Among the cedars

A beautiful and humane piece that captures the agony of people who are caught in the middle of someone else's war.

This weird shit though is why this nightmare is being unleashed on the Lebanese people. Who thinks like this? Israel is not retaliating against Hizbullah. The Lebanese government is not "responsible" for Hizbullah. Certainly, the people of Beirut aren't. What are they supposed to do, get on a bus and personally chastise the naughty boys? Does this guy simply not remember that the civil war that tore Lebanon apart ended in a stalemate because it simply was not possible for any one faction to destroy the others? (Not that they didn't try.)

This though is the worst of this guy's lunacy: "No country in the world could remain silent and abandon its citizens when its neighbour strikes without any provocation." Well, one country would. IRA terrorists used to operate out of the Republic. We accepted that it wasn't possible for the Irish to destroy a militia that blended into the population (and with which it sympathised, of course). We did not bomb Dublin. Neither has Spain bombed Paris, even though ETA operates out of southwest France.

Sadly, this is the tone of intellectual discourse out of Israel. The security situation has pushed a nation that was founded by leftists to the right, and guys like this get a ready hearing. The note of whining -- poor Israel -- is the leitmotif of rightist discussion of the Middle East. But Israel is not and has never been a victim. It was created in blood, maintained by force and today has no intention of reaching a just settlement with the people its state displaced, which it uses any fiction it thinks will play to pretend never lived there, have no claim to the land it stands on and are, as I have noted, savages who just want to kill Jews. While I have some sympathy with Israel, and none at all with Hizbullah, who are in no way a force for good and should not be mistaken for one, not by the Western left and not by the Palestinians either, every time it murders some of its neighbours I am reminded that it too is playing its part in perpetuating its own nightmare.

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:56 am