From the Jordan Times.
July 16, 2006 – 12:42 amA Simplistic Argument.
What is happening in Lebanon is Gaza writ large. A targeted military operation, something Israel and the US apparently find more infuriating than anything else, has prompted Israel to retaliate in the only way it knows: By targeting civilian infrastructure and engaging in murder on a large scale.
No amount of anger at the capture of three of its soldiers — one in Gaza and two in Lebanon — justifies blowing up bridges, power plants, airports and killing civilian after civilian. There is no justification for such disproportionate and brutal collective punishment.
The numbers speak for themselves. Against the four Israeli civilians killed in rocket attacks and nine soldiers in action since the two soldiers were captured (another three are now missing at sea), the Lebanese casualty list, by contrast, reaches into the hundreds. Nearly 80 Lebanese have so far been killed, almost all of them civilians. There is simply no equivalence.
As with Gaza, what began as an operation to find captured soldiers has broadened into a wider, open-ended and ill-defined fight to the finish, first against Hamas, and now against Hizbollah.
That, obviously, will not work. Neither group is simply or even largely militant. They represent sectors of their respective societies, and do so in all aspects, from the socio-economic to the political. But astonishingly, this is lost on Israel, whose foreign minister, apparently without irony (or reflection), on Thursday said: “We cannot allow that a leader like [Hizbollah chief Sheikh Hassan] Nasrallah… dictate acts in the area.”
With all due respect to Foreign Minister Tsipi Livni, that is simply idiotic.
To dictate events one needs to predict them, and Israel is so eminently predictable. It acts only with force, and the only degree of surprise comes in the depths to which Israel is willing to sink and the lengths to which the US is prepared to back it.
The past few weeks of unequivocal American support for the Israeli killings of Arab civilians has now reached a level of obscenity. A White House lacking all shame and any semblance of integrity is defining self-defence scaring Gazan children witless at night with sonic booms, ensuring that hospitals can only run on emergency power, and killing civilians in Lebanon.
How do Gaza’s refrigerators threaten Israel’s security?
The US proclaims itself a friend of Israel’s but even on that score it is sorely lacking. Allowing Israel the rope to hang itself and everyone around it is not very nice, really. But since the US invaded Iraq and became Israel, the US has lost its way, the little credibility it had, not to mention its moral compass.
Both the US and Israel are devoid of ideas and of policies for dealing with the Middle East.
Arab leaders far no better, rudderless in the absence of direction from Washington. So they run around, saying first one thing than another like nervous schoolgirls, while Nasrallah steadily increases his influence.
Sunday, July 16, 2006
This is both the British and the French mandate involved, right?