Question: Where is our apology, Barak? - by Helen Nesser Assad

...we do not need Barak's request for forgiveness, nor are we interested in one. Our friends and brothers, veterans of the IDF and defense establishment, who unlike Barak, did not abandon us, continue to accompany us in our struggles and our difficulties and have done so since that fateful day. Their friendship will not compensate for the crime, but it at least shows us that there are those in this country who are decent and moral and no less importantly, people of conscience.

Helen Nesser Assad..
Israel Hayom..
29 July '19..
Link: https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/where-is-our-apology-barak/

Israel Democratic Party leader Ehud Barak apologized last week for the deaths of 13 Israeli Arabs during the riots of October 2000, which marked the outbreak of the Second Intifada. He was prime minister at the time. There are quite a few people who are willing to be moved by this, even though they understand this is nothing more than a stunt, a transparent ploy to garner votes ahead of the September election.

I am not moved by this apology; in fact I find it infuriating. I can only speak for myself, but I believe quite a few of my brothers and sisters in the South Lebanon Army community in Israel are now asking themselves: Where is our apology?

I am a bereaved daughter and sister. Quite a few Israelis, mainly IDF officers and senior defense system officials who dealt with southern Lebanon within their framework of their service, know my family as the "dynasty of death." My father, four of my brothers and two of my nephews were killed in that terrible war in South Lebanon. My brothers were wearing South Lebanon Army uniforms when they fell in battle. I was recently recognized by the Defense Ministry as a bereaved sister.

I have lived in Israel since the 1990s. I built a life in Haifa, established a family and sent my sons to serve in the military. I do not regret this. As the daughter of a South Lebanon Army family, I continue to believe in the historic alliance between the Israel Defense Forces and the South Lebanon Army. I also believe that there is more to this alliance than security interests. We are joined together by common values, a shared war ethic, and I also believe, a shared destiny. Those who have not fought shoulder to shoulder, and those who were not there and did not witness this comradeship with their own eyes cannot understand the significance of this alliance. I remember, as a girl, my parents hosting IDF soldiers, officers, and sometimes very senior IDF officers, in their home. We treated them like family, no less.

Who would have thought that the day would come when this alliance would be violated? We never guessed the day would come when the IDF would abandon southern Lebanon without preparing us in advance. There were those who somehow succeeded in gathering some of their possessions and their family and taking them across the border. The rest were abandoned to their fate, meaning to Hezbollah. It seems to me a majority of Israelis can imagine the bloodbath that ensued.

South Lebanon Will Be Liberated from Hezb'allah

Charbel Barakat
American Thinker
30 May '10

Last Sunday was the tenth anniversary of Israel's withdrawal from what was used to be known as the "security zone." That day, following the instructions of then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barack, all Israeli units operating north of the borders inside Lebanese territories were pulled back inside Israeli territories. According to Barack, it was in implementation of the UNSCR 425, issued in 1978 after an Israeli incursion into Lebanon in response to PLO attacks across the borders then. So in the year 2000, 23 years after it entered the country to fight its enemies, Israel's government decided to pull its troops back from Lebanon abruptly. Barack at the time said he was complying with U.N. resolutions and that he expected that no threat will come from Lebanon anymore. That was the Israeli version of the Labor Government then.

But as IDF forces were pulling back, Iranian-backed Hezb'allah militias were entering every single village and town evacuated by the Israelis. According to Hassan Nasrallah, the commander of Hezb'allah, Israel withdrew because of the strikes by the so-called "resistance," which in fact was the Iranian-backed militia. The Hezb'allah story is that southern Lebanon was occupied by the Israelis, who had a proxy militia known as South Lebanon Army. And that Hezb'allah struggled to liberate the land from its Zionist occupiers.

However, there is a third version. It rejects the first two, and it claims it represents the struggle of the people of southern Lebanon, who struggled against Terror and were removed from their ancestral lands -- because of Ehud Barack's policies on the one hand and the abandonment of the West of Lebanon last resisting free people against the hordes of Hezb'allah and their Iranian and Syrian backers on the other. Unfortunately, the third story has no tellers these days. Barack has Israel's media at his service so that he can boast about his betrayal of southern Lebanon and his own Israeli people, and Nasrallah has his Iranian-funded media to claim his victories against the populations who resisted him in southern Lebanon.

(Read full article)

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In Israel: Liquor, Not War

Nomi Abeliovich
The Atlantic
04 March '10
Posted before Shabbat

In a region so complicated that anything is possible, local gastronomy seems to be extracting the better side of a messy situation. This is how a group of former Lebanese militiamen has found themselves producing the "milk of lions"—arak, an aniseed-flavored liquor made from grapes or other fruits—in Israel.

It all started in the late 1970s. As a result of the Lebanese civil war, the South Lebanon Army (SLA) was set up to combat various groups, and it was no longer under the direct control of the main Lebanese army. The SLA was closely allied with Israel, and after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, it turned over an occupied ''security zone'' in the south of Lebanon to the SLA, which mainly fought the Lebanese guerrilla forces led by Hezbollah. In return, Israel supported the organization with arms, uniforms, and equipment.

When the Israeli Defense Forces withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah guerrillas took control of the areas previously controlled by the SLA, the SLA collapsed, and its members were declared traitors and collaborators by the Lebanese government. Some surrendered and stood trial in military court while others sought emergency refuge, along with their families, in Israel.

(Read full story)
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