Heated exchanges today in the UN chamber. Israeli ambassador Dan Gillerman said, without a trace of irony, that the Lebanese people must choose between “those who build and those who destroy.” By the latter he meant Hezbollah, indeed a destructive force. But to ordinary Lebanese, the Orwellian tinge of Gillerman’s speech must have been hard to miss. Israel has chosen destruction, and the only choice it has given the Lebanese is flee or die.
[Update: I should have noted that Gillerman’s statement is tantamount to an admission that Israel is pressuring the Lebanese population through bombing — a violation of the Geneva Conventions.]
In coming days I hope to able to comment on the swirl of diplomatic initiatives. The Head Heeb has some provisional thoughts here. Meanwhile, Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch debunks the continued excuse-making for Israeli brutality. Of course right-wingers are spilling tons of virtual ink in an attempt to discredit HRW as biased, even though its condemnations of Hezbollah are quite clear.
Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic is candid about Israel’s claims of superior virtue:
If your guilt reminds you of how otherwise guiltless you are, then you have not been improved by the discovery of your sin, you have been corrupted by it. It is important also to be wary of the pride of self-criticism. At least we worry about such things [i.e., civilian deaths]: this proves only that the standard is low. To congratulate oneself upon the severity of one’s self-reckoning is to vitiate it–to nullify conscience by reference to its very exercise.
Indeed, and it makes Bernard Henri-Levy’s terrible essay in the NY Times Magazine that much harder to take. BHL, as he’s known, allows that “the Israelis aren’t saints,” but by the end of the piece he’s calling Shimon Peres “a prince-priest of Zionism,” “this Wise Man of Israel,” even carrying on about his “handsomeness.” Maintaining no critical distance whatsoever, BHL tries to pass off an apologia as a pained, philosophical soul-search.
That doesn’t stop Andrew Sullivan from lauding BHL’s bathos, as if it’s ironclad proof that Israel is facing “a different war” and has no choice but to pulverize Lebanon. In this light it’s worth reading Ethan Bronner’s discussion of the Ariel Sharon legacy in the NY Times Week in Review of August 6:
Hezbollah was hardly passive during Mr. Sharon’s five years in office. There were more than a dozen serious attacks, including cross-border infiltrations and seizures, and rocket and mortar fire, which killed Israeli civilians and soldiers. Mr. Sharon ordered a few airstrikes and return fire but nothing remotely on the scale of what has been happening now. What occurred on July 12 differed little from some of those earlier attacks.
The July 12 attack is nonetheless to be condemned, as I’ve done from the beginning. But Bronner’s analysis demonstrates that Israel has an array of choices, not just the choice of unrestrained wrath. Yes, Ahmadinejad’s regime can only be viewed with alarm, but as I’ve said, the Iranian connection is being bandied about cynically, to obstruct reasoned argument about Israel’s conduct.
It must also be said that the picture on the antiwar left is not at all pretty. On August 5 George Galloway and his minions marched among yellow Hezbollah flags and placards with pictures of Hassan Nasrallah. (One demonstrator even held aloft an image of the scowling Khomeini.) Critics are absolutely right to mock the UK’s Stop the War Coalition as the Start the War Coalition.
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