I under stand what the President is trying to do here, but if he truly wants to get at "root causes" in the Israeli/Hezbollah conflict I can't help but think that making Israel stop fighting and then deploying an international force to the area is the wrong way to go about doing it.
The modus operandi of the jihadists who have been fighting Israel for the last several decades is a pretty clear one. Every couple of years they intensify their attacks (in the form of suicide bombers and rocket barrages) on Israeli targets until Israel is goaded into fighting back. The jihadists then duke it out with Israeli soldiers for a couple of weeks - hiding behind and among civilians the entire time so as to maximize civilian body counts for propaganda purposes - knowing full well that within two to three weeks the international community will call for a cease fire and the Israelis will pull back.
When Israel does pull back jihadists leaders make noises about "lasting peace" all while recruiting new troops and restocking arsenals for the next attack.
And so it goes.
If we are ever going to end this so-called "cycle of violence" one side or the other in this conflict is going to have to be defeated, and I think most sane people agree that the Israelis are who should win it. This policy of allowing Israel just a small window to fight back against aggressors like Hezbollah before a cease fire is called for has done nothing but drag out the violence in that area.
It's time for a decisive victory. Let Israel finish this war. No cease fires, no international forces. Let Hezbollah suffer the consequences of the war they started for once.
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Comments: 5
I agree this is a proxy war. However you are not being even handed. You did not mention Iran and Syria and their proxy Hezbollah.
Iran and Syria are using Hezbollah as a tool to achieve their own political agenda. And of course who suffers for Iran and Syria's cowardly action? Lebanon.
All analysts agree that Hezbollah timing stinks. Why they choose to capture Israeli soldier's right after Hamas was reckless. Hezbollah could clearly see Israel's over reaction to Hamas and to not expect the same treatment was naïve.
Syria has stated they will help w/ the peace process if the Golan Heights are given back. Iran will help w/ the peace process if they are given leeway by the West on their nuclear program.
The US can not afford to let Iran win this one. The most important thing is to not let this theocracy obtain nuclear power. If Israel wins and Hezbollah is dismantled then Iran will see their influence greatly diminished.
War is an extension of politics and Iran and Syrian are playing hardball.
small, and Saudi Alabia is the only "fundamentalist" Islamic state) . The invasion and occupation of Iraq has indeed convinced millions of Muslims that the US and the West have declared war on all Muslims. Iran has sought recognition as a power in it's region, and offered to recognize Israel in 2003 if the US would negotiate with it regarding their mutual interests . The US refused. Iran's ties to Lebanon and Syria are based on their affording Iran defensive protection from Israel, a "second front" because of their geographical location.
Israel's policy in the Middle East and it's behavior regarding Palestine and Lebanon have a long history. Th is history is unfortunately often not well known in the West, especially in America.
What Americans read about Israel is usually as fantastic as the the "War on Terror," as were the threats from Iraq and the motives for invasion.
What is behind the invasion of Lebanon? The past is the pattern for today's events. The aims are the same now as then.
Ehud Olmert's political party, Kadima, currently leading the murderous charge in Lebanon, was forged out of Likud, and Likud out of Herut, the political party of Zeev Jabotinsky?s Revisionist Zionism, a movement at odds with socialist Zionism and taking its cues from Benito Mussolini and fascism.
In 1940, Avraham Stern, inspired by Jabotinsky, formed Irgun Zvai Leumi be-Yisrael, or simply Lehi, a terrorist group dedicated to killing not only officials and soldiers of British colonialism in Palestine, but anybody, regardless of race or religion (including Jews), who stood in the way of realizing a "homeland in the Land of Israel within the borders delineated in the Bible," as Stern declared in his 18 Principles of Rebirth (see David Ohana's Zarathustra in Jerusalem: Nietzsche and the "New Hebrews"). Stern and Lehi, also called the Stern Gang, attempted to team up with the Nazis during the Second World War, declaring a "common interests could exist between the establishment of a new order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO (Lehi)."
"Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can negate the use of terror as a means of battle," an article published in a Lehi underground newspaper stated in 1943. "We are quite far from moral hesitations on the national battlefield. We see before us the command of the Torah, the most moral teaching in the world: Obliterate ,until destruction. We are particularly far from this sort of hesitation in regard to an enemy whose moral perversion is admitted by all ?. But primarily terror is part of our political battle under present conditions and its role is large and great." In other words, as commanded in the Old Testament (the reference to "obliteration" is taken from Exodus 17:14 and Numbers 14:45), enemies should be destroyed completely and their "remembrance" blotted out for all history. Such mass murder and brutality, uncoupled from any moral restraint, "shakes the Yishuv [settlers] from their complacency"
After assassinating Lord Moyne in Cairo in 1944, followed by the murder of the UN Mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948 (Bernadotte was assassinated in part for revealing the depth of Zionist efforts to murder and ethnically cleanse Palestinians), Lehi was integrated into the Israeli Defense Forces on May 31, 1948, and a member was elected to the first Knesset. In short, terrorism became a military and state policy after the British decided to withdraw from the Palestine Mandate and the UN General Assembly approved a 1947 UN Partition Plan dividing the Palestine into two states (or rather one state, as the Israelis not only reneged on the promise to abide by the plan, but began ethnically cleansing Arabs in short order).
In the months prior to declaring a Zionist state (in fact, declared one day before the expiry of the Palestine Mandate), according to British Colonial Office and Foreign Office files, "the Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern Gang, in coordination with the Hagana, committed the infamous massacre of Deir Yassin, where 250 men, women and children were butchered and many of their houses blown up over their heads," writes the Palestinian Christian Issa Nakhleh, a representative of the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine in New York City 1947-1948
The details of the crimes committed by Zionist terrorist organizations in 1948 are verbatim reports photocopied from the War Office, Colonial Office and Foreign Office files i d Public Record Office, Kew Gardens, Surrey, the United Kingdom. Following is a summary of the types of crimes committed by Zionist terrorists in 1948:
1. Sneak attacks on many Arab villages, resulting in the death of many men, women and children.
2. Blowing up of bridges in different parts of the country.
3. Blowing up of Arab houses and hotels.
4. Firing on Arab cars and killing many Arabs.
5. Robbery of Barclay's Bank.
6. Assaulting British officers walking alone.
7. Firing into cafes and streets and cars, killing many innocent civilians.
8. Blowing up Arab trucks and killing occupants.
9. Attacking Arab shepherds and stealing their flocks.
10. Throwing hand grenades into churches.
11. Robbery of arms, ammunition, trucks, provisions and equipment from British Army depots.
12. Throwing bombs into Arab markets, killing and injuring many men, women and children.
13. Blowing up of trains and killing many passengers; in one incident alone, 40 Arabs were killed.
As Nakhleh notes, it was the fascist orientation of the Jabotinsky Zionists that permitted and excused these terrorist crimes. "By reason of their very objectives, Nazis and Zionists are fascists, a fact confirmed by their methods of doing things, and their attitude toward human life. This is demonstrated in their attitude toward war," a method of war completely at odds with international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions, a fact demonstrated once again with the invasion and ethnic cleansing of Lebanon. In essence, the bombardment and invasion of Lebanon is a repeat of the 1948 expulsion of the Palestinians:
In the first period of the Zionist war for the partition of Palestine, the Zionist forces bombarded indiscriminately every possible Arab village with mortar fire, killing innocent men, women and children. In some cases the villagers fled the murderous fire on their own; in other cases Arab authorities recommended flight to the villagers to escape the murderous fire raining down upon them for no apparent military reason ?. In many cases the Zionists killed Palestinian villagers by bombardment from the air, the same type of war crime they continued for decades afterwards against Palestinians in refugee camps ?. When bombing and shelling and the shooting of unarmed civilians to set an example of the fate awaiting those who would remain in their village was insufficient to force the Palestinians out, the Zionists would simply order the inhabitants to leave ?. After expelling those Palestinian Arabs they had not murdered, the Zionists wantonly burned and destroyed the houses of the inhabitants they had expelled ?. Many times Palestinian Arabs from villages on main roads fled temporarily for safety to nearby villages, expecting to return to their homes when the fighting died down. When they tried to return home, they found that the Zionists had wantonly destroyed their homes to make it impossible for the indigenous Arab populace to return. (Nakhleh, Chapter Nine, The Conspiracy to Expel and the Expulsion of Palestinian Arabs 1948-1950).
Although the pro-Israel (and some would contend Zionist controlled) corporate media engages in nothing short of a herculean effort to portray Israel's invasion and bombardment of Lebanon as a justified response to Hezbollah provocation, the fact is Israel is repeating what is now an established historical pattern. The personal diary of Moshe Sharett [the second prime minister of Israel, 1954-1955] sheds light by amply documenting the rationale and mechanics of Israel's "Arab policy" in the late 1940s and the 1950s. The policy portrayed, in its most intimate particulars, is one of deliberate Israeli acts of provocation, intended to generate Arab hostility and thus to create pretexts for armed action and territorial expansion. Sharett's records document this policy of "sacred terrorism" and expose the myths of Israel's "security needs" and the "Arab threat" that have been treated like self-evident truths from the creation of Israel to the present, when Israeli terrorism against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and against Palestinians and Lebanese in South Lebanon, has reached an intolerable level. It is becoming increasingly evident that the exceptional demographic and geographic alterations in Israeli society within the present generation have been brought about, not as the accidental results of the endeavor to guard "Israel's security" against an "Arab threat," but by a drive for lebensraum.
In addition to the Nazi philosophy of Lebensraum (ethnically cleansing an area in the interest of colonial settlement), the Israeli scorched earth policy in Lebanon, as in Gaza and the West Bank, is designed to destroy the economic infrastructure of the Arabs (a process well along in the latter areas). "The exact parallel between Nazi Germany?s willful destruction of the economies within Axis-occupied Europe, and Israel's willful destruction of the economy of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is of fundamental importance," notes Issa Nakhleh. "The destruction of the economies of Nazi-occupied Europe was not implemented solely for the purpose of exploiting the assets and labor of the occupied nations. It was not simply transitory wanton destruction in acts of war. It was for the purpose of expanding the Third Reich through the integration of the territories of occupied nations into Nazi Germany and utilizing the destruction of the economies of the indigent inhabitants as a prelude to their expulsion"
In grotesque fashion, the corporate media papers over the repeat of these crimes by Olmert and the supposed "centrist" Kadima dominated government of Israel, refusing to note the obvious pattern of pathological and murderous Zionist behavior. Instead of noting or even hinting at the fascistic character of this behavior, we are told "some civilians are more innocent than others" (Dershowitz) and Hezbollah is responsible for Israel?s extermination of hundreds, possibly thousands of Lebanese civilians. "The Zionist and Israeli leaders have followed in the footsteps of the Nazis. 3,000 Zionist and Israeli political and military leaders, during a period from 1939-1989, participated as organizers, instigators and accomplices in the commission of crimes of terrorism, crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide against the Palestinians and peoples of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt," writes Nakhleh in the preface to his online book.
All members of the Hagana, Palmach, Irgun Z?vai Leumi, the Stern Gang, the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund are charged with these crimes. Many of them became Presidents, Cabinet Ministers, Generals, officers of the Armed Forces and continued to participate in the commission of the aforementioned crimes. Many of them occupy high positions in Israeli society. It seems that participating in the commission of these crimes was, and still is, an essential qualification for advancement in the Israeli government and charged with these crimes are still at large, enjoying the fruits of their crimes. They are referred to as heroes. Many of them are being honored and received as heads of State, Prime Ministers, cabinet ministers, high government officials and scholars of an allegedly democratic state. The Palestinians who have been victims of these crimes are until today condemned to a life of a nation in exile deprived of all their rights. Their homeland is occupied. Thousands of them were murdered, hundreds of thousands have been imprisoned and tortured, suffering until today under barbaric Israeli occupation.
The victims are called terrorists, murderers and criminals and the real terrorists and war criminals are being received as respectable representatives of a democratic society.
I read thru your lengthy response. Oh vey! I agree w/ your historical aspects from the 40's. However, there is more to this story. If you look back to the 50's, Egypt, Jordan and Syria were committing terrorist acts on Israeli soil. Israel's strategy was collective punishment to Egypt, Jordan and Syria where they pulverized their infrastructure etc. Egypt, Jordan and Syria realized the price was too high and abandoned all direct terrorist practice.
Israel has applied this same principle to Lebanon and Palestine. The problem is collective punishment does not work when there is no strong central government.
Now the big question is Israel acting on America's self interest. You betcha! Hezbollah is a proxy for Iran and on a lesser scale Syria. America would like to see Irans influence diminished. Iran has invested millions into Hezbollah. However Israel is also acting within their self interest. There is a lot going on behind the scenes.
Iran is trying to be a major player in the Middle East. I find the timing of Hezbollah kidnapping interesting. Why did they choose the moment it did? All analysts agree that the timing does not make sense. The Israel reaction was predictable based on what Hamas did weeks earlier. The answer is Iran. The G8 summit was suppose to discuss Iran and its nuclear program however it got shelved due to the Hezbollah/Israel conflict. Iran has achieved their purpose which is to buy more time.