The Arab spring is exposing the cruel double standard in the Middle East. Last night we posted a piece on the international condemnation of Gaddafi’s use of cluster bombs in Libya. Well as Abdelnasser Rashid points out, “Let’s also not forget that Israel indiscriminately used cluster bombs in Lebanon in 2006.” He pointed me to Haaretz: “We fired more than a million cluster bombs in Lebanon.”
“What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs,” the head of an IDF rocket unit in Lebanon said regarding the use of cluster bombs and phosphorous shells during the war.
I have a story to tell on this subject. Last month my coeditor and I spoke to the U.N. Correspondents Association about the Goldstone Report. I had to kill some time in the U.N. lobby, and there is a small exhibit in the U.N.’s main hall of photographs from Lebanon of people maimed by cluster bombs. The pictures and stories are too much to take in. You see a boy who was playing soccer and kicked an object, and it blew up his leg. You see a farmer who was clearing land of stones, and lost a hand. Large black and white images of rural people, in their homes.
And then you see a picture of a girl with a sweet face, about 10, holding up her left hand. She is missing the digit of a finger. She reached for something in the yard, it was a cluster bomb, it blew up and destroyed a digit of her finger.
Why am I dwelling on this little girl? Because the caption for her photograph said that she has not spoken since she was 7 years old, that this injury, just the loss of one digit, so traumatized her that she abandoned the world of speech.
I am asking you to focus for a moment on the human damage of Israel’s aggression, the tremendous waste of lives produced by this kind of wanton and indiscriminate violence. Yes I account the damage to Israelis too: and we all know what the killing in Lebanon in ’06 of Uri Grossman did to his father the Israeli novelist David Grossman. I pity that family. But of course the death and destruction has been far greater on the other side.
And then consider that as we reported last night, that in the name of Israel’s security, Caroline Glick said that Israelis wanted the “blessed war” between Iraq and Iran to last 100 years. Blessed war? What are these people thinking? How isolated have they become from the estate of humankind? Do they think for a moment of how damaging even the loss of a single digit can be?
