The most troubling dimension of the current Israeli assault on Lebanon and Gaza is the continuing refusal by the G8 leaders, the United Nations Security Council, and Secretary-General Kofi Annan to call for a ceasefire, leave alone condemn the civilian slaughter that has been underway for some time now.

Israel's latest brutality will surprise few, since it has over the years routinely meted out brutal collective punishment. But these world leaders gave Israel what it needed, time to continue unimpeded its massacres and demolitions. To make their decision on the ceasefire more palatable, Prime Minister Tony Blair and Mr. Annan proposed instead an international force for southern Lebanon. It fooled no one: the force will take weeks to put in place.

Such transparent international complicity in a war whose main targets are civilians is unprecedented. It is also particularly odious because these leaders had at last September's extraordinary United Nations summit solemnly hailed as a historical milestone the declaration on the "Responsibility to Protect" civilians during conflict, labeling this protection as one of the most urgent global priorities.

The world already has the Hague and Geneva Conventions, but the new declaration, and April's Security Council resolution 1674, were adopted to further ensure that there would be no more impunity for civilian killings. But this promise to the weak and vulnerable became irrelevant in the face of Israeli and American needs this month. The resolution of choice now is not 1674 but 1559, which asked for the disarming of Lebanese militias.

The world's carefully-constructed international system for maintaining peace and security, built around the United Nations Charter written under US leadership in 1945, is now on its last legs. It is mute and unresponsive, unable to fathom how to respond in the face of lawless behaviour by our sole superpower and of course Israel.

The system is unraveling so rapidly now that even as world powers push for new laws that will serve their interests, these are quickly overtaken by other demands for hegemony and ruthlessness. What is therefore being fashioned by the US and its allies is a new, looser system in which the powerful may do as they wish. Those who oppose their occupations, hegemony, and injustice will be labeled criminals. Thus the labeling as terrorism of Hamas's attack and capture of the soldiers of an occupying state holding thousands of Palestinian detainees without trial, while the unrestrained destruction of populations is allowed to be proclaimed as self-defense.

The last few weeks have created intense new hatreds against Israel and the United States, and radicalized many Arabs and Muslims towards extremism. Interestingly, Mr. Blair had indicated when backing the Iraq war that he would convince President Bush to be more forceful and even-handed in making a major push in resolving the Israeli-Arab conflict. Britain, having already cruelly suffered from terrorism by locally-bred Muslims inflamed by its Iraq and Afghanistan occupations, has now added Palestine and Lebanon to their grievances because of Mr. Blair's almost militant backing in Parliament yesterday for the Israeli destruction of Lebanon and Gaza now underway.

Another victim of this new war is the United Nations, whose standing in the Arab and Muslim world is already deeply fractured. Mr. Annan’s refusal to call for a ceasefire and his general invisibility on the targeting of civilians aside has done it serious harm and will be seen by many as a disavowal of the Organization’s primary humanitarian and protection mandates.

Thankfully for the UN, its humanitarian and human rights chiefs Jan Egeland and Louise Arbour were most courageous in respectively raising the Responsibility to Protect Civilians mandate and possible war crimes prosecutions as they might apply to Israel.

Ironically, this latest Israeli assault was triggered not by an atrocity against civilians but by the killing and capturing of its soldiers. This military humiliation is partly the cause of the current Israeli fury, but its ultimate goal is to terrify civilians into opposing popular anti-occupation resistance movements, and to once again divide Lebanon along Muslim-Christian lines as a means to strengthen its former Phalangist allies of the Sabra and Shatilla fame.

Principles aside, the G8's giving Israel free rein is mystifying, since Lebanon's weak and pro-western government poses no threat to Israel. Its Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, is a moderate Sunni businessman elected with US support after Rafik Hariri's assassination last year. His passionate enumeration of the depravity of Israel's actions therefore had global resonance. The Israeli targeting of innocent civilians had driven his country to "the gates of hell and madness" and torn it to shreds with indiscriminate bombing of every possible economic asset and the civil infrastructure, he said. [Scores had been killed even in the North, where there is no Hezbollah presence. Mr. Siniora also passionately refuted Israeli protestations of previously benign behaviour at the border. But his desperate pleas for a ceasefire have moved none of the world's leaders.]

[The consequences of this new lawlessness will be profound. For example, the struggle of poorly-armed Arabs against powerful occupation armies in Iraq and the Palestinian territories has for some time been bedeviled by their resort to attacks explicitly directed at innocent civilians. This has prevented many Muslims, and most westerners, from supporting these anti-occupation struggles. United States and Israeli occupiers have committed much larger atrocities against civilians, but these have always been explained as unintended collateral damage, even when the vast majority of those killed are civilians. But now, in a world which allows Israel to explicitly target and kill large numbers of civilians, the more extremist Islamic factions will develop more support as well as more recruits.]

The United States could not build a strong consensus for the new order it seeks without the support of one of the major democracies. Britain has been offering close support thus far for the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations. But Mr. Blair's robust alliance with the United States and Israel in the current crisis has now made Britain an indispensable player in the making of the hegemonic order that the US and Israel seek. Such a frontline role has obvious advantages in this unipolar world, but this dramatic shift from Britain's moderate post-colonial role, and its distance from mainstream Europe, carries for it greater perils as well.

Email to: salimlone@yahoo.com

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