And you thought the Middle East was a difficult place to understand. Try living here.<\/i><\/p>\n
Borders are becoming a bit odd in the Middle East. They always have been, of course. Ever since Mark Sykes and Fran\u00e7ois Georges Picot \u2013 the latter a former French consul in Beirut, by the way, who cost a lot of brave Lebanese their lives by his carelessness in sealing their anti-Ottoman letters behind an embassy wall \u2013 divvied up the Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, etc, one lot of Arabs (or their grandchildren) found themselves living as hated refugees not many miles from their original homes, cursed and spat at and sometimes killed by another lot of Arabs who turned out to be \u2013 much to their own surprise, in some cases \u2013 Lebanese or Syrians.<\/p>\n
Then we come to the question of a state called Israel which exists in a land that was called Palestine, 22 per cent of which \u2013 and the percentage is growing smaller by the day \u2013 is supposed to be called \u201cPalestine\u201d. Well, maybe.<\/p>\n
Which brings me to the point. For last week, the Strategic Affairs Minister \u2013 is there any other nation on earth which has such a ministry, I ask myself? \u2013 of Israel, warned Lebanon that it must prevent Hezbollah (Iranian-armed, Syrian-supported, you know the usual and true clich\u00e9s) from attacking Israel in reprisal for Israel\u2019s attack on a weapons convoy \u2013 an attack which, as is often the case, Israel didn\u2019t actually admit to having carried out.<\/p>\n
So let\u2019s get this straight. And I start with a weird quotation from the Reuters news agency. \u201cIsrael warned Lebanon Friday to prevent a Hezbollah [sic] retaliation for an alleged [sic] Israeli air strike on a site used by the party on [sic] the Syrian border.\u201d\u00a0 What? Reuters editors had hit a factual problem, of course. The Israelis didn\u2019t actually admit that they had bombed the weapons inside Lebanon, so the agency had to fudge the strike which Israel had not admitted to staging \u2013 Israel\u2019s confirmation being needed for any statement of fact in the Middle East \u2013 while at the same time referring to the air strike which hundreds of Lebanese in the Bekaa Valley had actually witnessed as \u201calleged\u201d.\u00a0 Oddly, even Hezbollah didn\u2019t admit this in the beginning. No problem, I suppose, if the air raid had been staged inside the Syrian border \u2013 like another three such attacks, also unconfirmed by the Israelis.<\/p>\n
But let\u2019s get back to Yuval Steinitz \u2013 the aforesaid Israeli minister \u2013 who claimed that \u201cit is self-evident that we see Lebanon as responsible for any attack on Israel from the territory of Lebanon\u201d. Israel, according to the same Reuters report, has promised to destroy \u201cthousands\u201d of residential buildings that it claims Hezbollah uses as bases. This is even more odd. For many years \u2013 and I have been a witness to five of these wars, although Israel claims only to have fought three of them \u2013 I have seen thousands and thousands of \u201cresidential\u201d buildings blown to bits by Israel which were not Hezbollah bases. So is Mr Steinitz actually being more restrained than his predecessors? Is he saying that Israel may attack only those residential buildings that Hezbollah is using \u2013 and not any other residential buildings that may be in the area? If, of course, Hezbollah retaliates for the Israeli air raid that may \u2013 or may not \u2013 have happened? And just to finish with the crazed editors at Reuters, the agency report has one more wonderful line which I must share with you.\u00a0 \u201cIsrael is technically at war with Lebanon and Syria.\u201d Well, blow me down!<\/p>\n
So back to borders. There were, many decades ago, several villages in Lebanon which the French handed over to the Brits \u2013 when the Brits ran \u201cPalestine\u201d and the French controlled Lebanon and Syria (Lebanon being a part of Syria until the French chopped it off as a useful ally for future years). A lot of Lebanese, born into the Ottoman Empire, therefore woke up one morning and found they were no longer Lebanese \u2013 but Palestinian. And when the Israelis arrived in Galilee and did a spot of ethnic cleansing (see the work of that fine Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, among others), some of these former Lebanese \u2013 but now Palestinian \u2013 folk were murdered. The rest were thrown out of Israel (formerly Palestine) and into Lebanon \u2013 where most of them were born \u2013 as refugee Palestinians.\u00a0 A few years ago, they were actually given Lebanese passports \u2013 so they knew at last that they were no longer Palestinians.<\/p>\n
There can\u2019t be many still alive, although \u2013 if they had driven a few miles north of their present homes in Lebanon last week \u2013 they might have witnessed the air raid on Lebanon which was only \u201calleged\u201d to have happened, thus observing an attack by a country which expelled them from \u201cPalestine\u201d to a country they had actually been born in, an air assault which may not have actually happened because the country they were not born in did not claim that it had actually attacked the country of which they are now (again) citizens.<\/p>\n
And you, Readers, thought the Middle East was a difficult place to understand. Try living here.<\/p>\n
Well, let\u2019s get back to Syria for a moment.\u00a0 As you know, there\u2019s been a civil war going on there for more than two years. Hezbollah is fighting on the side of Bashar al-Assad\u2019s government \u2013 a heinous offence in the\u00a0 eyes of the Western governments which allowed France to chop Lebanon off from Syria after the First World War. Had the French not done so, of course, Hezbollah would all be Syrians fighting on their own government\u2019s side inside their own country and would thus not have offended us by crossing the border which we Westerners created against the wishes of their grandfathers. And in which case, the Israelis would not have to warn Lebanon about Hezbollah reprisals for an air raid which might \u2013 or might not \u2013 have been made on Lebanon by Israel but which would \u2013 if we hadn\u2019t created Lebanon \u2013 have been the fourth attack of its kind by Israel on Syria, always supposing that Israel \u201cacknowledged\u201d that it had attacked Syria in the first place.<\/p>\n
Over to you, folks!<\/p>\n
The good guys and the bad guys are interchangeable<\/b><\/p>\n
Dictators go on forever. Let\u2019s start with Abdelaziz Bouteflika who plans to stand for his fourth presidency of Algeria. Jolly good, too. The latest edition of Jeune Afrique \u2013 which you absolutely must read if you want to understand the Maghreb \u2013 carries a fascinating interview with a much younger man who calls himself \u201cNabil\u201d, who was, so he says, a member of the revolutionary Islamists who fought the regime during the 1990s war.<\/p>\n
Under a government amnesty, he ate \u201ccouscous\u201d with his intelligence officer enemies, persuaded his former comrades to surrender \u2013 but then discovered that some of them were billionaires.<\/p>\n
Funny how wars end with the good guys becoming the bad guys (or vice-versa, depending on your point of view).<\/p>\n
\u201cNabil\u201d, I have to add, ended his struggle with \u201cempty pockets\u201d.<\/p>\n
Bouteflika, they say in Algiers, doesn\u2019t know which day of the week it is. Which would you prefer?<\/p>\n
____________________________<\/p>\n
Robert Fisk, based in Beirut, is a multiple award-winning journalist on the Middle East and a <\/i>correspondent for <\/i>The Independent, a UK newspaper.\u00a0 He is the author of many books on the region, including <\/i>The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East<\/a>.<\/p>\n