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 Another Brazilian Air Force jet reaches the homeland carrying wearied vacationers turned war refugees. They are some of the 2,000 Brazilian nationals from the world's largest Lebanese community, flown back thus far after choosing to spend their "winter" holidays in Lubnan. On board: 72 Brazilian nationals, 4 Argentines and 11 Lebanese, whisked out of the country under life-risking conditions.
There are still thousands of Brazilians stranded in the country, according to Itamaraty. the Brazilian Foreign Affairs Ministry. One Brazilian-Lebanese family of four is already known to have perished under the bombs, fortunately not matching the twelve Canadians thus far killed amidst their government's silence. Beyond the rhetoric of the Bush Administration, democracy struggles for meaning. But in the near east, with the full support of the United States, it is under attack. As a group of 40 Lebanese community leaders met in Sao Paulo, the verdict was clear. This is the most savage war Israel has yet unleashed. So savage, that, in addition to the hundreds of dead and wounded and a democracy made tremulous, Lebanon's famed Mediterranean coast now lies under a foot-and-a-half of tar. A gigantic oil spill has been provoked by Israel's bombing of the country's largest oil refinery at the outset of hostilities. It has blanketed the coast. Under the bombs of the Israeli armed forces, democracy has been pulverized in its local form as well as in its international potential. In its local form, the democratic state of Lebanon lies in taters. Still, for the time being, democracy's concrete resilience exceeds the weakness of any building material. It is this regard that Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Sanori's government has reasserted Hizbollah's key role in the democratic governance of the Lebanese state. Israel's aerial attack has also stricken at democracy in its international form. As protected by the United Nations Organization, the Charter on the sovereignty of nations was sidestepped by the State that is second to none in its obsession at having its right to exist be universally recognized. Yet it isn't even the despicable humiliation of having its peace keeping force attacked and its diplomatic personnel murdered that furthers the blow the UN has suffered. Instead, it is the mortuary to which the condition of diplomatic deliberation, translation and adaptation have been willfully rendered. The bad faith keeps mounting with the lies and belligerent subversion of Dan Gillerman, Israel's ambassador in New York. In the name of some faintly veiled ideology of conquest, he has ditched any attempt at having the moral legitimation of negotiations curtail the use of force. The result is the wanton destruction of a sovereign nation. Who has a right to live in peace? On the level of international law, Gillerman need not even have shown solid reasons why Israel deserves every bit of the world's condemnation for this war of aggression. His counterpart, John Bolton, performs his job of discursive deception ever better. As the line goes, the United Nations Security Council cannot sanction a sovereign nation as it wages war against a non-governmental organization. Then again, there is no mystery to Israel's decision to engage in "regime change" in Beirut. Hizbollah may be non-governmental insofar as it organizes a militia, though it hardly stands outside of government by representing the country's 1.2 million strong Shia population. Hizbollah's whole reason for being is resistance to another illegal invasion, Israel's once again, back in 1982, which didn't stop once Arafat and the PLO were shipped off to Tunisia: Tshal went on to occupy the southern territory for another 18 years. A buffer zone, they claimed... Does anyone recall the USSR's widely condemned justification for occupying all lands east of the "iron curtain"? A buffer zone, they also claimed. The fact of the matter, however, is that since 1948 there exists no Palestinian State. While Arab and Muslim countries from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt have eventually granted Israel the right to its existence, Israel has merely addressed the issue of Palestine on the basis of a should we or shouldn't we? Should we allow the Palestinians their state or shouldn't we? It was an act of redemption that led to the European powers sponsoring the Israeli nation. Since then, Israel has metamorphosed into a belligerent settler state bent on territorial expansion, which means sweeping land clean of its inhabitants, as is now happening in southern Lebanon. Governments are the least inclined to express fury at the repeated transgression of international law. Israel's actions have instead drawn the ire of civilian populations the world over. What Israel offers the region in geopolitical power might suffice for Western governments, indeed for Arab governments, since they seem only to accept and promote it. But that power has civilians in its visor. Israel's war on Lebanon is preparing the grounds for a new generation of Hizbollah fighters, because it is primarily a war aimed at a civilian-based resistance movement. As it is a militia, Hizbollah have been prevented from reaping the overall support of Arab governments, let alone hear them denouncing Israel's attack. The issue again is not quite what it seems, i.e. kidnapping and murder of Israeli soldiers. The ferocity and willfulness of the southern Lebanese resistance movement paints a nightmare scenario for any of the Near and Middle East monarchies in their continual plight to stifle popular calls and moves for deep democratization. Given that the United States' plan is to remove the government of the countries it cares little to negotiate with, it is open to suggestion that Israel's ultimate destination is Damascus - whether the neo-conservatives exert as much influence on Bush Administration II than in BA-I. In fact, given the game plan repeated in the national security directive of 2005, whether they're still as strong in office is irrelevant. Despite the media's reassurance, Rumsfeld and Cheney are still calling the shots, although in international law, they're already liable for war crimes. The current war is but one more battle in the long drawn out sequel to Western attempts at occupying the Levant. Its current configuration apes the European colonial model whereby a Western power establishes a settler state on foreign territory by dispossessing hundreds of thousands of natives of their land, based on the claim that in the absence of the nation-state as political structure, no one can be called "native". Failure to see this reality obliges one to a hard choice, because so insistently enforced by the international media and cultural elite. In other words, one has to critically let go of the sacralized nature of Israeli claims to their land as redemption for the holocaust. So long as a Palestinian state fails to exist, there are little grounds for upholding the continuity of that vision. For the sake of critical thinking and the universal defense of human rights, one has to desacralize Israel's claims due to the media barrage that pins every bit of the blame on Arabs for the violence. In Europe, this horror of the past is very much part of the cognitive make-up. Questioning its legacy was the task to which as great a historian as Pierre Vidal-Nacquet (1930-2006) devoted much of his career, all the while struggling relentlessly to refute any form of negationism. It is less clear how the background of the Holocaust fares in the imaginary of (non-Muslim) North Americans who react as if spontaneously, or even naturally, to the plight of Israelis, while only deprecating Muslims. To be sure, the formidable contributions to the cultural landscape made from Jewish thinkers, scientists and artists has made it second nature for many North Americans to imagine that they have some type of Jewish ancestry in their past. But being Jewish and being an Israeli citizen are two completely different matters. This is what is at stake, then, in the task of desacralizing the monumental atrocities of the "Final Solution". It is the need to be able to discuss in a democratic and legal forum and eject the taboos to the television screens, if they must subsist, or to the pulpits of churches, synagogues and mosques alike. Katyusha rockets for all their destructive potential, filled as they have to be with ever so sophisticated ball bearings, can be shown on television where television crews are able to operate. By contrast, Israeli bombs carry King Tut's warning on them for journalists: come too close, reveal our structure, and your life will be at risk. The late Edward Said often used to bewail the PLO for its poor PR. Israel's has been on the downslide, too. It took until the Qana massacre of dozens of children for the Israeli government to usher in a more sympathetic spokesperson on CNN. Until then, the Israelis expressed only contempt at the thousands of foreign nationals spending their July holidays in their homeland as being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not all governments are as callous as Canada's or the United States' regarding their citizens of Lebanese descent. Canada's minority government Prime Minister Stephen Harper had no protest whatsoever to file when a handful of Lebanese-Canadians was slaughtered in the early days of the raids. To get on Bush's best side, he gave a full response of his allegiance to Israel even without being asked. Thinking he knows where his ticket to power lies, Harper has placed the future of his slim minority into the hands of a revolt of Lebanese voters in Alberta and Quebec. Now, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter Mackay, his own eyes on Sussex Drive, has upped the ante by calling Hizbollah "cold-blooded murderers" and a "cancer" (wasn't the issue of deliberately manipulative medical metaphors laid to rest once and for all by Susan Sontag, in "Illness as Metaphor"?) In South America, the Brazilian government, lacking the clout of the Anglo-Saxon master powers, has had to dispatch its diplomats to the Bekaa Valley in a bid to secure the safety of its nationals who have been stuck there during the weeks of bombing raids. Israel has simply denied to guarantee Brazilian convoys safe haven on a shorter passage to the coast. The world had been expecting an explosion of sorts as it witnessed Israel's destruction of democracy in the Palestinian territories week after week since the last elections. The Palestinian people have paid a very high price for expressing their desire - democratically - for change. For sweeping Hamas into office, the Palestinian dead keep mounting daily. Israelis might want to consider, if they truly do seek a transformative adaptation to the persistent conflict, that the leverage they gave to Sharon's government to systemically dismember and disable the Palestinian Authority three years ago sealed its fate as a real governing power. By electing Hamas, though, the Palestinians have proven democracy's sustenance. They have willed for a government to engage not only in protecting their "right to exist", but one that also pledged to provide some aspect of a welfare state, funds depending of course. There is no other government in the world - but for their American allies - who have contravened international law by systemically targeting resistance leaders for selective assassination. These ends are justified even with the tremendous flaws of civilian deaths in the execution of its assassinations. Democracy without the binding clauses of international law stands morally inert. Hizbollah is said to possess three types of missiles. The stream of the target-shy Katyusha rockets have terrorized Northern Israelis. There are also supposedly Chinese-made Raed and Iranian-made longer range "Zelzal" missiles, both radar-guided and the latter a most accurate projectile. To what extent, though, is Sheik Hassan Nasrallah bluffing when he threatens, only threatens, to bomb central Israel as his troops and bases are being decimated? After all, according to the strategy logic of military alliances, for all its friendship with Syria, Hizbollah's foreign military alliances only hold good as long as they serve each others' interests. This is what makes strategic thinking such a regressive form of deliberation. What would Syria gain in having Hizbollah possess missiles that could also reach Damascus as well as Tel Aviv, given that Hizbollah is above all an independence movement? The Western media tends to downplay this deep feeling for independence, from Syrian and Israel alike, as demonstrated in last year's Cedar Revolution. The Syrian occupation of northern and central Lebanon was part of the same package that let Israel occupy the south. So once again we see a militia confronting a hi-tech state-sponsored war machine driven to annihilate it - the very paradigm of the colonial wars of the 20th century. There are many mysteries to Israel's plans, most of all with respect to its understanding of how to achieve lasting peace. The next greatest mystery is the extent to which Prime Minister Olmert is ultimately devoted to carrying out the American plan for regime change in Damascus. After comes the question as to extent to which Israel has drafted plans on further territorial expansion in Gaza and the West Bank by either expelling its population, or liquidating it. Given that the Israeli-Palestinian issue is the West's greatest moral dilemma, what cries out for attention is how ineffective the United Nations has become under the current terms of its structure. Not only does it lie at the mercy of funding from its wealthiest states, but it is paralyzed to act on the real issues of international law that it and the international criminal court have the jurisdiction to adjudicate. The fact that democracies use military means to re-engineer dictatorships so they function like democracies is a project in deceit. In Iraq, a political system is used to undermine the ownership and control of natural resources. By contrast, striving democracies encounter the henchman of their past on their way to reconciliation with history - in Lebanon's case, the civil war and Israeli invasion, occupation and massacres in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila; in Iraq, the terror regime of the former CIA-agent Saddam Hussein; in Iran, the faux-glitter torturer in disguise Shah Reza Pahlavi. Our democracies only undermine themselves as they strive to damage the striving democracies immersed in memory conflict. Thus, there is no reform more urgent for the United Nations than opening a Peoples' Chamber with binding powers over the General Assembly (the Nations' chamber) and Security Council (the Victors' chamber). Opposing the Peoples' Chamber is the sign that goes hand-in-hand with the destruction of the Lebanese democracy to which we have unwittingly been witness over these three weeks. Opposing it is the surest proof of how the very ideal of democracy on the international scale, even beyond being damaged, is most of all being damned. for Pierre Vidal-Nacquet
Lubnan Ya Akhdar Hilo A Canadian, Norman Madarasz is associate professor of philosophy at Universidade Gama Filho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He kindly welcomes comments at
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thank you for your thoughtful and different perspectives on the Lebanese-Israeli crisis, wlthough sometimes I had difficulty following your ideas. It is obvious that you are very angry right now. I hope that you will write more when anger doesn't affect your way of stating things. 
I understand and appreciate Hezbollah’s approach of sticking close to the people, even trusting those civilian blocks with proximity to their arsenals, and CC centers. Hell, what can be better then gathering neighborhood kids around a rocket launcher and letting them push the trigger... Ain´t it fun? Win... win situation... If they live they could get a taste for firing missiles.... if they die... it is fantastic PR and an unbeatable recruitment move for the bereaved friends and family.
I mean, I am all for Democracy in Lebanon and have no problems with a heavily armed militia running a huge swank of it. Militia that is a proxy to a few very democratic regimes and that can and does wage war on neighboring country at will without running a plebscit or