergent factory, the IDF said. Some of the rockets landed near a shopping center.

Maybe there was a legitimate military target near the detergent factory in Kiryat Shmona, or maybe the detergent factory was really a weapons factory, but it is becoming increasingly necessary to postulate more and more such "maybe"s in order to believe that Hezbollah is not targeting Jewish Israeli non-combatants.

Last night I saw Nasrallah on T.V. giving a speech. There was an English translator. Maybe the translator that CNN carried was mis-translating in order to keep the American public from knowing the true words of Nasrallah. But if the translation was correct, the unmistakable message was that Nasrallah was threatening to kill Jewish Israeli non-combatants in cities like Tel Aviv if Israel attacked Beirut.

Now we know that CNN is not exactly a staunch anti-Zionist force. Like all the pro-Israel U.S. media, CNN likes to persuade Americans that Israel is defending itself against anti-Semitism. CNN apparently felt that Nasrallah's speech would help do that, and there is no reason to think they misjudged its effect. The only question is, did CNN have to provide a phony translation to carry out this pro-Israel propaganda, or was it able to use the genuine article?

If the war were indeed what the Zionists want us to believe it is, a war of Jews against crazy anti-Semitic Arabs who have an irrational hatred of Jews, then the English translation of Nasrallah's speech that I heard on T.V. would make sense: "If you kill our civilians, we'll kill yours." In this framework, Nasrallah even comes across as shrewdly trying to occupy the moral high ground, since he was saying that if Israel does not attack civilians in Beirut he would not kill civilians in Tel Aviv, thereby making it seem that the choice was up to Israel. (I doubt CNN worried too much about this, since most people had already heard plenty about Hezbollah's previous rocket attacks on Haifa and other towns in northern Israel.)

But the war is NOT Jews against non-Jews. The Israeli ruling class does not give a damn about Jewish Israeli civilian deaths, no more than the previous generation of Zionist leaders gave a damn about European Jews dying in the holocaust; in fact the Zionist leaders back then OPPOSED rescue efforts of European Jews during the holocaust because they WANTED Jewish deaths in order to have greater standing at the post war negotiations that would determine if Palestine would become a Jewish state.

The Israeli ruling class is not weakened, but on the contrary gains strength when its civilians are frightened of Hezbollah rockets aimed at them; after all, if the Israeli ruling class were not perceived by ordinary Jews as their protectors against anti-Semitism, it would lose its ability to rule, because the whole rationale for a Jewish state would make sense to absolutely nobody, neither Jew nor anybody else. The Israeli ruling class's greatest fear is not Hezbollah rockets, but that Jews would stop fearing Arabs and (as a result) would start doing what they did the last time Jews were not pre-occupied by fear of Arabs, which was 1997 when people were optimistic about peace because of Oslo, and when the Israeli population shut down the entire state of Israel with a 7 day general strike to stop the government from taking away their pensions.

The only realistic way that ordinary people in the Middle East will ever get war-mongering ethnic-cleansing anti-democratic upper class rulers like the Israeli and American ruling classes off their backs is to 1) identify the enemy as all such upper classes and the combatants who fight for them, 2) identify friends and potential friends as non-combatants of any and all religious persuasions, 3) target violence only against the former and do everything possible to win the confidence and respect and support of the latter and 4) make it as clear as possible to everybody that the goal is a society shaped by the working class values of democracy and equality and solidarity. This is what "No War But the Class War" means. It is the only strategy that can win what millions of people want more than anything else in the world.

I would still love to have somebody convince me that Hezbollah is not targeting Jewish Israeli non-combatants. I would love to believe that in Hezbollah we have finally found an organization that can defeat apartheid Israel. I want to believe this. I just find it extremely difficult at the moment to do so.