Fateful Triangle

Peace for Galilee419singing on the ruins.” And he asks, finally: “What will become of us,”acting in such ways?5.4 The Grand FinaleIsrael’s attack continued with mounting fury through July and August,the prime target now being the besieged city of West Beirut. By lateJune, residential areas had been savagely attacked in the defenselesscity. Robert Fisk writes that “The Israeli pilots presumably meant to droptheir bombs on the scruffy militia office on Corniche Mazraa, but theymissed. Instead, their handiwork spread fire and rubble half the lengthof Abu Chaker Street, and the people of this miserable littlethoroughfare—those who survived, that is—cannot grasp whathappened to them... Abu Chaker Street was in ruins, its collapsedapartment blocks still smoking and some of the dead still in theirpancaked homes, sandwiched beneath hundreds of tons of concrete...The perspiring ambulance crews had so far counted 32 dead, most ofthem men and women who were hiding in their homes in a nine-storeyblock of flats, when an Israeli bomb exploded on its roof and tore downhalf the building.” One old man “described briefly, almost withoutemotion, how [his daughter’s] stomach had been torn out by shrapnel.”“This was a civilian area,” he said. “The planes are terrorizing us. This isno way for soldiers to fight.” 165 This was before the massive air attacksof late July and August.On one occasion, on August 4, the IDF attempted a ground attack,but withdrew after 19 Israeli soldiers were killed. 166 The IDF thenreturned to safer tactics, keeping to bombing and shelling from land andsea, against which there was no defense, in accordance with familiarmilitary doctrine. The population of the beleaguered city was deprived ofClassics in Politics: The Fateful TriangleNoam Chomsky