The United States has the power to and stop Gaza’s war. You just have to ask Israel to desist from your offensive and threaten to withdraw your financial, military and diplomatic help if you do not stop. There is no country in the world that has the capacity of the greatest power of the planet, even more with a friendly nation since it was created, its aircraft carrier in the Middle East, perpetual and protected allied of the house.
But no, the current president of the United States, Donald Trump, is not going to make that call to the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanayhu, nor did his predecessor, Joe Biden, as those who came before did not do before and attended the operations on the strip of 2008-2009, 2012, 2014 … The Republican, current tenant of the White House, has chosen to reach a high Fire, recover hostages in the hands of Hamas, force the party-military to disarm and then undertake a juicy reconstruction of the Palestinian coast.
And yet, there was once an American president who did take the step, who planted and demanded to stop. Its influence took effect in just 20 minutes. It was called, he had been an actor and won the elections for the Republican Party, the one that Trump uses showcase and has practically dismantled. A photo of an injured child moved him so much that he could not.
You have to go back to June 1982. Tel Aviv gave the order to invade Lebanon to search its territory to members of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), created by. The government of the then prime minister, considered that the presence of these militants represented a security problem for his country and decided to act, as he had already done in 1978. The Israeli invasion occurred in the middle of a bloody civil war, unleashed after an attack by the Lebanese phalanges, a Christian militia of the right and ally of Israel, against a bus full of Palestinian refugees.
After an attempted murder to Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador to London, Begin understood that there was a case of wara reason for war, and crossed the border. He wanted to expel the OP of Lebanon and ended up achieving it, because he ended up leaving Tunisia. Israel mobilized 60,000 soldiers and, among other things, launched a fierce offensive about Beirut that lasted ten weeks. One of his bombings was eleven hours, uninterruptedly, and left more than one hundred dead. Tel Aviv then spoke of the need for “cleaning.” Today the same word is used for Gaza.
After that day, on August 2, 1982, the world press published some terrible photographs of a seven -month -old baby wrapped in bandages, the torso completely covered, like the eyes and part of his legs. The reporters of the Associated Press agencies and UPI found him in a hospital in the Lebanese capital and reported that he had lost his arms. His name was Elie Mass and was a Christian. A copy of With that image he ended up at the Reagan table and left him speechless, shocked. He commented with his team, including his Secretary of State, George Shultz, and said that snapshot seemed a symbol of the devastation of the war.
Baby Elie Masso, attended by a nurse at a Beirut hospital (Lebanon), in August 1982.
They tell books like by Lou Cannon, which Reagan asked for a telephone conference with Begin and said: “Menachen, this is a holocaust”, to which the Israeli replied: “Mr. President, I think I know what a holocaust is.” The American insisted that the siege had to stop, “destruction and unnecessary bloodstation”, which was commanded by the then Minister of Defense of Israel, a young man.
At 20 minutes of the call, Begin gave the order to end the attack. When the premier Israelí called Reagan again to inform him of his decision, the Republican thanked him, hung and acknowledged before the White House Cabinet Deputy Chief, Michael Deaver: “He didn’t know he had this kind of power.”
The details
The photograph of little Elie was a world courage. At a time when the press had the confidence of the readers, when social networks did not exist or the immediacy of the live, an image of that forcefulness was the best summary of a complex conflict to explain. So it was much the stinging that generated, beyond Reagan and that, in the end, their wounds were lower than the informed.
Israel strive in the following days to explain in the White House that the child was fine and that it had not been his planes that destroyed his house, in the Ramatiye area. The then Minister of Health and Israel, Eliezer Shostak, sent a letter to Reagan in which he realized the true wounds of the kid, with testimonies of his family and a doctor, who. He also insisted that he had not been attacked by Israel, but that his ills were due to the “indiscriminate bombings” of the PLO, of the Palestinians, in residential areas.
Apparently, the baby had been bandaged from top to bottom to treat the wounds that an air attack had produced, but he had not lost his arms, but had them very close to the trunk and that gave the feeling to the photographers that in reality his limbs had been amputated. UPI also corroborated that version in a later statement, blaming the error of his reporter to the “confusion prevailing at that time, both in the hospital and in the city” of Beirut. However, in the rectification of this medium, the initial version of his photo foot was not touched that it was the Israel army that had attacked the child’s house.
Constantin Hana Masso, the child’s grandfather; His mother, AIDS, and a doctor identified as G. Hage reports in the Israeli dossier that the child suffered, finally, a fracture in one arm and burns on the forehead and legs. A “projectile fragment” caused the greatest damage. “It has recovered well from burns and its fracture is healing well,” says the minister, who expressly sent doctors from his country to evaluate the boy’s status. At eight days, he was discharged and, already at home, he was portrayed again by Israel’s envoys. “This is my son,” reads next door, written in Arabic, of the mother’s handwriting.
The little injured, in his mother’s arms, after leaving the hospital.
He He accompanied the image of information in which he explained that the image of Israel was clouding through the killings in Lebanon. Begin was even sending visitors to the area in an attempt to show them that his army was “the most human in the world,” says the information. “But the image is still generally negative, according to many officials, and believe that Lebanon’s invasion has generated a new metaphor in which Israel is seen as Goliath and the OP as David,” said this medium on August 21, 1982.
Reagan and Middle East
Gaza’s images of these two years do not move the same, perhaps because everyone, even US presidents, are unforgivably anesthetized to see them. But the horror of each story is indescribable. There is, for example, that child who was doubly amputated, who ran out of arms and whose portrait in the NOW He deserved the last World Press Photo. Mahmoud Ajjour is called the child’s child, nine years old. Samar Abu Elouf, the photoreporter.
Apart from that apparent branch of humanity, Reagan had special interest in that things were not more in Lebanon because he wanted the US to be a mediator and peacemaker throughout the region, not only in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (he opted for an integral peace process) but in. Washington was trying to win allies and looking for territories to expand, especially defensive and commercial.
I did not agree with Israel’s barrage because they put those goals in danger, so he came to appoint several special envoys for the area to impose their vision. He even showed his anger to Tel Aviv not vetoing that of the UN, which claimed the “unconditional” withdrawal of Lebanese soil Israel. It was proposed to impose sanctions on Israel, but did not dare to not get more enhancing. In the end, Reagan was part of the negotiations that made the members of the PLOs exile again, this time to North Africa.
“Children do not come with the murder of other children”
Pronounced on September 20 of that year, televised and radiated to the nation, the president announced the shipment to Lebanon of 1,200 Marines for an international force in which France and Italy also participated to guarantee peace after those attacks and to help the local government have some stability. His words today contrast with Trump’s. He talked about the “Palestinian victims of this tragedy”, of “ending the nightmare”, of the “absolute need” of peace. “Children do not come with the murder of other children,” he said, with Elie in memory, surely.
He also insisted that “Israel must have learned that there is no way that he can impose his own solutions to such deep and bitter hatred.” To continue like this, he warned, “it will only sink more into the quagmire.” “Unless Israel acts quickly and courage to retire, it will be increasingly involved in problems that do not compete and cannot solve,” he insisted on allusion to Lebanon. The priority should be “to solve the Palestinian problem” and the defense of the “security” of civilians. “The whole world will be a safer place when this region, which has known so many problems, can begin to know peace,” he concluded.
Reagan was the man of the bombing of Libya and the Iran-Contra scandal, in addition to the defender of a new massive rearmament to cope with the cold war with the USSR. But also who, with a call, sent Israel to stop. And he succeeded.
