A terrible thought occurs to me - that there will be another 9/11
Robert Fisk
Published: 05 August 2006
The Independent

The room shook. Not since the 1983 earthquake has my apartment rockedfrom side to side. That was the force of the Israeli explosions in thesouthern suburbs of Beirut - three miles from my home - and the airpressure changed in the house yesterday morning and outside in thestreet the palm trees moved.Is it to be like this every day? How many civilians can you makehomeless before you start a revolution? And what is next? Are theIsraelis to bomb the centre of Beirut? The Corniche? Is this why allthe foreign warships came and took their citizens away, to make Beirutsafe to destroy?Yesterday, needless to say, was another day of massacres, great andsmall. The largest appeared to be 40 farm workers in northern Lebanon,some of them Kurds - a people who do not even have a country. AnIsraeli missile was reported to have exploded among them as theyloaded vegetables on to a refrigerated truck near Al-Qaa, a smallvillage east of Hermel in the far north. The wounded were taken tohospital in Syria because the roads of Lebanon have now all beencratered by Israeli bomb-bursts. Later we learnt that an air strike ona house in the village of Taibeh in the south had killed sevencivilians and wounded 10 seeking shelter from attack.In Israel two civilians were killed by Hizbollah missiles but, asusual, Lebanon bore the brunt of the day's attacks which centred -incredibly - on the Christian heartland that has traditionally showngreat sympathy towards Israel. It was the Christian Maronite communitywhose Phalangist militiamen were Israel's closest allies in its 1982invasion of Lebanon yet Israel's air force yesterday attacked threehighway bridges north of Beirut and - again as usual - it was thelittle people who died.One of them was Joseph Bassil, 65, a Christian man who had gone out onhis daily jogging exercise with four friends north of Jounieh. "Hisfriends packed up after four rounds of the bridge because it was hot,"a member of his family told us later. "Joseph decided to do one morejog on the bridge. That was what killed him." The Israelis gave noreason for the attacks - no Hizbollah fighters would ever enter thisChristian Maronite stronghold and the only hindrance was caused tohumanitarian convoys - and there were growing fears in Lebanon thatthe latest air raids were a sign of Israel's frustration rather anyserious military planning.Indeed, as the Lebanon war continues to destroy innocent lives - mostof them Lebanese - the conflict seems to be increasingly aimless. TheIsraeli air force has succeeded in killing perhaps 50 Hizbollahmembers and 600 civilians and has destroyed bridges, milk factories,gas stations, fuel storage depots, airport runways and thousands ofhomes. But to what purpose?Does the United States any longer believe Israel's claims that it willdestroy Hizbollah when its army clearly cannot do anything of thekind? Does Washington not realise that when Israel grows tired of thiswar, it will plead for a ceasefire - which only Washington can deliverby doing what it most loathes to do: by taking the road to Damascusand asking for help from President Bashar al-Assad of Syria?What in the meanwhile is happening to Lebanon? Bridges and buildingscan be reconstructed - with European Union loans, no doubt - but manyLebanese are now questioning the institutions of the democracy forwhich the US was itself so full of praise last year. What is the pointof a democratically elected Lebanese government which cannot protectits people? What is the point of a 75,000-member Lebanese army whichcannot protect its nation, which cannot be sent to the border, whichdoes not fire on Lebanon's enemies and which cannot disarm Hizbollah?Indeed, for many Lebanese Shias, Hizbollah is now the Lebanese army.So fierce has been Hizbollah's resistance - and so determined itsattacks on Israeli ground troops in Lebanon - that many people here nolonger recall that it was Hizbollah which provoked this latest war bycrossing the border on 12 July, killing three Israeli soldiers andcapturing two others. Israel's threats of enlarging the conflict evenfurther are now met with amusement rather than horror by a Lebanesepopulation which has been listening to Israel's warnings for 30 yearswith ever greater weariness. And yet they fear for their lives. If TelAviv is hit, will Beirut be spared. Or if central Beirut is hit, willTel Aviv be spared? Hizbollah now uses Israel's language of an eye foran eye. Every Israeli taunt is met by a Hizbollah taunt.And do the Israelis realise that they are legitimising Hizbollah, thata rag-tag army of guerrillas is winning its spurs against an Israeliarmy and air force whose targets - if intended - prove them to be warcriminals and if unintended suggest that they are a rif-raff littlebetter than the Arab armies they have been fighting, on and off, formore than half a century? Extraordinary precedents are being set inthis Lebanon war.In fact, one of the most profound changes in the region these pastthree decades has been the growing unwillingness of Arabs to beafraid. Their leaders - our "moderate" pro-Western Arab leaders suchas King Abdullah of Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt - may beafraid. But their peoples are not. And once a people have lost theirterror, they cannot be re-injected with fear. Thus Israel's consistentpolicy of smashing Arabs into submission no longer works. It is apolicy whose bankruptcy the Americans are now discovering in Iraq.And all across the Muslim world, "we" - the West, America, Israel -are fighting not nationalists but Islamists. And watching themartyrdom of Lebanon this week - its slaughtered children in Qanapacked into plastic bags until the bags ran out and their corpses hadto be wrapped in carpets - a terrible and daunting thought occurs tome, day by day. That there will be another 9/11.