Journalist: How will the deaths of Israeli soldiers today affect your plans?

Israeli Army spokesman: You saw that massacre of 12 Israelis .. it will ...

Journalist: Massacre you said? But those were soldiers and this is war.

Spokesman: No, it was a massacre because the people who fired the missiles werent targeting soldiers. They were targeting Israeli civilians but killed the soldiers by accident.

Journalist: But you also committed massacres in Qana and elsewhere.

Spokesman: No, there was no massacre in Qana. Hezbollah fighters were the targets of the bombardment but civilians were hit by accident.

This nightmarish gibberish, which would make any journalist quit his job, a spectator smash his TV screen and a dialogue participant abandon his faith in dialogue, is not from Alice in Wonderland. It is an excerpt taken verbatim from an interview on an Arab satellite station with a young spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces.

Now, when Israeli soldiers die its a massacre, whereas the wiping out of entire families in the course of the aerial bombardment of their homes and villages doesnt rate the term. Thats not a massacre but an accident or, in the euphemistic jargon of the science of the war against terrorism, collateral damage.

Much has been written about this term, which explains so little but hides so much which, after all, is the function of much political jargon: To keep people from understanding what is really going on.

The interview cited above is one scene in this saga of the absurd. Another is the sight of fleeing southern Lebanese who have sought refuge in Palestinian refugee camps in their country. Then there is Israel, acting as though it is the victim, chomping at the bit to avenge itself against Hezbollah, the criminal attacker. There is the military circus that pretends it is a Parliament, a tribe that calls itself democratic whooping in a war dance before TV cameras and marching to martial music in the studios of a purportedly democratic media.

The majority of victims in this war of terror belong to ethnic groups, or cultures as they are referred to now, that occupy the lowest rungs of the global cultural ladder. They belong to the collateral damage culture, as opposed to the victims of terrorism culture.

The awkward fact for Israel is that Hezbollah, in its long war against Israel, never made a policy of targeting civilians, except in retaliation for Israels targeting of Lebanese civilians. This, moreover, is a recent development. Throughout the 17 years of its fight against the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, Hezbollah killed only 20 Israeli civilians as opposed to the thousands of Lebanese killed by Israel. Even in the current war the ratio of Israeli military to civilian deaths has not fallen below 60 percent, whereas the number of Hezbollah fighters who have died in battle is less than 10 percent of the thousand Lebanese dead. This is not to mention the million Lebanese who have been driven from their homes and who will find no villages to which to return following Israels orgy of destruction.

This collateral destruction is deliberate and calculated. It is an extension of the state terrorism upon which Israel was built. Israel would not exist today had it not been for its systematic massacres of the Palestinian population in 1948.

Observers who have heard Israeli politicians and military officials away from the microphones of press conferences will have been subjected to daily rants about the need to flatten every Lebanese village that a missile comes from, to destroy electricity generators and other infrastructure and bomb the country back to the Dark Ages.

In an article published in Yediot Aharanot of Aug. 7 Rabins former PR advisor, the rabidly racist Eitan Haber, turned the clash of civilizations from a theoretical concept, a made-in-the-US paradigm for understanding the world, into a real and concrete war. Then, with customary pomposity he suggested that the current conflict between Israel and Hezbollah was that very war: We are at war, he writes. It is not an operation or a broad manoeuvre. It is war... Failure could bring ghosts out of the closet the entire fundamentalist Islamic world is baring its teeth at the Western world and moderate Arab countries.

The French-US sponsored UN Security Council resolution seems geared to transform this imaginary culture conflict into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Regardless of its underlying political position, as a literary text it is Israels narrative and the narrator is Israel. Israel, it tells us, is threatened by Hezbollah rockets. If Israel is to halt its bombardment Hezbollah must stop firing missiles into Israel first. Everyone knows that Israel regards the mere existence of missiles that could threaten its cities, even if only for deterrent purposes, as an act of aggression that must be answered. It is Israels right to threaten Lebanon, not Lebanons right to threaten Israel. As for the total destruction of half of Lebanon and the partial destruction of the other half, well thats a matter of opinion.

The document goes on to grant that the conflict began with the capture of the two Israeli soldiers and that Israel had the right to declare this a causus belli. The first step to ending the war is for Hezbollah to release the soldiers unconditionally.

Thus, with feigned navet, the resolution sets an official stamp on Israels pretext for going to war and for killing thousands and displacing a million in order to free two Israeli soldiers. Clearly, one of the resolutions collateral purposes is to consecrate the superiority of one culture over another.

The draft resolution concludes with a call for the disarming of Hezbollah, Israels original demand. From beginning to end, in its premises and aims, the language and substance is Israeli. The representatives of the nations who drafted it proceeded entirely from the Israeli perspective. Cultural communality has determined that Israel must be compensated for its military failures and that the Lebanese resistance must be prevented from translating its gains on the ground into political gains.

We should pause for a moment and consider what, exactly, the Arab people believe Hezbollah has accomplished and why they might be angered to see Israels allies on the Security Council and elsewhere obstruct the translation of these accomplishments into political gains.

The Arab public is drawn to Hezbollah precisely because it stands apart from Arab regimes and, simultaneously, from organizations like Al-Qaeda. The Arabs admire Hezbollah not as an Iranian tool but because it is made up of Arab Muslim fighters who are rebuilding peoples confidence in their identity. If these Arabs can take on Israel so can others, once they are free of the fetters of underdevelopment and armed with resolve. The Arabs admire Hezbollah for the same qualities that Americans or Europeans would admire a political party that led them in a struggle against a foreign enemy: Valor, courage, persistence, organizational skill, modesty in words, strength in action, a strong grassroots base, a desire to help the needy and other manifestations of a social conscience.

Israeli and Western politicians, and those Arabs who share their fear of Hezbollah, believed that the key to resolving their concerns lay in sectarian differences. They placed their bets on the Shiite-Sunni divide, only to be surprised at how they had misjudged things. Hezbollahs religious affiliation is both a strength and a weakness, but it certainly has not stood in the way of the partys popularity in the Arab world.

Hezbollah has not made it easy for those Arab intellectuals who do not like to distinguish between the culprits and the victims, who appeal to Beirut while ignoring the refugees in that citys parks and schools, who urge both sides to exercise restraint in spite of the evidence at Bint Jbeil, Al-Duwair, Mrouhin, Eita Al-Shab, Ansar, Tyre, Shiyah and the Bakaa. Hezbollah simply doesnt act like racists think a Muslim or Arab should act. The Muslim or Arab, according to the common racist assumption, will either sell out his principles and identity, toe the moderate line, live in peace as an inferior and ingratiate himself to his superiors or he will recoil into a nihilistic hatred and rejection of the other and of the West, thereby confirming his backwardness and the racist assumptions.

Azmi Bishara, Arab News