Events are unfolding rapidly. Not sure where to begin, but I think Jonathan Edelstein’s comments are useful.
Israel’s collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza is deplorable. The attempted killing of Hamas’s Muhammad Deif resulted in the deaths of innocent children, much like the 2002 killing of Salah Shehada.
Johann Hari alleges that Israel is pummeling Gaza not to rescue Gilad Shalit, but to stymie the Abbas referendum and the “prisoners’ document,” both of which could conceivably create positive conditions for negotiation. What Hari misses is that the foreign-based Meshal faction of Hamas may have kidnapped Shalit for the same reason — to undercut prime minister Haniyeh, who is nominally more moderate.
Now there is a Lebanese front, and Israel’s reaction to the Hezbollah incursion is, of course, wildly disproportionate. Blaming the Lebanese government is crazy; so is bombing Beirut’s airport, which now carries the name of the democratic leader Rafik Hariri, murdered in all likelihood by Hezbollah’s overlords in Syria. There’s a gloomy irony in this.
Hezbollah’s incursion, however, should go down in history as an unconscionable escalation of this conflict. The pro-Palestinian side is fond of citing UN Resolutions. Well, UN Resolution 1559 calls for “the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias,” including Hezbollah. Interestingly, Noam Chomsky, supposedly an advocate for instruments of international law and justice, recently traveled to Lebanon, met with Hezbollah, and declared:
Hizbullah’s insistence on keeping its arms is justified… I think [Sheik Hassan] Nasrallah has a reasoned argument and [a] persuasive argument that they [the arms] should be in the hands of Hizbullah as a deterrent to potential aggression, and there is plenty of background reasons for that.
“Potential aggression,” we now learn, was being planned by Hezbollah against Israel for a while–perhaps at the very moment Chomsky spoke those words.
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