I think it was a shrewd political move. He showed the world exactly what we should expect from the future Terrorist Republic of Palestine. Hamas and Fatah cooperated with Sharon better than he could have ever dreamed.
Six days that shook the world
- Thread starter Blackleaf
- Start date
I think it was a shrewd political move. He showed the world exactly what we should expect from the future Terrorist Republic of Palestine. Hamas and Fatah cooperated with Sharon better than he could have ever dreamed.
If he won't stop hitting you, then yes. You pin him down forever. What else can you do? Let him get up to try and kill you again (forcing you to either die or pin him again anyways).
The tide has turned... Sharon knew he had to take a more defensive posture in Gaza. Olmert learned the hard way last summer about the destruct power of IEDs with shaped charges and RPG-29s against Israeli tanks and helicopters.
Israel could take Gaza and hold it, but over time the occupation would exhaust Israel's ability to defend themselves. Israel could take on Hezbollah again, but they can't defeat them in a direct conflict. A drawn out war with Hezbollah would be even more costly occupying Gaza. Israel can still destroy cities at will, but soon their adversaries will have the same power. No country will ever take direct responsibility for the militants on Israel's borders. If Israel attacks Iran, Iran can attack Israel back. If Israel resorts to nukes, that would unify most of the world against Israel. If Israel doesn't attack Iran, then Iran's arms bazaars will keep Israel's adversaries well stocked. Sooner or later Israel's adversaries will have the numbers to blitz Israel...
Its a downward spiral for Israel now. It may take months, years or decades... but the tide has turned. The Zionist state of Israel's eventual defeat is inevitable.
Once Israel's enemies have the ability to level a city, they are screwed and Israel will be a carthiginian victor.
Blow up Haifa and sudenly no one cares when ever major settlement (city or refugee camp) that bothers them will go up into an atomic pyre in five minutes.
Worst thing the enemies of Israel could ever do is pose a threat.
Blow up Haifa and sudenly no one cares when ever major settlement (city or refugee camp) that bothers them will go up into an atomic pyre in five minutes.
Worst thing the enemies of Israel could ever do is pose a threat.
Why is there so much cerebral energy expended over the cesspool that is Israel?
A poor solution? to a fabricated responsibility that has occupied the minds and thoughts of people all over the world for fifty years....why?
Israel isn't a "democracy", not that the expressions of most "democratic nations" of the immediate human condition are worthy of much respect anyway... The great democracy of the United States is revealed almost daily as a nation led by its appetites and greed, just like the rest of the worlds great democracies... Like hysteria generated about crimes that involve a gun, a school shooting or revelations regarding a "plot" to blow up JFK....fillers to keep the ignorant masses attention diverted from the ineptitude and corruption of these great "democratic" states...
Israel is nothing more than the willingness of the elite of other nations to continue the charade that principles have value...that morality is a negotiable concept....a nation permitted to grovel in its own self-denial and self-pity on the basis of an agenda of guilt and responsibility built around one of the great tragedies of the human experience. The tragedy of one society and one dictator (chancellor) bestowing martyrdom on another society enabling them to hold the world hostage to its imagined guilt...
All these great democracies....have engaged in genocide and invasion as recently as Rwanda , where genocide was ignored becuase there wasn't any oil or any other "good-reason" to be involved in representing the lives of those women and children butchered in yet another flavour of racism and religious excess...to Iraq where the lunatic led government of the United States spent and continues to spend billions daily...to say nothing of the young people sacrificed to the hubris and personal agenda of another chancellor prepared to commit crimes against innocents and lie to his nation...just like the underpinning to the genocide that gave birth to the nation of Israel...
Terrorism isn't a passive phenomenon. Terrorism whether formulated under the guise of religious freedom, or the "right" of one nation to live beyond the tyranny of any other nation...is the practice of men and women of little insight into their own culpability and absolutely no depth to their long-term thinking/consideration of the world being created out out madness and greed as the moments tick by...
You won't find an "answer" or any "sense" in the Israeli Palestinian oozing pustule than you'd find "reason" or "rationality" among the dozen or so other cesspools created out of greed and the personal agendas of the wealthy exercising their rights to take what isn't their's...in the name of a people without the morality to bring their own greed and sense of entitlement into check voluntarily...
The Israeli-Palestinian brouhaha is a world testing its failed leadership policies married to the multi-billion dollar defense industry establishment as exercise in a "remote" corner of the planet that has nothing to offer to anyone....
Who cares that the continuing failure of the United Nations and the great democracy of the United States...being held to account by the wealthy vote-seekers pandering to the Jewish community in America as epitomized by the carnage sweeping in cycles throughout the middle east continues?
If Anna Nicole Simpson or Paris Hilton gets a cold that's front page news to the morons of North America. Sandwiched between the banal and the inconsequential that passes for "news" in Canada and the United States are glimpses of the Israeli-Palestinian mess, interrupted from time to time by chilling stories of potential catastrophies of planned but detected and exposed terrorist plots....
What's more imporant a nation willing to tear itself apart....and provide the proxy democracies of the west with fodder used to legitimize situational morality while generating sufficient fear and trepidation to keep the war machine rolling....or the price of gasoline and the effects of global climate change...?
You all just keep on yapping incessantly about Israel and that mess and the heart-rending stories of Alec Baldwin's rant at his child....while accepting that our governments (World Trade and G-8) are selling us all down the river....no need to think beyond a bunch of primitives in Israel or Iraq, those people are un-evolved warrior clans that never moved beyond their belief systems choke-hold over common sense.
Who cares?
A poor solution? to a fabricated responsibility that has occupied the minds and thoughts of people all over the world for fifty years....why?
Israel isn't a "democracy", not that the expressions of most "democratic nations" of the immediate human condition are worthy of much respect anyway... The great democracy of the United States is revealed almost daily as a nation led by its appetites and greed, just like the rest of the worlds great democracies... Like hysteria generated about crimes that involve a gun, a school shooting or revelations regarding a "plot" to blow up JFK....fillers to keep the ignorant masses attention diverted from the ineptitude and corruption of these great "democratic" states...
Israel is nothing more than the willingness of the elite of other nations to continue the charade that principles have value...that morality is a negotiable concept....a nation permitted to grovel in its own self-denial and self-pity on the basis of an agenda of guilt and responsibility built around one of the great tragedies of the human experience. The tragedy of one society and one dictator (chancellor) bestowing martyrdom on another society enabling them to hold the world hostage to its imagined guilt...
All these great democracies....have engaged in genocide and invasion as recently as Rwanda , where genocide was ignored becuase there wasn't any oil or any other "good-reason" to be involved in representing the lives of those women and children butchered in yet another flavour of racism and religious excess...to Iraq where the lunatic led government of the United States spent and continues to spend billions daily...to say nothing of the young people sacrificed to the hubris and personal agenda of another chancellor prepared to commit crimes against innocents and lie to his nation...just like the underpinning to the genocide that gave birth to the nation of Israel...
Terrorism isn't a passive phenomenon. Terrorism whether formulated under the guise of religious freedom, or the "right" of one nation to live beyond the tyranny of any other nation...is the practice of men and women of little insight into their own culpability and absolutely no depth to their long-term thinking/consideration of the world being created out out madness and greed as the moments tick by...
You won't find an "answer" or any "sense" in the Israeli Palestinian oozing pustule than you'd find "reason" or "rationality" among the dozen or so other cesspools created out of greed and the personal agendas of the wealthy exercising their rights to take what isn't their's...in the name of a people without the morality to bring their own greed and sense of entitlement into check voluntarily...
The Israeli-Palestinian brouhaha is a world testing its failed leadership policies married to the multi-billion dollar defense industry establishment as exercise in a "remote" corner of the planet that has nothing to offer to anyone....
Who cares that the continuing failure of the United Nations and the great democracy of the United States...being held to account by the wealthy vote-seekers pandering to the Jewish community in America as epitomized by the carnage sweeping in cycles throughout the middle east continues?
If Anna Nicole Simpson or Paris Hilton gets a cold that's front page news to the morons of North America. Sandwiched between the banal and the inconsequential that passes for "news" in Canada and the United States are glimpses of the Israeli-Palestinian mess, interrupted from time to time by chilling stories of potential catastrophies of planned but detected and exposed terrorist plots....
What's more imporant a nation willing to tear itself apart....and provide the proxy democracies of the west with fodder used to legitimize situational morality while generating sufficient fear and trepidation to keep the war machine rolling....or the price of gasoline and the effects of global climate change...?
You all just keep on yapping incessantly about Israel and that mess and the heart-rending stories of Alec Baldwin's rant at his child....while accepting that our governments (World Trade and G-8) are selling us all down the river....no need to think beyond a bunch of primitives in Israel or Iraq, those people are un-evolved warrior clans that never moved beyond their belief systems choke-hold over common sense.
Who cares?
Whatever one side gives, is fair game to get.
When Hezbollah attacked/captured IDF soldiers along the Lebanese border last summer, Israel was completely justified to go into Lebanon and attack/capture Hezbollah soldiers.
But when Israel escalated this minor border skirmish to clobber Beirut last summer, their adversaries would have been completely justified to do the same to Haifa in response. When Israel targeted civilian infrastructure like Beirut airport, power stations, bridges... Israel's adversaries were completely justified to respond in kind. When Israel targetted civilians, their adversaries were justified to respond in kind.
If Israel resorts to nukes and other WMDs, then their adversaries are also justified in responding with WMDs like biological and chemical warfare.
So you're saying Israel is perfectly justified in wiping Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Eqypt off the map, as those nations tried to do upon Israel several times in the last 60 years?
If Hezbo's charter stated that their goal was to kidnap several Israeli soldiers then go home, you might have a point. Since it's the stated goal of Hezbo and Hamas and Fatah as well, to wipe Israel off the map, then it's perfectly justifiable for Israel to in turn wipe "Palestine" as well as Iran and Syria (the true source of Hezbo) of the map.
After all, whatever one side gives, is fair game to get
I'm confused.The targets mentioned, airport,power stations bridges etc. are they not Lebonnese? Who actually responded.
Lebbenon is now loseing soldiers due to the al queda extermination program in their country. Backed by the west with ammo and might...so they seem to be our ally but get destroyed by another of our ally...
As I said i'm confused
Hezbollah's attack which killed and captured Israel soldiers was part of a war which has been going for 60 years. But it was not in violation of a signed agreement between Israel and Hezbollah regarding the conduct of this war:
But the agreement does allow attacks on military targets. Hezbollah's attack on an Israeli military target not a violation of that agreement. Israel's failed counter attack on Hezbollah positions in an attempt to recapture their men or inflict some pain on Hezbollah soldiers was not a violation of that agreement either.
But Israel violated that agreement and committed war crimes when it escalated the conflict to include civilian targets like Beirut's airport, downtown Beirut, power stations...
Hezbollah did eventually did retaliate to Israeli violations of the April Agreement and war crimes with some of their own after about a day or so, but Israel crossed that line first.
BTW its not like this was the first time Hezbollah launched a commando raid into Israel or vice versa...
Then there is this possibility:
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/israeli_solders.html
But the agreement does allow attacks on military targets. Hezbollah's attack on an Israeli military target not a violation of that agreement. Israel's failed counter attack on Hezbollah positions in an attempt to recapture their men or inflict some pain on Hezbollah soldiers was not a violation of that agreement either.
But Israel violated that agreement and committed war crimes when it escalated the conflict to include civilian targets like Beirut's airport, downtown Beirut, power stations...
Hezbollah did eventually did retaliate to Israeli violations of the April Agreement and war crimes with some of their own after about a day or so, but Israel crossed that line first.
BTW its not like this was the first time Hezbollah launched a commando raid into Israel or vice versa...
Then there is this possibility:
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/israeli_solders.html
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I think Doc's point was (if I may presume) that Hezbollah and Al Qaeda are not Lebanon.
Hezbollah exist in Lebanon only because until recently it was ruled by a Syrian puppet, and the Lebanese army does not have the might to remove them.
Hezbollah exist in Lebanon only because until recently it was ruled by a Syrian puppet, and the Lebanese army does not have the might to remove them.
Wait, now Earth as one...
Wasn't the agreement violated first by Hezbollah when it broke the bit about not using civilian villages as a staging area? Isn't that like saying "You broke our rental agreement by not paying rent, just because I demolished the house you were renting! You can't be trusted!"
Wasn't the agreement violated first by Hezbollah when it broke the bit about not using civilian villages as a staging area? Isn't that like saying "You broke our rental agreement by not paying rent, just because I demolished the house you were renting! You can't be trusted!"
That is a good point. Hezbollah is NOT the government of Lebanon. So, it should not be allowed to operate as if it was. If Lebanon allows Hezbollah free-reign in the south to commit hostile acts agains a foreign nation then it has abdicated it's responsibility to make the decisions. I'm sure I am not the only one who thought that with the Cedar Revolution Lebanon would finally get to make the decisions about Lebanon. It seems that Hezbollah is not satisfied participating in Lebanese government, it wants to make major decisions without consulting Lebanon.
What would happen if I started firing artillery shells into Detroit? Would it not make sense to expect a response from the Americans, especially if the Canadian government chose to do nothing to stop it?
How the 1967 War Doomed Israel
I.
Avir harim kalul ba’yayin, ve reach oranim…
The opening lines of Naomi Shemer’s legendary Yerushalayim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold) can still bring goosebumps to my flesh, even decades after I deconstructed and relinquished the mythology connoted by the old Basque lullaby she repurposed as an ode to Israel’s conquest of East Jerusalem in June of 1967. I first heard the song at age 8 in a documentary film shown at my afternoon Hebrew class (ugh!), all gorgeous evening sunshine glowing pink off the old city, as it related the “miracle” of Israel’s “six-day” triumph over its Arab neighbors in that year. And it made me feel good, in an epic kind of way. Already the song had become a kind of anthem, an emotional seduction into the notion of the conquest of East Jerusalem somehow signifying Jewish salvation. Steven Spielberg even planned to include it in the grossly misleading postcard he tacked on to the end of Schindler’s List, in which Holocaust survivors are shown in Jerusalem as if this was somehow a triumph over Nazism, although he dropped the idea after Israeli test audiences found the connection discordant. But rarely has there been a more powerful song in the Israeli imagination, precisely because of the giddily messianic atmosphere that prevailed in Israel in the wake of the war — an atmosphere that blinded Israelis to the calamitous implications of their conquest. But hey, even at age 6, I bought into that atmosphere.
There was no such thing as television in South Africa in 1967, so it was through grainy black-and-white photographs in the evening newspaper that I learned that Mirage jet fighters — the same delta-winged plane flown over my house with great, and occasionally sound barrier-breaking regularity by the South African Air Force to and from nearby Ysterplaat air base, although the ones in the paper bore the Star of David on their wing tips — had destroyed Egypt’s MiG squadrons on the ground. And with those images, and later ones of paratroopers in webbed helmets at the Wailing Wall, that I learned of the “miracle” — Israel, the tiny Jewish state whose map I knew from the blue and white money tin into which we would put a coin every Friday night after Shabbos dinner, had faced down the combined armies of its Arab neighbors, and had dispatched them within six days.
And they had “liberated” our “holiest” site, an old stone wall in East Jerusalem pocked with pubic clumps of weeds, into whose cracks and crannies I was told that Jews could insert notes to be read by God — like a hotel message cubby. (Let’s just say that by the time I got there, at age 17, this bubbemeis about holy stones and a celestial post office only fueled my atheism.) Not only that, they’d made Israel “safe” by “liberating” the whole of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights. In six days! A miracle, like the creation story in Genesis! (Of course, many years later, I would learn that it hadn’t even taken that long; Israel had attacked first and effectively won the war in the opening hours by destroying its enemy’s air forces on the ground — Six Days just sounded like a good name for a war given the creation story.)
Even at the age of six, my first year in big school, Israel’s victory had a profound effect on me. The previous year, I had heard my older step-brothers describe a Phys-Ed class being turned into a kind of playful pogrom, in some sort of fighting game that had pitched the Jewish boys against the rest. Being Jewish jocks, they had, according to my brothers’ account over dinner, given as good as they’d gotten, and it was a genuinely playful thing, besides — the sort of playful contest I recall from my older years that often saw a class divide on lines of “Boer against Brit,” i.e. Afrikaans kids against English-speakers, recalling the Boer War. But at six years old, the idea of a small group of Jewish boys being surrounded and set upon by their gentile classmates was absolutely terrifying.
But the news out of Israel in those mid-year months in 1967 was infinitely reassuring. Israel’s dramatic victory had proved that we, the prickly little state or the Jewish boys in their white Phys-ed (we called it PT) vests and shorts, were not to be ****ed with. (I remember a similar effect a decade later, after the audacious raid on Entebbe had freed a group of passengers held on a hijacked El Al plane in Uganda — by then, my friends and I were literally accepting congratulations on Israel’s behalf.) And, I know anecdotally as much as anything else, that anyone ever called a “Jewboy” anywhere in the world walked a lot taller after the first week of June in 1967.
We were certainly granted the recognition on the playground that the epic victory demanded. The idea of Jews as being weaklings or afraid to fight was buried; white South Africa with its own narrative pitting it as an embattled minority in a sea of hostile neighbors embraced the Israeli victory as an inspiration.
The word “Arab” became synonymous, on the playground and in the classroom, with incompetence and idiocy. “Don’t be an Arab!” I heard a teacher exclaim, more than once in response to a student’s failure to properly carry out his instructions. And, three years after the 1967 war, when the apartheid regime celebrated the tenth anniversary of South Africa’s formal independence from Britain, the ceremony in my school playground saw my Jewish friends and I, in our blue Habonim shirts and scarves and kakhi shorts, line up alongside the boy scouts and the Voortrekkers (the fascist Afrikaner youth movement) to salute the flag and proclaim our loyalty to the Republic (even though the whole point of Habonim was to persuade us to emigrate!). A regime rooted in vicious anti-Semitism and explicit admiration for the Nazis had now come to recognize Israel and its local supporters as a fighting ally in their epic struggle, couched in Cold War language, between white peoples and peoples of color.
Die Vaderland (The Fatherland), a newspaper of the apartheid regime, editorialized in 1969, on the occasion of a visit to South Africa by Ben Gurion, “When we, from our side, look realistically at the world situation, we know that Israel’s continued existence in the Middle East is also an essential element in our own security… If our Jewish citizens were to rally to the call of our distinguished visitor — to help build up Israel — their contribution would in essence be a contribution to South Africa’s security.”
South Africa and Israel became intimate allies in the years that followed the ‘67 war, with unrepentant former Nazis such as Prime Minister B.J. Vorster welcomed to Israel to seal military deals that resulted in collaboration in the development of weapons ranging from aircraft and assault rifles to, allegedly, nuclear weapons. I remember well how some products of South Africa’s Jewish day-school system, where Hebrew was taught as well as the mandatory Afrikaans, finding themselvse with cushy posting during their compulsory military services — as Hebrew-Afrikaans translators for Israeli personnel working with the SADF. And that alliance raised the comfort level of the South African Jewish community in apartheid South Africa — while a handful of Jewish revolutionaries had made up a dominant share of the white ranks of the national liberation movement, they were largely disowned by the mainstream organized Jewish community, which had chosen the path of quiescence and collaboration with the regime. Their posture, and Israel’s, were now in perfect alignment.
Fruitful collaboration: The Israeli
military called it the Galil, the SADF
called it the R-4, but it was the same gun
Even as I came to recognize and react to the horrors of apartheid, Israel seemed to me to represent a shining alternative. I remember shocking the grownups at a Pesach seder in 1974, my Bar Mitzvah year, by telling them that I would never do my compulsory military service in South Africa. But they smiled and murmured approvingly when I declared that, instead, I would go to Israel and serve in the army there, because that way “I could fight for something I believe in.” (I had, of course, in my cheesy adolescent way, stolen that line from a Jewish character in James A. Michener’s “The Drifters,” who uses it in relation to Vietnam; but the image in my mind when I read it, as when I said it, was of those paratroopers at the Wailing Wall.)
I could not conceive of Israel as in any way complicit in the crimes of apartheid, much less as engaged in its own forms of apartheid. After all, my connection to Israel, by the time I was 14, came largely through Habonim, a socialist-Zionist youth movement whose Zionism was infused with just the sort of left-wing universalism for which my own anti-apartheid subversive instincts yearned. My Habonim madrichim, bearded radicals from the University of Cape Town opened by mind to Marx and Marcuse, Bob Dylan and Yevtushenko, Woodie Guthrie and Erich Fromm. I was already a Jewish atheist, and considered myself a socialist, but in my mind, Israel and Kibbutz were the absolute negation of all that was wrong with South Africa; as a stepping stone to universal brotherhood and equality as expressed in the idealism of early left-wing Zionist thinkers like Ber Borochov, A.D. Gordon and Martin Buber. It became clear to me soon enough (by the time I was 18, to be specific) that their Zionist idealism — and mine — had no connection to the reality of Israel, largely because it ignored the elephant in the room: the Arab population of Palestine.
II.
The war of 1967 was a continuation of the war of 1948, a battle over sovereignty, ownership and possession of the land in what had been British-Mandate Palestine.
Sensing the escalating conflict between the Arab population and the European Jewish settlers who had been allowed by the British, since their conquest of Palestine in 1917, to settle there and establish the infrastructure of statehood — and moved by the impulse to create a sanctuary for the survivors of the Holocaust while avoiding giving most of them the choice of moving to the U.S. or other Western countries — the U.N. recommended in 1947 that Palestine be partitioned, to create separate Jewish and Arab states. The Zionists were disappointed by the plan, because they had hoped to have all of Palestine become a Jewish state. And the fact that it left Jerusalem, where 100,000 Jews lived, within the territory of the Arab zone, albeit run as an international city, was particularly irksome. But the Zionist leadership also knew that the plan was as good as they were going to get via diplomacy, and accepted the plan. (The rest, of course, they would acquire in battle, in 1948 and 1967, in wars that they could blame on their enemies — after all, 40 years after the 1967 war, during which time Israel has been at peace with the enemy it faced on that flank, the West Bank remains very much in Israeli hands, with close to half a million Israelis settled there.)
And, of course, war would likely have looked inevitable, because the Arabs were unlikely to accept a deal in which they were, by definition, the losers. Today, Israel insists that the demographic “facts on the ground” must be taken into account in any peace settlement, and demands that it be allowed to maintain the large settlement blocs built on the best land in the West Bank since 1967. And the Bush Administration has formally endorsed this claim. But look at the “facts on the ground” of 1947/8: The Partition Plan awarded 55% of the land to the Jewish state, including more than 80% of land under cultivation. At the time, Jews made up a little over one third of the total population, and owned some 7% of the land. Moreover, given the demographic demands of the Zionist movement for a Jewish majority, the plan was an invitation to tragedy: The population within the boundaries of the Jewish state envisaged in the 1947 partition consisted of around 500,000 Jews and 400,000 Arabs.
Hardly surprising, then, that the Arabs of Palestine and beyond rejected the partition plan.
For the Arab regimes, the creation of a separate Jewish sovereign state in the Holy Land over which the Crusades had been fought was a challenge to their authority; it was perceived by their citizenry as a test of their ability to protect their land and interests from foreign invasion. And so they went to war believing they could reverse what the U.N. had ordered on the battlefield. For the Jews of Palestine in 1948, a number of them having narrowly survived extermination in Europe, the war was a matter of physical survival. Although in the mythology, the war pitted a half million Jews against 20 million Arabs, in truth Israel was by far the stronger and better-organized and better-armed military power. And so what Israel called the War of Independence saw the Jewish state acquire 50% more territory than had been envisaged in the partition plan. The maps below describe the difference between the Israel envisaged by the UN in 1947 and the one that came into being in the war of 1948.
But maps don’t convey the disaster that befell the Palestinian Arabs in 1948. The war also allowed the Zionist movement to resolve its “demographic concerns,” as some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs found themselves driven from their homes and land — many driven out at gunpoint, the majority fleeing in fear of further massacres such as the one carried out by the Irgun at Dir Yassein, and all of them subject to the same ethnic-cleansing founding legislation by passed the new Israeli Knesset that seized the property of any Arab absent from his property on May 8, 1948, and forbad the refugees from returning.
The revised partition effected by the war left hundreds of thousands of Palestinians destitute in refugee camps in neighboring Arab countries, a drama that continues to play out today in northern Lebanon.
And for the next generation of Arab leaders, pan-Arabists and nationalists who overthrew the feeble Western-allied monarchies, the fundamental challenge of their nationalist vision became “redeeming” Arab honor by reversing their defeat of 1948. They tried twice, in 1967 and again in 1973, and failed. But even today, as political Islam supplants nationalism and pan-Arabism as the dominant ideologies of the Arab world, reversing the defeats of 1973, 1967 and 1948 remains a singular obsession.
III.
For Jews of my generation who came of age during the anti-apartheid struggle, there was no shaking the nagging sense that what Israel was doing in the West Bank was exactly what the South African regime was doing in the townships. Even as we waged our own intifada against apartheid in South Africa, we saw daily images of young Palestinians facing heavily armed Israeli police in tanks and armored vehicles with nothing more than stones, gasoline bombs and the occasional light weapon; a whole community united behind its children who had decided to cast off the yoke under which their parents suffered. And when Yitzhak Rabin, more famous as a signatory on the Oslo Agreement, ordered the Israeli military to systematically break the arms of young Palestinians in the hope of suppressing an entirely legitimate revolt, thuggery had become a matter of national policy. It was only when some of those same young men began blowing themselves up in Israeli restaurants and buses that many Israel supporters were once again able to construe the Israelis as the victim in the situation; during the intifada of the 1980s they could not question who was David and who was Goliath. Even for those of us who had grown up in the idealism of the left-Zionist youth movements, Israel had become a grotesque parody of everything we stood for.
Even those within the Zionist establishment who came through the same tradition were horrified: Former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg wrote in 2003:
in Zionist ideology away from the secular nationalism of Ben Gurion’s generation to a far more dangerous religious nationalism. Tom Segev, my favorite Israeli historian, writes that the 1967 war resulted in many Israelis coming to see the army as an instrument of messianic theology. The knitted yarmulke of the settlers moving to colonize the West Bank in the wake of the 1967 victory came to replace the cloth cap of the socialist kibbutznik as the symbol of Zionist pioneering. Segev quotes from Rav Kook, the founder of the settlement movement: “There is one principal thing: the state. It is entirely holy, and there is no flaw in it… the state is holy in any and every case.”
The settlement of Maale Adumim, on the West Bank.
Its permanence signifies that whatever their intentions,
the Zionists created a single (apartheid) state for Jews
and Palestinians after 1967
The religious Zionists saw the West Bank and holy land to be “redeemed,” or “liberated” by settlement, and with the tacit support of all Israeli governments since then (and the more active support of some) they rushed to build permanent structures and settle a civilian population there, in defiance of international law, in order to preclude the possibility of returning that land to the Palestians as a basis for peace.
As David Remnick notes in a review of some of the literature on 1967, many Israelis quickly realized that the “Six Day War” had brought about a potential disaster for the Zionist project, because Israel now found itself not only in control of all of the territory of British-Mandate Palestine, but also all of its current inhabitants. He quotes Amos Oz’s dark warning
And that is, indeed, what had transpired. Today, the West Bank is carved up by hundreds of Israeli settlements, and roads and land reserved for settlers. And they have no intention of leaving, while no Israeli government for the foreseeable future will muster the political strength to be able to remove them (even if that was their intent).
The black and blue areas are Israeli settlements, and the white parts are the roads and land under Israeli control
For an enlarged version of this map, click here.
Today, talk of a two-state solution to the conflict must reckon with the facts on the ground. The 1947 Partition plan left the Palestinians with 45 percent of the territory of Palestine; the 1948 war left them holding onto 22 percent, which fell into Israeli hands in 1967. Even when it talks about a two-state solution, Israel still demands to keep some of the best lands and the key water sources within that 22 percent. A simple glance at the map above should be enough to raise serious questions about the viability of a separate, sovereign Palestinian nation-state. It’s hard to imagine such an entity, blessed with few natural resources and with hardly any independent economic base, maintaining an independent economic existence, even as it is forced to accomodate hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees returning from refugee camps in Lebanon and elsewhere (as most versions of the two-state plan envisage). Indeed, such an entity may well have the feel of an enlarged refugee camp, whose survival is largely dependent on handouts.
When it conquered the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel put the Palestinian population of those territories under the rule of the Israeli state. For forty years, now, the entire population of British-Mandate Palestine has been governed by a single state. The difference, of course, is that those who live within Israel’s 1967 borders have democratic rights, while those outside are governed by an Israeli colonial and military administration. The extent of Palestinian “authority” in those territories — even Gaza — remains entirely circumscribed by Israeli power.
Suddenly panicked by the demographic implications of the apartheid order its 1967 conquests have created, Israeli leaders talk of “separating” from the Palestinians, as if they can dispense with the problem by drawing political boundaries and building a wall around self-governing Palestinian enclaves (Ariel Sharon himself used the analogy with South Africa’s apartheid Bantustan policy to describe the idea.) But the Gaza experience has made clear the limits of that option.
For the Palestinian population, and their Arab neighbors, the crisis of 1948 has never been resolved. And the Israelis, for the last 40 years, by colonizing the West Bank and East Jerusalem, have squandered whatever opportunities their victory of 1967 presented for changing the dynamic — instead, they have sought to cling to elements of the “Greater Israel” they created in that year, and in the vain hope that the Palestinians will some day surrender in exchange for whatever Israel chooses to offer them.
But precisely because they have continued to expand Israel since 1967, they have dimmed the prospects for a new partition creating a viable Palestinian state separate from Israel. Today, more than ever, the fate of the Israelis is inextricably, and intimately linked to the fate of the Palestinians — and vice versa. The lasting legacy of the 1967 war is the bi-national state it created in the old territory of British-Mandate Palestine.
I.
Avir harim kalul ba’yayin, ve reach oranim…
The opening lines of Naomi Shemer’s legendary Yerushalayim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold) can still bring goosebumps to my flesh, even decades after I deconstructed and relinquished the mythology connoted by the old Basque lullaby she repurposed as an ode to Israel’s conquest of East Jerusalem in June of 1967. I first heard the song at age 8 in a documentary film shown at my afternoon Hebrew class (ugh!), all gorgeous evening sunshine glowing pink off the old city, as it related the “miracle” of Israel’s “six-day” triumph over its Arab neighbors in that year. And it made me feel good, in an epic kind of way. Already the song had become a kind of anthem, an emotional seduction into the notion of the conquest of East Jerusalem somehow signifying Jewish salvation. Steven Spielberg even planned to include it in the grossly misleading postcard he tacked on to the end of Schindler’s List, in which Holocaust survivors are shown in Jerusalem as if this was somehow a triumph over Nazism, although he dropped the idea after Israeli test audiences found the connection discordant. But rarely has there been a more powerful song in the Israeli imagination, precisely because of the giddily messianic atmosphere that prevailed in Israel in the wake of the war — an atmosphere that blinded Israelis to the calamitous implications of their conquest. But hey, even at age 6, I bought into that atmosphere.
There was no such thing as television in South Africa in 1967, so it was through grainy black-and-white photographs in the evening newspaper that I learned that Mirage jet fighters — the same delta-winged plane flown over my house with great, and occasionally sound barrier-breaking regularity by the South African Air Force to and from nearby Ysterplaat air base, although the ones in the paper bore the Star of David on their wing tips — had destroyed Egypt’s MiG squadrons on the ground. And with those images, and later ones of paratroopers in webbed helmets at the Wailing Wall, that I learned of the “miracle” — Israel, the tiny Jewish state whose map I knew from the blue and white money tin into which we would put a coin every Friday night after Shabbos dinner, had faced down the combined armies of its Arab neighbors, and had dispatched them within six days.
Even at the age of six, my first year in big school, Israel’s victory had a profound effect on me. The previous year, I had heard my older step-brothers describe a Phys-Ed class being turned into a kind of playful pogrom, in some sort of fighting game that had pitched the Jewish boys against the rest. Being Jewish jocks, they had, according to my brothers’ account over dinner, given as good as they’d gotten, and it was a genuinely playful thing, besides — the sort of playful contest I recall from my older years that often saw a class divide on lines of “Boer against Brit,” i.e. Afrikaans kids against English-speakers, recalling the Boer War. But at six years old, the idea of a small group of Jewish boys being surrounded and set upon by their gentile classmates was absolutely terrifying.
We were certainly granted the recognition on the playground that the epic victory demanded. The idea of Jews as being weaklings or afraid to fight was buried; white South Africa with its own narrative pitting it as an embattled minority in a sea of hostile neighbors embraced the Israeli victory as an inspiration.
Die Vaderland (The Fatherland), a newspaper of the apartheid regime, editorialized in 1969, on the occasion of a visit to South Africa by Ben Gurion, “When we, from our side, look realistically at the world situation, we know that Israel’s continued existence in the Middle East is also an essential element in our own security… If our Jewish citizens were to rally to the call of our distinguished visitor — to help build up Israel — their contribution would in essence be a contribution to South Africa’s security.”
South Africa and Israel became intimate allies in the years that followed the ‘67 war, with unrepentant former Nazis such as Prime Minister B.J. Vorster welcomed to Israel to seal military deals that resulted in collaboration in the development of weapons ranging from aircraft and assault rifles to, allegedly, nuclear weapons. I remember well how some products of South Africa’s Jewish day-school system, where Hebrew was taught as well as the mandatory Afrikaans, finding themselvse with cushy posting during their compulsory military services — as Hebrew-Afrikaans translators for Israeli personnel working with the SADF. And that alliance raised the comfort level of the South African Jewish community in apartheid South Africa — while a handful of Jewish revolutionaries had made up a dominant share of the white ranks of the national liberation movement, they were largely disowned by the mainstream organized Jewish community, which had chosen the path of quiescence and collaboration with the regime. Their posture, and Israel’s, were now in perfect alignment.
Fruitful collaboration: The Israeli
military called it the Galil, the SADF
called it the R-4, but it was the same gun
Even as I came to recognize and react to the horrors of apartheid, Israel seemed to me to represent a shining alternative. I remember shocking the grownups at a Pesach seder in 1974, my Bar Mitzvah year, by telling them that I would never do my compulsory military service in South Africa. But they smiled and murmured approvingly when I declared that, instead, I would go to Israel and serve in the army there, because that way “I could fight for something I believe in.” (I had, of course, in my cheesy adolescent way, stolen that line from a Jewish character in James A. Michener’s “The Drifters,” who uses it in relation to Vietnam; but the image in my mind when I read it, as when I said it, was of those paratroopers at the Wailing Wall.)
I could not conceive of Israel as in any way complicit in the crimes of apartheid, much less as engaged in its own forms of apartheid. After all, my connection to Israel, by the time I was 14, came largely through Habonim, a socialist-Zionist youth movement whose Zionism was infused with just the sort of left-wing universalism for which my own anti-apartheid subversive instincts yearned. My Habonim madrichim, bearded radicals from the University of Cape Town opened by mind to Marx and Marcuse, Bob Dylan and Yevtushenko, Woodie Guthrie and Erich Fromm. I was already a Jewish atheist, and considered myself a socialist, but in my mind, Israel and Kibbutz were the absolute negation of all that was wrong with South Africa; as a stepping stone to universal brotherhood and equality as expressed in the idealism of early left-wing Zionist thinkers like Ber Borochov, A.D. Gordon and Martin Buber. It became clear to me soon enough (by the time I was 18, to be specific) that their Zionist idealism — and mine — had no connection to the reality of Israel, largely because it ignored the elephant in the room: the Arab population of Palestine.
II.
The war of 1967 was a continuation of the war of 1948, a battle over sovereignty, ownership and possession of the land in what had been British-Mandate Palestine.
And, of course, war would likely have looked inevitable, because the Arabs were unlikely to accept a deal in which they were, by definition, the losers. Today, Israel insists that the demographic “facts on the ground” must be taken into account in any peace settlement, and demands that it be allowed to maintain the large settlement blocs built on the best land in the West Bank since 1967. And the Bush Administration has formally endorsed this claim. But look at the “facts on the ground” of 1947/8: The Partition Plan awarded 55% of the land to the Jewish state, including more than 80% of land under cultivation. At the time, Jews made up a little over one third of the total population, and owned some 7% of the land. Moreover, given the demographic demands of the Zionist movement for a Jewish majority, the plan was an invitation to tragedy: The population within the boundaries of the Jewish state envisaged in the 1947 partition consisted of around 500,000 Jews and 400,000 Arabs.
Hardly surprising, then, that the Arabs of Palestine and beyond rejected the partition plan.
For the Arab regimes, the creation of a separate Jewish sovereign state in the Holy Land over which the Crusades had been fought was a challenge to their authority; it was perceived by their citizenry as a test of their ability to protect their land and interests from foreign invasion. And so they went to war believing they could reverse what the U.N. had ordered on the battlefield. For the Jews of Palestine in 1948, a number of them having narrowly survived extermination in Europe, the war was a matter of physical survival. Although in the mythology, the war pitted a half million Jews against 20 million Arabs, in truth Israel was by far the stronger and better-organized and better-armed military power. And so what Israel called the War of Independence saw the Jewish state acquire 50% more territory than had been envisaged in the partition plan. The maps below describe the difference between the Israel envisaged by the UN in 1947 and the one that came into being in the war of 1948.
But maps don’t convey the disaster that befell the Palestinian Arabs in 1948. The war also allowed the Zionist movement to resolve its “demographic concerns,” as some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs found themselves driven from their homes and land — many driven out at gunpoint, the majority fleeing in fear of further massacres such as the one carried out by the Irgun at Dir Yassein, and all of them subject to the same ethnic-cleansing founding legislation by passed the new Israeli Knesset that seized the property of any Arab absent from his property on May 8, 1948, and forbad the refugees from returning.
The revised partition effected by the war left hundreds of thousands of Palestinians destitute in refugee camps in neighboring Arab countries, a drama that continues to play out today in northern Lebanon.
And for the next generation of Arab leaders, pan-Arabists and nationalists who overthrew the feeble Western-allied monarchies, the fundamental challenge of their nationalist vision became “redeeming” Arab honor by reversing their defeat of 1948. They tried twice, in 1967 and again in 1973, and failed. But even today, as political Islam supplants nationalism and pan-Arabism as the dominant ideologies of the Arab world, reversing the defeats of 1973, 1967 and 1948 remains a singular obsession.
III.
Even those within the Zionist establishment who came through the same tradition were horrified: Former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg wrote in 2003:
It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents’ shock, that they do not know. The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun.
It is very comfortable to be a Zionist in West Bank settlements such as Beit El and Ofra. The biblical landscape is charming. You can gaze through the geraniums and bougainvilleas and not see the occupation. Travelling on the fast highway that skirts barely a half-mile west of the Palestinian roadblocks, it’s hard to comprehend the humiliating experience of the despised Arab who must creep for hours along the pocked, blockaded roads assigned to him. One road for the occupier, one road for the occupied.
This cannot work. Even if the Arabs lower their heads and swallow their shame and anger for ever, it won’t work. A structure built on human callousness will inevitably collapse in on itself. Note this moment well: Zionism’s superstructure is already collapsing like a cheap Jerusalem wedding hall. Only madmen continue dancing on the top floor while the pillars below are collapsing…
Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centres of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated. We could kill a thousand ringleaders a day and nothing will be solved, because the leaders come up from below - from the wells of hatred and anger, from the “infrastructures” of injustice and moral corruption…
Between the Jordan and the Mediterranean there is no longer a clear Jewish majority. And so, fellow citizens, it is not possible to keep the whole thing without paying a price. We cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live here, Arab as well as Jew. We cannot keep the territories and preserve a Jewish majority in the world’s only Jewish state - not by means that are humane and moral and Jewish.
Many pro-Israel commentators today lament what they see as a shift in the Palestinian political mindset from the secular nationalism of Fatah to a more implacable Islamist worldview, supposedly infinitely less reasonable because it couches its opposition to Israel in religious terms. Yet, what is often overlooked is how the Israeli victory in 1967 effected a similar shiftIt is very comfortable to be a Zionist in West Bank settlements such as Beit El and Ofra. The biblical landscape is charming. You can gaze through the geraniums and bougainvilleas and not see the occupation. Travelling on the fast highway that skirts barely a half-mile west of the Palestinian roadblocks, it’s hard to comprehend the humiliating experience of the despised Arab who must creep for hours along the pocked, blockaded roads assigned to him. One road for the occupier, one road for the occupied.
This cannot work. Even if the Arabs lower their heads and swallow their shame and anger for ever, it won’t work. A structure built on human callousness will inevitably collapse in on itself. Note this moment well: Zionism’s superstructure is already collapsing like a cheap Jerusalem wedding hall. Only madmen continue dancing on the top floor while the pillars below are collapsing…
Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centres of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated. We could kill a thousand ringleaders a day and nothing will be solved, because the leaders come up from below - from the wells of hatred and anger, from the “infrastructures” of injustice and moral corruption…
Between the Jordan and the Mediterranean there is no longer a clear Jewish majority. And so, fellow citizens, it is not possible to keep the whole thing without paying a price. We cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live here, Arab as well as Jew. We cannot keep the territories and preserve a Jewish majority in the world’s only Jewish state - not by means that are humane and moral and Jewish.
in Zionist ideology away from the secular nationalism of Ben Gurion’s generation to a far more dangerous religious nationalism. Tom Segev, my favorite Israeli historian, writes that the 1967 war resulted in many Israelis coming to see the army as an instrument of messianic theology. The knitted yarmulke of the settlers moving to colonize the West Bank in the wake of the 1967 victory came to replace the cloth cap of the socialist kibbutznik as the symbol of Zionist pioneering. Segev quotes from Rav Kook, the founder of the settlement movement: “There is one principal thing: the state. It is entirely holy, and there is no flaw in it… the state is holy in any and every case.”
The settlement of Maale Adumim, on the West Bank.
Its permanence signifies that whatever their intentions,
the Zionists created a single (apartheid) state for Jews
and Palestinians after 1967
The religious Zionists saw the West Bank and holy land to be “redeemed,” or “liberated” by settlement, and with the tacit support of all Israeli governments since then (and the more active support of some) they rushed to build permanent structures and settle a civilian population there, in defiance of international law, in order to preclude the possibility of returning that land to the Palestians as a basis for peace.
As David Remnick notes in a review of some of the literature on 1967, many Israelis quickly realized that the “Six Day War” had brought about a potential disaster for the Zionist project, because Israel now found itself not only in control of all of the territory of British-Mandate Palestine, but also all of its current inhabitants. He quotes Amos Oz’s dark warning
“For a month, for a year, or for a whole generation we will have to sit as occupiers in places that touch our hearts with their history. And we must remember: as occupiers, because there is no alternative. And as a pressure tactic to hasten peace. Not as saviors or liberators. Only in the twilight of myths can one speak of the liberation of a land struggling under a foreign yoke. Land is not enslaved and there is no such thing as a liberation of lands. There are enslaved people, and the word “liberation” applies only to human beings. We have not liberated Hebron and Ramallah and El-Arish, nor have we redeemed their inhabitants. We have conquered them and we are going to rule over them only until our peace is secured. “
But the religious-nationalists and Likudniks, who had always imagined a “Greater Israel” [EM] the Betar kids I knew in Cape Town used to wear a silver pendant on their chests, depicting a state of Israel running from the Nile to the Euphrates, and they used to sing a song called “Shte Gadot La Yarden” (”Both Sides of the Jordan” [EM] had something else in mind. As I’ve noted previously, it was my South African Habonim elders on Kibbutz Yizreel, in 1978, who first warned my generation that the settlement policies of the new Likud government would turn Israel into an apartheid state — Israel, they said, could not afford to give the Palestinians on the West Bank the vote, but the objective of the settlements was to ensure that Israel did not withdraw from the land it had conquered. The result would be that Israel would rule over its Palestinian residents without giving them the rights of citizens — the very essence of the apartheid regime back home.
And that is, indeed, what had transpired. Today, the West Bank is carved up by hundreds of Israeli settlements, and roads and land reserved for settlers. And they have no intention of leaving, while no Israeli government for the foreseeable future will muster the political strength to be able to remove them (even if that was their intent).
The black and blue areas are Israeli settlements, and the white parts are the roads and land under Israeli control
For an enlarged version of this map, click here.
Today, talk of a two-state solution to the conflict must reckon with the facts on the ground. The 1947 Partition plan left the Palestinians with 45 percent of the territory of Palestine; the 1948 war left them holding onto 22 percent, which fell into Israeli hands in 1967. Even when it talks about a two-state solution, Israel still demands to keep some of the best lands and the key water sources within that 22 percent. A simple glance at the map above should be enough to raise serious questions about the viability of a separate, sovereign Palestinian nation-state. It’s hard to imagine such an entity, blessed with few natural resources and with hardly any independent economic base, maintaining an independent economic existence, even as it is forced to accomodate hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees returning from refugee camps in Lebanon and elsewhere (as most versions of the two-state plan envisage). Indeed, such an entity may well have the feel of an enlarged refugee camp, whose survival is largely dependent on handouts.
When it conquered the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel put the Palestinian population of those territories under the rule of the Israeli state. For forty years, now, the entire population of British-Mandate Palestine has been governed by a single state. The difference, of course, is that those who live within Israel’s 1967 borders have democratic rights, while those outside are governed by an Israeli colonial and military administration. The extent of Palestinian “authority” in those territories — even Gaza — remains entirely circumscribed by Israeli power.
Suddenly panicked by the demographic implications of the apartheid order its 1967 conquests have created, Israeli leaders talk of “separating” from the Palestinians, as if they can dispense with the problem by drawing political boundaries and building a wall around self-governing Palestinian enclaves (Ariel Sharon himself used the analogy with South Africa’s apartheid Bantustan policy to describe the idea.) But the Gaza experience has made clear the limits of that option.
For the Palestinian population, and their Arab neighbors, the crisis of 1948 has never been resolved. And the Israelis, for the last 40 years, by colonizing the West Bank and East Jerusalem, have squandered whatever opportunities their victory of 1967 presented for changing the dynamic — instead, they have sought to cling to elements of the “Greater Israel” they created in that year, and in the vain hope that the Palestinians will some day surrender in exchange for whatever Israel chooses to offer them.
But precisely because they have continued to expand Israel since 1967, they have dimmed the prospects for a new partition creating a viable Palestinian state separate from Israel. Today, more than ever, the fate of the Israelis is inextricably, and intimately linked to the fate of the Palestinians — and vice versa. The lasting legacy of the 1967 war is the bi-national state it created in the old territory of British-Mandate Palestine.
Human Rights Watch investigated Israel's claims and found no evidence to support them:
Amnesty International looked at the results of Israel's bombing campaign across Lebanon and concluded that Israel deliberately destroyed civilian targets with no strategic value.
But maybe you know something HRW and AI don't.
By the time Hezbollah fired its first rocket at a civilian target, Israel had already bombed the Beirut airport, levelled parts of downtown Beirut and destroyed power plants and water treatment facilities throughout Lebanon.
WEDNESDAY 12 JULY
Hezbollah fighters based in southern Lebanon launch Katyusha rockets across the border with Israel, targeting the town of Shlomi and outposts in the Shebaa Farms area. (eao: all these were IDF positions, which were allowed by the terms of the April agreement)
In pictures: Border clashes
In a cross-border raid, guerrillas seize two Israeli soldiers before retreating back into Lebanon, insisting on a prisoner exchange and warning against confrontation. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert describes the capture of the soldiers as "an act of war". (eao: also allowed in the terms of the April agreement. Technically Lebanon and Israel have been at war since 1948. An act of war does not violate the terms of the April Agreement)
In response Israeli planes bomb Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon and troops cross into southern Lebanon for the first time since the military withdrawal of 2000. (eao: allowed by the April agreement)
However, the troops encounter heavy resistance - eight are killed and two others are injured during fighting with Hezbollah. Israel calls up reserve troops as it pledges a swift and large-scale response to the Hezbollah attack.
THURSDAY 13 JULY
After a night of Israeli air raids across southern Lebanon (eao: some of these targets were likely violations of the April agreement. If these "civilian" targets were warehousing arms, then they can be destroyed. But if these targets were purely civilian and Israel had no reason to believe they were being used by Hezbollah, then they are violations), Israeli jets strike the runways at Beirut's international airport in the morning, forcing the airport to close. (eao: clearly a violation of the April agreement. Israel had no evidence that Beirut airport was being used by Hezbollah) Reports emerge of significant numbers of civilian casualties in Lebanese towns and villages close to Israeli targets, with at least 35 people reported killed.
In pictures: Lebanon strikes
As Israel announces an air and sea blockade of Lebanon, (eao: allowed by the April agreement) insisting that Hezbollah will not be allowed to return to its former position along the international border, world powers react to the escalating crisis.
The US president defends Israel's right to defend itself from attack, but France, Russia and the EU are all critical of a "disproportionate" use of force. As night falls a rocket hits Israel's third-largest city, Haifa, although Hezbollah denies responsibility. (eao: Maybe Hezbollah's first violation of the April agreement, but its also possible that Hezbollah had nothing to do with this. It appears that some militants may have been acting independantly of Hezbollah as no order had been given by Hezbollah to attack Israeli civilians)
FRIDAY 14 JULY
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah promises "open war" against Israel after his offices in Beirut are bombed. (An expression of intent to violate an agreement isn't a violation. Only an action against a civilian target violates the agreement.)
The strikes are part of Israel's ongoing operation against targets across Lebanon.
In pictures: After the strikes
Bridges, roads and fuel depots are hit, with new strikes against Beirut airport. (eao: many of these targets were purely civilian and these attacks were a clear violation of the April agreement) The number of Lebanese civilians killed in the strikes rises above 50, and the crisis continues to concern international powers.
The UN Security Council in an emergency meeting calls for an end to the Israeli operation, saying it is causing the death of innocent civilians. Iran's president warns that any Israeli attack on Syria, seen as a sponsor of Hezbollah, will provoke a "fierce response".
Israel expands its strikes in Lebanon, attacking a large number of targets including, for the first time, the northern port city of Tripoli.
Eighteen Lebanese fleeing a village are killed when their vehicles are struck with missiles on the road to the southern city of Tyre.
Israel has vowed to press on with attacks until soldiers are freed
The headquarters of Hezbollah are destroyed in southern Beirut.
Hezbollah responds by firing rockets on the town of Tiberias in its deepest attack into Israel so far. (eao: Hezbollah's first official violation of the April agreement)
Israel recovers the body of one of four sailors missing after a Hezbollah strike on a navy vessel off the Lebanese coast. (eao: Allowed by the April agreement)
Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa says the Middle East peace process is dead and calls on the UN Security Council to tackle the crisis.
Lebanon's PM says his country is a "disaster zone" and calls for international help.
Speaking ahead of the G8 meeting in St Petersburg , US President George W Bush blames Hezbollah for the crisis and urges Syria to put pressure on the militants. His host, Russian President Vladimir Putin, is more critical of Israel's massive bombing campaign, saying that the "use of force should be balanced".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5179434.stm
By the time Hezbollah began targeting Israeli towns with rockets, Israel had already killed over 50 Lebanese civilians, levelled parts of Beirut and repeatedly bombed the Beirut airport. All of this carnage in response to a cross minor border raid on a purely military target within the limits of the April agreement.
Seems to me pretty clear that Israel violated the April agreement first when it bombed civilian targets across southern Lebanon and the Beirut airport on the morning of July 13, 2006. Hezbollah respected the terms of the April agreement until the afternoon of July 14, 2006.
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By the time Hezbollah officially fired its first rocket at an Israeli civilian target, Israel had already been hammering civilian targets in Lebanon for over a day and had already killed more Lebanese civilians than Hezbollah would kill during the entire course of this conflict. Israel violated the April agreement first. That makes Israel responsible for the civilian casualties on both sides...
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OK. So which is it. First they say they found no cases, then they go on to list some examples of cases.
If I recall Israel also released cockpit video of rockets and missiles being launched from backyards. This is a tired old argument that should have gone away by now.
My point above is that Israel, NOT Hezbollah, raised the stakes to include civilians first in violation of the April Agreement. Israel deliberate attacked purely civilian targets as a form of collective punnishment on Lebanese civilians for over 24 hours before Hezbollah responded in kind.
Hezbollah can fire rockets from civilian backyards legally. They just have to evacuate the occupants first before commandeering their house to use as a base of operations. Not allowing the occupants to leave would be using human shields. Its well documented that Hezbollah not only evacuated civilians, but gave them shelter, medical aid and after the conflict ended, helped people rebuild their homes.
Caching arms in people's homes is also legal, provided the occupants are evacuated first or are themselves belligerents.
Israel has every right to destroy Hezbollah bases of operations or weapons caches, provided it takes due diligence not to cause disproportiate harm to civilians relative to the military objective. For example its illegal to level entire city blocks on the small chance that one of the homes might be a Hezbollah base of operation. However, once Israel has evidence which leads them to believe a specific home is Hezbollah base of operations or weapons cache, Israel can legally destroy that home, but not the entire neighborhood or town. That's what is meant by proportionate.
Here is a good reference on international law regarding war and treatment of civilians:
I'm not saying that everything Israel did was a violation of international law or war crimes and that everything Hezbollah did was not. In many cases Israel did use due diligence to limit civilian casualties. Hezbollah's rocket attacks on Israeli civilians are obvious violations of international law and war crimes.
What I'm saying is that Israel deliberately attacked civilian targets of no military value first for the purpose of collectively punishing Lebanon's civilian population.
Once Israel raised the stakes to include purely civilian targets, they are responsible for all civilian casualties which result as a consequence of that decision. Hezbollah is responsible for their decision to target civilians in response.
If I was to divide responsibility, I would say that Israel is 100% responsible for most Lebanese civilian casualties and 50% responsible for Israeli civilian casualties.
Hezbollah is not responsible for most Lebanese civilian caualties and 50% responsible for Israeli civilian casualties.
But Hezbollah is 100% responsible for any Lebanese civilian casualties resulting from their failure to evacuate civilians from an area they used as a base of operations.
Hezbollah can fire rockets from civilian backyards legally. They just have to evacuate the occupants first before commandeering their house to use as a base of operations. Not allowing the occupants to leave would be using human shields. Its well documented that Hezbollah not only evacuated civilians, but gave them shelter, medical aid and after the conflict ended, helped people rebuild their homes.
Caching arms in people's homes is also legal, provided the occupants are evacuated first or are themselves belligerents.
Israel has every right to destroy Hezbollah bases of operations or weapons caches, provided it takes due diligence not to cause disproportiate harm to civilians relative to the military objective. For example its illegal to level entire city blocks on the small chance that one of the homes might be a Hezbollah base of operation. However, once Israel has evidence which leads them to believe a specific home is Hezbollah base of operations or weapons cache, Israel can legally destroy that home, but not the entire neighborhood or town. That's what is meant by proportionate.
Here is a good reference on international law regarding war and treatment of civilians:
I'm not saying that everything Israel did was a violation of international law or war crimes and that everything Hezbollah did was not. In many cases Israel did use due diligence to limit civilian casualties. Hezbollah's rocket attacks on Israeli civilians are obvious violations of international law and war crimes.
What I'm saying is that Israel deliberately attacked civilian targets of no military value first for the purpose of collectively punishing Lebanon's civilian population.
Once Israel raised the stakes to include purely civilian targets, they are responsible for all civilian casualties which result as a consequence of that decision. Hezbollah is responsible for their decision to target civilians in response.
If I was to divide responsibility, I would say that Israel is 100% responsible for most Lebanese civilian casualties and 50% responsible for Israeli civilian casualties.
Hezbollah is not responsible for most Lebanese civilian caualties and 50% responsible for Israeli civilian casualties.
But Hezbollah is 100% responsible for any Lebanese civilian casualties resulting from their failure to evacuate civilians from an area they used as a base of operations.
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That would be a good point if it were true. Hezbo's fired rockets at civilian areas as part of a diversionary attck during it's FIRST INCURSION to kill and kidnap Israeli soldiers.
You can't get much more first than that.
Referencing the diversionary attack. What evidence do you have it was directed at civilians?
The BBC article says only:
The Shebaa Farms is a disputed area along the Syria/Lebanon/Israel border. I bet this area on the front line has more military outposts than scarecrows, more soldiers than farmers and more landmines than potatos.
(This 2002 article also predicts what happened in 2006. Interesting read.)
A closer read of the news reveals the rockets landed near the town of Shlomi, not actually the town of Shlomi itself.
(An exchange of rockets? Sounds like Israel fired some rockets of their own.)
Military targets can be found near the Israeli town of Shlomi:
Sure looks like a military target to me.
The news is so distorted regarding this conflict, it wouldn't surprise me if the Israeli soldiers were captured on the Lebanese side of the border:
As far as we know, Israel started the exchange as a diversion to send a commando team into Lebanon. If that was the case, I doubt the news would report it that way.
What proof do you have that Hezbollah attacked civilian targets?
How many civilians did Hezbollah kill in Shlomi and the Shebaa Farms that day?
Probably the best evidence that these attacks were directed at military targets is the lack of information on what targets were specifically. If they were civilian and resulted in civilian casualties, I'm sure it would have been headlines.
The attacks sound pretty diversionary and military oriented. If only Israel's response across Lebannon had been as diversionary, maybe fewer Lebanese civilians would have died...
The BBC article says only:
The Shebaa Farms is a disputed area along the Syria/Lebanon/Israel border. I bet this area on the front line has more military outposts than scarecrows, more soldiers than farmers and more landmines than potatos.
Israeli army outposts in the Shebaa Farms sounds like military targets to me.
(This 2002 article also predicts what happened in 2006. Interesting read.)
A closer read of the news reveals the rockets landed near the town of Shlomi, not actually the town of Shlomi itself.
(An exchange of rockets? Sounds like Israel fired some rockets of their own.)
Military targets can be found near the Israeli town of Shlomi:
Israeli soldiers pray next to an artillery piece, near Shlomi, northern Israel on Saturday. (AP / Jacob Silberberg)
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNe...st_crisis_main_060721/20060721?hub=TopStories
Sure looks like a military target to me.
The news is so distorted regarding this conflict, it wouldn't surprise me if the Israeli soldiers were captured on the Lebanese side of the border:
As far as we know, Israel started the exchange as a diversion to send a commando team into Lebanon. If that was the case, I doubt the news would report it that way.
What proof do you have that Hezbollah attacked civilian targets?
How many civilians did Hezbollah kill in Shlomi and the Shebaa Farms that day?
Probably the best evidence that these attacks were directed at military targets is the lack of information on what targets were specifically. If they were civilian and resulted in civilian casualties, I'm sure it would have been headlines.
The attacks sound pretty diversionary and military oriented. If only Israel's response across Lebannon had been as diversionary, maybe fewer Lebanese civilians would have died...
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