Guardian Special

Guardian:
The summit fails. War rages

· 14 IDF soldiers killed
· Surprise at Hizbullah strength
· US-UK block ceasefire move

Ewen MacAskill and Ian Black in Jerusalem and Rory McCarthy in Haifa
Thursday July 27, 2006

Israel yesterday suffered its worst day since the Lebanon conflict began when 14 of its soldiers were believed to have been killed in fighting with Hizbullah, a military calamity that could prove to be a turning point in the war

The setback appeared to unnerve Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister. Less than a day after he had vowed to fight Hizbullah to the end, he yesterday spoke for a need for a quick end to the conflict. The Israeli military has been taken by surprise by the ferocity of Hizbullah's resistance and may have to rethink its strategy.

Last night Mr Olmert called an emergency meeting of his generals as General Udi Adam, head of the Israeli army's northern command, said fighting in Lebanon could continue for several more weeks. Israel confirmed that eight soldiers were killed and 22 injured in a fierce battle with Hizbullah fighters at Bint Jbeil in southern Lebanon. The death toll was expected to rise to at least 13.

Later, it emerged that an Israeli officer was killed in Maroun el-Ras, a village the army had moved in to over the weekend. Four other soldiers were injured.

Even before the scale of casualties was disclosed there had been growing disquiet in Israel over the failure to stop rocket attacks on the north of the country - more than 100 landed yesterday - and the absence of a significant victory against the Shia guerrillas in more than two weeks of fighting. Israel Radio said yesterday's casualties marked a potential turning point for public opinion, which has so far been strongly in favour of the war.

Fighting escalated on both sides as the much-vaunted peace conference in Rome broke up after failing to reach agreement to call for an immediate ceasefire. Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, backed by Margaret Beckett, the foreign secretary, resisted calls from 13 other countries, as well as the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, for such a ceasefire.

Ms Rice said: "We have to have a plan that will actually create conditions in which we can have a ceasefire that will be sustainable." Mrs Beckett said: "Even if you could get a ceasefire half an hour ago, you would probably be back in hostilities in a few days."

The summit ended in failure, issuing only a joint statement in support of sending an international force into Lebanon under a UN mandate but without any specifics of which countries might contribute troops. Diplomats, who have failed to come up with a solution after two weeks of fighting, now head back to the UN security council but no discussion is likely there until next week.

In another setback for Israel, Mr Olmert yesterday had to apologise for the deaths of four UN observers, killed by Israeli shelling at a border post, after protests from the international community.

In a seeming U-turn, Mr Olmert signalled that he would make do with a weakened Hizbullah rather than one that had been completely disarmed. "We want to stop the operation as fast as possible," Mr Olmert told MPs, "but we will not do so until we achieve the results which would justify the price we have paid and which would prevent us paying a price which we cannot pay."

Israel has hundreds of troops in southern Lebanon fighting house to house, and village to village, in an attempt to create a buffer zone that they hope will be filled by a multinational peacekeeping force some time in the future.

Israel tried to balance its losses by claiming that Hizbullah had lost scores of men in the heavy fighting which was continuing as night fell. Hizbullah, which is heavily armed, has reportedly mined all approaches from Israel. The guerrillas are said to have sophisticated roadside bombs of the type used against US and British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Israeli analysts predicted there will be a change in military strategy following the latest casualties. "There will be pressure from the public for a change of strategy. This will be a shock," the military commentator Ron Ben-Yishai said.

A more far-reaching possibility is to move straight to the search for a deal that would have to include negotiations with Syria, Hizbullah's chief ally after Iran, as well as a prisoner swap.

"We have had two weeks of fighting and we are still at a draw," said one Israeli opposition MP. "We have not been able to destroy all the launchers. There is the danger of sinking back into the Lebanese quagmire ... If our goal is not to destroy Hizbullah we have to think about diplomatic means and bring Syria into negotiations. At the moment we have no exit strategy."

Two Israeli missiles last night struck a seven-storey building in the centre of Tyre injuring 12 people, including six children, hospital officials said. The building was used as a Hizbullah community centre and included a school. In Gaza, Israeli forces killed 21 Palestinians, including three children.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1831110,00.html

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Israel's heaviest losses fuel doubts over strategy

· Soldiers were trying to take border town
· Offensive predicted to last several weeks

Rory McCarthy in Haifa, Suzanne Goldenberg in Tyre and Ian Black in Jerusalem
Thursday July 27, 2006

Growing evidence that the ground battle in Lebanon will be far tougher than Israel had expected emerged yesterday after firefights against Hizbullah in two border villages left Israeli troops counting their highest death toll in a single day since the conflict began.

Up to 13 Israeli soldiers were killed and many more wounded yesterday in the southern Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil during the fiercest battle so far in the Middle East conflict. Nearby, in the village of Maroun el-Ras, which troops had entered at the weekend, an Israeli officer was reported killed.

Last night the city of Tyre was hit in a major Israeli air strike. Sixteen people, including six children, were injured when a seven-storey building that had been used as a Hizbullah community centre collapsed.

In Bint Jbeil, Israeli troops ran into large numbers of heavily armed Hizbullah fighters when they tried to sweep through the town, just two and a half miles from the Israeli border.

"We have got very intense fighting, house to house, room to room," a spokesman for the Israeli military said last night. He refused to give full casualty figures but said there were "many seriously injured Israelis". Reports put the number of dead and injured at 30.

Troops found a large cache of Hizbullah weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades, automatic assault rifles and ammunition. The spokesman said: "This indicates they were planning on holding out much longer." He said more than 200 Hizbullah fighters had been killed since the conflict began.

Israel's northern command chief said the offensive in Lebanon was still not nearing its end. "I assume it will continue for several more weeks and in a number of weeks we will be able to declare a victory," Major General Udi Adam said.

The heaviest fighting yesterday came as troops tried to capture an important hilltop at Bint Jbeil. Hizbullah said its fighters had ambushed an Israeli unit that was moving from a ridge towards the town. "Our men can hear the screams of their wounded calling for help," one Hizbullah source told Reuters.

Israeli troops had taken some areas in Bint Jbeil, but not the whole town. "The bodies of the soldiers remained on the ground amid the destroyed and burning vehicles," said an announcer on Hizbullah's television channel, al-Manar.

Many of the Israeli injured had to wait hours under heavy fire before they could be evacuated. Helicopters eventually flew them to hospital in Haifa.

"We knew well that we are entering a dangerous nest and the nest needs to be taken care of slowly," Major Tzvika Golan, an Israeli spokesman, told reporters.

Before the conflict erupted two weeks ago, Bint Jbeil was a small town of about 20,000 people but one regarded by Israeli commanders as symbolically crucial for Hizbullah. Its leader, the cleric Hassan Nasrullah, made an important speech in the town in 2000, shortly after the Israeli military withdrew from southern Lebanon. Israeli officers describe it as the "terror capital" and say it is an important logistics base for the militia.

But yesterday's fighting confirms an emerging sense within Israel that the ground battle is proving far tougher than expected. Before yesterday, 24 Israeli troops had been killed and 79 injured.

General Yiftah Ron-Tal, a former commander of Israeli land forces, told Israel Radio: "You can't fight a battle like that without taking losses. The question is whether the mission has been accomplished. We had no choice but to fight there. This kind of position can't be taken without using ground troops. The enemy is well trained and knows the terrain well."

One armoured brigade colonel told the Jerusalem Post that the operation to capture Bint Jbeil had been expected to last between 48 and 72 hours. It has now run for four days.

Early this morning Israel reportedly attacked a Lebanese army base at Aamchit, 30 miles north of Beirut. It was not clear whether the base had been attacked from the air or the sea. Hizbullah fired about 130 rockets into Israel yesterday, injuring at least 31 people.

The casualties

Israeli

Yesterday:

Civilian wounded 9

Military deaths 14

Since outbreak:

Military deaths 38

Civilian deaths 18

Wounded 390+

Lebanese

Yesterday:

No reported deaths

Civilian wounded 16

Since outbreak:

Military deaths 20

Hizbullah deaths 31

Civilian deaths 391

Wounded 1,550+

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1831157,00.html

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The T-shirt seller of Beirut

The inhabitants of the Lebanese capital are making the most of a terrible situation, despite official incompetence and Israel's continuing air campaign

Brian Whitaker
Thursday July 27, 2006

The Phoenicians were the greatest traders of the ancient world and the Lebanese are their descendants. In Lebanon, every situation - no matter how dire - is an opportunity for someone to do business.

Ammar runs a shop selling decorative inlaid boxes, hubble-bubble pipes, necklaces, keffiyehs (cotton headdresses), historical-looking artefacts and just about anything else that a tourist in Beirut might be induced to buy.

"You can't be selling much at the moment," I suggested after he had almost dragged me inside.

"You'd be surprised," he said.

Only the other day, a Hungarian diplomat who was due to leave Beirut had called in and spent $500 (£270) on souvenirs.

Ammar gave me his business card. "Ammar Stores - exporter," it said. "Abaya factory, oriental gifts, leather goods, all kinds of ladies' wear."

His latest line of business, with samples proudly draped over a traffic sign in the street, is T-shirts. They are printed on the back with this message:

PRESS DON'T SHOOT

"If you don't like the words I can print something different," he persisted. "You want a car and driver? I can get you one. Very reasonable price."

He took out a photograph from a folder and laid it on the counter. It showed a dark-haired young man wearing another T-shirt, this time labelled "BBC".

"1982," he said - the year Israel invaded Lebanon.

"And who is that in the picture?" I asked, not immediately recognising the face.

"Me," he said. "I was working for the BBC. I know Tim Llewellyn. I took some stupid risks at that time. I wouldn't do it now."

Sadly, Ammar's spirit of go-getting enterprise doesn't extend to large parts of the Lebanese government, especially where people fleeing the bombs (officially known as "internally displaced persons" or IDPs) are concerned.

It is now one week since Nayla Mouawad, the social affairs minister, told a press conference of her plans to set up tents for them in sports grounds and other open spaces. On Tuesday, she informed another press conference that the tents had yet to arrive from Switzerland. The ministry also seems to be having problems with staff who are unable or unwilling to turn up for work.

In the meantime, individuals and non-governmental organisations have been taking the initiative. On Tuesday, I visited Zico House, which has become the hub for voluntary relief efforts in central Beirut.

Zico House used to be a sort of arts centre which also housed various radical and leftist groups such as the Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections, Haya Bina ("Let's Get Going!") and Helem, the only openly functioning gay and lesbian organisation in the Arab world.

Helem's office is still recognisable from the posters promoting safer sex and another in rainbow colours saying "No pride in occupation", but as soon as the war started it was turned over to the relief effort.

As I arrived at Zico House, they were preparing to distribute a consignment of cooking oil. A van was parked outside and a long line of people rapidly passing the oil containers from hand to hand stretched from the van into the building and way up the stairs.

In the back yard, there were piles of newly-donated clothes and volunteers sorting them into boxes labelled "skirts - long", "pyjamas - men", "shorts - men", etc.

In the kitchen, I found Rhea, with a ring through her lip, and Aida (punk-style pants and hair dyed in an interesting pattern) along with two other young women, grappling with a vast pan of spaghetti to feed the volunteers. They said it was their first experience of cooking and I could quite believe it. As the pasta began to stick to the pan they admitted it wasn't a huge success.

This particular relief effort, which now comprises some 40 different groups, goes by the name of Samidoun ("Steadfast"), and most of its volunteers are in their 20s and 30s.

It may look a bit chaotic but it's actually highly organised, using computers to keep track of people's needs. Volunteer helpers present themselves to a man with a laptop who assigns them a task.

Having spent three months in Beirut last year during the so-called Cedar Revolution, I decided this week to call some of my old contacts and find out what had happened to them.

When I called Magda, a university teacher, her phone wasn't working. I thought she might have gone to her home up in the mountains but someone told me later she had got fed up with Lebanon and emigrated to the United States.

Dina, who works for a publishing company, was still here in her office, so I dropped round for coffee. I found her alone, trying to start up a computer. She was coming to the office every day, she said, not because she had much work to do but mainly to get away from the family.

Like many Lebanese, her home is now crammed with relatives from the south; there aren't enough mattresses to go round, it's hard to get any sleep and with so many people cooped up in the same small space it doesn't take much to start the kids screaming and the aunts and cousins bickering. It sounds like a particularly bad family Christmas - except that this one looks like carrying on for weeks rather than a single day.

"I'm so tired," said Dina. "This is worse than the civil war. Much worse."

Leila, who in normal times works in Lebanon for a German NGO, was also tired. Her flat has become a haven for friends from the south who stay up talking politics until 5am. She has also been getting calls for help from a young German journalist who has never been to Lebanon before, and a Greek journalist who had the not-very-brilliant idea of trying to spend a night with a Shia family in bombed-out Dahiyeh.

Leila welcomed the idea of escaping for a while to have dinner, but we arrived to find the restaurant in darkness, with its staff sitting on the steps outside. There was a power cut.

They had a small generator providing just enough light for the kitchen, so we ate by candlelight - which might have been romantic in other circumstances. At around 10pm the staff became fidgety and we decided it was time to leave.

As we finished, a couple from another table - the only other customers - came over to chat. The man introduced himself as Hugh from the BBC and said he had just arrived, having previously been in Iraq.

"I'm going to do something that you may think is very strange," he said, pulling out his recording equipment. "But it's amazingly quiet in here. I want to record the silence."

And with that, he disappeared into the gloom holding his microphone.

Back at the hotel, I was just dozing off when the noise started: Israeli planes roaring overhead. When that happens, you expect to hear a bomb a few seconds later, but strangely I could hear no explosions. It was considerably more agonising than the bombing I have heard on other nights.

Is this some new form of torture, I wondered ... keeping people awake with the sound of planes then waiting, waiting, for a bang that never comes.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/story/0,,1831363,00.html

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Indulging folly

Leader
Thursday July 27, 2006

It seems astonishing that the world is still watching rather than acting two weeks after the Lebanon war began. After the international embarrassments of the 1990s, in which Europe watched as Sarajevo's civilian population was assaulted from its surrounding hills and the UN failed to intervene to halt genocide in Rwanda, audiences in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, seeing nightly on television the carnage and despoilation of the Lebanon, rightly expect their governments to respond. And yet nothing happens.

The conference in Rome yesterday, attended by more than a dozen countries as well the UN, the European Union and the World Bank, offered an opportunity for the diplomats to put together a belated peace package. Predictably, it ended in failure. Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, backed by Britain alone, spent 90 minutes deflecting and then blocking demands by all the other participants for a joint statement calling for an immediate ceasefire. Instead, the conference ended in fudge, calling for an urgent and sustainable ceasefire, not an immediate one. This painful delay shows no sign of ending. The war has been referred by the conference back to the UN security council, which may not meet until later this week or even next week. Ms Rice, meanwhile, flies to Malaysia for a regional meeting of Asian states unrelated to the war.

The US alliance with Israel has been a fact of international life for decades, but seldom has Washington acted so blatantly in support of the country and with such disregard for the rest of the international community. By blocking diplomatic action, the US has alienated the Arab world even further. And Britain, shamefully, has been a party to this. Washington and London argue that there is no point in calling for an immediate ceasefire because it would only be a temporary solution and what is needed is a sustainable ceasefire. This is an unusual approach to conflict. It is normal to press for a ceasefire and then try to work out peace terms. To demand a workable peace plan for the Israel-Lebanon first is the stuff of dreams. Israel and Lebanon have now been in conflict since 1982: there is no easy solution on offer.

What Ms Rice needs to do is cancel her trip to Malaysia and return to the Middle East sharpish, and not just to Israel. The US has to end its policy of blocking diplomacy in order to allow Israel time to deal with Hizbullah militarily - an option that Israel may be finding less attractive anyway in the face of stiff Hizbullah resistance. Ms Rice needs to push for an immediate ceasefire and that can only be achieved by persuading not just Israel but Hizbullah and its two backers in the region, Iran and Syria. Such is the poverty of US diplomacy in the region, made worse under the Bush administration, that Washington has no diplomatic links with Iran and only limited ones with Syria. There is nothing to stop her flying to Damascus to open negotiations with Syria's president, Bashar Assad, no matter how distasteful that might be to her.

Going to Tehran is not an option for Ms Rice, though the US should have got over the 1980 embassy hostage crisis by now. But it is an option for Margaret Beckett. Her first two months in office have been undistinguished and she has been little visible since the war began. She should consider delaying her caravanning holiday in Europe and think about getting to Tehran as fast as she can. Britain, unlike the US, has an embassy there and her predecessor, Jack Straw, was a regular visitor. No country can expect to face attacks from outside, as Israel has done, without reply. But Israel's reply has been completely disproportionate. This is Olmert's war, largely about the new Israeli prime minister establishing his political credibility, needing to demonstrate he is as tough as Ariel Sharon. He may have miscalculated. Britain should not be party to Olmert's folly.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1830976,00.html

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We Europeans must never forget that
we created the Middle East conflict

Justified criticism of Israeli policy needs to be informed by a sense of our own historical responsibility

Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday July 27, 2006

When and where did this war begin? Shortly after 9am local time on Wednesday July 12, when Hizbullah militants seized Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev - Israeli reservists on the last day of their tour of duty - in a cross-border raid into northern Israel? Friday June 9, when Israeli shells killed at least seven Palestinian civilians on a beach in the Gaza strip? January this year, when Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections, in a backhanded triumph for an American policy of supporting democratisation? 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon? 1979, with the Islamic revolution in Iran? 1948, with the creation of the state of Israel? Or how about Russia in the spring of 1881?

Simple questions require such complicated answers. Even if the basic facts are agreed, every term is disputed: militants, soldiers or terrorists? Seized, captured or kidnapped? Every selection of facts implies an interpretation. And in tortured histories like this, every horror will be explained or justified by reference back to some antecedent horror:

From tyranny to tyranny to war

From dynasty to dynasty to hate

From villainy to villainy to death

From policy to policy to grave...

"The song is yours. Arrange it as you will," writes the poet James Fenton, in his Ballad of the Imam and the Shah.

Yet observing European responses to the current conflict, I want to insist on Europe's own strong claim to be among the earliest causes. The Russian pogroms of 1881; the French mob chanting "à bas les juifs" as Captain Dreyfus was stripped of his epaulettes at the École Militaire; the festering anti-semitism of Austria around 1900, shaping the young Adolf Hitler; all the way to the Holocaust of European Jewry and the waves of anti-semitism that convulsed parts of Europe in its immediate aftermath. It was that history of increasingly radical European rejection, from the 1880s to the 1940s, that produced the driving force for political Zionism, Jewish emigration to Palestine and eventually the creation of the state of Israel.

"What made me a Zionist was the Dreyfus trial," said Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism. If Europe decided that each nation should have its own state, would not accept even emancipated Jews as fully members of the French or German nation, and eventually became the scene of the attempted extermination of all Jewry, then the Jews must have their own national home somewhere else. Home - in a definition beloved of Isaiah Berlin - is the place where, if you have to go there, they have to take you in. And never again would Jews go as lambs to the slaughter. As Israelis, they would fight for the life of every single fellow Jew. The 19th-century stereotypes of German Helden and Jewish Händler have been reversed. The Germans, and with them most of today's bourgeois Europeans, have become the eternal traders; the Jews, in Israel, the eternal warriors.

Of course, this is only one thread in perhaps the world's most complicated political tapestry; but it's a very important one. I don't think any European should speak or write about today's conflict in the Middle East without displaying some consciousness of our own historical responsibility. I'm afraid that some Europeans today do so speak and write; and I don't just mean the German rightwing extremists who marched through the town of Verden in Lower Saxony last Saturday, waving Iranian flags and chanting "Israel - international genocide centre". I also mean thinking people on the left, contributors to discussion threads on Guardian blogs and the like. Even as we criticise the way the Israeli military are killing Lebanese civilians and UN monitors in the name of recovering Ehud Goldwasser (and destroying the military infrastructure of Hizbullah), we must remember that all of this would almost certainly not be happening if some Europeans had not attempted, a few decades back, to remove everyone called Goldwasser from the face of Europe - if not the earth.

Let me be very clear what I mean. It does not follow from this terrible European history that Europeans must display uncritical solidarity with whatever the current government of Israel chooses to do, however violent or ill-advised. On the contrary, the true friend is the one who speaks up when you're making a mistake. It does not follow that we should sign up to the latest dangerous simplifications about a "third world war" against "an Iran-Syrian-Hizbullah-Hamas terrorist alliance" (according to the US Republican Newt Gingrich) or a "seamless totalitarian movement" of political Islamism (according to the Conservative MP and journalist Michael Gove).

It does not follow that every European who criticises Israel is a covert anti-semite, as some commentators in the United States tend to imply. And it certainly does not follow that we should be any less alert to the suffering of the Arabs, including the Palestinian Arabs who fled or were driven out of their homes at the founding of the state of Israel, and their descendants who grew up in refugee camps. The life of every single Lebanese killed or wounded by Israeli bombing is worth exactly as much as that of every Israeli killed or wounded by Hizbullah rocket attacks.

Does it follow that Europeans have a special obligation to get involved in trying to secure a peace settlement in which the state of Israel can live in secure frontiers next to a viable Palestinian state? I think it does. To be sure, since Europeans have one way or another affected almost every corner of the earth, such an argument from history could in theory take us everywhere - the legacy of European imperialism providing a universal moral excuse for European neo-imperialism. But the story of the Jews driven from their European homelands, and in their turn driving Palestinian Arabs from their homeland, is unique. Even if you don't accept this argument from historical and moral responsibility, Europe's vital interests are plainly at stake: oil, nuclear proliferation and the potential reaction among our alienated Muslim minorities, to name but three.

It's less clear what that involvement should be. One proposal is for European forces to participate in a multinational peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, but that only makes sense if realistic parameters are established for a clear, feasible and finite mission. Those are not yet in sight. Even a ceasefire is not yet in sight. The Rome summit concluded yesterday afternoon barely papering over a clear difference between the United States and Israel, on the one side, and most of the rest of the world, including the EU and the UN, on the other, about how a ceasefire should be achieved. The truth is that now, more than ever, the diplomatic key lies in the full engagement of the United States, using its unique influence with Israel and negotiating as directly as possible with all partners to the conflict, however unsavoury. Until that happens, Europe alone can do little.

Yet the issue here is not just changing the realities on the ground in the Middle East. How Europeans speak and write about the position of the Jews in the region to which Europeans drove them is also a matter of our own self-definition. We should weigh every word.

www.timothygartonash.com

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1831149,00.html