Stoning Sison: Lebanon Rejects US-Israeli Peace Overture

Michele Sison, U.S. Chargé d’Affaires in Lebanon (State Department photo)

Michele Sison, the American Chargé d’Affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon, was speaking last April at the 25th-year anniversary of a 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. There were three bombings targeting Americans that year, the year of Hezbollah’s coming out . The one on April 18 took the lives of 63 people, including 32 Lebanese and 17 American employees at the embassy.

“All of us Americans currently posted at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut,” Sison said two months ago, “feel privileged to be serving in Lebanon during this particular time. We pass the stone memorial, engraved with the names of those no longer with us, every day. It reminds us that they came here to contribute to a strong and positive relationship between Lebanon and the United States.”

Sison was in southern Lebanon today, visiting with Abdullah Bitar, a municipal councilman in the town of Nabatiyeh. As she got ready to leave, her convoy was surrounded by about 200 villagers, including women and children, who pelted Sison’s car with stones. She was unharmed and the car, helped by an added dose of Lebanese police escort, made it back to Beirut, but not before Sison heard the crowd shout “Death to Israel” and “We don’t want you in South Lebanon.”

While Nabatiyeh is in Hezbollah country, villagers there have reason to be angry at the United States and Israel: American-made cluster bombs dropped by Israel are still maiming and killing civilians two years after the 2006 Hezbollah-Israeli war . Still, the incident might not have been be particularly remarkable if it hadn’t happened just three days after U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s parachuting visit to Lebanon , where she met with the new Lebanese president, Michele Suleiman, and publicly endorsed Israel’s overture to Lebanon to talk peace. Peace is, after all, what southern Lebanese want most—or it should be.

Then again, maybe not. Read a full analysis of Lebanon's rejection...