"Israeli warplanes targeted for the first time a Christian area [the Ashrafiyah neighborhood] of eastern Beirut on Wednesday morning," reports Adnkronos International.

"During the night the Israeli air and naval forces also targeted another prevalently Christian area, the southern suburb of Hadeth. The junction that takes to the closed Semaan tunnel was struck and a fire broke out in a shrine with a votive cross on top. The areas of Shweifat and Choueifat were targeted in the south-eastern suburbs," adds Spero News.

"Lebanese believe that not a single inch of their country is beyond the whir of Israeli warplanes, the hiss of a falling bomb or the devastating explosion when one hits," explains the Mercury News.

Meanwhile, the Brits are taking issue with the Israelis, not for bombing Lebanon per se but rather because "right-wing Israelis" are celebrating killing British.

"The rightwingers, including Binyamin Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister, are commemorating the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the headquarters of British rule, that killed 92 people and helped to drive the British from Palestine," reports the Times Online. "They have erected a plaque [in tribute to the terrorist group Irgun] outside the restored building, and are holding a two-day seminar with speeches and a tour of the hotel by one of the Jewish resistance fighters involved in the attack…. The controversy over the plaque and the two-day celebration of the bombing, sponsored by Irgun veterans and the right-wing Menachem Begin Heritage Centre, goes to the heart of the debate over the use of political violence in the Middle East. Yesterday Mr. Netanyahu argued in a speech celebrating the attack that the Irgun were governed by morals, unlike fighters from groups such as Hamas."

In other words, terrorism is moral when it is unleashed by Zionists. Likewise, we are told ad nauseam by the pro-Israel corporate media, Israel’s mass murder campaign in Lebanon is moral because it is "self defense," never mind that the babies and grandmothers slaughtered never lifted a hand against Israel. Obviously, it is a punishable offense to be born Arab. The fact one is a Christian does not serve as a hall pass.

While the Brits whine about "right-wing" (in a word, fascist) Israelis killing their colonial officers and celebrating it, few talk about the crimes perpetuated against the Lebanese.

In 1982, during "Operation Peace for Galilee" (as in the tombstone epitaph, rest in peace), Lebanon was not only a killing ground, it was also systematically looted. "Twenty thousand Palestinians and Lebanese died, 25,000 were wounded and 400,000 were made homeless during the first months of the 1982 Israeli invasion. The tonnages dropped on Beirut alone surpassed those of the atomic bomb which devastated Hiroshima. Schools and hospitals were particularly targeted," writes Ralph Schoenman (The Hidden History of Zionism).

Virtually all rolling stock and heavy equipment from Lebanese factories were looted and taken to Israel. Even the lathes and smaller machine tools from the U.N.R.W.A. vocational training centers were pillaged.

The citrus and olive production of Lebanon south of Beirut was destroyed. The Lebanese economy, whose exports had competed with Israel’s, became moribund. The south of Lebanon became an Israeli market even as the headwaters of the Litani River, like the Jordan River before it, were diverted by the Israelis.

The author of this book experienced the bombing and siege of West Beirut in 1982, lived with Palestinians in the ruins of Ain El Helweh during Israeli occupation and witnessed the devastation in the Palestinian camps of Rashidya, El Bas, Burj al lamali, Mieh Mieh, Burj al Burajneh, Sabra and Shatila, as well as the destruction of the Lebanese towns and villages throughout the south.

The accounts of Israeli enactment of the massacre of Sabra and Shatila have been substantiated by this author, who was present in the camps on the final day of slaughter. He and Mya Shone photographed Israeli tanks and soldiers in Sabra and Shatila and spoke to the survivors over a period of four days.

Israel is currently revisiting these horrors on Lebanon as I write. Lebanon, an example of a modern and multi-ethnic Arab society that works, must be destroyed, as the Arabs, according to the vile ideology of "right-wing" Israelis such as Binyamin Netanyahu, must never be allowed to prosper.

Moreover, Lebanon serves as the template for the larger Zionist plan to balkanize the neighborhood. "Lebanon was the model, prepared for its role by the Israelis for thirty years, as the Sharett diaries revealed. It is the expansionist compulsion set forth by Herzl and Ben Gurion even as it is the logical extension of the Sharett diaries. The dissolution of Lebanon was proposed in 1919, planned in 1936, launched in 1954 and realized in 1982," Schoenman continues, and then quotes the late Israel Shahak:

Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula and is already following that track. The subsequent dissolution of Syria and Iraq into ethnically or religiously unique areas, as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run. The dissolution of the military power of these states serves as the primary short-term target.

"Each Arab state is examined with a view to assessing how it may be disassembled. Wherever minority religious groupings are present in the army, [Oded Yinon] sees opportunity," Schoenman explains.

Yinon’s plan for Arab and Muslim balkanization, drafted at the precise time Israel was bombarding Lebanon in 1982, was "shared by many people in power" in Israel, according to its author.

"But the article clearly doesn’t represent any official Israeli view. Instead, it’s an example of the contentious internal debate about Israeli policy that goes on daily in the Hebrew press. Moreover, the Arab reaction to the article may indicate more about Arab fears than the article itself does about Israeli intentions," opined a dismissive Wall Street Journal on December 8, 1982. "Still, given the current fragile situation in the Middle East, in which some Lebanese leaders are accusing Israel of encouraging religious strife between Lebanon’s Christian and Druse Moslem sects, Mr. Yinon’s article makes interesting reading."

"Every Arab state … especially those with cohesive and clear nationalist directions, is a real target sooner or later," writes Khalil Nakhleh in the publisher’s note of Israel Shahak’s translation of Yinon’s A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties. "This is not a new idea, nor does it surface for the first time in Zionist strategic thinking. Indeed, fragmenting all Arab states into smaller units has been a recurrent theme," as revealed by Livia Rokach.

In her book, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, Rokach argues that the "inter-Lebanese conflict," invented by Ben Gurion "from scratch," was "attributed, shamelessly, to Israeli security needs," a cynical effort to exploit "terror and aggression to provoke or create the appearance of an Arab threat to Israel’s existence" in order to force the "partition and subordination of that country to Israel." According to Rokach, "a detailed blueprint… was elaborated by Israel more than fifteen years before the Palestinian presence became a political factor in Lebanon," that is well before Israel used Palestinian "terrorism" (resistance to occupation and brutality) as an excuse to decimate its neighbor in 1982.

Now the excuse is Hezbollah. Lebanese PM "Siniora told Milan-based newspaper Corriere della Sera that the Shi’ite militia has been doing the bidding of Syria and Iran, and that it can only be disarmed with the help of the international community and once a cease-fire has been achieved in the current Middle East fighting," reports Haaretz. "It’s not a mystery that Hezbollah answers to the political agendas of Tehran and Damascus," Siniora was quoted as saying by Corriere. "The entire world must help us disarm Hezbollah. But first we need to reach a cease-fire."

Of course, attempting to disarm Hezbollah—that is to say set the resistance organization up to be slaughtered by Israel—will result in yet another Lebanese civil war, as Shi’ites will once again turn against Christians, with international "peacekeepers" caught in the middle, and this will further reduce the country, as long planned.

Finally, the corporate media, working feverishly to blame Hezbollah for Israel’s provocations, admits Hezbollah is a military force to be reckoned with.

"Hezbollah’s ability to use relatively advanced weapons in the last week of fighting against Israel, as well as the variety of its armaments, has surprised U.S. military experts, current and former officials involved in Middle East policy said," writes the Los Angeles Times, making sure to blame the next target on the neocon hit list. "The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because intelligence matters are involved, said Hezbollah fighters, once viewed as a ragtag group of guerrillas, appear to have received training by Iran in sophisticated missile technologies. Some of the training may have taken place in Iran, they said…. Israeli intelligence officials said assistance, including basic weapons and supplies, continues to flow from Iran. One Israeli intelligence official said there was new evidence that Iran had stepped up arms shipments through Camp Zabadani, a longtime base that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard maintains in Syria, near the Lebanese border."

In other words, in order to take out Hezbollah, according to these Israeli "analysts," Syria and Iran must be attacked. Of course, even if Israel or the United States attack Syria and Iran, this will not end the resistance in Lebanon.

"The Israelis believe they have had some effect, but Hezbollah remains in this fight," Jon B. Alterman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and a Bush neocon, told the LA Times. "They can sustain this for quite some time," thus providing the criminal and genocidal state of Israel all the reason more to attack the innocent and defenseless, including their erstwhile "friends," the Maronite Christians of Lebanon.