Beirut



Email debate with a Jewish neo-con friend


Pamela Olson
July 27, 2006

Statements by my adversary are in bold.

1) Why does everyone expect Israel to have a proportionate response? You win by having disproportionate responses. When the US attacked Afghanistan we didn't try to use poorer weapons and unskilled soldiers so that we could have more proportional fighting.

And we're doing great in Afghanistan now, right? And in Iraq. I feel more secure than ever, don't you?

The concept of proportionality is a hallmark of enlightened societies. Without it, we devolve into barbarity. If a thief steals bread, you shouldn't cut his hand off or hang him. The punishment should fit the crime. Sir Thomas More in Utopia wrote:

"One of the [king's] English lawyers... took occasion to run out in a high commendation of the severe execution of justice upon thieves, who, as he said, were then hanged so fast, that there were sometimes twenty on one gibbet; and upon that he said he could not wonder enough how it came to pass, that since so few escaped, there were yet so many thieves left who were still robbing in all places."

This is your solution to insurgency / resistance / terrorism, apparently, or at least Israel's (and Rumsfeld's), which you seem to support: kill and destroy them. Implicit in this strategy is that the civilians surrounding the insurgents are fair game, because very often it is impossible to tell insurgents from civilians, and both America and Israel regularly bomb wide areas in order to target or assassinate alleged militants. I won't argue the morality of this with you, since it seems not to matter. But I will attempt to show that it is completely counter-productive to the stated aims of peace and security.

To read someone who could explain better than I could, check out Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, written in 1964 by David Galula, a lieutenant colonel in the French army who was born in Tunisia, witnessed guerrilla warfare on three continents, and died in 1967. It spells out how and why Israel's and America's tactics are so counterproductive to anyone's security. For more of my analysis, read on.

For its part, Hezbollah is responding to deliberate and humiliating provocations by Israel, not least the brutal occupation of Palestine (which you saw for yourself) and several massacres on Lebanese soil (Sabra, Chatila, Qana), which were never brought to justice, and many other violations of Lebanese sovereignty, big and small, including the continued incarceration of Lebanese citizens and the refusal to negotiate about the disputed Shebaa Farms area.

Hezbollah's attack no doubt had as much to do with raising Nasrallah's star as showing solidarity with Palestinians and reclaiming prisoners and a farm. But the fact that his plan worked brilliantly -- the fact that Israel responded in a way that makes him look like a hero resisting a wild dragon rather than a rogue militant facing a strong and wise democratic nation -- has a lot to do with Israel and America's utter inability or unwillingness to acknowledge or help solve the region's longstanding grievances or even talk to them as human beings with human rights. People do not take well to the kind of humiliating treatment America and Israel shower on them.

You will not understand what I mean if you only watch the mainstream American news. It became evident quickly when I first went to the Middle East how much I had been misled by the American media.

Hezbollah wins either way. If Israel gives back the Shebaa Farms and the prisoners (and what the hell, if they negotiate a fair solution to the Palestinian question, too), Hezbollah will look like they pulled off a coup and defeated the 4th most powerful army in the world. But if Israel continues to refuse to do these things, Hezbollah's professed raison d'etre will remain firmly in place, and they will be the only possible heroes in the whole world who can defend Arab sovereignty and get these concessions (most of which are merely fulfillments of international law).

Israel loses either way. Either the root causes of terrorism remain, or Israel solves these problems and negotiates not from a position of strength but after taking a nasty smacking and losing its head on top of it all by gratuitously destroying Lebanon. Israel looks pathetic right now. It had so many chances to negotiate peace from a position of strength, not least the Saudi Initiative of 2002. But it has always refused to talk to its neighbors as equals with an equal stake in the destiny of the region.

America has a great deal of egg on its face, too. The West ordered Syria to get out of Lebanon, and now we all overheard Bush talking to "Yo, Blair" saying we outta get Kofi to "get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit." America has sat back for several days watching its allies in democratic Lebanon, the much-vaunted heroes of the Cedar Revolution, get pounded. Everyone knows we are the only ones with the power to rein in Israel and get them to stop doing much worse "shit". If Bush were really interested in democracy in the Middle East, he would help the democratically-elected government in Beirut. Instead, he is reacting with such casual indifference, even the so-called "moderate" Arab regimes like Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi, who are allied with us because we give them money and business deals, and who are terrified of anything resembling a Shiite resurgence, have failed to hide their horror for long, and Switzerland is out for war crimes trials.

In 1982, when Israel last smashed Beirut, Americans were sane, humane, and educated enough to be horrified by it. A Newsweek correspondent cabled home: "Watching the Israeli Air Force smashing Beirut to pieces was like having to watch a man slowly beating a sick dog to death." Watching what Israel is doing today is sadly reminiscent of those terrible times for people in the know, and America's reaction (or lack thereof) is, if possible, even more disappointing.

In any case, if Israel wanted to target Hezbollah, that would be fair. But the Lebanese people themselves haven't been doing anything for ten years but trying to rebuild their beautiful torn-up country. Israel didn't just destroy their infrastructure. Israel has damaged if not destroyed all their plans for the next several years -- art shows, plays, tourism, development, political maturation, exchange students, vacations, and much more. They've destroyed families' livelihoods, entire suburbs, and several villages. They've gone way beyond the pale of just trying to curb Hezbollah. They've brought the entire nation, Christian and Muslim, secular and religious, businessman and villager, intellectual and fundamentalist, to their collective knees.

And they've killed so many families. Families who never did anything except live and try to do their best for themselves and their children, who were planning weddings and pregnancies and graduations and grandchildren and wedding anniversaries, who are now lying charred by the side of the road because they tried to flee the Israeli onslaught in terror. A doctor from Tyre tried to save his family in the south, and they were in their car ten minutes from the hospital in Tyre when an Israeli jet or helicopter or ship bombed their car, killing everyone. Children are more than a third of the casualties. Women and children together almost certainly more than half. Fewer than 10% combatants. This is thoroughly shameful.

If you want to say, "But Hezbollah acts the same way! They target Israeli cities full of innocent civilians!"

I respond: (a) Hezbollah didn't target a single Israeli civilian until Israel had already killed several Lebanese innocents, (b) Israel knows that Hezbollah does not have anything like the power Israel has to destroy Lebanese civilians and infrastructure, and Israel also knew that the best way to get Israeli civilians killed was to kill large numbers of Lebanese civilians in order to precipitate Hezbollah's inevitable response, and (c) Hezbollah is an extra-state terrorist organization. Israel cherishes its image as a modern democratic nation-state. If Israel holds itself to no higher standard of behavior than Hezbollah, it is quite pathetic.

2) The UN didn't condemn Israel. Besides that the UN isn't terribly significant.

The US has blocked any UN condemnation of Israel. This seems to be just a tic for us by now.

And the UN may not be significant to you, but as a vehicle of global legitimacy and beacon of at least a hope of accountability for global actors, the more powerless countries, as well as minorities within countries, find it very significant as something they can possibly turn to in order to correct injustices non-violently. It is the only hope we have for a reasonably universally-respected and neutral arbiter. It's not perfect. But we should try to perfect and strengthen it, not sideline, ignore, and de-legitimize it. It's the best potential anti-terror weapons we have.

Even after all this time, most Palestinians would respect a solution to this conflict based on UN resolutions, and would live in peace with Israel if the minimum fair and legal deal were genuinely offered, and if real, public negotiations were held to iron out the red lines on both sides. Then Israel could have universally-recognized borders and live in legitimacy and peace -- certainly in a better situation than it has now, and with a great deal more global support. This has never been offered by Israel.

Jewish activists helped start the entire human rights movement last century after the horrors of the World Wars. If it had been in place earlier, it might have helped prevent atrocities like the genocides against Armenians and Jews.

It is sad to note that now Israel and America are champions of the destruction and irrelevance of international humanitarian law.

3) While I do think that Israel is trigger happy in assuming that all trucks are carrying missiles, I think a strong case can be made for bombing the airport and highways to prevent Hezbollah from being resupplied with weapons from Iran and Syria. If the enemies main weapon is missiles, and you can prevent them from getting more, you are doing something pretty reasonable. Hopefully Israel came up with a way to close the airport which will allow it to reopen quickly when this all passes.

(a) If even you acknowledge that Israel is being trigger-happy against vehicles on the roads, I have nothing to add.

(b) Hezbollah knows ways of getting around the terrain, and obviously they would be smart enough to stockpile the weapons they needed before they attacked. One of Hezbollah's leaders explained how they had evacuated all the well-known Hezbollah strongholds and moved the Al-Manar broadcasting to another location, knowing Israel would immediately pulverize them. He said, "We know who we're dealing with."

Hezbollah is not stupid; I am sure they made sure to get what they needed before they captured the soldiers. Israel's attacks, including all over the north, and on the airport of all places (Hezbollah does not get their arms shipments from there, they get them from Syria), only hurts civilians. And dairy farms and grain silos? Was that because Hezbollah guerrillas might eat grain to give them strength to fight Israel? Or was it just terrorist grain? And the Christian north? What the hell have they done?

Even ambulances and UN bases have been targeted. If Israel doesn't answer for this in the Hague, many people will lose all hope of justice being served in this world. Many of them will take up arms rather than be so humiliated as to take this unjustified pummeling with no hope of redress. There will be no faith in the human rights regime or international institutions. The sense of anarchy and lawlessness in the world will increase. In an age of non-state actors with relatively few resources able to kill thousands of Americans, I would prefer to do anything that might decrease the sense of lawlessness and anarchy in the world, and to give disaffected people a hope of justice without having to fight guerrilla wars to try to achieve it, or to feel like the world is so amoral that terrorism is at least as justified as, e.g., Israel destroying Lebanon.

People are people. They generally only become monsters after they see monstrous things done. They learn by example. The Iraq War was and is monstrous, and Israel's destruction of Lebanon was monstrous. I hate to live in fear because my leaders are monstrous.


Khiam village, southern Lebanon


Israel also, incidentally, just destroyed the Khiam prison, Israel's equivalent of Abu Ghraib when they occupied the south. Hezbollah had turned it into a museum, which I visited when I was there. Israel took the opportunity to destroy this evidence of their past war crimes, and also killed four UN observers in this area for reasons unknown. Israel claimed it was a mistake, but the IDF lies so frequently and shamelessly that even the Israeli people don't take their claims seriously.

Imagine if Northern Irish militants bombed London and killed eight soldiers and captured two, and in response Britain bombed every road and bridge and airport and grain silo and fuel storage tank in southern Ireland, flattened several suburbs in Dublin that were sympathetic to Sinn Fein, and destroyed entire villages as well as civilian cars as they fled them, and killed 500 Irish, one-third of them children, with the stated intention of trying to turn the Irish against Sinn Fein. This is precisely what Israel is doing to Lebanon. It will be precisely as effective.

4) This thing isn't about the two kidnapped soldiers. Israel has no chance of getting those back by this fighting and it knows it. It's about setting up a situation where future kidnappings don't happen and where Hezbollah doesn't shoot mortars and missiles at Israel.

Israel is not the only country on earth. Its complete and total 100% security forever and ever amen against any kind of attack whatsoever no matter how relatively small (a) is not worth this horrible price unless you firmly and seriously believe an Israeli life is an order of magnitude more valuable than an Arab life and (b) will not be served by this kind of gross disproportionality, either in the short-term or the long-term.

The fact that Israel has gotten away with cruelly disproportionate acts in the past, including massacres such as the ones in Sabra, Chatila, and Qana, is both poisoning to the Israeli mentality and social fabric and likely to be a time bomb that Israel may have to pay up in the future in some horrible way. In this sense, Hezbollah's attack was nothing surprising whatsoever. Given all Israel has done to the Lebanese, and gotten away with, and the fact that no justice has ever been done for so many crimes, it was practically inevitable that there would be some manifestation of this otherwise impotent rage.

That rage has tripled in the past ten days.

Israel's overwhelming military response to this relatively tiny attack (the initial capture of the soldiers) underscores its moral weakness. It can't let one thread unravel lest it lose the whole tapestry of historical revisionism and propaganda on which Israel has been built. If Hezbollah succeeds in bringing Israel to the table, it will be a major coup, because otherwise Israel steadfastly refuses to talk to anyone or acknowledge anyone's legitimate grievances. If Hezbollah can bring Israel to the table, why not the Palestinians? And then there will be an end to Olmert's dream of unilaterally dictating the terms of the final settlement of the Israel/Palestine problem, which has no hope of working in any case. Israel has to give a little ground, and yet they can't. Israel is at a dead end, and they must, somewhere in their hearts, know it.

And if Israel admits culpability in one area, the sweater may start unraveling quickly, right on up to the expulsions of 1948 and the legitimacy of Israel itself. All Israel has to buttress itself against all this is its overwhelming military might. This, I believe, is one reason why Israel's response appears so psychotic. Hezbollah outmaneuvered them. Hezbollah hit them in their trump card. Hezbollah might very well force them to the table. Israel reacted like the measly capture of a couple of soldiers was a potentially mortal wound. This underscores their weakness, not their strength.

And they know it. And the Lebanese and all the Arabs know it, too. Furthermore, rather stupidly, Israel has already gone about as far as it could go in this particular conflict. It's already destroyed Lebanon. Where can it go from here? All it can do now is just kill some more people, because it's not going to beat Hezbollah even in another 18 years, and it's already hit all the infrastructure. It has no threat left except massacres. Europe and the "moderate" Arab regimes are being pretty quiet for now, but how long do you think they'll tolerate the targeting of civilian areas and infrastructure as such? Israel's got nothing left up its sleeve.

If Israel had been smart, they would have told Hezbollah, "Look, we'll give you 24 hours to give our soldiers back. Then we'll start bombing the south. Then we'll start bombing the Bekaa Valley. Then we'll hit southern Beirut. Then we'll take out villages around Sour (Tyre) and Sidon." Etc. Israel could up the ante every day in clearly-defined terms. This might have turned Lebanese public opinion (even Shia public opinion) into pressuring Hezbollah to give up the soldiers and de-escalate this whole mess. Sure, Hezbollah would be left in the south. (They will be in any case.) But they'd have egg on their face instead of coming out like heroes, and Israel would look smart and restrained and legitimate and legal and like statesmen instead of maniacs. Any bombing they did, even if it was pretty harsh, would be seen by a lot more people as Hezbollah's fault for refusing extremely clear and fairly reasonable terms.

Instead, Israel just blew up all over the place without saying a word. And now it has nowhere left to go. Hezbollah is smelling like a rose in the Arab world, Israel looks like it's having a fit, and Israel will pretty soon have to back down, because they know they can't win. And that will hurt them in many ways.

5) I think short-term the Lebanese will rally around Hezbollah and it'll look like what Israel is doing is retarded. But long term Lebanon's movers and shakers will hopefully see that it is in their interest to have a quiet southern border.

Do you really think that even Lebanon's movers and shakers will say, "Oh, look, Israel just destroyed our country. Damnedest thing. Guess we should try to keep things quiet from now on. Sorry, Israel. We promise to do better from now on."

At some point this is no longer about pragmatism or soldiers or prisoners. It's about human dignity and the basic right of self-determination. Who is Israel to set the limits of what Lebanon can or can't do, and to off-handedly destroy an entire country, and massacre 90% innocents, when it feels displeased? If anything, this may awaken the broader Arab street to... who knows what? But it's clear that Hezbollah's popularity, along with Iran's, has just skyrocketed worldwide among Arabs and people with Arab sympathies. Even people who are moderate and educated and secular are in shock at Israel's brutality, and can't help but admire the only people standing up against the "monster".

Downtrodden people must feel their spirits lifted just a little bit to see someone with the gall to give the finger to the Beast, to the war criminals who have never been brought to justice, to the arrogant Israelis who think their lives are orders of magnitude more valuable than anyone else's and that their security is the only security that matters. This kind of attitude, prevalent in both Israel and America, is not the stuff popularity is made of. People are people. We ignore this basic fact at our great peril.

These are real people who are suffering exactly as much as we would suffer if our friends and family were killed in gruesome ways and our homes and infrastructure destroyed. Think 9/11 multiplied many times.

I had hoped 9/11 would show us what it's like to be the victims of indiscriminate bombing campaigns against civilian targets (and even against military targets, as at the Pentagon) and awaken a small amount of compassion in us. Instead, it only whetted our appetite for blood and made us more callous and hateful. Not all, but enough to allow us to stomach if not enjoy pointless massacres in Iraq and elsewhere.

Americans are aware that 3,000 Iraqis were killed this month. So who has time to care about 370 Lebanese? Who cares that both Lebanon and Israel are our allies, that we have the power to restrain Israel's policies and therefore are largely responsible for them, that we are undermining our own security, Israel's security, and our credibility as people who respect human rights and democracy? The fact that the ones being slaughtered, their lives destroyed, are men, women, and children with lives and hopes and favorite picnic spots doesn't enter into it.

So we shouldn't be surprised that what Israel (and by extension we) just did to Lebanon will whet their appetite for blood and make them more callous and hateful. Not all, but enough to... well, I guess we'll find out. Wouldn't be surprised by another Israeli embassy bombing somewhere, for example. (This is what happened in 1992 in Argentina after Israel assassinated a Hezbollah leader and his wife and son and four others.)

Religion is the last refuge when all hope is lost in this world, when there is no other apparent hope of justice or mercy or dignity. You can't be in a situation like the one in Lebanon, and see the senseless slaughter, and know that the perpetrators are getting away with it, and know that the most powerful nation on this earth is providing them with diplomatic cover and neutering the UN and the International Court of Justice, and continue to function normally unless you are either an extraordinarily strong person or you believe there will be justice beyond this world. When there is no hope of justice or mercy or dignity in this world, the last hope is for glory in the afterlife.

To be honest, as an atheist myself, sometimes I wonder how I continue to function given what I've lived through in Palestine, given the blundering horrors committed by my country in Iraq, and now given the senseless destruction of Lebanon by an American ally. I do have extraordinary faith in the human spirit, and in the progress of history, despite disastrous and heartbreaking and humiliating setbacks like the ones in Lebanon and Iraq. But then again, my home wasn't just leveled and my family wasn't just incinerated.

We've just created tens of thousands more people with nothing to lose and no faith in anything of this world. I keep seeing interviews with shell-shocked southern Lebanese saying it doesn't matter to them if they live or die.

I don't think this is good for our security.

6) I don't think Israel is targeting civilians.

Israel targeting civilian cars and civilian areas and homes without allowing civilians any hope or possibility of safe passage out. Of course, giving civilians safe passage may mean also allowing Hezbollah to sneak things around. But Israel is choosing to execute hundreds on the off-chance that they may be Hezbollah or supporters. Judge, jury, and executioner.

There are less immoral and illegal ways of working toward genuine, lasting peace and security. Israel is behaving unwisely and her leaders are not acting like competent statesmen. Kill and destroy is not a workable strategy for bringing peace, security, and stability to a region. Ask Rumsfeld. In fact, ask Israel, who has been assassinating Palestinians like crazy for decades and only gotten a more and more extreme and resolute enemy out of it every time. America has destroyed Iraq, and we aren't any more secure, are we? And Iraq's not even right next door to us. How is Israel's security going to be served by having a savaged, destabilized Lebanon right next door where Hezbollah is more popular than ever?

7) Lebanon isn't getting destroyed. A few bridges have been bombed, a few blocks of a city, a bunch of trucks, a few bombs dropping on highways and airports... it sounds bad, and it looks bad on TV, but in terms of the overall amount of damage I don't think it's all that crazy. The area near the border with Israel though might be different, I don't know.

I think you will find that the damage is worse than you understand right now. It wasn't a few bridges. It was every bridge and road and port and probably hundreds of homes by now and much, much more. It is a serious tonnage Israel is dropping on this relatively small place. Do you know what it is like to lose your family's home with no compensation? Where will these people go? What will they do? Do you think the security of Israel will be high on their list of priorities?

Besides, the damage wasn't just the infrastructure. The damage is psychological for the terrorized children, and more than anything else, it is devastating to the economy, which depends heavily on tourism and the service industry. It was just starting to recover. Many families will go bankrupt completely. Where will they go? What will they do? People don't have savings to fall back on. People were scraping by. All their hopes have been put back five or ten years. And for what? Israel is not accomplishing anything productive. It's all destructive.

Here's a brief description of the destruction from the Independent:

"Before this latest Middle Eastern crisis began, the Israeli army's chief of staff threatened to "turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years". That process is now nearing completion. Israeli military action in Lebanon has brought the country to its knees. Tens of thousands of refugees have been created in just nine days... Some 500,000 Lebanese civilians have been forced from their homes... Lebanon's infrastructure has been destroyed by Israeli air strikes. So many roads and bridges have been bombed out that the distribution of water, sanitation and medical facilities for the displaced is proving almost impossible. Transporting the injured to hospitals in the south is proving particularly hazardous as Israel will, it seems, bomb anything that moves there. United Nations aid agencies are warning of an unfolding humanitarian disaster."

Did you see how many thousands of foreigners were there? How many do you think will be there next summer? That place is going to look like a ghost town for a while. The Lebanese are strong, and they'll survive and rebuild. But they're tired of having to survive and be strong and rebuild. They just wanted to live for a while and enjoy the fruits of years of hard work rebuilding their infrastructure, psyches, and popularity as a tourist destination. All that's been set back for God knows how many years. And how many kids won't be able to afford to go to college now because their parents' source of income has dried up? What will they do? What governmental faction do you figure they'll support in their bitterness at losing their hope for advancement because Israel's rampage destroyed their parents' livelihood?

8) Israel will eventually agree to a prisoner swap, but it'll wait till this whole brouhaha is long past. That way people associate the kidnapping with the retaliation rather than with success.

The prisoner swap will be seen as a victory by Hezbollah, and Israel's killing and destruction will be seen by all concerned (except for Israel and America, the neo-con mentality havens) as gratuitous and hateful and completely pointless and without benefit for anyone. It will be seen in the Arab world as pure terrorism, a turkey shoot, a massacre.

What's our definition of terrorism? Targeting civilians to achieve political aims. Israel has targeted all of Lebanon to try to terrorize them into opposing Hezbollah. That's what they say: that the people of Lebanon will see how hard Israel will hit them if they or any of their factions dare use any kind of force whatsoever against Israel. This not only is immoral and illegal but also has no hope of working.

Hezbollah and Iran are gaining standing on the Arab street because of this. Israel played right into the Islamists' hands.

9) There's gonna be a ceasefire that doesn't succeed in getting rid of Hezbollah or returning the soldiers. Maybe there'll be UN soldiers on the ground, but it won't make much of a difference, things will be like they were before this. The Israeli hope is that over the long-term (years) this whole experience will weaken Hezbollah.

If this is their aim, Israel is sadly mistaken. When it destroyed the PLO last time, it got Hezbollah. When it undermined Fatah, it got Hamas. Israel is accomplishing less than nothing with this, only destroying any nascent hopes there were for regional integration and peace. Israel just sowed a truckload of hate. History shows that this does not bring security. Unless they are willing to commit total genocide. And I don't think that will fly in 2006, even with Bush in office.

Israel seems to be caught in a fit of existential rage. This kind of brutality is the kind of thing that turns people from trying to figure out how to integrate Israel into the Middle East in reasonable fairness to questioning the legitimacy of its founding. It is the best way to brinig about its destruction as a political entity in the long-term.

Until then, it will ensure a lot of misery and suffering for a lot of lovely, creative, otherwise peacefully-inclined and totally innocent people. Including Israelis.

This is the kind of world the neo-con mentality ensures. If you can admit you were wrong about Iraq, how can you think the same strategy of shock and awe will work in Lebanon? Arabs aren't stupid. They aren't children. And they aren't as weak and disunified as they've been in the past. We can't just bomb them and tell them what to do anymore. If Iraq didn't convince you of that, I have no idea what will.

NEXT EMAIL:

I want to start by saying I understated the destruction in Lebanon. I read more about it and its a lot worse than I thought... [But] I think history bears out that overwhelming force works quite effectively. Not so much in guerilla campaigns, but I think Hizbollah is different from Hamas in this regard. Israel was not occupying Lebanon when this started. Any incursions/overflights Israel was making into Lebanon were due to the rocket attacks coming from Hezbollah. Israel has quiet borders with Jordan, Syria and Egypt, because no rockets come (directly) from those countries.

Israel has quiet borders with Jordan and Egypt because they both accepted American money and patronage in return for a peace treaty without solving the Palestinian problem. Israel has a quiet border with Syria because Israel and Syria have some military parity, and therefore either attacking the other would be much more dangerous than a turkey shoot in Lebanon.

Lebanon, on the other hand, is a weak little sitting duck that Israel has regularly violated, particularly in 1982 when it killed 10,000 Lebanese, occupied for 18 years, massacred innocents in Qana in 1996, etc. Palestinians are sitting ducks, too, and Israel messes with them a lot, too. People get tired of this and form organizations to resist. Voila. The borders aren't quiet.

Israel's incursions, overflights, raids, assassinations, and other violations of Lebanese sovereignty, as well as their disputed occupation of the Shebaa farms area, which they refuse to talk to Lebanon about, as well as their incarceration of Lebanese citizens were, I'm sure, perceived by Israelis to be attempts to protect Israel's security. But as we see now, this was counter-productive, and if you ask the Lebanese, it was humiliating and disproportionate.

I don't think bombing refugee camps in Palestine would help the situation there, but its a different circumstance there than in Lebanon. The Lebanese are not pining for their homes in Israel. They just want peace and quiet, like the Israelis.

The Palestinian refugees in Lebanon certainly are pining for their homes. And the majority of Arab hearts are pining for a fair solution for Palestinians, whose humiliation and suffering resonates deeply with ordinary Arabs. For their part, Palestinians are heartened and delighted, dazzled even, that someone, somewhere, is speaking up for them, no matter what his true motive is.

Everyone wants peace and quiet. But first they want justice. It's too humiliating otherwise. They are tired of the indignity of it all, of Jordan and Egypt kowtowing to America and Israel, of Israel dictating the terms of just about everything in its immediate region, of nobody else having a real voice. The Israel/Palestine question is even more important region-wide than I had previously thought. It is the glue in the gears. Nothing will move in a good way, in a genuine and sustainable way, until it is solved.

As a final note:

Even the Washington Post is admitting Israel is targeting and attacking Lebanese military positions, blowing up barracks full of Lebanese soldiers who aren't in any way engaged in hostilities. Haaretz says "20 Lebanese soldiers have been killed in strikes on their bases during the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon."

Yet Israel says legitimate Lebanese military strength is the key to regional stability.

So... how can this be explained?


NEXT EMAIL, August 21, 2006:

I think Israel's original reaction was justified.

You mean the bombing of civilians and infrastructure as collective punishment against the Lebanese for not reigning in Hezbollah (which they had no power to do) and/or as collective punishment to try to re-install "deterrence"? Nevermind that these are war crimes. You don't care about international law, you apparently prefer global anarchy that leaves desperate and humiliated people no other way to bring grievances to the table than violence.

But did deterrence work in Gaza? Israel has done everything to Gazans short of carpet bomb them, and the home made rockets are still falling. Israel didn't deter Hezbollah, either. All they did was incite a rocket barrage. Their damage to Lebanon is seen by almost all of the world as exactly what it was: illegal, immoral, ineffective collective punishment. The Hezbollah rockets didn't stop falling until a reasonably acceptable political solution was offered, one that happened to be humiliating for Israel.

Also, it seems like Israelis has unrealistic expectations from their military. Just like Americans can't deal with the fact that the govment can't protect them 100% from terrorists, Israelis can't accept that the army can't always pull of an Entebbe or Six Day War scenario. Guerrilla warfare is a very different game from normal warfare. Israelis seem shocked that like 10 soldiers or what not got killed, which is absurd.

It was more like 100, and yes, they were shocked by 100 soldiers and 40 civilians dying, particularly since it was for nothing and in a grossly incompetent, half-tea, half-coffee kind of way. Lebanon II was Israel's Katrina plus its Iraq War combined, on a lesser scale of course. But faith in the Israeli generals and government has just nose-dived in a big way. Some soldiers were sent to battle without even water, for Christ's sake. Pathetic.

I think short-term Hezbollah will definitely be bolstered. But I think medium to long-term they will be much less inclined to launch operations against Israel, and that is what Israel was going for. All the Hezbollah money and rebuilding in the world won't make people happy to leave their houses again and evacuate.

Do you honestly think that next time Hezbollah attacks, Israel will just massacre 1,000 random civilians and destroy all their infrastructure again? How much patience do you think the world has for this? How many countries will the world let Israel destroy? And if tiny little Lebanon, which doesn't even have an airforce or anti-aircraft capabilities, could absorb that much hell and still win a moral victory, how much more will Israel have to do to Syria or Iran, how many more Israeli soldiers and civilians will have to die, how many Arabs will Israel have to massacre?

Forget the rest of the world, how much patience do Israelis have for massacreing their neighbors and killing their own soldier sons and civilians without improving their security or providing sustainable peace?

And how far is deterrence supposed to go? Should it always be outrageously disproportionate? What about when the first tiny little chemical attack comes from Syria? What will Israel do, nuke them? The Samson option? We're getting into the realm of the silly. There's no military solution to this, and if Lebanon didn't prove that, if Iraq didn't prove that, if Palestine didn't prove that, whoever's still left in the deluded world of "the military can provide all our security and we don't need friends" is living in the realm of the silly.

The fact that the Arab world feels that Hezbollah was victorious might be a good thing for the peace prospects between Israel and Syria and Israel and Lebanon. In the same way that the Egyptian and Israeli peace settlement happened after the '73 war 'victory'.

Agreed. This is the silver lining. Insha'Allah khair.

Militarily Israel needs to start building the robotic land and air forces that will dominate future warfare. I'm surprised we didn't see it already. If this sounds too futuristic, just consider that Lockheed is building a pilotless version of the F22 Rapture...

See above again. We can have all the technology in the world in Iraq, and we still get busted by IEDs. Israel just got busted by Katyushas. Twenty guys may have almost killed hundreds of plane passengers with Pepsi bottles at Heathrow. People who are sufficiently pissed off will find a way to mess with us, technology or no. Besides, do you want to live like Israel, with M16s everywhere, "administrative detention" (imprisonment without charge or trial) for dissidents, and people rummaging through your bags at the mall? Because that's where we're headed if we don't change course.

Good luck with your robots and Missile Defense. I'd rather make friends.

War is fundamentally about technology, and the Israeli lead in all things high-tech seems pretty stable. I'm not saying that Israel shouldn't try to make peace deals with its neighbors -- it definitely should. But this alarmist "we better make peace before they kick our ass" line of thinking seems hollow for the forseeble future.

Again, see above. In my humble opinion, you're being silly and ignoring all the evidence at hand. What technology can stop a catapult from slinging a water balloon full of sarin at Zion Square, or what have you? I'm telling you, sufficiently pissed off people are quite resourceful. I'd just as soon calm the world down a little with international law and negotiations, rather than stir it up with turkey shoots and occupations.


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