Israel’s Latest Genocide Is Against the Shias of Lebanon. Why Is the World Silent?
Lebanon’s Christians are being told by the Israeli military to get rid of any displaced Shias hiding in their homes or villages. Haven’t we seen this story before, and don’t we all know how it ends?
Do you want to know what total impunity actually looks like? Look at Israel. It got away with a genocide in Gaza, and now it’s unleashing a similar genocidal campaign against Shia communities in southern Lebanon.
Right now, hundreds of thousands of Shia civilians are being displaced, bombed, and forced to flee. Their villages are emptied. Their homes are reduced to rubble. And Israel’s defense minister says they cannot return.
Where is the anger in the West, or in the Global South, or even in the Muslim world? Where are the emergency summits, the outraged headlines, the moral indignation that we saw when, for example, ISIS was carrying out a genocide against the Yazidis in Iraq and Syria?
Think I’m being hyperbolic? First, consider the relevant sections of the 1948 Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part” a “religious group,” including “killing members of the group” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Next, consider the recent reporting from both the New York Times and Drop Site News, which reveal how Israeli forces have issued evacuation orders across large swaths of southern Lebanon, explicitly targeting Shia communities who make up the majority of the local population.
Wouldn’t this be labeled “ethnic cleansing” if it were any other part of the world? Here is an entire population, an entire religious group, being targeted, displaced, and massacred simply because of who they are and where they live. The current Israeli approach to the Shias of southern Lebanon is collective, indiscriminate, and chillingly familiar: a community of innocents conflated with a security threat. “Every home in southern Lebanon, the Shia homes, are command and control centers,” an Israeli military spokesman told LBC radio in the UK last month, without offering a shred of evidence.
But it gets even worse.