The problem now is how to enforce it. If you’ll recall, the United Nations has earlier passed a resolution (No. 1559) in 2004 – also crafted by the US and France – which called for the disarming of the Hezbollah militia and the deployment of the Lebanese Army in southern Lebanon to form a buffer between the militants and Israel. Neither was done. The Hezbollah was not only permitted to keep its weapons (but, indeed, enhanced its arsenal with 12,000 rockets and missiles, and more modern weaponry), and even transmogrified into a political and social movement as well, getting 15 of its members elected to the Lebanese parliament (also numerous local positions), plus getting two members into the Cabinet, one of them in the vital post of Energy Minister.
In short, UN Resolution 1559 was totally ignored.
Why should the Israelis now believe the UN will be able to mobilize a 15,000-man strong international fighting force to enforce the projected ceasefire by occupying southern Lebanon, in tandem with the Lebanese Army which is now supposed to do the same thing, two years too late to implement UN Resolution 1559.
This is not to justify Israel’s "invasion" of Lebanon, and the horrible damage the airstrikes, bombings and shellings, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have inflicted on that helpless country’s towns, cities, roads, bridges and infrastructure.
But war is war. Thus far, about 1,000 Lebanese have been killed in those attacks, aside from scores of Hezbollah guerrilla combatants. Yet, how else can Israel strike back when 200 or more Hezbollah missiles, from Katyushas to a few longer-range rockets, are raining on Israel’s northern cities, one exploding far south as the West Bank?
"Live or die, survive or perish" was one of the elocution pieces we were compelled to commit to memory in high school. This could very well be the motto of the IDF. The IDF believes it must halt the rocketing and missile attacks which have brought northern Israel to a standstill and wrought misery and death on its inhabitants. Ditto for the Lebanese who’re being pulverized by the IDF assaults. It’s the lex talionis of the Old Testament in operation – "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."
The watching world is awaiting the Israeli Cabinet’s response to the UN Security Council call, but earlier Prime Minister Ehud Olmert already stated that the IDF would keep on slugging it out until the 15,000 UN force actually arrives and is in place in southern Lebanon. The Israelis don’t believe the Lebanese Army itself can keep the Hezbollah in check. It failed to do so in the past, not even having the gumption (nor the instructions) to disarm that powerful Shiite "army."
Neither will Hezbollah’s chief, the 46-year old Hassan Nasrallah, the movement’s secretary-general, be inclined to stop fighting. His guerrillas have been bloodied by the relentless onslaught of Israeli armor and infantry, but he himself is on a roll. Nasrallah has emerged as the new Icon of the Arab World, fighting to expel an occupier of Lebanese land and struggling to reclaim "stolen" land like, he declares, the Shebaah farms – and, perhaps (as his Syrian backers whisper, the fecund and strategic Golan Heights). Israel will never give up the Golan – so there you are. Endless conflict.
Nasrallah, whose black turban identifies him as a sayyid, a Muslim cleric who can trace his lineage back to the Prophet Muhammad, is a force in the huge Shiite community, and his main sponsor is Iran.
What Nasrallah and Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have in common is that both subscribe to the concept that Israel "must be wiped off the face of the earth." Not at talking point, really, on which Olmert and the Israeli Cabinet can negotiate.
When he visited Malaysia only a bit more than a week ago, the militant Ahmadinejad took his Kuala Lumpur sojourn as a pulpit to champion the destruction of the Jewish state once again. "Peace can come to the Middle East," he thundered, "only when there will be no Israel there."
What is disquieting is that neither of the so-called "moderate" leaders of the two East Asian nations with the biggest Muslim populations contradicted, or even playfully chided the fiery Ahmadinejad, who literally preached genocide. During the August 3 (Thursday) meeting of Muslim leaders in K.L., Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono even blamed Israel for bringing the world to "a clash of civilizations." Malaysia’s Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmed Badawi went so far as to insinuate that Israel and America were in collusion in pursuit of some "secret design" in the Middle East.
Sanamagan. Those two countries have very publicly asserted they are ready to send troops to participate in an international peacekeeping force in Lebanon. On whose side will they peace-keep? In favor of the Hezbollah, I reckon – wouldn’t you judging from their public remarks? I submit Israel won’t accept such peacekeepers even wearing the blue helmets of the United Nations.
Israel is just a tiny sliver of a country, no more than 75 miles wide by 260 miles long, with a population of only 6.1 million Jews. The Jews feel that ranged against them are one billion Muslims around the globe, while they can count on the support overseas of only 13 million Jews. The odds are a bit daunting, wouldn’t you say?
David, even with his powerful sling, is growing tired – and old. The Goliaths are multiplying, even as I write. And Iran may soon be able to match Israel in possessing a nuclear bomb.
In sum, the Jews have their back to the wall – literally their Wailing Wall, the ruin of the old Temple in Jerusalem. They feel themselves surrounded by hostile nations, with Muslim populations whose wish is to eradicate them, not just expel them from the land they now hold.
In hopelessness and fury, they have resolved to spare no enemies, or their civilian supporters, in the struggle to survive.
"Break their bones" was the order to his troops by the sainted Yitzhak Rabin, then commander-in-chief, during the first Palestinian Intifada. This was six years before Rabin, following the historic handshake of peace with the Palestinians’ Yasser Arafat in the Clinton White House, became an Apostle of Reconciliation and later Martyr for Peace.
The Israelis, when they created their state in 1948, had determined to become a New Kind of Jew. A Jew, they pointed out, very different from the European Jews whom the secular-minded Zionist founders knew and criticized – different, in truth, from all the Jews since the Middle Ages. As Pulitzer Prize winner (for his Middle East reporting) Richard Ben Cramer (TIME, Newsweek, The New York Times and Rolling Stone Magazine) put it: "The New Jew would be a farmer, a miner, or a laboring man, and tough, no more cowering with the holy books behind the temple wall, while the Cossacks or Nazis, or (in this case) the Arabs rained death down on them . . . . This Jew would be a fighter, a stoic, a Spartan."
This is why IDF soldiers wear on their shoulder a patch vowing, "Massada will not fall again!" (Massada was a mountain fortress of Jewish zealots resisting Roman occupation – and when the Legions finally threatened to overwhelm it, every man and woman left alive committed suicide, first killing their own children to make sure their suicide pact was complete).
About two years ago, our Ambassador to Budapest, former Manila Standard Publisher, went to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi death camp in Oswiecim, Poland, which has become the symbol of the Holocaust. In that concentration camp, more than 1.1 million Jews had been beaten and ultimately gassed to death, after being herded there along with 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Romani (gypsies), 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and 25,000 prisoners of other nationalities. At the entrance to that camp, on top of the entry arch were the lying words: "Arbeit Macht Frei." (Work Makes You Free). False. There was no hope for freedom for the doomed Jewish prisoners – men, women and kids.
What startled Andy and this writer was the fact Auschwitz was crowded with Jews, this time hundreds of young Israelis in white smocks or jackets, each embossed with the blue Star of David. These visitors turned out to be high school kids and their teachers, all sent on grants from the government in Jerusalem to see for themselves how 1.1 million (of the six million Jews eliminated by the Nazis) perished. At the edge of each eye, we noticed the glisten of a tear. Those kids, no doubt, returned to Israel with the pledge that the same thing would never be inflicted on them – or their siblings and parents, or their own children.
Thus is that terrible and terrifying war machine, the IDF, forged in steel, honed to sharpness on the cutting edge of memory.
A ceasefire in Lebanon? The Israeli Cabinet has approved it unanimously, Hezbollah too, with reservation.Will the shooting stop?
With an attitude like that, how can any anti-terrorism law be approved. When I talked to Senate President Manny Villar two days ago, he said that the bill’s chief objector, Sen. Serge Osmeña, was "coming around," and needed only a few more days to reconcile in his mind the idea that the GMA government would not mis-use the tougher strictures contained in the bill.
Senator Ralph Recto, over dinner in the Tower Club, said that he was unsure Villar’s optimism over "soon getting that measure passed in the upper chamber was anchored in reality. He didn’t think Serge was ready to "agree", even at this late stage. And now comes Pimentel, throwing a new spanner into the works.
That Anti-Terrorism Law is long overdue. The House of Representatives approved its own version last April 5. The Senate has stonewalled on it – and may do so till kingdom come. What a silly state of affairs. The "terrorists" are in no danger – except of laughing themselves to death.
This is a nation, sorry to say, where politics is paramount, edging out by its histrionics even matters of life and death. As for "human rights" being trampled by the anti-terrorist measure – what about the right of the terrorists’ victims, whether from bombing or the bullet, to life?
C’mon boys and girls. Approve that anti-terrorism law. Give our soldiers and policemen, who risk their own lives on the frontlines, the legal backing they need and deserve. Somos o no somos? Manuel L. Quezon and his generation, in the Golden Yesterday, used to challenge their peers on every issue. Are you on the side of the "terrorists" – or on the side of law and order? It sounds both trite and jejeune to have to put it that way – but it’s the only way.