[News] They Now Know What Real Bombing Means

[Anti-Imperialist News]

They Now Know What Real Bombing Means: The Forty-First Newsletter (2024)
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*They Now Know What Real Bombing Means: The Forty-First Newsletter (2024)*


Ayman Baalbaki (Lebanon), /Untitled/, 2020.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=cfa353f132&e=d206d0a40d>.

On 1 October, US Representative Michael McCaul, the chair of the House 
Foreign Affairs Committee issued a statement 
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urging US President Joe Biden to ‘place maximum pressure on Iran and its 
proxies, rather than pressure Israel for a ceasefire. We need to 
expedite arms transfers to Israel that this administration has delayed 
for months, including 2,000-pound bombs, to ensure Israel has all the 
tools to deter these threats’. McCaul’s belligerent call came days 
/after /Israel used over eighty US-made 2,000-pound bombs and other 
munitions on 27 September, to strike a residential neighbourhood in 
Beirut and kill – amongst hundreds of civilians – Sayyed Hassan 
Nasrallah 
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(1960–2024), the leader of Hezbollah. In this one bombing raid, Israel 
dropped more of these ‘bunker buster’ bombs than the United States 
military used in its 2003 invasion of Iraq.

A former US aviator, Commander Graham Scarbro of the US Navy, reviewed 
the evidence of the Israeli strikes for the US Naval Institute. In a 
very revealing article 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=aa0274f1c2&e=d206d0a40d>, 
Scarbro notes that Israel ‘seems to have taken a notably different 
approach to collateral damage than US forces over the past few decades’. 
While the US has never demonstrated any significant concern for civilian 
casualties or ‘collateral damage’, it is worth noting that even senior 
US military officials have raised their eyebrows at the degree of 
Israel’s disregard for human life. Israel’s military, Scarbro writes, 
‘seems to have a higher threshold for collateral damage… meaning they 
strike even when chances are higher for civilian casualties’.

Bassim al-Shaker (Iraq), /Symphony of Death 1/, 2019.

Despite Washington’s knowledge that the Israelis have been bombing Gaza, 
and now Lebanon, with complete abandon – and even after the 
International Court of Justice ruled 
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that it is ‘plausible’ that Israel is committing genocide against the 
Palestinians in Gaza – the United States has continued to arm the 
Israelis with deadly weaponry. On 10 October 2023, Biden said 
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‘We’re surging additional military assistance’, which has amounted 
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to a record-level of at least $17.9 billion during the past year of 
genocide. In March 2024, /The/ /Washington Post/ reported 
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that the US had ‘quietly approved and delivered more than 100 separate 
foreign military sales to Israel that amounted to ‘thousands of 
precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters, small 
arms and other lethal aid’. These ‘small’ sales fell below the minimum 
threshold under US law which requires the president to approach Congress 
for approval (which anyway would not have been denied). These sales 
amounted to the transfer 
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of at least 14,000 of the 2,000 pound MK-84 bombs and 6,500 500-pound 
bombs that Israel has used in both Gaza and Lebanon.

In Gaza, the Israelis have routinely used 
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the 2,000-pound bombs to strike areas populated by civilians – who had 
been told to take refuge at these locations by the Israeli authorities 
themselves. ‘In the first two weeks of the war’, /The/ /New York Times 
/reported 
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‘roughly 90 percent of the munitions Israel dropped in Gaza were 
satellite-guided bombs of 1,000 or 2,000 pounds’. In March 2024, US 
Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted 
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‘The US cannot beg Netanyahu to stop bombing civilians one day and the 
next send him thousands more 2,000 lb. bombs that can level entire city 
blocks. This is obscene’. A 2016 report 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=882fe7d9a0&e=d206d0a40d> 
by Action on Armed Violence offered the following assessment of these 
weapons of mass destruction:

    These are extremely powerful bombs, with a large destructive
    capacity when used in populated areas. They can blow apart buildings
    and kill and injure people hundreds of metres from the point of
    detonation. The fragmentation pattern and range of a 2,000lb MK 84
    bomb are difficult to predict, but it is generally said that this
    weapon has a ‘lethal radius’ (i.e. the distance in which it is
    likely to kill people in the vicinity) of up to 360m. The blast
    waves of such a weapon can create a great concussive effect; a
    2,000lb bomb can be expected to cause severe injury and damage as
    far as 800 metres from the point of impact.

Ismail Shammout (Palestine), Guardian of the Fire, 1988.

Ismail Shammout (Palestine), /Guardian of the Fire/, 1988.

I have several times walked around the Beirut neighbourhood of Haret 
Hreik in Dahiyeh, which was struck by Israeli bombs in the attack on the 
Hezbollah leadership. This is a highly congested area, with barely a few 
metres between high-rise residential buildings. To strike a complex of 
these buildings with over eighty of these powerful bombs cannot be 
called ‘precise’. Israel’s bombing of Beirut mirrors its harsh attacks 
on Gaza and symbolises the disdain for human life that characterises 
both Israeli and US warfare. On 23 September, Israel bombarded 
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Lebanon at a rate of more than one airstrike per minute. In days, 
Israel’s ‘intense airstrikes’ displaced over a million people, a fifth 
of the entire population of Lebanon.

The first bomb to ever fall from an aircraft was a Haasen hand grenade 
(Denmark) dropped by Lieutenant Giulio Cavotti of the Italian Air Force 
on 1 November 1911 onto the town of Tagiura, near Tripoli, Libya. A 
hundred years later, in a grotesque commemoration of sorts, French and 
US aircraft bombed Libya once more as part of their war to overthrow the 
government of Muammar Gaddafi. The ferocity of aerial bombing was 
understood from the very outset, as Sven Lindqvist documented in his 
book, /A History of Bombing/ (2003). In March 1924, UK Squadron Leader 
Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris authored a report (later expunged) about his 
bombings in Iraq and the ‘real’ meaning of aerial bombardment:

    Where the Arab and Kurd had just begun to realise that if they could
    stand a little noise, they could stand bombing… they now know what
    real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they now know that
    within forty-five minutes a full-sized village … can be practically
    wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four
    or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for
    glory as warriors, no effective means of escape.

A hundred years later, these words of ‘Bomber’ Harris aptly describe the 
kind of ruthlessness inflicted on both Palestine and Lebanon.

André Masson (France), /There Is No Finished World/, 1942

You might ask: what about the rockets fired on Israel by Hezbollah and 
Iran? Are they not part of the brutality of war? Certainly, these are 
part of the ugliness of warfare, but an easy parallel cannot be drawn. 
Iran’s ballistic missiles followed Israel’s attack on an Iranian 
diplomatic facility in Syria (April 2024), the assassination of Hamas 
leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran following the inauguration of Iranian 
President Masoud Pezeshkian (July 2024), the assassination of Nasrallah 
in Beirut (September 2024), and the killing of several Iranian military 
officials. Significantly, whereas Israel has launched countless strikes 
targeting civilians, medical personnel, journalists, and aid workers, 
Iran’s missiles exclusively targeted Israeli military and intelligence 
facilities and not civilian areas. Hezbollah, meanwhile, targeted 
Israel’s Ramat David Airbase, east of Haifa, in September 2024. Neither 
Iran nor Hezbollah have fired their munitions into congested 
neighbourhoods of Israeli cities. Since 8 October 2023, Israeli 
airstrikes against Lebanon have far outnumbered 
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Hezbollah’s strikes against Israel. Before the current wave of 
hostilities, by 10 September, Israel had killed 
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137 Lebanese civilians and displaced hundreds of thousands of Lebanese 
from their homes; meanwhile, Hezbollah rockets had by then killed 14 
Israeli civilians, with their rockets leading to the evacuation of 
63,000 Israeli civilians. There has been not only a quantitative 
difference in the number of strikes and death toll, but a qualitative 
difference in the use of violence. Violence that is directed largely at 
military targets, is permissible in certain conditions under 
international law; violence that is indiscriminate, such as when massive 
bombs are used against civilians, violates the laws of war.

Etel Adnan (Lebanon), /Untitled/, 2017.

Etel Adnan (1925–2021), a Lebanese poet and artist, grew up in Beirut 
after her parents fled the collapsing Ottoman Empire that became modern 
day Turkey. She dug deep into the soil of conflict and pain, the 
ingredients for her poetry. Her voice resonated from the balcony of her 
apartment in Ashrafieh, the ‘little mountain’, from where she could see 
the ships come in and out of the port. When Etel Adnan died, the 
novelist Elias Khoury (1948–2024), who himself died just before Beirut 
was again bombarded, wrote 
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that he mourned a woman who would not die, but he feared for his city 
which was suffering alone. Here are a few extracts from Etel’s poem, 
‘Beirut, 1982’, to remind us that we are as angry as a storm.

I never believed
that vengeance
would be a tree
growing in my garden

*

Trees grow in all directions
So do Palestinians:

uprooted
and unlike butterflies
wingless,
earthbound,
heavy with love
for their borders and their
misery,

no people can go forever behind
bars
or under the rain.

…

We shall never cry with tears
but with blood.

…

It is not on cemeteries that we shall
plant grain
nor in the palm of my hand
We are as angry as a storm.

Warmly,

Vijay

Website <www.eltricontinental.org>

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