Israeli Military Push Bumps Into Reality
The rhetoric of the Israeli military campaign in Lebanon has rudely bumped into reality. Israeli forces got bloodied in the fight for the Lebanese border city of Bint Jbeil. And all of a sudden, the goal posts have begun to slide.
After boasting for two weeks that it was intent on eradicating Hezbollah as a military force, Israel is now downgrading its strategic objectives. “The target is not to totally dismantle Hezbollah,” said Public Security Minister Avi Dichter, a former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service. “What we are doing now is to try to send a message to Hezbollah.” What that has to do, however, with the continued Israeli bombardment of Lebanese civilian population centers is a question no one in Jerusalem has yet bothered to answer.
The shift in Israeli rhetoric simply reflects a complicated reality that you would have thought Israeli war planners would have figured out before they dove head on into the briar patch. But I have learned, in my ripe old age, that is always a dangerous thing to over-estimate the intelligence or shrewdness of anybody or any government.
Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Professor Augustus Richard Norton — a veteran expert on Lebanon– warns that Israel is deluding itself if it believes that a drawn-out military campaign puts time on its side:
The idea that time favors Israel’s goal of disarming Hizbullah is dubious for five reasons:
• Hizbullah is wellprovisioned with weapons, and it is unlikely that the group could be completely disarmed. Southern Lebanon is filled with hills, valleys, and caves, not to mention villages where weapons can easily be cached. Moreover, Hizbullah enjoys widespread support in the south. The Shiite Muslims who predominate there revere Hizbullah for pressuring Israel to withdraw in 2000.
• Hizbullah precipitated the war by crossing into Israel to capture two soldiers, and many Lebanese are furious that Hizbullah provoked Israel. Israel has hoped to reinforce Lebanese alienation from Hizbullah, but Israel’s prolonged and vengeful response is fostering new hatred for Israel and its US protector. Recently, an-Nahar, the respected Beirut paper and no fan of Hizbullah, featured a cartoon showing Dr. Rice trying to quell Lebanon’s war fires with an eye dropper.
• An international force is no magic solution whether it deploys independently or in conjunction with the Lebanese army. Many soldiers in the army are Shiites, and they are more likely to applaud Hizbullah than to disarm it. As for the international soldiers, what will happen when Israel, with a robust record for recidivism, raids Lebanon, kidnaps or kills Lebanese, or attempts to prevent Lebanese from returning to their homes in a unilaterally imposed buffer zone? Hizbullah draws many of its members from the south. Will they be excluded from their own villages? The record of intervention in Lebanon reveals that even the well-intentioned may become part of the problem.
• For both the US and Israel, Hizbullah is an extension of Iranian influence. Yet, it is likely that Iran is going to be a major beneficiary of Israel’s new war in Lebanon. To the extent the Shiites feel they were singled out for attacks, Iran will be seen as a stalwart coreligionist ally. And given the extraordinary destruction in the Shiite suburbs of Beirut, Iran will have a further entree by providing materiel assistance and financial aid.
• Support for Hizbullah is growing in the Arab world with every day that it confronts Israel. In Iraq, the parliament has spoken out forcefully against Israel’s campaign, and last week Ayatollah Ali Sistani issued a powerful fatwa (religious opinion) condemning the attacks on Lebanese civilians and infrastructure and calling on all Shiite clerics to take action. Rice had to scratch Egypt off her itinerary because of swelling support for Hizbullah there. In Arab countries with a large Shiite community, sectarian sentiment is being fueled by the fighting in Lebanon.
Wednesday’s peace talks in Rome failed because of overt pressure by Condi Rice to block an immediate call for cease fire. That means the Bush administration has now openly assumed the political liabilities and consequences that will stem from Israel’s crushing campaign in Lebanon. Add that to the legacy of the still unfinished war in Iraq and we can pretty much guarantee record profits for American defense contractors for the next two or three generations.
July 27th, 2006 at 12:42 am
Excellent post, Marc. And amazing that all this was not obvious to everyone from the start, especially Israel and the US. Tragic that politicians seem to be the last ones to learn anything from history.
July 27th, 2006 at 1:14 am
If I am reading this correctly, this is an argument for Hizbullah as an ineradicable force in Lebanese and Mideastern politics; this is an argument for giving Hizbullah a role, instead of killing Hizbullah leadership and fighters.
Okay, what are Hizbullah’s terms for peace in the Middle East?
Hizbullah’s minimum terms are the eradication of Israel.
Marc Cooper writes:
” For both the US and Israel, Hizbullah is an extension of Iranian influence.”
Mr. Cooper Dude, you should catalogue the governments and individuals who claim that Iran doesn’t sponsor Hizbullah. (To my knowledge, none, including you.) Hizbullah is funded and underwritten by Iran, period, paragrah. Note: this is not to say that Hizbullah doesn’t enjoy demotic approval, but to say that Hizbullah doesn’t produce wealth; Iranian oil revenue does.
‘Support for Hizbullah is growing in the Arab world with every day that it confronts Israel.”
This is probably a true statement, alas. The prevalent theory in the Arab world is that Israel is the number one problem in the Arab world. Many left-wingers enthusiastically support this theory. None, however, can explain how and by what means the Arab-Muslim countries will become prosperous and free following the elimination of Israel.
Fucking Jews!
.
July 27th, 2006 at 1:39 am
P.S. Some day the honor roll will be written for Western liberals and progressives (no scare quotes) who supported their progressive counterparts in Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Iran: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom of the Press, and yes, even the freedom not to get married and to comport with somone of your own sex. What side are you on?
July 27th, 2006 at 2:09 am
Samuel Stott is as full of shit as one can get. Complain about civilian casualties and wholesale destruction of a country and you are for terrorism. Complain about violations of civil liberties and torture, you are for terrorism. It’s getting old, it’s bullshit, and it stinks.
July 27th, 2006 at 3:58 am
Wednesday’s peace talks in Rome failed because of overt pressure by Condi Rice to block an immediate call for cease fire.
Condi blocked immediate calls for a cease fire b/c they were not sustainable. It was a Chimera. Real peace is not a break in the action that allows Hezbollah to regroup and rearm before IDF can deliver a decisive blow. Like I said earlier, if your wife & daughter were being gang-raped, your solution would be to call for a time-out every fifteen minutes.
The shuttle diplomacy of the last 50 years is as much responsible for today’s bloodshed as the IDF and Hezbollah. Condi is not looking for another bs Noble Peace Prize, she’s actually trying to solve the problem – as opposed to kicking it down the road for another round of generational warfare.
July 27th, 2006 at 4:45 am
According to Jeffrey Goldberg (New Yorker 10-14-2002)
Even before the Israeli pullout, a leading scholar of Hezbollah, Augustus Richard Norton, of Boston University, wrote a paper entitled “Hezbollah: From Radicalism to Pragmatism?” In his paper, Norton said that in discussions with Hezbollah officials he had got the impression that the group “has no appetite to launch a military campaign across the Israeli border, should Israel withdraw from the South.”
July 27th, 2006 at 4:55 am
Obviously, Fen, it has become nessessary for Condi to burn down the Middle East in order to save it.
July 27th, 2006 at 5:18 am
OK, folks, here’s a fun game. Guess where this one came from?
—-
Israel, in a way, is being expected to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for [Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt], too. Israel for its part would expect these Arab states to at least give their backing and blessing to a new political order in Lebanon that would embolden the Lebanese government and the non-Shi’ite majority to clip the wings of Hizballah. Syria, recently forced to leave Lebanon, has in this conflict played second fiddle to Iran. It might be worth exploring the possibility of reengaging Syria in the stabilizing of Lebanon.
If the Lebanese prove incapable, as they might, then encouraging Syria to assist in the containment of Hizballah would make sense. Syria may do so lest it be drawn in the future into an undesirable clash with Israel because of Hizballah’s subservience to Iranian interests, which are not all in line with those of Syria. The Syrians, after all, are much more vulnerable than Iran to Israeli reprisal.
—
The Al Ahram editorial page? The Beirut Daily Star? Al Jazeera online English website? Maybe some Syrian foreign ministry official speaking off the record?
Wrong-o!
“Prof. Asher Susser is director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University.”
http://www.bitterlemons.org/issue/isr2.php
Susser wrote an interesting piece back in early April, “Disintegration of Iraq would pose multiple problems for Israel”, which is sounding kind of dated in its prescriptons, if you search Google News today on “Iraq” and “civil war”.
—
The disintegration of Iraq along sectarian lines would be the first such development of its kind in the Arab state system since its creation in the 1920s. Others could follow, like Lebanon and Syria, leading to sectarian shifts of power to the Shiites in Lebanon and, in Syria, to fundamentalist Sunnis bent on unseating the Alawites who dispossessed them a generation ago. The Iranians and Hizbullah, Hamas and their Syrian counterparts in the Muslim Brotherhood would all stand to benefit from the new disorder, in which Israel, Jordan and Turkey would be equally hard-pressed to cope with the negative fallout of Iraq’s demise.
Considering the alternatives, none appears more appealing than the restoration of the integrity of an independent, unoccupied, Arab-Kurdish Iraqi state, which would probably be more inclined to restrain Iranian influence than an occupied and fragmented Iraq.
—-
http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t45861-400.html
I have no doubt that Tehran’s political analysts read comments by the likes of Susser very closely indeed. But they probably get equal attention in Israel policy circles.
Susser saw a breakup of Iraq possibly leading to a breakup of Lebanon, but now it looks like Lebanon first, then Iraq not long after. It would be Lebanon first at Israeli initiative, however, and that’s the interesting part.
Israel’s “disproportionate” response to Hezbollah and Lebanese sovereignty failure may be an effort to triage the (possibly disingenuous) American-led “Arab democracy” initiative, and simply take the region to the brink, to see what leverage might be had there. That is, to hold out the appalling prospect of islamist state capture across the region by continuing to hit Lebanon, while bracing themselves for the worst consequences if these weak Arab states, in their political paralysis, go over the edge.
Since Israel doesn’t control events in Iraq, and Iraq appears about ripe for a (possibly very violent) partition, by Susser’s analysis, one might conclude that Israel is better off taking simply the initiative in the face of a fait accompli, and driving right up to the edge of the cliff, come what may. Israel does, in the final analysis, have a superior shield: nuclear weapons. Iran doesn’t, yet, and Pakistan is highly unlikely to weigh in. The hope may be that various players in the region will do what’s necessary to realign their interests into a formation more congenial to Israel.
What’s “necessary” in this view? If there’s no Hezbollah/Israel ceasefire soon, “necessary” might be the most savage crackdown on islamists by Arab governments since the shelling of Hama by Hafez Assad — but in several Arab countries at the same time. I think most Arab countries would rather do what they can to get a ceasefire here soon. After all, multiple, simultaneous Hama-like events would be lighting a fuse that they could never extinguish.
What’s the soonest ceasefire possible? Syria is the only likely enabler of that. Israel has to bully them into it, of course, without seeming to “send that message” to Damascus in any overt way. But Syria — with its borders open to all Arabs by constitutional decree — is already bulging at the seams with Palestinians and Iraqi refugees, and is now saddled with over 130,000 Lebanese refugees, with more waves coming. And it has to feed, cloth and house them with its number one trading partner, Lebanon, reeling economically from Israeli attack? It’s already a pretty strong “message”, I think. And Hezbollah leadership can probably read it as well as anyone.
What a nasty business this is.
July 27th, 2006 at 5:20 am
” Real peace is not a break in the action that allows Hezbollah to regroup and rearm before IDF can deliver a decisive blow.”
Those who see war as the answer in this and so many other situations have got to point to a case where war solved things. Have we forgotten that Israel already tried to deliver a decisive blow to Hezbollah and ended up having to leave Lebanon? Let me know when the decisive blow is likely.
July 27th, 2006 at 5:36 am
Stott writes: “Okay, what are Hizbullah’s terms for peace in the Middle East?
“Hizbullah’s minimum terms are the eradication of Israel.”
Stott obviously doesn’t understand the meaning of statements for public consumption. But I’m tired of repeating my arguments, so if he cares, he’ll just have to go back over my previous comments.
Or–wait a minute, how about the Socratic Method? Haven’t tried that yet. Here goes:
“Mr. Stott, can you think a good reason why any leader in the Middle East would call persistently for the destruction of Israel, while secretly hoping that there will always be conflict with Israel?”
I’ll be waiting for your answer. (Probably forever, though.) Hint: adolescent readers of Orwell’s 1984 don’t have to struggle with the core concept behind the reason. And you shouldn’t either, if you can drop your hatred for long enough to engage your cerebral cortex.
July 27th, 2006 at 5:50 am
just to second michael turner’s point about public statements versus pragmatic calculation–iran has been calling, year after year, for the destruction of israel. this hasn’t stopped them from covertly doing business with “the zionist entity” whenever the price is right. while i have no doubt that the mullahs in tehran are as antisemitic as they come, i also know that they’ve been shrewd enough to stay in power for almost three decades, and are not likely to jepordize their position by seeking to actually annihilate the regional superpower (nuclear-class). this doesn’t mean they won’t or don’t get up to all kinds of nastiness at israel’s expense, only that statements intended to shore up domestic and regional political support shouldn’t taken at face value.
July 27th, 2006 at 6:02 am
So the argument is, just because they keep killing small numbers of you, you must be a fool and a neocon tool to think they mean to kill ALL of you?
Somehow, in a nuclear age, I don’t find that very comforting.
Nor am I impressed bv Marc’s delight that Israel has suffered a setback against a terrorist death cult. True colors shown on the Left, once again.
July 27th, 2006 at 6:45 am
Since rosedog has set the excellent example of probing our current crisis with poetry and song, a much more appropriate response to the killing fields than cheerleading for one side or the other, I thought I would share something I just came across while working on an article about serotonin and anxiety for Science. I had Googled the Age of Anxiety. It was written more than 75 years ago but little has changed since:
“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me. What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing; — it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us? (Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929)”
July 27th, 2006 at 6:52 am
Marc Cooper:
Good points. I was really surprised to read day-after-day that Israeli forces were encountering “fierce resistance”, and then the US rushing precision missiles. Things are certainly changing in the middle east. The 1982 Israeli “incursion” or “entry” in to Lebanon (funny how they never “invade”, according to MSM parlance) was a cake walk.
You might think that this shift in relative power would make Israel less belligerent militarily and more willing to seek diplomatic resolutions but thier continued bombing of Bierut and other civilian population centers
indicates otherwise (tactically, falling short of thier objective, Israel feels even more compelled to punish the host country). And as you point out, the effect of all this will only increase Hez’s political strength.
Also worth considering: when a nuclear armed country’s conventional forces “bump into reality”, is that a “good thing”? Esp when that country is basically a regional, military “banana republic” proxy for the world’s lone superpower who is also currently learning a lesson in the limits of conventional warfare?
July 27th, 2006 at 7:22 am
Yeah, if we’re going to start taking song and prose to explain the current crisis in Lebanon, then let’s take Edwin Starr’s song “War,” but everywhere the word “War” is said substitute “U.N.”
What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.
July 27th, 2006 at 7:23 am
Mike Turner: “Stott obviously doesn’t understand the meaning of statements for public consumption”
Not everybody on the planet acts like a DC or Brussels politician. When they say they want to wipe Israel out, they actually mean it. You’d be surprised how often and open people are in places like Africa and the Middle East. And the people that comment on it need to stop thinking they’re in New York. So yeah, when they say they want to eradicate Israel, they mean it.
“Mr. Stott, can you think a good reason why any leader in the Middle East would call persistently for the destruction of Israel, while secretly hoping that there will always be conflict with Israel?â€
Just for grins, I’ll use an argument that’s often tossed against many in current power, and often Capitalism at large, although my old German Marxist history prof could do it better. For one thing, war provides a permanent distraction and blame for local problems, and also allows the leaders to stay in control. If you’re good at getting people to blow up Jews, but not good at helping to lay out a power grid system, then why not stick to what you know? For example, blowing up Jews and blaming them for a lack of power.
Also, maybe it’s just my viewpoint from being a military historian, but, what, 10 KIA? from a fight for a town isn’t really a lot. That’s hardly being “bloodied” unless you’re some kind of wuss. KIA’s are the price of doing business.
July 27th, 2006 at 7:27 am
It looks like Thomas L. Friedman is also bumping up against reality, as he does by accident from time to time. He’s in Damascus.
http://www.theday.com/re.aspx?re=66558a0d-d46d-4a49-a3b1-017570018e3e
Verdict: can’t clean this one up without the Syrians.
Anti-Shi’a Al Qaeda, which eulogized Iraq’s #1 slaughterer of Shi’ites not so long ago, finally has to break down and side with “our muslim brothers”
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1107AP_Mideast_Fighting_Al_Qaida.html
How does the old saying go? “Me against my brother, my brother and I against our cousin, and all of us against the Infidel!” Except that Zawahiri is even calling upon non-muslims to fight. A former Islamic Jihad cellmate of Zawahiri’s finds this truly odd.
July 27th, 2006 at 7:37 am
Marc,
Michael Totten and I watched pairs fo Apache attack helicopters fly north past the Tel Aviv Hilton Saturday. They were loaded for war and I’m pretty sure they were coming back light.
It is embarrassing to read someone of your experience react so hysterically as to infer that Israel is targeting civilians. “…with the continued Israeli bombardment of Lebanese civilian population centers…” If Israel was targeting civilians, those helicopters would have turned the Beirut to Damascus road into a charnel house last week. The body count would not be in the hundreds, it would be in the hundreds of thousands.
Israel is not targeting civilians and implying they are does not make it so. In reality, they are probably trying to kill the leadership and then get Hezbollah to break, wiping them out as a military force in the rout. It is all of our bad luck that Hezbollah has been drinking the kool-aid so long that they aren’t going quickly.
But lay off the population center crap. That plays into Hezbollah’s strategy of victimization of their neighbors and makes you a sap. You can’t even find pristine wars of video games now, stop pretending they can exist in the Middle East.
July 27th, 2006 at 7:52 am
pristine no one has demanded. an end to collective and disproportionate punishment, however, doesn’t seem unreasonable. what are beruit’s residental areas if not “population centers” by the way?
July 27th, 2006 at 7:54 am
“So the argument is, just because they keep killing small numbers of you, you must be a fool and a neocon tool to think they mean to kill ALL of you? Somehow, in a nuclear age, I don’t find that very comforting.”
Naivete — it’s not just for neocon tools anymore.
If you have an enemy that talks about killing all of you, loudly, over and over, and never gets around to doing it, despite colossal aggregate oil wealth, and an overwhelmingly greater population, you might start figuring out that the message has different purposes than you suppose.
Sometimes it can take a while, even if you are a former Israeli chief of intelligence who is fluent and literate in Arabic.
Yehoshafat Harkabi:
—
“”For many years I had a monopoly on Arab-Israeli books in this country,” he said. His longest work, ”Arab Attitudes,” was published just prior to the 1967 war. ”In those days,” he said, ”people didn’t believe the Arabs wanted to destroy Israel, and I had to substantiate it.” He changed his attitute in 1985 with the agreement between Jordan and the P.L.O.: ”The treaty was based on the principle of peace for territory – that was revolutionary, and I thought Israel had to respond.”
—
Then he wrote Israel’s Fateful Hour, in which he said that turning the occupied territories over to the Palestinians was a bad option, but that there was only one other option — keeping them — and that was even worse.
In his Arab Strategies and Israel’s Response, he points out the perennial value of perpetual conflict with Israel for the propagandists of despotic Arab regimes. Peace would undermine their regimes, and they know it. So would the destruction of Israel, because then they’d only turn on themselves. Hatred is a powerful unifying force — but only as long as it’s a hatred of something Out There. And this is why Al Qaeda suddenly needs to jump on the bandwagon that Hezbollah got rolling, even though they tried to assassinate Nasrallah at one point.
July 27th, 2006 at 8:34 am
Thanks for fighting the good fight, Mr. Turner. The other folks here wouldn’t know a good fight if they were being beaten and ass-raped.
Death to the Hezbollah thugs! Long live Israel!
July 27th, 2006 at 8:48 am
Patrick Lasswell writes: “Israel is not targeting civilians and implying they are does not make it so.”
Yeah, but Marc wrote that Israeli is targeting population centers, not civilians. And that’s accurate — Israel has flattened much of South Beirut in the vicinity of Hezbollah headquarters, a (formerly) densely populated area, and it continues to hit whole neighborhoods in southern Lebanon, though it seems to be making a habit of aerial leafletting of them ahead of time.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/07/20/news/mideast.php
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Israel continued its massive air attacks on Hezbollah positions. It dropped leaflets in southern Lebanese villages, informed local leaders and broadcast warnings in Arabic to residents to move north of the Litani River if their villages contained Hezbollah assets or rockets. The leaflets gave no deadline. Israel dropped similar leaflets in Gaza, possibly foreshadowing more attacks on populated areas where Israel believes Qassam rockets are stored.
—-
If you want to accuse Marc of saying that Israel is targeting civilians, you’ll need a leg to stand on, and I don’t think you have one here. If you want to accuse him of not rounding out the picture more accurately, go ahead. You won’t get much argument from me. But Marc isn’t responsible for implying what the more tendentious might infer. That’s their responsibility. I didn’t infer that Marc was saying Israel is targeting civilians. Any more than I infer that it somehow represents Israeli military policy that some Israeli children have been signing missiles targeted for Lebanon:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002913202
You can’t on the one hand point out terrorists of using the civilian population as a shield, and on the other denounce those who point out that attacks on those terrorist arms caches are hitting population centers. Not without being a hypocrite, anyway. Of course, you realize that — which is why you water your pathetically defensive accusation down to “implied” rather than “said”. But I guess you figured there was no other way to get the mudslinging match going, eh?
July 27th, 2006 at 8:58 am
“Israel is not targeting civilians and implying they are does not make it so.”
Israel is conducting a war with wanton disregard for civilian lives, which makes its actions just as criminal under international law. How come so many civilians are dead, poor marksmanship? The clear evidence is that Israel doesn’t care whether it kills civilians or not. Neither does the US in Iraq. One reason why the two countries are so pally, they share values–or at least their leaders do.
July 27th, 2006 at 9:04 am
RC writes: “Not everybody on the planet acts like a DC or Brussels politician. When they say they want to wipe Israel out, they actually mean it. You’d be surprised how often and open people are in places like Africa and the Middle East. And the people that comment on it need to stop thinking they’re in New York. So yeah, when they say they want to eradicate Israel, they mean it.”
So kindly explain to me why the Arab world, with all its oil-derived wealth far exceeding that of Israel’s and all its population far exceeding that of Israel’s, has yet to wipe out Israel, despite decades of posturing to that effect?
Pardon me if I defer to the late Harkabi, a defense intelligence chief for Israel, and an ardent student of Arab regime propaganda, who finally woke up one day to discover that if you make a reasonable concession of territory here and there, you can actual deal with people who previously talked about being bent on your total destruction. Reasonable conclusion: “we’ll push you into the sea!” was useful propaganda, but these people (more properly, their shrewd leaders) are bought off from that position rather easily.
I don’t care how “open” you think people in Africa and the Middle East are. In Africa, the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide were so “open” about the plot that almost nobody knew it was happening until the blade descended. Subterfuge and propaganda manipulation are lessons easily learned from the history of any country, anywhere. The leaders in those countries either study their own history, or they are condemned to repeat it and be swept aside both those who *have* studied that history.
RC, as a miliary historian, you expect my rapt attention to anything you have to say about Israeli strategy and tactics in Lebanon. For politics, however, I’ll turn to those who know politics. And this is what I think I know about politics and war: war is the continuation of politics by violent means (does that one ring any bells?), and politicians–including, even especially, dictators–will *always* lie when lying is in their interests, and they can get away with it. Especially during war. If you can give me an example of how that’s NOT a cultural invariant, I’m all ears. But nothing in reading about the Middle East for several decades has persuaded me otherwise.
July 27th, 2006 at 9:42 am
“you expect” -> “you can expect”, excuse me.
July 27th, 2006 at 10:05 am
Michael Turner,
Some reasons they haven’t
a)The Israelies simply outfight them almost every time. Money =/ military power. All the tanks (well, a lot) in the world couldn’t make the Syrians use them with any competance in the Golan.
b)Some of the major leaders do worry about their skins, and thus worry about a response from the US, or a major response from Israel. A last ditch response from Israel would involve nukes. The terrorists don’t worry about that response ’cause they mostly don’t mind getting killed.
“Pardon me if I defer to the late Harkabi, a defense intelligence chief for Israel, and an ardent student of Arab regime propaganda, who finally woke up one day to discover that if you make a reasonable concession of territory here and there, you can actual deal with people who previously talked about being bent on your total destruction. ”
Worked well in Gaza and Lebanon, yeah?
“Reasonable concessions” only work with reasonable people. Hence why giving back the peninsula to Egypt worked. Egypt was run by fairly reasonable people.
The folks that run Hamas and Hez happen to not be reasonable.
Also, in Rwanda, people just ignored the warning signs. As usual. Same in Sierra Leone, Liberia, ex-Belge Congo, etc.
July 27th, 2006 at 10:16 am
Michael Balter writes: “Israel is conducting a war with wanton disregard for civilian lives, which makes its actions just as criminal under international law. How come so many civilians are dead, poor marksmanship?”
Israel had conducted 2000 sorties in this war last I checked. Even if the death toll were now at 1000 somehow, that would be half a death per sortie. If they were actually *targeting* civilians, your “poor marksmanship” gibe would be right on the mark–if that’s what it’s trying to do, it can’t seem to hit them half the time, even in an Arab country that’s relatively densely populated like Lebanon.
However, “wanton disregard” shouldn’t be equated with “targeting civilians,” I admit. But leafletting target areas prior to hitting them (as Israel has just recently done for an area near the border about 20 miles wide) is decidedly NOT “wanton disregard of civilian lives”. If anything, it is giving Hezbollah more opportunities to transport arms to relative safety, in the process of giving people in those areas a chance to figure out which way to jump. I’m sure Israel regards that as an unfortunate but necessary trade-off. Why is it necessary? Because even if Israeli’s war planners were as cold and unfeeling as you are convinced they are, they aren’t stupid. They know that every noncombatant death feeds anti-Israel perceptions everywhere (inevitably in the Arab and Muslim world — one of Hezbollah’s aims here), but particularly where it might actually hurt Israel: with its patrons in the West. Massive civilian casualties do not work for Israel. Israel’s leaders know better than to become unpopular in the halls of Congress.
I don’t say this as some big fan of what Israel is doing. I say it only as someone who’s trying to figure out what’s really going on right now in the Middle East. A distortion like yours is really of no interest in developing any such understanding unless it’s a distortion that, when aggregated over many holders of the same position, could affect political outcomes by sheer weight of public opinon.
Geez, at the rate I’m going, *everybody* here will hate me pretty soon. But that’s OK — the more enraged you get, the more fun I have. I love tearing down illogical and incoherent rhetoric.
July 27th, 2006 at 10:17 am
Marc,
How refreshing it is to read an American journalist who is unafraid to go beyond the usual “Israel can do no wrong” tripe that passes for reporting in our mainstream media! Keep up the cogent commentary, we need to hear more than the usual Isreali apologists we normally have to suffer.
July 27th, 2006 at 10:43 am
Balter: And Hezbollah does care about civilian lives, pleez. Not only do they shoot rockets at civilians without giving a damn where it may fall, hospital, kindergarten or wherever, they apparently force Lebanese to stay in their homes to serve as human shields. Where is your morally righteous anger when it comes to Hezbollah?
Israel faces quite a dilemma: they need to move as fast as possible to halt the rockets, but to do so they have to fight a cowardly Hezbollah which integrates itself with civilians.
I think a big part of the Israeli problem, however, in addition to a unnecessary disproportionate response to the Hez action, is just arrogance and poor professionalism on the part of some Israeli soliders. The liberal Israeli paper Haaretz came out with similar harsh criticism of the Israeli military the other day. I think much of the tragic loss of civilians in Lebanon, and perhaps the UN hit, are micro screw ups and not a marco, i.e. its not a plot from the Israeli president and cabinent and others above. Shit happens in war, and not all soldiers are careful as they should be. We have seen that often, often with the US military, too, where American GI fuckups torture prisoners for laughs in Iraq, for example. Does not necessarily reflect on US policies, though perhaps it means poor oversight by some higher ups of Israel or the US. Whomever hit the UN post needs to answer publicly.
July 27th, 2006 at 10:48 am
RC writes: “All the tanks (well, a lot) in the world couldn’t make the Syrians use them with any competance in the Golan.”
But did Syrians engage in *total* war against Israel? Observers in Damascus at the time were hard pressed to see any signs that Syria was massively mobilized against Israel, or even that Syria was at war at all. Tank against tank — yes, Israel had the advantage. But a million men running past Israeli tanks into Israel — why didn’t we see that? Or Saudi Arabia making sure that Syria had 20 tanks for every Israeli tank? Why didn’t we see that?
Because the political will didn’t exist.
“b)Some of the major leaders do worry about their skins, and thus worry about a response from the US, or a major response from Israel. A last ditch response from Israel would involve nukes.”
Nukes are militarily useless against an enemy that has overrun your domestic positions by sheer numbers. Killing millions of propaganda-benighted civilians in a distant capital in response to a conventional invasion force wouldn’t be treated with much sympathy by Israel’s patrons. Or anyone else, for that matter.
“The terrorists don’t worry about that response ’cause they mostly don’t mind getting killed.”
Nukes are militarily useless against them anyway. (Am I really debating a military historian here? What do you specialize in, the Punic Wars?)
“…if you make a reasonable concession of territory here and there, you can actual deal with people who previously talked about being bent on your total destruction. â€
RC: Worked well in Gaza and Lebanon, yeah?
It didn’t work well there, but Harkabi’s argument doesn’t reach there, for two reasons. To the extent that Syria still has territorial issues with Israel (and it does), it will enflame Palestinian sentiment against Israel however it can, through proxies like Hamas. Iran has no territorial claims, but Harkabi was speaking of *Arab* responses–his logic extends to Iran only in his theory of the value of Israel as propaganda pinata. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for rapprochement on non-territorial issues, however. For example, if Israel stands by and lets Iran get to the brink of having a nuclear deterrent (which it may need regionally in the event of an Al Qaeda Arabia replacing the Saudi regime), Iran might consider that it has more to gain from an alliance of convenience with Israel against that common enemy than it has from stoking the Palestinian issue. Israel’s nuclear deterrent will always be more effective than Iran’s, and I don’t think the mullahs are suicidal.
RC:“Reasonable concessions†only work with reasonable people. Hence why giving back the peninsula to Egypt worked. Egypt was run by fairly reasonable people.
Perceptions of “reasonable” are subject to manipulation. Are you so sure you’re not being manipulated? Eisenhower stepped into the Suez crisis and kicked British butt back out of the way, because the Anthony Eden was foisting off an impression on the British public that Nasser was a nutcase. Nasser was no friend of either America or Britain. But he was not a nutcase. Nasrallah is not a nutcase either. For that matter, I consider the leadership of Al Qaeda relatively sane politicians. Evil, of course. But sane.
RC: The folks that run Hamas and Hez happen to not be reasonable.
Anybody who runs anything is, to my mind, a shrewd politician until proven otherwise. And politicians don’t get where they get by being stupid. They can make mistakes, but they are always looking after their own asses.
RC: Also, in Rwanda, people just ignored the warning signs. As usual. Same in Sierra Leone, Liberia, ex-Belge Congo, etc.
The problem with “warning signs” is that once you start taking them all seriously, you end up being a superpower patsy for devious coup leaders, you’re intervening everywhere and getting nowhere. (Field: game theory. Concept: repeated play. Look it up.) If I were Annan or Clinton, I’d prefer to be seen as stupid or oblivious or dumbly uncomprehending of isolated, anecdotal Rwanda genocide “warnings” than to be seen as knowing and operating from that unpleasant political fact. But it is a fact, however unpleasant.
If Africans were as “open” as you seem to think they are, we would have heard from dozens of leaders bragging openly in the press about their genocide plans. If anything, the pattern here seems to be that those who rail about their genocide plans don’t even have a plan, and those who do have a plan try to plug the leaks as much as possible.
July 27th, 2006 at 11:05 am
anon writes: “[Hezbollah] apparently force Lebanese to stay in their homes to serve as human shields.”
Any chance you could substantiate that? I don’t doubt that every civilian casualty is a propaganda victory for them. Their whole modus operandi reeks of it. But they can’t be seen as openly manufacturing casualties in the above manner. All the popular support they have in the region right now would evaporate overnight.
And please don’t give me a debkafile link, OK?
July 27th, 2006 at 11:13 am
Michael Turner…. It’s wildly refreshing to read your continuing analysis that’s based on….y’know…. actual logic. While I don’t agree with every single point and conclusion, your intelligence, as always, is a great relief.
It’s astonishing to me that many people (many of them in positions of power) can handily parse or excuse the bellicose rhetoric coming from our own politicians, seeing it for what it is— playing to the cheap seats, shoring up the base in an election year, or simply making a political chess move of some kind, i.e. setting a bargaining chip on the table.
Yet, when presented with the same sort of political statements and/or rants by….say….Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, .the words are taken entirely at face value—-as if all but Americans and Europeans are one-dimensional idiots. The nuances— personal, cultural, and political—are dismissed as non-existent.
In addition to the questionable morality of such a simplistic view, it’s staggeringly moronic….and ….how to put it?….unhelpful when making foreign policy decisions.
*****************************
Now, Michael, I have only one question, what translation project are you presently dodging by hanging out here?????
July 27th, 2006 at 11:14 am
“Balter: And Hezbollah does care about civilian lives, pleez. Not only do they shoot rockets at civilians without giving a damn where it may fall, hospital, kindergarten or wherever, they apparently force Lebanese to stay in their homes to serve as human shields. Where is your morally righteous anger when it comes to Hezbollah?”
Anon, you’ve got your head straight up your ass. I’ve criticized Hezbollah’s targeting of civilians many times in these threads. Do you think that their acts cancel out or justify Israel’s violations of the laws of war? Your posts are usually despicable but this one really takes the cake.
July 27th, 2006 at 11:36 am
One more thing: And while we’re contemplating events in Lebanon, Gaza, Israel, and Iraq, my personal soundtrack of choice for the moment is:
“The Band Played Waltzing Matilda†and “Willie McBride†both written by Eric Bogle.
(For listening purposes, may I respectfully recommend the versions from the Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy, to be found on “The Makem & Clancy Collection.†The Irish have a real knack for conveying the sorrows of human folly.)
Okay, now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
July 27th, 2006 at 11:46 am
Turner: Heard that this morning on BBC. We also heard the same exact criticism from the UN’s Jan Egeland, the humanitarian and emergency affairs coordinator, some 2 or 3 days ago.
Here’s the BBC story, an excerpt followed by link:
Cpt Doron Spielman told BBC News the battle at Bint Jbeil was being fought at close range and accused Hezbollah of using the civilian population as human shields.
“Hezbollah blockaded the city before the battle began, and we now know at gunpoint forced the Lebanese residents to stay inside the city,” Cpt Spielman said.
“We are engaged in a very close combat urban battle – but there are Lebanese civilians trapped inside the city which makes our progress very difficult. We are trying of course to take care of the terrorists while preserving civilian life.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5221384.stm
July 27th, 2006 at 11:46 am
Got more Augustus Richard Norton if ya want it. Here he is on July 19, Six Questions for Norton:
http://www.harpers.org/sb-six-questions-on-lebanon-20060719iboxeklhesoh.html
He’s convinced that both Olmert and Nasrallah have each made a colossal error. With all his experience (Vietnam, Lebanon, academia), I hate to second-guess him, but …
No, wait: actually, I’d *love* to second-guess him.
So … here … I … go ….. again ……
Norton’s answers to the six questions above focus exclusively on Hezbollah as Iran proxy versus Israel. He refers glancingly to the rest of the region, e.g., something about Israel ending up even more hated than it already is. But it’s as if this isn’t all taking place against a larger backdrop of conflict: Iraq staring into the maw of sectarian partition, democracy stirrings in the region making islamists more conspicuous and active, oil prices climbing obscenely on fears of wider conflict, the largely Sunni regimes looking aghast at the prospect of what King Abdullah has dubbed a nascent “Shi’ite Cescent, and the linchpin make-or-break player in any such a crescent scenario: Syria.
I think Norton’s weakness is that, at the core, he’s a military guy. Everything has to break down into the simple X-vs-Y paradigm for conflict analysis. Middle East politics isn’t like that. The fracture lines and the stakes are multidimensional and moving all the time. You have to focus on forces, not players.
OK, in answer to rosedog: first, I’m not even sure that *I* agree with my own reasoning half the time. Any alert reader should have found where I’ve already contradicted myself, and that’s a depressing thought, because it probably means I don’t *have* any alert readers here.
Second, I really should be translating this patent for human-motion capture suits used for animation and special effects. But even though the tech itself is supernifty (and invented by a superbright friend of mine), the Japanese patent text is both fiendishly contorted and unspeakably dull somehow.
As I imagine many people feel about what I write here.
But you’re right, I should get back to work.
July 27th, 2006 at 11:53 am
“Anon, you’ve got your head straight up your ass. I’ve criticized Hezbollah’s targeting of civilians many times in these threads. Do you think that their acts cancel out or justify Israel’s violations of the laws of war? Your posts are usually despicable but this one really takes the cake. ”
Beautiful, and gentlemanly, your comments, Balter. You are pathetic.
First, I doubt seriously you have read all my comments, because your comment reflects, as usual, ignorance of my views and includes no substantive criticism of anything have written.
Second, I never said it “cancels out” anything. But have noted your crying in comment after comment about the Lebanese with little sympathy for the other side.
Balter, you seem to think that you are the only person who understands Lebanese suffering. Every decent human being understands and sympathizes with Lebanese suffering. As your editors no doubt tell you: move on.
Meantime, keep your foul mouthed self to yourself.
July 27th, 2006 at 11:59 am
If anyone one the right wants to post his or her email, I’d be very happy to send a notice every time I criticize the actions of Hizuollah or Hamas. You can keep an ongoing tally of criticisms and make certain that I’m not trying to sneak in some support for killing civilians. If you don’t want to post your email, I suggest you either find somebody promoting the violent tactics of Hizbullah or Hamas or shut the fuck up.
July 27th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
“Here’s the BBC story, an excerpt followed by link:
Cpt Doron Spielman told BBC News the battle at Bint Jbeil was being fought at close range and accused Hezbollah of using the civilian population as human shields”
Notice how our anon uses Doron Spielman, an Israeli Defence Force captain, as his evidence. That’s pretty pathetic even for him. If he wants to willfully accept IDF claims at face value when its so obvious that they are lying then thats his choice. As for his “concern” about Lebonese civilians Im sorry but i dont really buy it. I read a report that Israel recentky struck a truck carrying medical and food supplies doanted to Lebenin by the UAE killing the driver in the process. Reprts like this of wanton destruction of infrustructure, roads, schools and villages are everywhere. Its important to note that Israel is not targetting Hezbollah ideology rather they are targetting the Lebonese civilian life. Perhaps in the futurw Anon can refer us to the relevant human rights groups who have copiosly documented the war crimes commited by on both sides of this equation (although i hesistate to use that language, being that the scale of the destrcution and death is so heavily ONE SIDED) instead of sourcing IDF field reports.
July 27th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
Chris Hedges has another excellent piece over at truthdig
http://tinyurl.com/oteaw
July 27th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
Ahmed, as I stated above, and as you no doubt selectively chose to ignore for your own biased reasons, here”s the exact quote from Jan Egeland, the United Nations Humanitarian and Emergency Relief Coordinator:
“Consistently, from the Hezbollah heartland, my message was that Hezbollah must stop this cowardly blending … among women and children,” he said. “I heard they were proud because they lost very few fighters and that it was the civilians bearing the brunt of this. I don’t think anyone should be proud of having many more children and women dead than armed men.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060724/ap_on_re_mi_ea/mideast_fighting_aid
Am surprised people are even questioning this well known and accepted fact. I am sure we can find dozens of other news stories or quotes stating a similar observation.
July 27th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
People really should read the entire article but let me quote the frist couple of paragraphs
“The rage and extremism of the Islamic militants in Lebanon and the occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza appear incomprehensible to the outside world. The wanton murder, the raw anti-Semitism, the callous disregard for human life, including the lives of children and other innocents, permit those on the outside to thrust these militant fighters in another moral universe, to certify them as incomprehensible.
But this branding of these militants as something less than human, as something that reasonable people cannot hope to understand, is possible only because we have ignored and disregarded the decades of repression, the crushing weight of occupation, the abject humiliation and violence, unleashed on Lebanese and Palestinians by Israel because of our silence and indifference. It is the Israeli penchant for violence and occupation that slowly created and formed these frightening groups.
The failure by the outside world to react to the years of brutal repression, the refusal by the United States to intercede on behalf of the occupied Lebanese and Palestinians, gradually formed and galvanized the radicals who now occupy the stage with Israel, answering death for death, atrocity for atrocity. ”
Those inside these zones of occupation pleaded over the years for help. We refused to listen. And once they burst through these barriers, enraged, bloodied, bent on revenge, we recoiled in horror, unable to see our complicity. We asked them to be quiet, to be reasonable, to calm down, and when they did not, their blood heated by years of abuse and neglect, we condemned them to their fate
July 27th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
Mavis: shut the fuck up
Lighten up Francis.
Those who see war as the answer in this and so many other situations have got to point to a case where war solved things
World War 2 for starters. Diplomacy gave away Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Millions dead for “peace in our time”.
Likewise, those today that worship at the altar of Peace are just as responsible for the current bloodshed as the IDF and Hezbollah.
July 27th, 2006 at 12:42 pm
Your use of an IDF field report was still rather revealing. As usual Anon cuts and pastes he way around here. Jan Egelang, as our resident culture warroir surely knows, has also accused Israel of creating “a generation of hatred’ in its wanton destruction of Lebenon. He conveniently forgot to mention that part.
http://tinyurl.com/q2bqc
July 27th, 2006 at 12:51 pm
Ahmed, you and your deranged blogging buddies here love to disinform the others who don’t have day and night, like you, to read through the blog posts. But, again and again, you and yours dishonestly misrepresent my views.
I simply answered a question from Michael Turner asking me to back up my statement by Hezbollah shields — now you try to twist things around to accuse me of “forgetting to mention” the similarly deplorable tactics by the Israeli side. If you were honest, and if you were a person concerned with genuine fairness and peace, you would scroll up the screen and repeat back the part of my first comment in this thread in which I said: “a big part of the Israeli problem, however, in addition to a unnecessary disproportionate response to the Hez action, is just arrogance and poor professionalism on the part of some Israeli soliders.”
In fact, thats been my consistent view from the get go of this conflict.
Still, in your typical twisted style, you look to attack me with disinformaiton and dishonesty.
That said, an IDF soldier would probably have a better vantage point on the human shield question then you arm-chaired, blog addicted “hez apologists.”
July 27th, 2006 at 1:39 pm
Wow, every once in a while we get a blazing asshole on this blog, and anon has stepped up to the plate to fill the role. I will say whatever I think of the garbage you spew here, and you are free to respond how you like.
July 27th, 2006 at 1:58 pm
wow, your the one acting like a raging moron, balter.
again: try to say something substantive instead of flying off the handle like a jackass on speed who can’t read.
do your editors know what a jerk you are? where is the focus on facts and ideas instead of flipping insults backed by nothing but your ugly personality.
July 27th, 2006 at 2:03 pm
“an IDF soldier would probably have a better vantage point on the human shield….”
This may well be the first valid point youve made during youre entire presence here
http://tinyurl.com/oqk7w
July 27th, 2006 at 2:24 pm
go anon, go, let your squirming brain hang out–love it!
July 27th, 2006 at 2:26 pm
ahmed, nice. thanks for the sarcasm.
am surpised you link to that site, the same people which published this:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3278026,00.html
July 27th, 2006 at 2:31 pm
balter: someone needs to tell you what a complete idiot you look like with your recent comments about me, which are based in nothing but bullshit. you are devoid of credibility with your insults.
i used to have respect for you, based on your journalism. i guess this is your real face. very sad.
July 27th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
There is a school of thought that says Israel started this expecting the usual US demand for a cease-fire and then was blindsided when the Bushies decided to let them have their head. And they don’t know what to do now. Hezbollah, after all, did chase them out of Lebanon – at least that is how they see it – and the the Israelis really don’t want to stay there again. So they get more brutal and lose more international support. And we look ridiculuous – as well we should.
Sorry its not more insightful but as this point I really don’t think anyone looks good. Least of all Condi and the diplomats (a new group?)
July 27th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
anon wrote: balter, i used to have respect for you, based on your journalism. i guess this is your real face. very sad.
anon, I never had respect for Balter. Did you read something that I didn’t?
This should not come as a surprise:
Hezbollah was using UN post as ‘shield’
Canadian wrote of militia’s presence, ‘necessity’ of bombing
The words of a Canadian United Nations observer written just days before he was killed in an Israeli bombing of a UN post in Lebanon are evidence Hezbollah was using the post as a “shield” to fire rockets into Israel, says a former UN commander in Bosnia.
July 27th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
They mean what they say, indeed:
…..Another major use of the Israeli bomb is to compel the U.S. to act in Israel’s favor, even when it runs counter to its own strategic interests. As early as 1956 Francis Perrin, head of the French A-bomb project wrote “We thought the Israeli Bomb was aimed at the Americans, not to launch it at the Americans, but to say, ‘If you don’t want to help us in a critical situation we will require you to help us; otherwise we will use our nuclear bombs.’†During the 1973 war, Israel used nuclear blackmail to force Kissinger and Nixon to airlift massive amounts of military hardware to Israel. The Israeli Ambassador, Simha Dinitz, is quoted as saying, at the time, “If a massive airlift to Israel does not start immediately, then I will know that the U.S. is reneging on its promises and…we will have to draw very serious conclusions…†Just one example of this strategy was spelled out in 1987 by Amos Rubin, economic adviser to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who said “If left to its own Israel will have no choice but to fall back on a riskier defense which will endanger itself and the world at large… To enable Israel to abstain from dependence on nuclear arms calls for $2 to 3 billion per year in U.S. aid.†….
….It is clear from Israel Shahak that Israel has no interest in peace except that which is dictated on its own terms, and has absolutely no intention of negotiating in good faith to curtail its nuclear program or discuss seriously a nuclear-free Middle East,â€Israel’s insistence on the independent use of its nuclear weapons can be seen as the foundation on which Israeli grand strategy rests.â€
According to Seymour Hersh, “the size and sophistication of Israel’s nuclear arsenal allows men such as Ariel Sharon to dream of redrawing the map of the Middle East aided by the implicit threat of nuclear force.†…. Ze’ev Shiff, an Israeli military expert writing in Haaretz said, “Whoever believes that Israel will ever sign the UN Convention prohibiting the proliferation of nuclear weapons… is day dreaming,†and Munya Mardoch, Director of the Israeli Institute for the Development of Weaponry, said in 1994, “The moral and political meaning of nuclear weapons is that states which renounce their use are acquiescing to the status of Vassal states. All those states which feel satisfied with possessing conventional weapons alone are fated to become vassal states.â€
….. Seymour Hersh warns, “Should war break out in the Middle East again,… or should any Arab nation fire missiles against Israel, as the Iraqis did, a nuclear escalation, once unthinkable except as a last resort, would now be a strong probability.†Ezar Weissman, Israel’s current President said “The nuclear issue is gaining momentum (and the) next war will not be conventional.†Russia and before it the Soviet Union has long been a major (if not the major) target of Israeli nukes. It is widely reported that the principal purpose of Jonathan Pollard’s spying for Israel was to furnish satellite images of Soviet targets and other super sensitive data relating to U.S. nuclear targeting strategy. (Since launching its own satellite in 1988, Israel no longer needs U.S. spy secrets.) Israeli nukes aimed at the Russian heartland seriously complicate disarmament and arms control negotiations and, at the very least, the unilateral possession of nuclear weapons by Israel is enormously destabilizing, and dramatically lowers the threshold for their actual use, if not for all out nuclear war.
Seymour Hersh sites other threats in The Samson Option. Referring to the U.S. failure to support Israel’s invasion of Egypt in 1956, including in the face of nuclear threats from the Soviet Union, one unnamed former Israeli official told Hersh in the late 1980s: “You Americans screwed us…We got the message. We can still remember the smell of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Next time we’ll take all of you with us.â€
From:
http://www.carolmoore.net/nuclearwar/israelithreats.html
July 27th, 2006 at 3:53 pm
“Arabs may have the oil, but we have the matches.” Israeli leader Ariel Sharon
July 27th, 2006 at 4:00 pm
It seems all right-wing nationalists love to use the whole “we-will-wipe-our-enemies-from-the-face-of-the-earth” blowhardisms.
July 27th, 2006 at 6:12 pm
Welcome to the belly of the irrational left!
Viva the Jihad? Long live hate and anti-semitism, death to Israel..
You so-called liberals, Balter, Ahmed and company, is that the kind of thinking you want to win and dominate the Middle East? What happened to a left based in high moral principles. Instead you whitewash hate, you overlook terrorism, and you denounce anyone sympathetic to Israel as quick as you bat an eye. Sure hope the left finds better leaders to help the blind followes such as yourselves see what peace and human rights and other principles of the rational thinking left really mean.
July 27th, 2006 at 7:06 pm
I’m very suspicious of anyone who expresses as their goal to “dominate the Middle East” and then lectures about “high moral principles” in the same breath. A “dominate the Middle East” mindset is at the root of most of our problems there to begin with. It’s one of those “perfect storm” notions – a trifecta of crackpot, impossible and just plain wrong.
And the “anti-semitism” cliche is getting very, very tired.
July 27th, 2006 at 7:28 pm
I see some have run into the same imbeciles that I have in previous posts – what a surprise, not. Most of them are little ubermensch’s in the budding, and have no idea what they are talking about. These deficient bombasts know about as much about sourcing as the Samsonite ape in the old TV commerical knew about luggage! So you really have to cut them some slack, I am serious – they don’t have any idea what they are espousing. Let’s just call it a blogosphere anomaly and leave it at that.
Let me give an give a simple analogy for these, um, deficient commentators. It is a story that the dreaded Dr. Finkelstein uses:
Let’s say a suicide bomber blows up a bus, and than afterward part of the group that claims responsibility comes out and says quite seriously – “well, we just wanted to destroy the bus.” That would make us all laugh and scorn these individuals.
The same goes for someone who drops a ton bomb on a building filled with people, and than says afterwards – “we were just trying to kill the terrorist.”
Although this was used as an illustration to describe the occupied territory atrocities in concert with the suicide bombing atrocities – that there is NO difference, the same could be applied to Lebanon. I hope that simple analogy shed’s some light, because it is REALLY that simple.
Since this thread about the indiscriminate bombing of lebanon has started, I have heard every story in the book about this region come to the surface. It is really quite disgusting, and not only brings new meaning to the naivete of most ignorant Americans – but is really an embarassment because of the lack of objectivity and the plain prejudice.
It give new meaning to “my party, or, my view right or wrong and damn the facts” – no matter how many people suffer and die. This administration was right again, it read the people of America correctly (even though I hate to admit it), and it gives them the signal that they can move forward with their oppressive agenda. It exposes the reasons why we do not advance as a nation, in fact, why we are slowly going back to previous centuries.
There is nothing “mystical” about the conflict in this region, there is nothing “moral” about the present course of those in power (both in the region and generally speaking), and the the only reason why this continues is to maintain power and control and prosperity for the few – and to be really blunt, fuck the rest.
Do any of you people who argue for the present course think you are going to get anything out of this activity? You are an idiot if you think this, it will do nothing but make your life harder – and implicate you, as naive as you are, with this reprobate course.
The only course that makes sense in this area is to pursue peace – and it is NOT COMPLICATED in it’s overview (you just think it is because you believe in fairy tales about this region). The only answer is to stop the fighting now, demand that this machine and it’s destructive direction stop, and that everything is on the table – period. Don’t let the warmongers who make a buck off of this get richer, do not allow the countries that depend on the resources of this region subvert and exploit it further, and allow these shakled and abused people to move forward with no interruption – in fact, what you want for yourselves, allow them the opportunity.
I assure you they are not backward, and they are not stupid, they have been hampered and oppressed and it is time for the people to wake up and stop the travesty unfolding in their name.
July 27th, 2006 at 9:20 pm
Suicide mission to fill swimming pools
Israel had planned the attack on Lebanon for more than a year, and probably longer.
From the Lebanese daily Assafir, on the rounding up of more of the Israeli spy ring in Lebanon, as reported by SANA (my emphasis in red):
“One of the prominent figures in the network confessed that Israel has put itself on the alert 4 days before arrest of the two Israeli soldiers and provided its inactive spy cells with directives and technologies regarding targeting centers and headquarters of Hizbullah party in all Lebanese territories particularly in the Beirut’s southern suburb.â€
Israel uses on-the-ground local spotters to determine where to drop its bombs. The spotters were told to be ready four days before the Israeli soldiers were captured, meaning that Israel had to have known that they would be captured, and when they would be captured. If they had been captured in a surprise attack by Hezbollah inside Israel, Israel could not possibly have known that they would be seized, or when.
The captured Israeli soldiers were captured inside Lebanon (summarized here; see also here and here and here). That means the self-defense pretext is a lie, and the concept that Israel has a right to defend itself, spouted by all its apologists, is irrelevant (the Hezbollah missiles were only sent after the Israeli attack was well under way). In fact, Hezbollah only poses a military threat inside Lebanon defending it from Israel, and is absolutely no military ‘existential’ threat to Israel itself, meaning that all the discussions by the disgusting apologists for war crimes, fine considerations of when you can murder citizens under the pretext of ‘self-defense’, is immoral bullshit.
The only logical conclusion is that the Israeli generals sent a group of Israeli soldiers into Lebanon on a suicide mission, intending that they be killed and/or captured by Hezbollah. It would not surprise me if they let Hezbollah know the soldiers were coming by broadcasting the information over signals they knew Hezbollah was monitoring. The soldiers, of course, wouldn’t know what was planned for them, and would have assumed that this was just another of the many illegal Israeli incursions onto Lebanese territory. In other words, the Israeli generals sent their young conscripts over the Lebanese border with the intention that they be captured or die, all in order to create the excuse for the pre-planned attack on Lebanon.
I’m sure the relatives of the soldiers are proud of them, on the assumption that their sacrifice was made to protect Israel. I wonder how they’d feel if they realized that their sacrifice was really made in order to fill the swimming pools of the settlers, and that Israel, as a direct result of this foolishness, is actually much less safe.
http://xymphora.blogspot.com/2006/07/suicide-mission-to-fill-swimming-pools.html
July 27th, 2006 at 9:20 pm
Just sayin’
July 27th, 2006 at 10:35 pm
When anon first came onto the scene he described me as a “good arab brother”, a samrt guy who could be “reasoned with”. How quickly I’ve morphed into a “hez apologist” acting in tamdem with my supossed blogging buddies, presumably the good Michael Balter and others . Notice how I make use of the international human rights groups, like B’teslem while he relies on the word of the IDF when the whole world knows they are lying, yet he paints me as some sort of extremist. Notice how he claims to care for Lebonese civilains trying to flee Israeli attacks yet fails to mention that his source Jan Egeland scolded Israel for telling residents in the South of Lebenon to flee while destroying the roads that would allow them to do that. Perhaps this was another case of “lack of professionalism” as anon calls it. could you imagine if someone here suggested that hezbollahs bombing of haifa was due to “a lack of professionalism” but we’ve already seen that for anon arab lives are awfully cheap. what sickening terminology he evokes, devoid of humanity, disingenous rhetoric, aplogetics of the most vilest sort desinged specifically to make the deaths of hundreds of civilians look respectful. Shame
July 27th, 2006 at 10:40 pm
Anon wrote: “[Hezbollah] apparently force Lebanese to stay in their homes to serve as human shields.â€
I asked for substantiation, and all I got was an assertion to that effect by one Israeli officer.
And yet we have refugee reports saying that the town was almost empty except for some old people who refused to leave their homes.
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2006/s1696212.htm
Which perspective is more accurate? I don’t know. Both seem totally anecdotal at this point. The truth, if and when if comes out, will inevitably be mixed with lies, among which I include tales that grow in the telling, a common enough phenomenon in wartime.
Doron Spielman may have seen (or heard of) a few isolated incidents, and generalized; the interviewed Rani Bazzi may have just been reporting what he saw as he was hurriedly leaving his neighborhood, and extrapolated across the entire town of (formerly) 45,000 residents. Or they might both be right: Hezbollah militants might have forced the few old people stubbornly clinging to their homes to at least go inside (or to another neighborhood) to be safer, if didn’t want to leave town entirely.
So, anon, you don’t have much of a basis even for qualifying your assertion with “apparently”. “Apparently” would require that every street corner of Bint Jbeil have webcams that you’ve been personally monitoring. I reasoned that Hezbollah’s strategy depends on generating civilian casualties on *both* sides, but that it would be undermining that strategy by actually forcing people at gunpoint to take Israeli fire. You haven’t responded to the evident illogic of your observation. Perhaps your next move will be to say that we’re dealing with crazy Hezbollah, so logic has nothing to do with it?
To the critics of Ahmed here, I have something to say. Ahmed is right that we’re talking about the result of decades of humiliation. There comes a point where you have to stop talking about what’s right and just from day to day, because it has become impossible to apply ordinary standards. You should instead try to figure out how to solve the problem in the long term. Woodrow Wilson recoiled in disgust at the punitive terms imposed on post WW I Germany, because he saw it (correctly) as simply setting the stage for more conflict. At the time, nothing could have been more obvious to most Europeans that Germany should pay war reparations, in some eye-eye-tooth-tooth reasoning. But nothing could have been more immoral than to further humiliate Germans.
I think Israel is also correct when it says that, in Hezbollah, Lebanon has swallowed a cancer and must now vomit it back up. Just as many German voters “swallowed the cancer” of Nazism, even those who cast ballots for Hitler as chancellor only as a protest vote, not out of any love for the Nazi Party. They needed some way to express their humiliation. But at that point, it was probably too late already.
Clausewitz said that war is the continuation of politics by violent means. But he also said it’s a wrestling match–a particularly violent spectator sport, in which fans on one side or the other are part of the political equation. If you just want to be an armchair referee for the wrestling match, crying foul when it’s your guy who gets jabbed in the eye, and saying “well, it’s because of the other guy’s foul earlier that my guy kicked their guy in the nuts,” then go right ahead. But don’t pretend that, in taking that role, you’re anything better than a political pawn, and more likely simply irrelevant. It’s really about the politics, and if you want to understand the politics, you’re going to have to study. And to do that, you’re have to calm down, stop rooting for your favorite wrestler in the current match, and pay some attention to what might be going on behind the scenes. What you’ll see there won’t be pretty–it will not be about fairness and the best wrestler winning. It will be about how to sell more tickets for future matches, and which matches will be thrown, while managers, coaches and impresarios on all sides jointly worry about keeping the crowd under control.
The Middle East conflict has been going on for a very long time now. Because it’s good business in a region in which most regimes are not a whole lot better than mafias. The arms business, of course, but mainly: the oil business.
July 27th, 2006 at 11:14 pm
Many thanks to Ahmed and Michael for eloquent posts and for searching for the truth behind what is going on in Lebanon.
Note to anon: There is a war on in which a lot of innocent people are being killed in war crimes by both sides. This is not a time for polite debate. If some of us focus more on Israel’s crimes it is because they are at least ten times heavier in terms of deaths, but I and many others here have condemned Hezbollah’s targeting of civilians on many occasions. You, as Ahmed and Michael have pointed out, suck up every lie that Israel tells without question and you apologize for and rationalize war crimes. If you don’t like me calling you the shithead that you are, go blog somewhere else–you will not get gentlemanly treatment from me.
July 27th, 2006 at 11:20 pm
btw anyone who hates Hezbollah can thank Israel and the USA for turning them into heros throughout the Arab world overnight. Check out today’s NYT for more details.
July 28th, 2006 at 12:54 am
Michael Balter:
“btw anyone who hates Hezbollah can thank Israel and the USA for turning them into heros throughout the Arab world overnight. Check out today’s NYT for more details.”
This is perfect: “anyone who hates Hezbollah,” i.e.: anyone who hates an Islamist terrorist group, sponsored by Iranian mullahs and Syrian-Baathist facists, hostile to Lebanese democracy, who hide behind women and children, devoted to the destruction of Israel and pledged to oppose any liberal freedom ever invented, including sexual equality, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom to worship.
It is perfect in every way. No fault greater than the fault of the US and Israel lies with Hezbollah anymore than it does with the famously humane and liberal “Arab street,”
itself mired in corruption, tyrrany, poverty and ignorance, indifferent to the murder of hundreds of thousands of Muslims by fellow Muslims (just like Leftists, exactly) but infinitely sensitive to the death of a single Muslim killed by an infidel.
Behind all of this outrage and moral equivelance lies some sort of of rationale that no one will ever, ever, explain to you. It m ight be that you are operating in good faith and don’t have a strong opinion about how Israel should defend itself. You only know that Israel has the right. You think the burden of proof lies with the people who would cut your own throat in a heartbeat. You reject the idea that Israel is the problem but you are are a liberal (small “l”) and a democrat (small “d”) so you are willing to listen.
You wonder how professed Western “progressives” could give every benefit of every doubt to theocrats and facists, and why they continue to support the most reactionary elements within Arab and Muslim society while hanging their modern, liberal and progressive Muslim and Arab brothers and sisters out to dry.
July 28th, 2006 at 4:51 am
Stott writes: “It might be that you are operating in good faith and don’t have a strong opinion about how Israel should defend itself. You only know that Israel has the right. You think the burden of proof lies with the people who would cut your own throat in a heartbeat. You reject the idea that Israel is the problem but you you are are a liberal (small “lâ€) and a democrat (small “dâ€) so you are willing to listen.”
Liberal Democrats (capital “L”, capital “D”) in Lebanon
http://yalibnan.com/site/about.php
nevertheless agree that Israel’s responses are breeding new terrorists
http://yalibnan.com/site/about.php
and not just because Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon seems to have suddenly broadened the (official?) definition of “terrorist”.
Stott, if you want to say that Israel can defend its interests only in ways that breed more islamist extremism and terrorism, you’ll at least sound coherent. Israel can then blame that negative side effect on the nature of its enemies. It can argue that the phenomenon is very much a product of terror-sponsoring states anyway, that it’s forced to play the terror-breeding game. I believe there’s a lot of truth to that line of reasoning, even if it isn’t the whole truth.
However, the question you should then ask is: why has Israel responded at the scale of its current operations? If greater scale creates greater extremism in the future, is that considered by Israeli foreign policy architects just a price to be paid for security (now, but more so in the future)? Or is it a strategic calculation, given that the extremism being bred could also threaten Arab states nominally opposed to Israel but currently not exchanging direct blows with Israel? This is leverage, after all. What is Israel planning to do with that leverage?
If the aim were to simply “send Hezbollah a message”, the response seems quite disproportionate. If you assume that the Israeli response is intelligent anyway, for unstated reasons, you must conclude that the real aims are strategic and sweepingly regional. What do you suppose these aims are?
If all I hear back is something that toes the Israel party line, I’ll know: you’re just cheering for your favorite wrestler in this particular wrestling match, and you don’t really care what the overall conflict in the Middle East is really all about.
July 28th, 2006 at 5:12 am
Do any of you people who argue for the present course think you are going to get anything out of this activity?
Yes. Hezbollah will be degraded and a NATO force with teeth [unlike the UN] will be drafted to prevent Hez from randomly firing Iranian missiles into Israel.
The only course that makes sense in this area is to pursue peace
Of course. But your idea of “peace” is yet another cease-fire to be exploited by the terrorists, to regroup and rearm for another round of warfare. Hezbollah is like a childish coward that throws a cheap kidney punch at Israel, then runs to the international community to stop the fight before he gets pummeled. And then Hez comes back and does the same thing tomorrow, and the day after. Why? Because you and your kind enable it. The violence and bloodshed is on your hands, as much as it is the IDF and Hez.
Micheal Balter: This is not a time for polite debate
Maybe not, but you only use that as an excuse to attack people, instead of their ideas. Its obvious why you and Virgil spend paragraphs on cheap shots and insults instead of argument. In some ways its entertaining. But it says alot about you and your position.
July 28th, 2006 at 5:21 am
Do any of you people who argue for the present course think you are going to get anything out of this activity?
“Yes. Hezbollah will be degraded and a NATO force with teeth [unlike the UN] will be drafted to prevent Hez from randomly firing Iranian missiles into Israel.”
I forgot to add:
Syria and Iran will be outed for their use of Hez as a proxy, they will become more politically isolated, and will lose face and influence in the ME. This may even be a domino that leads to their fall – regime change.
And Lebannon will learn that their are consequences for allowing terrorists to set up shop within their borders. No more enabling.
July 28th, 2006 at 5:23 am
Neo wrote: Israel had planned the attack on Lebanon for more than a year, and probably longer.
Well, duh. Israel should have all sorts of contingency plans for attacking every country and defending itself from every country in that region.
You might be interested in this contingency attack plan:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/29/AR2005122901412_pf.html
and here is why and how: http://invadecanada.us/ .
July 28th, 2006 at 6:30 am
Fen writes: “Syria and Iran will be outed for their use of Hez as a proxy …”
Hm, at this point … wouldn’t that be a little like outing George Michael as gay?
“…. they will become more politically isolated …”
From those in the Middle East who are cheering Hezbollah on? (Which seems to be almost everybody except regimes that fear islamist takeover, and even they are engaged in routine denunciations of Israeli aggression.)
“…. and will lose face and influence in the ME.”
Not if those islamists take over, though. Didn’t think of that, didja? You can bet that Mubarak is losing sleep over it, though. Not to mention the entire Saudi royal family.
“This may even be a domino that leads to their fall – regime change.”
More like the monkey that flies out my butt.
Dude, read the frickin’ tea leaves already.
Bush doesn’t have a big problem with Maliki denouncing Israeli aggression before Congress. And why not? He’d prefer that his recent pacify-Baghdad-first program benefit by a lift in Arab unity in Iraq, and there’s probably little that could unify Iraqis in Baghdad right now more than to get together and hate-hate-hate Israel. Maybe Sistani can make guest appearances at the sectarian-unity rallies.
If Israel gets its soldiers back and the rocket attacks end, Olmert can do a victory jig and almost all of Israel will be dancing with him.
If Hezbollah can merely *survive* by the skin of its teeth, Nasrallah (and Iran, and Syria) can do victory jigs and the Arab street will be full of their dance partners.
Note that victory for Hezbollah and Israel is not mutually exclusive, as the victories are defined above.
The leadership in Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia (the last of which just plopped down about $2b for Lebanese reconstruction–boy do they know how to work the local protection rackets) having gone out on a limb to praise Hezbollah with faint damns, will see the victory jigs in the streets and turn up the volume on the dance music.
Fen, you’ve got a simplistic zero-sum picture of how the Middle East works politically. The video of this big-time wrestling match can be cut three or four different ways for various media markets, by the censors and propagandists of the participating network governments, and everybody can see their favorite wrestler win. It’s all in the editing and the voice-overs.
July 28th, 2006 at 6:58 am
michael turner,
i’m not sure about everything you’ve written on this topic (that makes at least two of us, i guess) , but your last post, the final paragraph in particular, was an unqualified delight. very thought-provoking stuff. thanks.
July 28th, 2006 at 7:31 am
Hey, kids! It’s time once again for … Guess that Kibitzer. Here’s Episode II (“The Shoggoths Strike Back”):
—-
MYSTERY KIBITZER: “[....] Don’t get me wrong — if I thought that this air campaign would work, and would eliminate Nasrullah and the leadership of Hezbollah, I think it would all be fine. But I fear that you can’t do this from the sky, and that you’re going to end up empowering Hezbollah, and perhaps introducing an element into the body politic in Lebanon that will take some great period of time to recover from.”
MC: “An element into the body politic that as yet we do not know?”
MYSTERY KIBITZER: “I think we do not know. And we’re not, as far as I’m concerned, using all the levers that we have, such as having the Secretary of State talk to the Syrians. I think they want to get involved. I think they want to become more central to a solution, and you might as well give them the opportunity. If they step up to it, fine. If they don’t, we’ll know them for what they are.”
—-
Who is this?
That limpwrist egghead PLO-appeaser Asher Susser over at BitterLemons.com?
Tom Friedman on his mobile phone, sweating on the patio of some Damascus cafe, while taking a break from frenzied backpedaling over regretted columns past?
Wes Clark, poking his head above the trenches and engaging in some amateur diplomatic theatrics?
Richard Holbrooke, after mistily reminiscing about the days when The International Community[1] hung on his every word?
Wrong-o! Bzzt! Double Bzzt!!
The answer is: Dick Armitage.
http://shrillblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/former-depsecstate-richard-armitage-is.html
—
[1] For those of you unfamiliar with The International Community, I have some of their LPs, the vinyl now warping under summer heat in the same part of my parents’ attic as my Village People albums.
July 28th, 2006 at 7:49 am
to my critics:
you folks are off the deep end, turning me into something that i am not. i feel sorry for you, because you prefer to lob insults on the ridiculous notion that, since i support the right for israel to exist, and am no fan of suicide bombers and the like, that i am the “enemy.” because i don’t try to prove my leftist credentials by raising the hezbollah flag and pummel israel every chance, i am spat on with all sorts of foul, stupid abuse. the fact is, deranged blog children, my views, based on his posts here, seem to only slightly differ from mr. cooper on these issues.
maybe you should also start acting like jerks with cooper, then, if you want to be consistent.
balter: if you want to pathetically resort to vulgar insults, it all reflects more on you in the end. the times do not, as you rationalize, demand rudeness and acting like an idiot. you have not once made a substantive remark on my ideas. grow up.
ahmed: you delight in disinformation and misrepresenting my views, because, as you know, i see through all the bullshit put out by the hamas and hezbollah fanatics. but anyone who lies loses in the end. you not only cheat others with such tactics, you cheat yourself to the truth.
turner: i cited more than the idf reports, again, i also cited the united nation’s humanitarian chief jan egeland. the other “apparent” enemy of the fifth dimension brigade on this blog, woody, also linked in this thread to a united nations observer who reported similar observations.
July 28th, 2006 at 8:17 am
Well, the latest news is that even the US State Dept has sharply criticized Israel for claiming that it was given carte blanche to bomb out of the Rome meeting. Perhaps some cooler heads over there are realizing where this is all likely to lead, and how counterproductive Israel’s actions are. Blair’s cred will be on the line too very shortly.
Friends of Israel have to ask themselves whether its enormous ESCALATION of the conflict will turn out to be the best strategy to insure security. I say not, and so do many people here. I second lucas’ comments about Michael Turner’s posts, the most thoughtful and provocative of any here for my money–and motivated by a real humanity that is lacking in the more strident of Israel’s defenders.
July 28th, 2006 at 9:19 am
Yes, this friend of Israel has criticized the scale of Israel’s response. I have called it disproportionate. I have to wonder if my understanding of the English language is different from others? If you are including me in your criticism of the Israeli friends, again, read my words. Again, to clarify, because you apparently don’t know what I think, Balter, I have criticized the scale and strategy of the Israeli response, but I do not criticize Israel for responding. Do you think Israel should not have responded at all militarily? I think, after Israel pulls out of Lebanon, and then the Hez massively stockpiles and occasionally lobsrockets over the years, then Hez crosses the border, kills 8 Israeli soliders and takes hostage two soldiers, coupled with the lack of attention or will by the Lebanese govt. and the internaitonal community for some six years to do anything to disarm Hez, a military response is justified. That said, again, I disagree with the scale and much of the targeting involved in that response.
And, if indeed you are referring to me or including me in your comment above, in which you refer to the lack of “real humanity in the more strident of Israel’s defenders” — you are utterly full of shit. One can sympathize with Israel and remain humane. Is not either or, black-white. I guess what I don’t like about your stance on this conflict, Balter, is that you let your emotions cloud and overlook the larger, core issues. So much so, that I think you are losing a sense of fairness in this conflict. One can denounce Israel’s escalation and at the same time place blame on the fanaticism of Hezbollah which got us here to begin with. I don’t believe Israel, or people who are friends with Israel, are blood thirsty. I do think the questionable stategy and tactics in Israeli military’s response is moreso a fuckup of the Israeli military and does not necessarily reflect on Israel on the whole or its friends. One can support Israel and criticize its military. That said, shit does happen in war and its not all reduced to this false idea of inhumanity of Israeli defenders. War will always mean pain and suffering, no matter what country wages it. The conflict, like life itself, is complex.
July 28th, 2006 at 9:20 am
Look, no one is trying to crush anyone on this site – it’s just that old rhetoric get’s, well, it get’s old. The point is not merely that these people are oppressed in this area and brutalized – what is going on is not good for the people of Israel either.
For some reason I get the impression that those who support Israel in this unreserved fashion really do not support the people – they may not know it, but they support a minority in power who are crooks and liars just like our politicians here. Believe me, there is no Zionistic ideology in play here – just a lot of noise to the effect!
I have friends and relatives in shelters in areas of Israel, and these policies harm them just like they harm the Lebanese – maybe not with the same body count, but with the prospect of unrest and perpetutal turmoil. Those in power are no friend of the people, just like those in power here are no friend of the people – period. No one is singing “let my people go” and gos is not currently parting the Red Sea in this instance.
All this aggression does is maintian the status quo in this region. It does not help the people on either side of the conflict. There is no “New Middle East” on the way, it is the same old one with perhaps more bloodshed. If you want my view look at what I write on my site – shameless plug, no – I do not have time to write endlessly here.
July 28th, 2006 at 9:49 am
NeoDude:
Good posts, good points esp re: the Israeli “Samson” option – scarey stuff!
Arguing with people that support Israel’s military belligerence and aggression is a vexing endeavor. Judging from the above, these bloggers sincerely have no inkling of the pro-Israeli bias present in U.S MSM (EG. bloggers providing links to ABC news to support thier claims). And they’re so quick to cry anti-semitism or that other wonderful term,”self-hating jew”.
It seems to me, that if they truly loved the Israeli people, they would want to look ahead at possible factors affecting long-term Israeli security. Israel’s previous invasion of Lebanon was a cake-walk. Now they are encountering a well armed savvy force. Things are certainly changing in the middle east. If the so-called “supporters of Israel” continue to blithely assume that the current balance of relative power in the middle east will remain static as will Israel’s ability to act with impunity, then these “supporters’ may constitute the biggest challenge to Israel’s
“right to exist”.
Those who are truly concerned for Israel’s security need task some fundamental question:
> What is the bedrock on which the relationship between The US and Israel is based? Is it based on mutual love and respect of the peoples or is Israel looked upon by US geopolitical planners solely as a military proxy in the region, useful only for purposes of command and control of the ME’s oil?
> Is Israel’s economy an independent, viable, functioning system or is it largely dependent for its existence on the several billion dollars it receives from the US annually?
> Has Israel’s ability to continue its harsh treatment of the Palestinians, as well as conducting several military operations of questionable legality, in defiance of world opinion and UN resolutions (therefor escaping the sort of repercussions that ultimately forced apartheid South Africa to change its policies) been due to the US providing diplomatic cover, UN vetoes etc.?
(honest evaluation of this question by US MSM-fed “supporters” of Israel will be almost impossible, for instance a frequent blogger, Robert Fiore, fancies that Israel found some legal loophole in the UN resolutions regarding the occupied territories and is therefor, not in violation of the resolutions).
If you feel that oil resources are infinite: that the current political/military balance of power in the ME is static; that the US, unlike every other superpower throughout world history,
will maintain its preemminence forever, then
why not continue simultaneously cheerleading
and rationalizing Israeli atrocities.
If you answer the above questions the way I and many forward thinking people in Israel do,
then true concern for Israel’s continued existence would lead you to urge Israel to follow policies that optimize the chances for peace in the region – trading land for peace (another idea that US MSM-fed “supporters’ of Israel couldn’t even contemplate – they fancy that Israel has earnestly attempted to make peace; that bantustans and allowing palestinians to collect thier own garbage equals soveriegnty etc).
Furthermore, people that sincerely love Israel
would urge thier government to end thier social and economic isolation, pursuing policies that increase thier integration into the region and the world.
If the Israeli government continues its military bellegerence under the apron strings of the US, then sooner or later thay will have no choice to exercise the “Samson” option that NeoDude warned of.
July 28th, 2006 at 10:00 am
This report seems a whole lot more reliable than the IDF propaganda touted by mr “poor professionalism”.
The “hiding among civilians” myth
07.28.2006 | Salon.com
By Mitch Prothero
Israel claims it’s justified in bombing civilians because Hezbollah mingles with them. In fact, the militant group doesn’t trust its civilians and stays as far away from them as possible.
Jul. 28, 2006 | The bombs came just as night fell, around 7 p.m. The locals knew that the 10-story apartment building had been the office, and possibly the residence, of Sheik Tawouk, the Hezbollah commander for the south, so they had moved their families out at the start of the war. The landlord had refused to rent to Hezbollah when they requested the top floors of the building. No matter, the locals said, the Hezb guys just moved in anyway in the name of the “resistance.”
Everyone knew that the building would be hit eventually. Its location in downtown Tyre, which had yet to be hit by Israeli airstrikes, was not going to protect it forever. And “everyone” apparently included Sheik Tawouk, because he wasn’t anywhere near it when it was finally hit.
Two guided bombs struck it in a huge flash bang of fire and concrete dust followed by the roar of 10 stories pancaking on top of each other, local residents said. Jihad Husseini, 46, runs the driving school a block away and was sitting in his office when the bombs struck. He said his life was saved because he had drawn the heavy cloth curtains shut on the windows facing the street, preventing him from being hit by a wave of shattered glass. But even so, a chunk of smoldering steel flew through the air, broke through the window and the curtain, and shot past his head and through the wall before coming to rest in his neighbor’s home.
But Jihad still refuses to leave.
“Everything is broken, but I can make it better,” he says, surrounded by his sons Raed, 20, and Mohammed, 12. “I will not leave. This place is not military, it is not Hezbollah; it was an empty apartment.”
Throughout this now 16-day-old war, Israeli planes high above civilian areas make decisions on what to bomb. They send huge bombs capable of killing things for hundreds of meters around their targets, and then blame the inevitable civilian deaths — the Lebanese government says 600 civilians have been killed so far — on “terrorists” who callously use the civilian infrastructure for protection.
But this claim is almost always false. My own reporting and that of other journalists reveals that in fact Hezbollah fighters — as opposed to the much more numerous Hezbollah political members, and the vastly more numerous Hezbollah sympathizers — avoid civilians. Much smarter and better trained than the PLO and Hamas fighters, they know that if they mingle with civilians, they will sooner or later be betrayed by collaborators — as so many Palestinian militants have been.
For their part, the Israelis seem to think that if they keep pounding civilians, they’ll get some fighters, too. The almost nightly airstrikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut could be seen as making some sense, as the Israelis appear convinced there are command and control bunkers underneath the continually smoldering rubble. There were some civilian casualties the first few nights in places like Haret Hreik, but people quickly left the area to the Hezbollah fighters with their radios and motorbikes.
But other attacks seem gratuitous, fishing expeditions, or simply intended to punish anything and anyone even vaguely connected to Hezbollah. Lighthouses, grain elevators, milk factories, bridges in the north used by refugees, apartment buildings partially occupied by members of Hezbollah’s political wing — all have been reduced to rubble.
In the south, where Shiites dominate, just about everyone supports Hezbollah. Does mere support for Hezbollah, or even participation in Hezbollah activities, mean your house and family are fair game? Do you need to fire rockets from your front yard? Or is it enough to be a political activist?
The Israelis are consistent: They bomb everyone and everything remotely associated with Hezbollah, including noncombatants. In effect, that means punishing Lebanon. The nation is 40 percent Shiite, and of that 40 percent, tens of thousands are employed by Hezbollah’s social services, political operations, schools, and other nonmilitary functions. The “terrorist” organization Hezbollah is Lebanon’s second-biggest employer.
People throw the phrase “ghost town” around a lot, but Nabatiya, a bombed-out town about 15 miles from the Lebanon-Israel border, deserves it. One expects the spirits of the town’s dead, or its refugees, to silently glide out onto its abandoned streets from the ruined buildings that make up much of the town.
Not all of the buildings show bomb damage, but those that don’t have metal shutters blown out as if by a terrible wind. And there are no people at all, except for the occasional Hezbollah scout on a motorbike armed only with a two-way radio, keeping an eye on things as Israeli jets and unmanned drones circle overhead.
Overlooking the outskirts of this town, which has a peacetime population of 100,000 or so — mostly Shiite supporters of Hezbollah and its more secular rival Amal — is the Ragheh Hareb Hospital, a facility that makes quite clear what side the residents of Nabatiya are on in this conflict.
The hospital’s carefully sculpted and trimmed front lawn contains the giant Red Crescent that denotes the Muslim version of the Red Cross. As we approach it, an Israeli missile streaks by, smashing into a school on the opposite hilltop. As we crouch and then run for the shelter of the hospital awning, that giant crescent reassures me until I look at the flagpole. The Lebanese flag and its cedar tree is there — right next to the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
It’s safe to say that Ragheh Hareb Hospital has an association with Hezbollah. And the staff sports the trimmed beards and polite, if somewhat ominous, manner of the group. After young men demand press IDs and do some quick questioning, they allow us to enter.
Dr. Ahmed Tahir recognizes me from a funeral in the nearby village of Dweir. An Israeli bomb dropped on their house killed a Hezbollah cleric and 11 members of his immediate family, mostly children. People in Lebanon are calling it a war crime. Tahir looks exhausted, and our talk is even more tense than the last time.
“Maybe it would be best if the Israelis bombed your car on the road here,” he said, with a sharp edge. “If you were killed, maybe the public outcry would be so bad in America that the Jews would be forced to stop these attacks.”
When I volunteered that the Bush administration cared little for journalists, let alone ones who reported from Hezbollah territory, he shrugged. “Maybe if it was an American bomb used by the Israelis that killed an American journalist, they would stop this horror,” he said.
The handful of people in the town include some from Hezbollah’s political wing, as well as volunteers keeping an eye on things while the residents are gone. Off to the side, as we watch the Israelis pummel ridgelines on the outskirts of town, one of the political operatives explains that the fighters never come near the town, reinforcing what other Hezbollah people have told me over the years.
Although Israel targets apartments and offices because they are considered “Hezbollah” installations, the group has a clear policy of keeping its fighters away from civilians as much as possible. This is not for humanitarian reasons — they did, after all, take over an apartment building against the protests of the landlord, knowing full well it would be bombed — but for military ones.
“You can be a member of Hezbollah your entire life and never see a military wing fighter with a weapon,” a Lebanese military intelligence official, now retired, once told me. “They do not come out with their masks off and never operate around people if they can avoid it. They’re completely afraid of collaborators. They know this is what breaks the Palestinians — no discipline and too much showing off.”
Perhaps once a year, Hezbollah will hold a military parade in the south, in which its weapons and fighters appear. Media access to these parades is tightly limited and controlled. Unlike the fighters in the half dozen other countries where I have covered insurgencies, Hezbollah fighters do not like to show off for the cameras. In Iraq, with some risk taking, you can meet with and even watch the resistance guys in action. (At least you could during my last time there.) In Afghanistan, you can lunch with Taliban fighters if you’re willing to walk a day or so in the mountains. In Gaza and the West Bank, the Fatah or Hamas fighter is almost ubiquitous with his mask, gun and sloganeering to convince the Western journalist of the justice of his cause.
The Hezbollah guys, on the other hand, know that letting their fighters near outsiders of any kind — journalists or Lebanese, even Hezbollah supporters — is stupid. In three trips over the last week to the south, where I came near enough to the fighting to hear Israeli artillery, and not just airstrikes, I saw exactly no fighters. Guys with radios with the look of Hezbollah always found me. But no fighters on corners, no invitations to watch them shoot rockets at the Zionist enemy, nothing that can be used to track them.
Even before the war, on many of my trips to the south, the Lebanese army, or the ubiquitous guy on a motorbike with a radio, would halt my trip and send me over to Tyre to get permission from a Hezbollah official before I could proceed, usually with strict limits on where I could go.
Every other journalist I know who has covered Hezbollah has had the same experience. A fellow journalist, a Lebanese who has covered them for two decades, knows only one military guy who will admit it, and he never talks or grants interviews. All he will say is, “I’ll be gone for a few months for training. I’ll call when I’m back.” Presumably his friends and neighbors may suspect something, but no one says anything.
Hezbollah’s political members say they have little or no access to the workings of the fighters. This seems to be largely true: While they obviously hear and know more than the outside world, the firewall is strong.
Israel, however, has chosen to treat the political members of Hezbollah as if they were fighters. And by targeting the civilian wing of the group, which supplies much of the humanitarian aid and social protection for the poorest people in the south, they are targeting civilians.
Earlier in the week, I stood next to a giant crater that had smashed through the highway between Tyre and Sidon — the only route of escape for most of the people in the far south. Overhead, Israeli fighters and drones circled above the city and its outlying areas and regular blasts of bombs and naval artillery could be heard.
The crater served as a nice place to check up on the refugees, who were forced by the crater to slow down long enough to be asked questions. They barely stopped, their faces wrenched in near panic. The main wave of refugees out of the south had come the previous two days, so these were the hard-luck cases, the people who had been really close to the fighting and who needed two days just to get to Tyre, or who had had to make the tough decision whether to flee or stay put, with neither choice looking good.
The roads in the south are full of the cars of people who chose wrong — burned-out chassis, broken glass, some cars driven straight into posts or ditches. Other seem to have broken down or run out of gas on the long dirt detours around the blown-out highway and bridge network the Israeli air force had spent days methodically destroying even as it warned people to flee.
One man, slowing his car around the crater, almost screams, “There is nothing left. This country is not for us.” His brief pause immediately draws horns and impatient yells from the people in the cars behind him. They pass the crater but within two minutes a large explosion behind us, north, in the direction of Sidon, rocks us.
As we drive south toward Tyre, we soon pass a new series of scars on the highway: shrapnel, hubcaps and broken glass. A car that had been maybe five minutes ahead of us was hit by an Israeli shell. Three of its passengers were wounded, and it was heading north to the Hammound hospital at Sidon. We turned around because of the attack and followed the car to Sidon. Those unhurt staked out the parking lot of the hospital, looking for the Western journalists they were convinced had called in the strike. Luckily my Iraqi fixer smelled trouble and we got out of there. Probably nothing would have happened — mostly they were just freaked-out country people who didn’t like the coincidence of an Israeli attack and a car full of journalists driving past.
So the analysts talking on cable news about Hezbollah “hiding within the civilian population” clearly have spent little time if any in the south Lebanon war zone and don’t know what they’re talking about. Hezbollah doesn’t trust the civilian population and has worked very hard to evacuate as much of it as possible from the battlefield. And this is why they fight so well — with no one to spy on them, they have lots of chances to take the Israel Defense Forces by surprise, as they have by continuing to fire rockets and punish every Israeli ground incursion.
And the civilians? They see themselves as targeted regardless of their affiliation. They are enraged at Israel and at the United States, the only two countries on earth not calling for an immediate cease-fire. Lebanese of all persuasions think the United States and Israel believe that Lebanese lives are cheaper than Israeli ones. And many are now saying that they want to fight.
July 28th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
Israel, no offense, the same goes for the terrorists, seem to have a penchant for killing innocent civilians. Whatever they do militarily, there always seem to be mostly civilians who pay the price. Yet all others can do is chanting “self-defense, self-defense”, what hypocricy. None of the idiotic war enthusiasts have ever tasted 1/5th of the pain of losing somone near & dear. That’s why they can be so casual about thousands dying. It’s so fundamental, but they don’t get it.
All this Middle East violence will backlash. Iraq was enough. Arabs must see how outsiders totally don’t value them, and behave as if their lives were disposable, JUST like the terrorists do of others. When their babies get killed you hear support and chants about self-defense. It’s so cynical. Israel and the US justifiy the overwhelming deaths of civilians in the name of “self-defense”. The bottom-line isn’t self-defense, but that they utterly don’t value the lives lost, period.
July 28th, 2006 at 7:42 pm
I would add that mingling is exactly what they do. It makes for propaganda casualties. Then we can see the pictures out of context. Sacrifices have been the MO since before the time of Solomon.
July 28th, 2006 at 9:20 pm
Publius you are a classic wimp.
You would piss your panties, if you ever had to “sacrifice”
July 28th, 2006 at 11:17 pm
Ed Watters writes: “turner: i cited more than the idf reports, again, i also cited the united nation’s humanitarian chief jan egeland. the other “apparent†enemy of the fifth dimension brigade on this blog, woody, also linked in this thread to a united nations observer who reported similar observations.”
Ed: You’re mixing two issues. One issue was whether Hezbollah has actually trapped civilians in combat zones, and as far as I know, we still only have the one IDF soldier saying so. You cite Woody’s link to a Canadian story about an interpretation of past e-mail from the UN observer post in El Khiam. But the UN observer deaths are a separate issue — UN observers are not civilians. And, as far as I know, no comments so far by Egeland address this specific issue of Hez entrapment of civilians either.
I think my position makes perfect sense. If I were running Hezbollah, every Lebanese civilian casualty counts as propaganda ammunition ONLY if I can be sure it can’t be used against me in any effective way. Since, as even Al Qaeda recognizes, this is a war in the court of public opinion (even fractured publics, such as we have here), I’ll want to keep my powder dry.
Moreover, even if the issue WERE whether the UN post was being used as a “shield”, the article linked by Woody (read it again, carefully) is excellent evidence that, if such was Hezbollah’s intent, it hadn’t been working for a long time. And yet Hezbollah continued to use the area anyway. When that UN observer wrote that the previous Israeli attacks did not involve deliberate targeting of the observer post, but were rather a matter of “tactical necessity”, he might have been talking–accurately–about tactical necessity on BOTH sides (he was, after all, an observer, and sussing out such things was his job). In any case, it sounded like this particular observer was inured to periodic Israeli bombardment of the area. The e-mail (insofar as it was quoted) mentions nothing about any persistent requests that the bombardment stop. In other words, at the time that e-mail was written, everybody involved — Israeli targeters, Hezbollah attackers AND UN observers–knew that the observation post had no shield value at all. Thus, as of that e-mail, the observer post was not only NOT a “civilian shield”, it wasn’t even a shield.
I have said that the killing of UN observers by Israeli bombardment represents, at least, serious incompetence. And it seems that if the dead could speak, they’d agree: they called the Israeli 10 times in the course of a bombardment lasting over 6 hours, pleas that, as far as we know, they had never issued before despite experiencing artillery rounds and rockets landing near their post. Clearly, something more intense and serious was suddenly going on, and it was probably intensified, more serious, more focused Israeli bombardment.
However, I’m open to any plausible line of speculation about this event. I don’t think it’s impossible, for example, that the observers (or one of them; see below) had suddenly been taken captive by Hezbollah, and the observers’ pleas to stop bombardment were elicited at gunpoint, precisely so that the observer post COULD become a (temporary) shield. The fact that one of the four observers is MIA (though “presumed dead”) might lend some support to this hypothesis–perhaps he had been kidnapped and used in part as leverage against the remaining three, to get them on the hotline to Israel and the UN. That’s hardly impossible as far as I know, nor absurdly unlikely under the circumstances, though I still think it’s a stretch.
We do know this, however: the Israeli government has admitted error. And UN officials have since accepted that admission of error. For the face-saving value all around? Who knows. Maybe my speculation above is correct, and maybe Israeli targeters, with better information, became very confident that such was the case, and decided that directly taking out the observer post and killing the observers in the process was the best of some very unpleasant options. It was a virtual military necessity, and after all, any ensuing diplomatic fracas could be cleared up later, if everybody kept their story straight.
(I can honestly say: I don’t know what *I* would have decided in that event, if it were my call. Do I risk more civilian casualties on my side? Or do I commit the “war crime” of killing UN observers, who clearly know they signed up for dangerous territory, who will probably be killed anyway by their captors, and in the process improve my chances of killing their captors, who hardly deserve the benefit of the doubt? But maybe their captors operating in relative safety, with a gun pointed at the head of the kidnapped observer in a bunker blocks away, and are aiming to get either the propaganda victory of an Israeli strike on the observer post or the temporary tactical advantage of operating practically inside it? From my armchair right now, I imagine I’d probably say, “OK, I guess we have to hit ‘em”, then try to get some discharge based on having become a psychiatric casualty.)
I don’t think my main theory–that someone in the chain of command callously shrugged off the observers’ pleas–is implausible either. After all, somebody in some chain of command somewhere in Israel thought it was OK to let Israeli schoolchildren scrawl graffiti on missiles like “From Israel with Love”. (Hez propaganda? Nope: I read it in the Jerusalem Post, and linked it here recently.) After all, it’s war–there is more than enough callousness to go around.
July 29th, 2006 at 1:21 am
As visitors here may know there’s little love loss between myself and Mark York. That said its important to realise every now and then that we are all human beings. I just read York’s wonderful tribute to his late father who passed away very recently. To Mark then, my condolences and sorry to hear of your loss. take care
ahmed
July 29th, 2006 at 3:51 am
(Greater) Israel Must Go, Period.
There is nothing illegitimate, irrational, bigoted, insubstantive or chauvanistic about calling for the destruction of (Greater) Israel.
The occupation is illegal, immoral and unsustainable. It should be destroyed immediately. Inasmuch as Israel in very clear de facto terms has annexed the West Bank, the nation of Israel itself can unassailably be defined in those same terms.
What would it take for Israel apologists to at long last acknowlege how clearly, definitively Israel has established that it will be removed from the West Bank by force and only by force?
How many Jewish colonial land theft suburbs have to be thrown up on the West Bank with U.S. deficit tax dollars before the undeniability of it all caves in on the Israel lobby and its dupes/apparatchiks/parasites in the American media?
How many Palestinian homes will Israel bulldoze to make way for exclusively religously radical Jewish colonial estates before we can at last say Enough! without being snidely, crudely dismissed as somehow less humane, or even “nutty” in some way?
This most vicious, most deeply held of all U.S. media taboos must go. And I think in the latest invasion of Lebanon, that may be starting to happen.
People around the world who value peace, freedom and democracy are calling for the destruction of Zionist militarism and the neocolonial chuavanist state it has created not because it is the wrong religion or the wrong skin-color people but because it is intensely militaristic and aggressive and is driven by a religious ideology demonstrated to be fundamentally incompatible with liberal democracy.
Judiasm? Nothing whatsoever to do with it. I don’t care if they’re Scientologists, or snake handling orb worshippers. I can take or leave anyone’s religion and whatever they choose to believe is 100 percent fine by me, UNTIL they want to use that claim to steal my house, my land and my very existence. Then I have to say: you’re religion isn’t an excuse.
Calling for Greater Israel’s destruction has nothing to do with Judaism, a great, beautiful, healthy, creative, responsible religion. Rather, it is a plea for the survival of the real Judaism, not the sickly perverted politically fascist movement that seeks the elimination of the Palestinians as a people or a nation.
…burp….
July 29th, 2006 at 3:54 am
Clarification: Israel may indeed by extirpated from the West Bank by means other than force. It may be possible to achieve that by THREAT of force, if it’s credible enough. So the relevant sentence above should read:
What would it take for Israel apologists to at long last acknowlege how clearly, definitively Israel has established that it will be removed from the West Bank by force or highly credible threat of force.
July 29th, 2006 at 7:12 am
bunkerbuster:
I’m not sure that I would characterize any religion as healthy and responsible. They all provide theological cover to thier host state’s atrocities.
Also, given the unique nature of Israeli ideology, and the “special relationship” Israel
enjoys with its sole ally, the world’s lone superpower (which provides virtual immunity
to any diplomatic economic or military consequences of thier actions), could Israel behave any differently than it does?
July 29th, 2006 at 10:10 am
“Sacrifices have been the MO since before the time of Solomon. ”
Really dude? I bet we’d be shocked if there were any in your history. There are in mine. I’m sure he will appreciate the kind words from ahmed who has been anything but kind consistently. Vendettas are common online. Yahoo recently took action on one of them stemming from this blog.
July 30th, 2006 at 12:48 am
I have said this before, and I will probably say it again – there is nothing “Zionistic” taking place in Israel. Maybe there was some Zionist ideology at the very beginning, but not now – it is long gone. There is a ton of verbage to the effect, but it is merely the cloak for the same BS we find in any aggressive power.
This biblical “wording” is used to further cement a relationship with a nation that calls itself Christian (America) – mostly through the fundamentalist sect. It is about as Zionistic to crush the Palestinians as it is Christian for this country to bomb Iraq. I’m afraid we are dealing with the same crooks and liars we find in any corrupt government. I know that is inconceivable to some, but I am afraid you are going to have to wake up from your biblio/religio stuper.
July 30th, 2006 at 8:21 am
We are dealing with cultural radicals taught hate from birth. Their societies have failed and they blame Jews for it. That much is clear.
July 30th, 2006 at 9:15 am
We are dealing with cultural radicals taught hate from birth. Their societies have failed and they blame Jews for it. That much is clear.
That sounds like America’s right-wing culture!
July 30th, 2006 at 10:09 am
Days of darkness
By Gideon Levy
In war as in war: Israel is sinking into a strident, nationalistic atmosphere and darkness is beginning to cover everything. The brakes we still had are eroding, the insensitivity and blindness that characterized Israeli society in recent years is intensifying. The home front is cut in half: the north suffers and the center is serene. But both have been taken over by tones of jingoism, ruthlessness and vengeance, and the voices of extremism that previously characterized the camp’s margins are now expressing its heart. The left has once again lost its way, wrapped in silence or “admitting mistakes.” Israel is exposing a unified, nationalistic face.
The devastation we are sowing in Lebanon doesn’t touch anyone here and most of it is not even shown to Israelis. Those who want to know what Tyre looks like now have to turn to foreign channels – the BBC reporter brings chilling images from there, the likes of which won’t be seen here. How can one not be shocked by the suffering of the other, at our hands, even when our north suffers? The death we are sowing at the same time, right now in Gaza, with close to 120 dead since the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, 27 last Wednesday alone, touches us even less. The hospitals in Gaza are full of burned children, but who cares? The darkness of the war in the north covers them, too.
From:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/744061.html
July 30th, 2006 at 12:55 pm
With a complete left/right dichotomy no solution will be found for anything. There’s a middle where truth and solutions dwell. We never see it in blog comment threads.
July 30th, 2006 at 9:47 pm
Michael Totten and I watched pairs fo Apache attack helicopters fly north past the Tel Aviv Hilton Saturday. They were loaded for war and I’m pretty sure they were coming back light.
Just to complete my mental picture of this heroic moment, may I ask who was reaching around whom?
July 31st, 2006 at 1:39 pm
“With a complete left/right dichotomy no solution will be found for anything”
Mark solutions to historical conflicts need to be grounded in an understading of history first and foremost. You’ve denied that Palestinians were ethically cleansed from their lands, which is a central fact of their existence in exile and refugee camps, more so youve argued that the palestianian identity is an “arab invention.” How can we possibly ever have reconciliation or justice if this is your position. What you say is in fact music to the ears af the Israeli right wing. On this issue its interesting to see that you, woody, gm roper and annon are all in total agreement
August 1st, 2006 at 7:49 pm
Would like to make several points:
1) It is often said that Islamic Radicals are after our (American)way of life — If that was the case, how come during this current attack on Lebenon by the Israeli’s, NOT 1 American (of an estimated 25,000 in Lebenon) was killed or taken hostage by these “Islamic Radicals” — would have seemed so easy for them to do
2) We keep holding out Israel as an example of democracy in the middle east yet almost half of the population (meaning the palistinians in the occupied westbank and gaza strip) do not get a vote in israeli elections
3) We keep talking about 1 UN resolution that Lebenon has not obeyed, yet no talk of the 45+ UN resolutions that Israel has defied
4) We complain that Lebenon is not controlling Hezbollah in sourthern Lebenon, yet we (the mighty USA) cannot stop mexicans from crossing our own border
5) The Israeli Lobby is so strong that both democrats and republicans can’t try hard enough to supportive of Israel (the same democrats and republicans who argue weekly about how to handle Iraq)
6) If anybody questions Israel in anyway, you are labeled as “Anti-Semitic”
Just a few things to think about
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