A Conversation With Dimitri Lascaris

Message in a Bomber

Imagine a squadron of US F-35 jets roaring over a football stadium in Calgary or Winnipeg or Toronto, packed with maple leaf-waving fans at Canada’s fall classic, the annual championship game of the Canadian Football League, the Grey Cup.

Or over the funeral of a venerated Canadian politician, who had had the temerity to champion Canadian cultural and economic sovereignty in the face of US imperialism.

In both instances, not so fanciful, Donald Trump’s message would be clear: Don’t boo our national anthem. Give us your oil, gas, and minerals; become our 51st state — or else.

This past weekend, a handful of Israeli F-35 fighter bombers delivered a message of just this sort, flying low over a stadium in Beirut, Lebanon, packed with mourners for the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, charismatic Shia leader and Secretary General of the Party of God, Hezbollah, brutally assassinated five months earlier (perhaps by the same Israeli fighter pilots), beneath a rain of US bunker buster bombs.

Other than their low-altitude (low enough to be visually inspected, without setting off sonic booms), nothing out of the ordinary here. Israeli fighter jets, surveillance craft and drones have been violating Lebanese airspace for years, day and night, sonic booms and all.

In the wake of the November 27 ceasefire deal between Israel and Lebanon, brokered by the US and France, Israeli forces also occupy a handful of hilltops across southern Lebanon, surveilling the Shia villages they’ve destroyed, the fields they’ve littered with cluster munitions, and poisoned with white phosphorus.

To the east, free to seize any lands they please, Israeli forces have now extended their occupation beyond the purportedly annexed Syrian Golan Heights, into a buffer zone established following the 1973 Yom Kippur war.

“Israel is waiting for Syria to stabilize,” the Jewish News Syndicate reports.

If the past is any indication of the future (as it usually is), Israel will stay in southern Syria indefinitely; forever, possibly even colonizing it.

So says, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.

Last Sunday, Netanyahu demanded that southern Syria be fully demilitarized, declaring the southern Syrian provinces of Quneitra, Daraa and Suwayda, south of Damascus, off-bounds for military forces of the freshly minted Syrian regime.

An astonishing but fully rational evocation of Israeli supremacy across southwest Asia, albeit in flagrant breach of international law.

Israel is accustomed to doing as it pleases, a unique dispensation guaranteed by the European Union, Canada, and, of course, Israel-USA.

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For an eyewitness account of the February 23 funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, Israel’s low-altitude flyovers (more than one), and the situation currently facing fellow Canadian activist Yves Engler, the GPM turned to Dimitri Lascaris. Lascaris is a Canadian lawyer, social justice advocate, and journalist.