History lessons

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

In the early 1930s many people campaigned to make aerial bombardment illegal. People realised that the development of aircraft could herald a new and bloody form of warfare. So it was seriously suggested that planes could only be developed for peaceful purposes and that bombers would be outlawed.

History shows how tragic that campaign's failure was. In the 1930s, the fascist powers intervened on the side of Franco in Spain. The bombing of the ancient Basque town of Guernica, so dramatically portrayed by Picasso, was only the most famous. Then followed the Second World War where many of the cities of Europe were damaged or destroyed from the air.

My home city of London was one of them. My primary school still had its air raid shelters (used to store old desks and sit on in the summer). London suffered the Blitz from 1940 to 1941 and then the rocket attacks from V1s and V2s in 1944 and 1945.

The Israeli hawks now justifying their attacks on Lebanon repeatedly try to draw parallels between those bombings and what is happening in north Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu, former prime minister of Israel and Likud hardliner, said recently that Britain and the US bombed the German city of Dresden in response to the V2 attacks and they should therefore understand Israel bombing Beirut.

He was at it again on the news last night, saying that Londoners suffered similar to Israel during the Blitz. There are analogies between the Second World War and the present situation, but not the ones Netanyahu thinks there are.

Take weapons. The V2 was a state of the art rocket, the weapon of mass destruction of its day. It resulted in very high civilian casualties, there was no warning and no defence against it. It could be fired hundreds of miles. Compare this to Hizbollah's Katyusha rocket, also first developed in the Second World War, which has only limited range. The discrepancy in casualties tells the story. While over 1000 Lebanese had died by yesterday, just under 100 Israelis had (two thirds of them soldiers). Israel's attacks are closer to the blanket bombing carried out by the major powers on Britain, Germany or Japan.

Or take attacks on civilians. In 1949 collective punishment was outlawed by the Geneva conventions because of the Nazi killings of civilians in response to supposed terrorism by the resistance in countries such as France and Italy. The resistance came from the local people and was supported by the local people. The Italian town of Marzabotto saw around 2000 mainly women and children killed by the SS in response to partisan attacks. In the tiny hill town of Civatella more than a hundred men including their priest were massacred while attending mass on the town's saint's day.

Yet in Lebanon and Palestine the illegal collective punishment of civilians has been used repeatedly supposedly to attack Hizbollah and Hamas. Precisely because Hizbollah and Hamas have mass support, including representatives in government, this punishment both targets the whole population and tends to increase support for the organisations.

The treatment of the Lebanese government today has parallels with the Munich settlement in 1938, when Britain's prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, dealt with Hitler to the advantage of Germany and to the disadvantage of Czechoslovakia. Today, Britain and the US are willing to back Israel's invasion of Lebanon in a UN resolution which gives nearly everything that Israel wants while denying Lebanon its sovereignty.

Netanyahu uses the Second World War because he knows that the Holocaust, the most terrible act of that or any war, means so much to Jews everywhere. But the more you look at the parallels, the more you see Israel not as a small power defending itself, but as the biggest and best armed aggressor in the region.

8/08/2006 12:45:00 PM | Permalink