“Then it rained missiles... My parents believe that this shouldn’t carry on any longer than another week,” Shula from Israel told a friend the week of July 9, when the war broke out. Her mail followed a number of Lebanon versus Israel and vice versa e-mail attacks posted on an international university in Germany forum that students eventually called spam. Fifteen days into the war”, following a confused gathering of UN-15, and a US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice visit to Israel and Lebanon, peace in the Middle East is not exactly in sight.
Rice would not commit to a war deadline, insisting that an immediate truce would give Hezbollah guerrillas time to re-arm, while the US wants to solve the conflict “long-term”.
Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert would not commit to any deadline either, even if he witnesses a heated debate at home over the amount of time the Israeli army is taking to weaken Hezbollah.
At the July 26 Middle East crisis talks in Rome, UN secretary general Kofi Annan called for an immediate ceasefire from both Hezbollah and Israel, following the death of four UN observers in Lebanon, who were killed by an Israeli jet after apparently calling Israel forces six times, asking them to stop attacks.
Earlier, Annan had called for the deployment of a UN buffer force between the belligerents in south Lebanon that would would include French, German and Spanish troops, and be supplemented by forces from Turkey, the Netherlands, Canada and Arab states such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, AFP said.
And while the international community busies to construct what Terje Roed-Larsen, Norwegian diplomat in charge of monitoring Syria-Lebanon issues, called “the correct political unpinnings that would produce a ceasefire”, students from Lebanon and Israel attending the same international university in Germany sent each other lots of fear, aggression and prejudice online: “How dare you pass judgement?” Shula asked a fellow student of hers. “Unlike the rest of you sitting afar, I am actually in hell.”
Hell is Haifa, northern Israel. Shula writes between siren calls and says that she is tired of her fellow students’ ignorance, so she goes on to give her account of what happened: “Hezbollah members cut through an internationally recognised border, planted explosives and killed and injured soldiers patrolling the border. Meaning (that) they did this on sovereign ISRAELI soil.”
Samien from Lebanon replies: “The abducted soldiers were taken from INSIDE Lebanese land where an Israeli tank and infantry were patrolling the Shebaa farms (also occupied lands)”. Proof of this was that during the ambush, more Israeli soldiers had come in to save them, but were killed and the tank destroyed, he says.
Shula: “On an interesting note, several Arab countries (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, etc.) actually did NOT back Hezbollah in the Arab summit.”
Samien: “I am ashamed of Arab countries who blame and point fingers rather than get off their silky couches and do something about it. Today I am ashamed of these leaders.”
These leaders – Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt – will call for a ceasefire and not insist that it is sustainable, as the US does. France, Russia, Greece, members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Annan and Pope Benedict XVI insisit on a ceasefire as well, AFP said.
Samien goes on to mention some peace petition that he had sent out and that was being signed “in masses”.
The Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace (JAJP), which claims it is strongest among Jewish organisations lobbying for peace– was gathering letters as well.
However, JAJP, Americans for Peace Now and the Israel Policy Forum (IPF) – the American Jewish “doves” calling for a peaceful resolution of the Middle East conflict – don’t have much influence because they don’t raise money, Michael Massing says in an article for The New York Review of Books. Politically, they represent the views of American Jews better than the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which The New York Times calls “the most important organization affecting America’s relationship with Israel”, and which belongs to “the hawks”, Massing says.
“At the last (IPF meeting) in June (2006), Ehud Olmert appeared, and talked of new ‘policies’ that would bring ‘peace and security to ourselves and to the Palestinians’, who ‘will live in an independent state of their own’,” Massing wrote, but then questioned Israel’s intention to cede enough territory to Palestine for a workable state, relying in his deductions on what he said were “liberal commentators in Israel and the US”.
A Christian Lebanese citizen speaking to The Sofia Echo did not believe diplomacy and peace organisations could help either: “The game here is very deep... And you can’t lead negotiations with Islamists. They recognise only the power of weapons. Everyone is afraid of Islam and they keep their fingers crossed that the Jews will manage this time, including me”, she said.
Her views somewhat remind of the deductions of seminar participants in a May 10 forum on Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking, hosted by the Middle East Programme, which gathered former government officials from Israel, Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian territories. While most Palestinian participants pushed for a negotiated solution, Israeli participants pushed for unilateral steps.
Trust between Israelis and Palestinians was lacking, the forum concluded.
Trust and understanding between students attending the international university in Germany was obviously lacking also. Still, some trust appeared (to outside readers and at least symbolically) to be building overnight, in bomb shelters.
During siren calls in Israel in the week of July 9, Shula was in the same bomb shelter with an Arab family living in her building and described things like this: “I was stuck in the shelter – getting to know my neighbors and listening to the radio”.
