UPDATE 2: Raed Jarrar of Raed in the Middle and Global Exchange, describing his recent experience in Lebanon on Democracy Now!:

And people were furious against the U.S., people were furious against Israel. And, I mean, even for me, I mean, it was such a, like, catch-22, because even for me as an Arab and Muslim who just immigrated to the U.S. last year, I was shouted at, because I’m a U.S. taxpayer, and I was accused with other people in the delegation who went to visit one shelter where Lebanese refugees were staying. We were accused of funding the war and buying these bombs by our money. So we were kicked out of these refugee camps, because they told us, “If you are good Americans, go and try to stop your government. Don't come here and apologize in our shelters.”

So you can feel that even the sense of anti-Americanism and, like, hatred to the U.S. increased very much in a very unfortunate way that even prevents us, as people who are representing the antiwar or peace and justice movement, from going there. It's like burned bridges with many countries in the Middle East. And like, you know, it made Israel and the U.S. less secure, made Hezbollah, as a means or tool for armed resistance, one of the only choices that people are supporting. So what happened there during the last one month’s war against Lebanon is so tragic. It’s just a tragic, devastating political mistake that turned the region into more extremism and into more potentiality to have violence.

If you click on the link for the interview, you can also read about how he was harassed by Jet Blue and airport security when he boarded a flight from D. C. to San Francisco, California.

UPDATE 1: Mike Whitney nails it:

The coverage of the Lebanon fiasco in the Israeli media is alternately narcissistic and hysterical. The details of the massive destruction to Lebanon’s civil infrastructure and environment are brushed aside as inconsequential; the 1,300 civilian deaths, irrelevant. The only thing that matters is Israeli suffering; everything else is trivial. While Lebanon is busy digging out another 300 or so corpses from the rubble of their destroyed homes, Israel is preoccupied with its loss of “deterrents” or its battered sense of “invincibility”.

It is an interesting study in the prevailing megalomania of Israeli society, a culture as pathologically self-absorbed as its American ally. It’s no wonder security is so hard to come by when people are so lacking in empathy.

INITIAL POST: On Monday, I posted about the hypocrisy of David Grossman, and associated intellectuals in the purported Israeli peace movement. Grossman, like his associates, Amos Oz and A. P. Yehoshua, supported the war in Lebanon, and, even worse, consigned the dead, the wounded and the displaced Lebanese to invisibility. Even as they spoke out for a ceasefire before last weekend's IDF ground invasion, they emphasized it in terms of the lives of Israelis, not Lebanese.

And, then, Grossman receives the shattering news: his son had died in Lebanon. Was this the personal motivation for his advocacy of a ceasefire all along? Fear about the safety of his son? Certainly, we can all strongly empathize with such a fear, and it would explain the paradox as to why Grossman supported the war in its initial stages, as necessary for the defense of Israel, despite the horrific consequences for the Lebanese, and then opposed the expansion of it, even though Hizbollah's effective resistance should have, according to Grossman's perspective, increased the threat.

All of this, if true, is understandable, an acceptable expression of human frailty that many of us might display in similar circumstances. Wrapped within a man's love for his son is, however, something sinister. Grossman, through his silence, his unwillingness to acknowledge what the IDF has done to the Lebanese, refuses to acknowledge that the Lebanese possess a similar humanity, that they suffer as he did when he learned of his son's death, as they have done over 1,300 times, and deserve our compassion for the hardships that they, unlike the Israelis, must still endure.

Today, the Observer published a translation of Grossman's eulogy for his son. As one reads it, the Lebanese remain invisible, as they will be the next time the IDF attacks Lebanon, and the intellectuals of the Israeli peace movement again choose cowardice and social acceptability over personal integrity. I can only hope that the translation provided by the Observer is a partial one, or that Grossman has made some highly visible public statements in recent days about the many personal tragedies experienced by the Lebanese as well, because, otherwise, there is a coldheartness, a self-centeredness in his remarks, when he could have reached out to those on the other side of the divide, people who have also lost loved ones.

In this respect, Grossman has become a tragic symbol of the narcissism of Zionism, a social doctrine that justifies the indiscriminate killing of the Lebanese in the name of power politics, but romanticizes the deaths of its own as the most profound personal loss. It echoes a similar moral myopia in this country, where the voluntary enlistees of an army that has inflicted the most unspeakable brutalities in Iraq have been transformed into victims, especially if they have been killed or maimed by the resistance, with the experiences of the Iraqis themselves relegated to a distant, secondary status. Hence, there is a peculiar logic to periodic Pentagon malapropisms that disassociate participants in the Iraqi resistance from their own country.

Labels: David Grossman, Israel, Israeli/Lebanese/US War, Lebanon, Zionism