Lebanon – Globalities

Israel’s deadly escalations in Lebanon & their background

Helena CobbanSeptember 23, 2024April 15, 2025Israel, Lebanon

There is so much to be said about the horrrendous escalations that Netanyahu’s government and military have been undertaking in Lebanon since the grotesque, booby-trapped pager attack they launched September 17. First, my deepest condolences to all those families, individuals, and communities devastated by these escalations. (Those impacted by them do include many Israelis caught in Hizbullah’s blowback to Netanyahu’s escalations. But the carnage on the Lebanese side thus far seems to have been far, far more serious and widespread.)

Prior to September 17, there was a precarious balance of deterrent terror between Israel and Hizbullah– one that the Hizb had established back in 2006 when it successfully and speedily cleaned the Israeli military’s clock as the outcome of Israel’s last major escalation in Lebanon. But clearly, in the lead-up to last week’s “pager attack” and the other escalations that speedily followed it, Netanyahu had taken a decision to majorly upset that deterrent balance.

Sec0nd, it’s worth noting that Netanyahu’s decision(s) to escalate at this point came in the context of the political battles he has been fighting both at home, and internationally– primarily to avoid being held accountable for the numerous, very serious domestic-political and laws-of-war violations for which he is responsible.

Also worth noting: the ease with which Netanyahu has brushed aside– in Lebanon as in Gaza– any attempt by Joe Biden to be even a minimally effective “mediator” in these conflicts.

American “mediation” is now seen worldwide as a cracked and empty vessel.

…Since people in the “West” do not know much about Hizbullah except what they are told by the corporate media, I thought it worthwhile to dig back through some of the books on the topic — and some of my own writings on the topic–that I’ve found useful over the years.

Israel’s path to defeat: The implications

Helena CobbanJune 21, 2024June 23, 2024Gaza, Global balance, Hamas, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Palestinians, West Asia6 Comments

The image above is a still from footage a Hizbullah drone recently shot of a key Israeli naval base in Haifa

Today, nearly nine months into Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, the evidence is mounting that the country’s political-military leadership is on a path to serious defeat not only in Gaza but also more broadly in its decades-long contest against West Asia’s Iran-led “Axis of Resistance.” This fact is only just starting to receive some glimmers of recognition in the corporate media in the West. (Interestingly, one of the few to give it any public acknowledgment at all has been lifelong Zionist apologist Tom Friedman, who did so in some key portions of this June 18 column. Most of the other Zionist apologists who are deeply embedded in the US elite are still publicly spinning fairy tales of “an imminent defeat for Hamas.”)

The defeat towards which the Israeli leadership is currently hurtling is, as I noted, not only in Gaza, where numerous, apparently well-coordinated, cells of armed resisters have been making smart use of the rubble to which the Israeli military has reduced most of the Strip’s buildings, as well as their own tunnels, to launch well-prepared and often lethal attacks on Israel’s tanks, APCs, and snipers across the length and breadth of the Strip… and where Israel’s grotesquely genocidal attacks and other policies have notably failed to turn the population against Hamas. (Find more on the evidence for that key political fact, below.) But this defeat looms also in the ever-tense, but until now somewhat controlled, confrontation Israeli forces have been engaged in in the North, against Hizbullah fighters who are considerably more lethally armed than the Hamas fighters of Gaza and who have continued to upgrade their capabilities almost continuously in the 18 years since they last inflicted a decisive defeat on Israel’s military, in summer 2006.

The 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the Palestinians

Helena CobbanSeptember 30, 2023September 30, 2023Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Palestinians, U.S. policy, West Asia

PLO leader Yasser Arafat taking part in the November 1974 Arab League summit

Most of the current commentary in the Western media on the 1973 Arab-Israeli war has focused on the “shock” effect the war had on Israel’s society and politics, or on the role the war played in jump-starting the Egyptian-Israeli negotiations that in 1978 led to the Camp David Accords, and a year later to the conclusion of a complete Egyptian-Israeli peace. (The recent release of a new Hollywood movie about Israel’s then-premier Golda Meir has helped keep the focus on the Israeli dimension of the war, though the historical accuracy of the movie has come under much serious questioning, e.g. here, here, or here.)

However, the Israelis and Egyptians were far from the only peoples in West Asia (the “Middle East”) whose fate was greatly impacted by the war. Indeed, given that Egypt was at that time far and away the weightiest of the Arab states, the fact that the war led to the launching of a diplomatic process that removed Egypt from the coalition of Arab parties that since 1948 had been in a state of unresolved war with Israel transformed the balance of power throughout the whole region.

The parties most direly affected by Egypt’s removal from the former Arab-rights coalition were firstly the always vulnerable Palestinians, and also the states of Syria (which had been a party to the war of 1973) and Lebanon, which had not.

On living in a war-zone

Helena CobbanMay 12, 2023May 15, 2023Lebanon, Nature of war4 Comments

Above: 1982 view of the Green Line in downtown Beirut. Becoming greener in a bad way. Credit James Case.

Wars that are fought within countries, rather than between countries, are for some reason called “civil wars.” But in truth they are often the most brutal and uncivil form of conflict imaginable—perhaps because the express goal of the warring parties is to definitively silence the dissident voices of their own compatriots on the “other” side or sides, rather than to win a military contest on a battlefield. Over the years I’ve reported on, researched, analyzed, and reflected on a number of different wars on three continents. But the experiences I had in the very first war I encountered were different from all those other wars, and taught me the most about the nature of war. Because there, for six years, I was actually living and raising a family in the war-zone.

Let me take you back to the summer of 1974. I had spent some months discerning what I wanted to do with my very mediocre degree from Oxford; and now I decided to go to some intriguing-looking spot in the Global South to become a foreign correspondent. This was a step many British male writers had taken over the decades. So why not me?

The spot I chose was Beirut, Lebanon, where I had a few friends already. I went to my bank in Oxford and took out a loan of, I recall, £100. I bought an air ticket, and took off for Beirut. By the end of 1974 I had a job in a local advertising agency; I was taking Arabic classes in the Jesuit university; I was writing book reviews for the local English-language daily; and I had met an interesting local guy called Souheil, also an aspiring journalist…