An Open Letter to the Government of Israel and to All Their Apologisers and Supporters.

I will have such revenges on you both That all the world shall—I will do such things,— What they are yet I know not,—but they shall be The terrors of the earth. - Shakespeare: King Lear, Act II Scene IV. Dear Israel and friends, The other day, on a television in my dingy hotel room in a Colombian small town, I saw Arye Mekel, Israel's Consol General, telling the BBC that Israel is "doing the Lebanese a favour" by bombing the Hizbollah. With a straight face he told the camera that "most Lebanese appreciate what we are doing". Of course it is true that a majority of Lebanese ordinarily oppose the actions of the Hizbollah. It is true that the Hizbollah are a ruthless and destructive guerilla army whose killing of Israelis and contribution to the continual culture of violence in Lebanon are not only counter-productive to their "cause" but heartbreaking terrible and entirely unforgivable. One would think from comments like Mekel's that Israel is well aware of the difference between the Hizbollah and Lebanon. But it is impossible to understand one's values, one's beliefs, one's mind without taking into account his actions. In the past two weeks Israel has decimated the infrastructure of Lebanon and targeted and killed both the civilian and humanitarian population. You have flattened schools and airports, bridges and hospitals, homes and petrol stations. You have sent missiles into the new aqueduct built by Rafik Hariri with aid from the Italian government - a symbol of cooperation between Lebanon and the European Union. You have bombed milk factories and pharmaceutical factories. You have once again displaced over half a million people from their homes, killed hundreds, maimed thousands. You have bombed Red Cross vehicles, you have killed UN volunteers and health workers, you have ordered the evacuation of southern villages then bombed and murdered the fleeing convey of civilian vehicles. You have broken the heart and soul of Lebanon right at the time the country was starting to blossom after decades of civil and regional war. Your aim undoubtably is to defeat "terrorism" and to defend your citizens. But what you are destroying is not terrorism. You are destroying a country, a people, a sense of hope, a future. You are fertilising the Arab and Muslim world, and Lebanon in particular, with anger, with fear, with hatred. You are teaching a whole new, young, largely educated, multi-lingual generation of Lebanese - many of whom missed the pure horror of the country's previous years of conflict - why it is their parents and their grandparents had so much resentment for and fury at Israel. You are breeding terrorism. You are teaching that violence is the only solution. And you are dooming your own people, and with them the entire world, to decades, if not centuries, of continued bloodshed. A young and concered Mexican asked me the other day why the Israeli army and their unfaltering supporters (the US, for example) does not attack Syria, if they are the political supporters of the Hizbollah. Why attack Lebanon? I would like to propose an answer to this question; tell me if I'm mistaken. If Israel was to attack Syria, the response would be obvious. Syria has the military capabilities to immediately respond; they could hurl rockets at Tel Aviv, at Ashkelon, at West Jerusalem. Lebanon has none of this military power. Its air force is made up of three ancient Hawker Hunters and an equally ancient fleet of Vietnam-era Huey helicopters. So it is Lebanon which you attack. We know well that members and sympatisers of "terrorist" or guerilla organisations live throughout Lebanon, just as they live throughout the world. We know they live in Gaza, they live in Tehran, they live in Paris, they live in New Jersey. To bomb Beirut and to bomb South Lebanon in order to "break" the Hizbollah makes as much sense as bombing the United States once suspected terrorists are located. And such acts are as close to "terrorism" as any acts by Hizbollah. I laugh to think of what the international reaction would have been if in the last year, after one of the Israeli armys frequent incursions into southern Lebanon to "capture" Hizbollah fighters, the impotent Lebanese army had responded by bombing Israeli cities and bridges, by destroying Ben Guiron airport, by killing hundreds of Israeli citizens. Such an act would have universally been called terrorism. Yet Israel's attacks are, at worst, described by the EU, and even by the timid Lebanese prime minister as "disproportionate". In your country's 1982 invasion of Lebanon 17,500 people were killed. Please, please stop this before we reach anywhere near this number again and set Lebanon, the region, and indeed the world back another 24 years. Yours Sincerely, Christopher John Stokes Girón, Colombia, 2006