My lifes been pretty unremarkable lately, but pfft. Oh well. My mind is like a void. I havent gotten much done….

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Interesting post. I came across this blog by accident, but it was a good accident. I have now bookmarked your blog for future use. Best wishes. Wael Kfoury….

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

Just to complete my mental picture of this heroic moment, may I ask who was reaching around whom?

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

That sounds like America’s right-wing culture!

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.

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.

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?

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.

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….

ahmed

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.