From International Socialist Review (ISR), Issue 50, November – December 2006.
By HADAS THEIR
It looked as if a tornado had torn through the residential building and partments, ripping off balconies and roof supports, tearing down massive walls and collapsing whole blocks inwards upon their occupants. Many of the dead were sandwiched inside these ruins. In the streets, where Israeli bulldozers had swept away the rubble with military briskness, the people of Sidon walked in a daze.
– Journalist Robert Fisk describes the scene at Sidon, where many Lebanese and Palestinian refugees had fled to, trying to escape Israeli raids.(1)
They are all terrorists.
– An army officer when asked why bulldozers were destroying houses in which women and children lived.(2)
I was not even six when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, too young to be conscious of war and politics. My only memory of the war is the day that my uncle, then thirty-one, serving in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), died – my mother wailing in agony, the shattered expressions on my grandparents’ faces. I would sit with my grandparents for hours in the living room, gently stroking their arms, attempting to ease their pain. For the conquering army, death and suffering is an unavoidable consequence of resistance to occupation. In this case, the six hundred or so IDF deaths, led to a rare development of a peace movement in Israel. But for the conquered, their only crime was to be, by their very existence, in the way of the occupier’s ambition.
– The author
