An obsessive’s documenting of Israeli war
crimes in Lebanon can show us how the West
lost respect for international law One Norwegian officer left Lebanon with a
typed report on torture taped to his chest In this archive image provided by the Israeli
Government Press Office (GPO), during Israel's
Lebanese war, Israeli soldiers check the identity of
Lebanese prisoners before they leave an Israeli
military prison on their release from Ansar
detention camp April 2, 1985 in southern Lebanon.......Odd Karsten Tveit was always a very obsessional
chap. Every story he covered, he always wanted to
dig deeper, study further, hear one more tale of
horror, one more joke, one more historical fact.
We all covered the story of Israel’s wars in
Lebanon, in 1978, in 1982, in 1996, in 2006. Over the years, I covered the story of Israel’s torturers
in Khiam jail in southern Lebanon, the massive
Ansar prison camp in 1982, the frightful
interrogation of Lebanese and Palestinian
inmates. But Karsten has put together a book of immense
research which will remain the volume on Israel’s
shame in Lebanon and its historical defeat. That’s
the title of the English edition – Goodbye Lebanon: Israel’s First Defeat. His detailed questioning of torture victims – hanged by their
arms, electrocuted, in one case apparently raped
and in another mistreated in an Israeli hospital –
have an unstoppable power to convince. Not only
did he cover the events on the ground in southern
Lebanon, he interviewed Israeli veterans in Israel itself. He reported constantly on Norwegian television
and radio; he wanted to learn so much of the
vicious Israeli-Hezbollah guerrilla war that he actually took time off to serve in the Norwegian
UN battalion n southern Lebanon, wearing the
blue beret. Now that is obsession for you. It is a terrible tale, stories which upset many of the
UN peacekeepers, especially military doctors, as
evidence mounted of the Israeli brutality on
prisoners in Lebanon and inside Israel itself. One
Norwegian officer even left Lebanon via Tel Aviv
with a typed report on torture taped to his chest for the eyes of a Norwegian government minister. Prisoners at Ansar were grossly mistreated.
Outside the walls of Khiam prison, I visited a post
of UN unarmed truth supervisors who told me
they could hear the screams of tortured men and
women at night. Karsten did the same. Israeli
interrogators were present, Karsten says. Israel denied responsibility, saying Khiam was under the
control of their local Lebanese militia. The UN did
not believe it. There are also stories of great courage. Two out of
the four men who managed to escape from Khiam
were hunted through the night and only reached
Beirut with the secret help of UN soldiers. They
had been inspired by Allied escapes from prison
camps in the Second World War. “The prisoners in Stalag III had managed to get hold of
equipment by bribing a German guard,” Karsten
writes. “In Khiam, such an attempt would likely
have meant more torture and confinement in the
‘chicken cage’, the 90-cubic-centimetre enclosure
used for extra-severe punishment.” It was only thanks to an Israeli lawyer that
Lebanese prisoners held in Israel – illegally under
international law – managed to have their cases
heard. Many were held for years without trial, as
they were in Khiam, naked during interrogations,
refused visits from the International Red Cross, wounds untended or untreated for days. And I wondered, reading this shameful narrative,
why we were so surprised when we found that the
American military were torturing and killing
prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. Karsten says at one point that Israeli soldiers in the occupation
zone in southern Lebanon – the Israelis called it a
‘security zone’, a description that many
newspapers gutlessly repeated – were joint
Israeli-American nationals. Did any of them also
serve in the American army in Iraq? The mass prison camp at Ansar sounds like a hot
version of Guantanamo. And when the US repeatedly vetoed UN Security Council
resolutions condemning Israel’s treatment of
Lebanese civilians, I wonder whether somehow
that’s when American governments lost their
respect for international law – as they showed in
their treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan (or the Iraqi invasion itself). There are painful details of the torment of
Western hostages in Lebanon and the merciless
judgements bestowed on informers by Hezbollah.
There are not many good guys in Karsten’s
reporting. In the end, it turned out that the
prisoners of the Israelis were hostages too – the Israelis called them “bargaining chips”, another
phrase the press used freely – and they were freed
to secure the release of Israeli prisoners or their
bodies. Khiam is long gone. The war in Lebanon is now
outclassed by the bloodbath in Syria. Karsten’s
work is a reminder that cruelty has no geographic
boundaries. How much more is there to learn
about the horrors of Lebanon? Or Afghanistan? Or Iraq? Or Syria? Parallels with Ireland not so
clear I see that Mustafa Barghouti, the leader of the
Palestinian National Initiative – which holds no
truck with either Hamas or the Palestinian
Authority – has been holding forth in Dublin
about the parallels of Irish and Palestinian
history. “I find great similarity between the struggle of Irish people and the Palestinian
struggle for independence and freedom,” he says.
That deserved one response: Hmmm. Visiting Kilmainham jail, he told the Irish Times
that he intended to read more about Robert
Emmett, executed for a hopeless rising in 1803.
“We were also colonised by the British colonial
system,” said Barghouti (pictured). “My
grandfather and uncle were imprisoned in similar prisons.” Now, he says, the Netanyahu
government is “bulldozing the two-state solution
and the possibility of a Palestinian state”. Barghouti wants Ireland’s political help, claiming
that without “international solidarity” for a
peaceful solution, the Palestinians will not have a
state. But I’m not sure Barghouti has chosen quite
the right period of Irish history. I would have
thought the dispossession of the Catholics and the Protestant settlement in the Pale was a more
likely parallel with Netanyahu’s colonial
expansion. Getting rid of the Penal Laws wasn’t
much of a prospect at the time. Catholics couldn’t
even buy land. And “international solidarity” with
the Irish wasn’t much use then