In 1917, Lt Gen Stanley Maude marched with the British army into Baghdad – then part of the Ottoman empire – with a proclamation. “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators,” he said.
No one within earshot believed him.
The Iraqis all knew the British came as colonizers, and the iron fist of British domination proved them right. By 1920, British rule was so despised in Iraq that a popular rebellion uniting the country’s many divisions of sect (Sunnis and Shias), class (merchant and laborer) and geography (urban and rural) broke out. To quell the uprising, the British resorted to a massive aerial bombing campaign, killing thousands of Iraqis.
In January 1991, George HW Bush held a televised announcement of his invasion of Iraq. The US president told the world that the American people “have no argument with the people of Iraq”. He continued: “Indeed, for the innocents caught in this conflict, I pray for their safety. Our goal is not the conquest of Iraq.”
Yet, for more than a decade after, US-sponsored sanctions proceeded to brutalize Iraqi infrastructure. The American diplomat Madeleine Albright was asked on the TV show 60 Minutes if she believed the UN-reported deaths of possibly more than 500,000 Iraqi children due to these sanctions was “worth it” (as leverage over the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein). Her answer? Albright immediately responded: “We believe the price is worth it.”
In 2003, George W Bush launched his invasion of Iraq with his own televised speech. “If we must begin a military campaign,” Bush said, “it will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you … We will help you to build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free.” Meanwhile, a 2013 study estimated that in Iraq between 2003 and 2011, “close to half a million excess deaths are attributable to the recent Iraq war and occupation.”
After more than a century of such speech, we Arabs have become accustomed to this talk. This is the language of colonialism. The words may suggest high-minded notions of performative concern, but the reality is entirely the opposite: pure dominance delivered with bullets and bombs from the land, the sea and the sky.
On Tuesday 8 October, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, tried to supply his version of Maude’s speech to Lebanon, but with an increasingly malevolent twist. Maude had told his Iraqi audience: “Your lands have been subject to the tyranny of strangers, your palaces have fallen into ruins, your gardens have sunk in desolation, and your forefathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage.”
Like Maude, Netanyahu sought to paint a sovereign people lost to the existence of a foreign power. “Do you remember when your country was called ‘the pearl of the Middle East’? I do. So what happened to Lebanon?” His answer is hardly convincing. “The country that actually conquered Lebanon is not Israel,” he said. “It’s Iran.”
I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in Lebanon, a gorgeous country full of multilayered histories and a dynamism that as unique as it is vibrant. And while it is true that Iran has influence among some sectors in Lebanon, it is equally true that the United States has even greater influence in even more sectors in Israel. And whether you like it or not, Hezbollah is an indigenous and multifaceted Lebanese political party and social movement. Netanyahu’s allegation that Hezbollah is merely an Iranian proxy that has taken over all of Lebanon should be seen for what it is: a ploy to stoke as much sectarian division in Lebanon as possible, and a brazen attempt to lead the country into yet another disastrous civil war, all for Israel’s benefit.
More frighteningly still is Netanyahu’s statement to the Lebanese people: “You have an opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss of the long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza,” he said.
Not that it was worth anything, but in the past, the colonial script focused on the (usually false) promises of a better future. Netanyahu, on the other hand, heads right to the threat. We will turn Lebanon into Gaza, he says. Worse yet, his threat utilizes his own ongoing campaign of unspeakable carnage in Gaza, an offensive labeled as plausibly a genocide by the International Court of Justice. And as Netanyahu posted his “message” to Lebanon, Israeli forces were once again besieging the northern Gaza Strip, bombing schools turned into shelters, encircling the Jabaliya refugee camp, killing more journalists.
How is Netanyahu’s speech to the people of Lebanon not an example of terrorism? He is clearly menacing civilians with death from the skies (Israel is already responsible for more than 2,000 deaths in Lebanon), certainly thus terrorizing them, all to generate a political change favorable to him in Lebanon. Or is the charge of terrorism reserved only for Arabs and Iranians?
Israel is telling the Lebanese people that it will destroy Lebanon unless the Lebanese kill their own neighbors. This is both cruel and amoral. Who is going to stop Netanyahu and his monstrous policy? Certainly not the United States, which feigns concerns for civilian casualties in Gaza and Lebanon while arming Israel to the teeth. In the readout of the latest call between Biden and Netanyahu (on 9 October), the word “ceasefire” doesn’t even appear. After a year of Biden arming Israel’s assaults on the region, we can only conclude that this massive destruction is in fact American policy, all those curated reports of Biden’s pained concerns and complaints against Netanyahu notwithstanding.
There’s a long history of outsiders raining death on Arabs. Have we in the west become so accustomed to it that it seems almost natural, so inured to it that yet another massacre passes us by with barely a notice? If so, what does that say about the west? And who will stop this madness?
Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist
