Plus ça change

And to those countries who claim we are using disproportionate force, I have only this to say: "you're damn right we are!"
—Israeli UN ambassador Dan Gillerman, July 18, 2006

Israeli politicians have claimed the only people left in southern Lebanon are terrorists. But the group of 65 people who huddled for safety in one of the larger buildings on Saturday night were mostly children and pensioners.
—The Telegraph

The Angry Arab, As'ad AbuKhalil's blog, is the one indispensible source of news, analysis, and (entirely appropriate) rage, bitterness, and sarcasm about the devastation in Lebanon.

Today, in one of his many reflections on this weekend's war crime at Qana, As'ad notes that Robert Fisk "wrote [the following] before Qana":

And having seen the cadavers of so many more men and women, I have to say--from my eyrie only three miles from the Israeli border--that the compliant, gutless, shameful refusal of Bush, Rice and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara to bring this bloodbath to an end sentenced many hundreds of innocent Lebanese to death. As I write this near the village of Blat, which has its own little list of civilian dead, it's quite clear that many more innocent Lebanese are being prepared for the slaughter--and will indeed die in the coming days.

Prescient, yes, but how difficult for one who has seen all that Fisk has seen? (Not to take anything away from him and his great work.) My search on the terms "Fisk + Qana" turned up a column from April 1996, one about an equally, if not more, repulsive massacre by the Israelis, that took place in the same town.

Qana has the dubious distinction of having been the site of two appalling Israeli slaughters of civilians.

A couple of quotes from the 1996 Fisk column:

It was a massacre. Not since Sabra and Chatila had I seen the innocent slaughtered like this.

In front of a burning building of the UN's Fijian battalion headquarters, a girl held a corpse in her arms, the body of a grey- haired man whose eyes were staring at her, and she rocked the corpse back and forth in her arms, keening and weeping and crying the same words over and over: "My father, my father." A Fijian UN soldier stood amid a sea of bodies and, without saying a word, held aloft the body of a headless child.

"The Israelis have just told us they'll stop shelling the area", a UN soldier said, shaking with anger. "Are we supposed to thank them?" In the remains of a burning building - the conference room of the Fijian UN headquarters - a pile of corpses was burning. The roof had crashed in flames onto their bodies, cremating them in front of my eyes. When I walked towards them, I slipped on a human hand...

... Israel's slaughter of civilians in this terrible 10-day offensive - 206 by last night - has been so cavalier, so ferocious, that not a Lebanese will forgive this massacre.

That was Fisk's take on the 1996 atrocity. Let's hope that no one forgets--or forgives the Qana atrocity of 2006.