By RANA KABBANI

“Remember that I can do anything to anybody,” Caligula liked to gloat. This seems to be the boast of the Israeli army.

In 1978 i experienced first-hand one of Israel’s many wars against Lebanon. It was a ruthless—if ultimately futile—attempt to destroy the Palestinian resistance. There was no Hizballah then. The guerrillas who are now seeking to counter this Anglo-American-Israeli destruction of an entire country—their leader having lit the tinderbox— had not been born yet. The women who would bear them were still girls, traumatised forever by the indiscriminate air attacks on their villages and the mass killing of their loved ones.

Terrified families clutching babies and bundles streamed into Beirut’s squares and parks, the first pitiful wave of refugees from the impoverished Shi‘a south to arrive in the capital. Hundreds of thousands would follow them in the years to come, most of them forcibly displaced in 1982— year of the unspeakable Sabra and Chatila massacre. Yet more came in 1996, year of the first Qana massacre. The Israeli army was doing what it does best—“creating facts on the ground,” arrogantly unaware of the consequences these “facts” would have.

Elias Khoury, the Lebanese novelist who lived through the Israeli war of 1982, is presently moved to ask, in an eloquent essay: “Am I seeing, or am I remembering?” For who can believe that they are not re-living the obscenity of that past war? Who could have imagined that the world would allow the same crimes to be visited on the same hostage civilian population?

As I write, a million people have been terrorised into having to run for their lives, leaving everything behind of worth to them and value. Many have been murdered in their crowded vehicles, as they were bombed without mercy, while seeking to escape. In three catastrophic weeks, the south of Lebanon has been emptied of its population.