An op-ed by the Norwegian novelist Torgrim Eggen, readworthy especially for its historical point of view.

Now they are bombing Beirut again. That’s what it’s like to have the world’s worst neighbor.

THE INTERNET is quite a tool. I am sitting here with Google Earth looking at satellite images of Beirut. I think I have found Khraibeh Street, where I lived in the fall of 1993.
     Khraibeh Street is situated in the hillside in Hadeth east of the airport, and from my roof terrace adorned with pictoresque bullet holes I enjoyed a panorama view of western Beirut. Nearest was the ghetto Hay al-Sellum, which US Marines called “Hooterville” when they served as a peacekeeping force in Beirut from 1982 to 1984. Hay al-Sellum is Hizbollahstan. The area was dangerous, claimed my Christian hosts, so when we ventured there it was on the condition that I was “Swiss.” This, of course, was thanks to the Oslo Accords.

NORTH OF “Hooterville,” in good view of my terrace, was the Palestinian refugee camp of Bourj al-Barajneh. Or rather, what was left of it. North-west of this, in turn, are Sabra and Shatila, the scene of perhaps the blackest chapter of Israeli and Lebanese history.
     I recall people asking: — What are you doing in Beirut day after day? Why don’t you head up to see the Roman ruins at Baalbek, or the ruins of Byblos? My reply: — Don’t you think I see enough ruins from the terrace? There was, as it were, nothing else.

AND NOW THEY are at it bombing Beirut again. What wrong have these people done?
     It would be unfair to blame all of Lebanon’s misery on its southern neighbor. Let us say Israel is merely responsible for ninety percent. It is shocking what brutality the Israelis display when Lebanon is the target. The current Chief of Staff is Dan Halutz, and the acts of war had barely begun when he declared that they would “bomb Lebanon 20 years back in time.” This week he reportedly said that Israel “will bomb ten housing blocks in Beirut for every missile hitting Haifa.” To avoid the commonplace accusations of “anti-Semitism” I shall not mention what this is reminiscent of. According to the Jerusalem Post, Halutz was misquoted. In any case, this is a man who is staying the course toward the Hague. His former boss Ariel Sharon, now in coma, should have been charged there as well.

IN THE WAR OF 1982, Israel managed to commit just about every war crime in the book. Bombing of hospitals. Terror bombing of residential quarters. Use of phosphorous and cluster bombs against civilians. Summary executions of prisoners. You name it. Israel was even able to bomb Beirut’s sole remaining synagogue. All this and more can be read in Pity the Nation: Lebanon and War by Robert Fisk, hereby recommended. This is the book that will make you laugh out loud the next time you hear the term ’surgical strikes’.

SO WHY dwell at length on a war 24 years past? Because that was when Israel invented Hizbollah. It was an accomplishment making the expression ‘to shoot oneself in the leg’ sound tame.
     When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 to weed out the PLO, the poor Shia minority in southern Lebanon were relatively impartial. The conflict lacked the religous resonances it has today, and besides, the majority of the PLO, Fatah, et cetera were Sunnis. The problem was that the Shias were in the way. The savagery and brutality with which Israel proceeded, first against southern villages and then against the quarters of Beirut to which the villagers fled (those who weren’t mowed down by Israeli aircraft underway), led to radicalization. The Shias became militant, and there was inspiration (as well as finances) on offer in Iran.
     On November 11 1982 it said boom. Israel’s military headquarters in Tyre went up in smoke; 75 Israelis died. A previously unknown group that called itself Islamic Jihad took responsibility for what was in fact the first suicide operation in the Middle East. Islamic Jihad is believed to have been a branch of “the Party of God.”

CAN I TEMPT with an interesting moral dilemma? A “terrorist organization” stations a SAM site on a hospital roof in violation of the Geneva Conventions. A martial power bombs the hospital and kills everyone inside — doctors, nurses, and civilian patients. Is it possible to talk about ‘degrees’ of responsibility here? I think it is. The “terrorists” put civilian lives in danger. The martial power executes them. Much of today’s Lebanon conflict is about such things, about “living shields” and “collateral damage.”
     The above example is once again from Israel’s invasion in 1982. To be fair, they also bombed hospitals on which the “terrorists” had stationed nothing whatsoever. At Bourj al-Barajneh it appeared that the Israeli pilot had used the Red Cross-symbol on the roof to aim. After all, there could be “terrorists” in the hospital beds. This year it seems that shooting at ambulances is the sport in vogue. Or was it UN observers?

ISRAEL’S FORMER Prime Minister Menachem Begin once declared that “if Adolf Hitler were hiding in a housing block full of civilians, we would bomb it.” Now, there wasn’t any Israel at the time when Hitler frequented housing blocks. That is at the core of the problem, so to speak. Back when PLO was the main enemy, it was passable in the Israeli public sphere to compare Yassir Arafat to Hitler. This year the Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has the honor of being “Hitler.”
     But in that case it would surely suffice to bomb one house? As opposed to reducing a city of millions to rubble?
     This is where the Israeli logic fails, and it does so because it is the logic of terrorism. The logic of terrorism dictates that a hospital is a legitimate target if it may contain combatants.
     The logic is so bizarre that it values the life of one terrorist higher than other lives — if one kills twenty innocents to eliminate one Hizbollah stalwart, the operation is a success.
     Yes, I think Israel must have the right to exist and defend itself. I even find the idea of a “security zone” a good one. But then, in the name of decency, it should surely be located in Israel and not in Lebanon. After all, you don’t empty your garbage bin over the fence to your neighbor, right?

By Torgrim Eggen 2006. Translation by Sirocco.