[News] Shimon Peres was no peacemaker. I’ll never forget the sight of pouring blood and burning bodies at Qana

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/shimon-peres-dies-israel-qana-massacre-never-forget-no-peacemaker-robert-fisk-a7334656.html 



  Shimon Peres was no peacemaker. I’ll never forget the sight of pouring
  blood and burning bodies at Qana

Robert Fisk - September 28, 2016

When the world heard that Shimon Peres had died 
<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/shimon-peres-dead-israel-president-tel-aviv-a7334186.html>, 
it shouted “Peacemaker!” But when I heard that Peres 
<http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/shimon-peres> was dead, I thought of 
blood and fire and slaughter.

I saw the results: babies torn apart, shrieking refugees, smouldering 
bodies. It was a place called Qana and most of the 106 bodies – half of 
them children – now lie beneath the UN 
<http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/UnitedNations> camp where they were 
torn to pieces by Israeli <http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/Israel> 
shells in 1996. I had been on a UN aid convoy just outside the south 
Lebanese village. Those shells swished right over our heads and into the 
refugees packed below us. It lasted for 17 minutes.

Shimon Peres, standing for election as Israel’s prime minister – a post 
he inherited when his predecessor Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated – 
decided to increase his military credentials before polling day by 
assaulting Lebanon. The joint Nobel Peace Prize holder 
<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/shimon-peres-dead-israel-president-tel-aviv-a7334186.html> 
used as an excuse the firing of Katyusha rockets over the Lebanese 
border by the Hezbollah <http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/Hezbollah>. 
In fact, their rockets were retaliation for the killing of a small 
Lebanese boy by a booby-trap bomb they suspected had been left by an 
Israeli patrol. It mattered not.

A few days later, Israeli troops inside Lebanon 
<http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/Lebanon> came under attack close to 
Qana and retaliated by opening fire into the village. Their first shells 
hit a cemetery used by Hezbollah; the rest flew directly into the UN 
Fijian army camp where hundreds of civilians were sheltering. Peres 
announced that “we did not know that several hundred people were 
concentrated in that camp. It came to us as a bitter surprise.”

Israel’s Shimon Peres dies aged 93: Tributes from around the world

It was a lie. The Israelis had occupied Qana for years after their 1982 
invasion, they had video film of the camp, they were even flying a drone 
over the camp during the 1996 massacre – a fact they denied until a UN 
soldier gave me his video of the drone, frames from which we published 
in /The Independent/. The UN had repeatedly told Israel that the camp 
was packed with refugees.

This was Peres’s contribution to Lebanese peace. He lost the election 
and probably never thought much more about Qana. But I never forgot it.

When I reached the UN gates, blood was pouring through them in torrents. 
I could smell it. It washed over our shoes and stuck to them like glue. 
There were legs and arms, babies without heads, old men’s heads without 
bodies. A man’s body was hanging in two pieces in a burning tree. What 
was left of him was on fire.

On the steps of the barracks, a girl sat holding a man with grey hair, 
her arm round his shoulder, rocking the corpse back and forth in her 
arms. His eyes were staring at her. She was keening and weeping and 
crying, over and over: “My father, my father.” If she is still alive – 
and there was to be another Qana massacre in the years to come, this 
time from the Israeli air force – I doubt if the word “peacemaker” will 
be crossing her lips.

There was a UN enquiry which stated in its bland way that it did not 
believe the slaughter was an accident. The UN report was accused of 
being anti-Semitic. Much later, a brave Israeli magazine published an 
interview with the artillery soldiers who fired at Qana. An officer had 
referred to the villagers as “just a bunch of Arabs” (‘arabushim’ in 
Hebrew). “A few Arabushim die, there is no harm in that,” he was quoted 
as saying. Peres’s chief of staff was almost equally carefree: “I don’t 
know any other rules of the game, either for the [Israeli] army or for 
civilians…”

Peres called his Lebanese invasion “Operation Grapes of Wrath”, which – 
if it wasn’t inspired by John Steinbeck – must have come from the /Book 
of Deuteronomy/. “The sword without and terror within,” it says in 
Chapter 32, “shall destroy both the young man and the virgin, the 
suckling also with the man of grey hairs.” Could there be a better 
description of those 17 minutes at Qana?


    Remembering the Israel-Gaza conflict

Yes, of course, Peres changed in later years. They claimed that Ariel 
Sharon – whose soldiers watched the massacre at Sabra and Chatila camps 
in 1982 by their Lebanese Christian allies – was also a “peacemaker” 
when he died. At least he didn’t receive the Nobel Prize.

Peres later became an advocate of a “two state solution”, even as the 
Jewish colonies on Palestinian land – which he once so fervently 
supported – continued to grow.

Now we must call him a “peacemaker”. And count, if you can, how often 
the word “peace” is used in the Peres obituaries over the next few days. 
Then count how many times the word Qana appears.

-- 
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