Two Sri Lankans serving in embattled Lebanon in the UN peacekeeping force have been seriously injured by direct Israeli firing on their post on Friday with one Sri Lankan in ‘critical condition’ and hospitalised. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Friday said the “Embassy in Beirut is in contact with UNIFIL regarding the medical attention and speedy recovery of the Sri Lankan peacekeepers.”
The Foreign Ministry release on behalf of the Government stated that “Sri Lanka strongly condemns the attack at UNIFIL’s headquarters in Naqoura, South Lebanon”, in which SL personnel were injured. The Ministry added: “Sri Lanka values the brave contribution of its UN peacekeepers worldwide.”
The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), is a UN peacekeeping mission established in March 1978 by the UN Security Council. UNIFIL was deployed in southern Lebanon initially to oversee the withdrawal of Israeli invading forces that year.
Since then, UNIFIL has faced numerous Israeli strikes on Lebanon and two more invasions. The UN force remains primarily to halt any further Israeli aggression but also to separate the IDF from Lebanese Government forces and local Palestinian and Arab militia mobilised to protect the nearly a million Palestinian refugees housed in Lebanon after displacement when the state of Israel was forcibly created in 1948.
With the ongoing latest Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, the Lebanese Government is warning that it would deploy its army to confront the invading forces. Meanwhile, after over two weeks of deployment into Lebanon – itself a barely functioning state beset by economic woes and entrenched ethnic divisions – the IDF has not been successful in its advance, despite the boasts of Israeli Government leaders and constant US aid.
As has happened in the past such ‘invasions’, the heavily armed IDF units, despite supportive massive shelling and aerial bombing all over Lebanon, are confronted by guerilla resistance by various Lebanese militia. In this latest Israeli invasion, the resistance is mainly led by the Hezbollah Movement, a well-established Lebanese Shia community organisation with its own Iranian-backed militia.
The two Sri Lankan peacekeeper soldiers were injured in what is the second direct strike on UNIFIL by the Israeli Defence Forces since its invasion. In response to ‘outrage’ expressed by not only the UN headquarters but also many European Union member states, the IDF officials said that their units had fired in the direction of incoming hostile fire.
Incoming fire
The terrible fact that is slowly dawning on both Jewish supremacist Israel and its main Western great power sponsors is that this so-called “outpost of Western civilisation” is now receiving incoming fire from all directions. This is the direct result of the recent months of aggressive military strikes by Israel all around the region – Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen and inside the Occupied Territories of Gaza and West Bank.
While the rest of the world has endlessly condemned the Israeli military offensives in Gaza – labelled by all world institutions as ‘plausible genocide’ – the Western power bloc has continued its financial and military sustenance of the Israeli war effort, claiming Israel’s right of self-defence. Even after months of regional warfare and the humanitarian crisis within Israel-Palestine, United States President Joe Biden defended Israel’s latest direct invasion of Lebanon as justifiable ‘self-defence’.
The world community has yet again to watch on its TV screens and social media sites the brutish military operations by Western and Israeli forces all across the region. US-supplied 2,000-lb bombs that Israel has used repeatedly in tiny Gaza is now being dropped on Beirut and other Lebanese cities including several places famed as historic sites of ancient buildings and shrines.
The consequent onslaught of hundreds of missiles fired into Israel by hostile Arab militia from Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq, has notably injured less than a hundred Israelis and killing just two over these past many months. This is because the weapons possessed and deployed by all the opposing forces are not even remotely comparable to the latest technology, most destructive, firepower of Western-armed Israel.
The exception is Iran which, given its own relative weaknesses, is yet holding back from using its large missile forces at full strength.
The weapons possessed by the Hezbollah and Syrian and Iraqi militia are of very light calibre, of short range and, of poor accuracy. Likewise, while the missiles so far deployed by the better-armed Yemeni Houthi forces have been a very few in number and also of light calibre and poor accuracy.
The several hundred missiles and drones launched at Israel in the two salvos by Iran in the past two months, while of a slightly heavier calibre, were of older types that are slow and easily detectable and did not target many significant localities. As Tehran had indicated through back channels to Washington at the time, these responding strikes were deliberately largely symbolic because Iran does not want an escalation that would devastate the whole region and immediately kill millions.
Despite this tactical restraint by the West Asian power resisting the West, namely Iran, and the poor firepower of the non-state Arab militias, aggressor Israel, given its own small size in territory and population, has begun to suffer serious social and economic stress as never before in its, no doubt, violent, short, history.
The Hezbollah missile bombardments after last October’s launch of a massive Israeli war against Gaza and the West Bank may have killed just two Israelis and injured a dozen. But it has served to severely depopulate Israel’s northern sector along its land border with Lebanon from where the Hezbollah is launching its ordnance.
According to reports from Israel, some 250,000 Israeli residents of this northern sector have been displaced. This means that region (notable for agriculture, tourism and some industry) is now economically non-reproductive. The displaced population is a burden on the state and on relatives elsewhere.
Economic
Worse is the economic and social situation in the rest of Israel.
In last October there was a massive mobilisation of personnel for the IDF to enable it to operate simultaneously on the Gazan, West Bank and Lebanese fronts (including the Golan Heights and Jordanian border) while also maintaining internal security in the rest of Israel.
This has meant that entire sectors of the economy as well as administration and public services (including medical and fire/rescue services) are now severely depleted of competent labour and trained personnel.
Because after October 7, Israel also halted all Palestinian labour of the Occupied Territories from serving in Israel farms, in construction and other services, there is now a critical labour shortage for all these sectors. Israeli attempts to import migrant labour from some Third World countries – including Sri Lanka – as substitutes for the banned Palestinian labour force has not succeeded precisely due to the war-like conditions in which these new entrants must serve.
There are already reports of a growing exodus of long-resident migrant workers in Israeli services eager to get themselves out of the line of fire. Hundreds of migrant workers are already flying out, and some developing country government from across the world may soon be organising mass evacuation flights.
Fortunately, with Israel being a small-scale economy, the numbers of migrant workers are not more than several score thousands unlike the millions endangered and requiring evacuation during the Persian Gulf invasions by the Western power bloc two decades ago. India’s Government may soon regret its encouragement to tens of thousands of Indians to run to Israel.
However, there is another looming problem of a creeping de-population of the Israeli nation itself, as a result of a complex of domestic political problems of which the current war on all fronts can be seen as the final challenge.
Israel is a settler state from its origins at the end of the Second World War. It was created not by Palestinian native Jews but by refugee and migrant European Jews fleeing and encouraged to flee their war-battered European homeland. It was a mass migration, encouraged by the European powers and facilitated by the provision of living space in the British and French-controlled colonies (‘mandates’ as termed by a then, European-dominated, UN) of the Levant region which comprised the Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Jordan of today.
Net emigration
After the forcible establishment of the settlers’ state of Israel in Palestine in 1948, that state was only able to grow and flourish because a sustained flow of migrants of European Jews from all parts of the world – that is, in addition to Europe itself.
After decades of Jewish immigration into Israel, in recent years, however, there has begun a net emigration of Israeli Jews. This was first significantly noticed only after the creation of new Jewish supremacist constitution a few years ago which turned a once largely secularist state into a strict Jewish religious one.
This has seen an increasing number of the more modernist and secular Jewish families migrating back to the Western societies from which either they or their parent came. Since about 2020, some 200,000 Israeli Jews have failed to return from trips abroad. As Israeli commentators are now noting, these emigrants included sections of Israeli technocracy, the intelligentsia and even the business class.
Since October last year, this emigration has increased dramatically. Israeli media is noting that many recent Israeli immigrants had retained citizenship of their countries of birth and were now using their native passports to flee their new homeland.
The economic and social impact of this brain drain is yet to be acknowledged by the current Jewish supremacist Likud party Government. But will these telltale-signs of a national war-weariness have an impact before Zionist extremists unleash an even deadlier war?
