Now that UNIFIL has substantially endorsed Israel’s account of yesterday’s fatal shooting on its border, a couple of thoughts…
Archive for the 'Lebanon' Category
A deadly conflict in Lebanon could derail the prospect of direct talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, thus boosting Hamas at just the time that the Obama Administration is urging the PA to drop its reticence. Iran also has a vested interest in opening up a western front. In the last fortnight, a host of countries from the United States to the European Union to Japan have added a new layer of sanctions to those already agreed by the UN Security Council in response to Tehran’s continued nuclear defiance. And Hezbollah - as Sheikh Naim Qassem confessed in a 2007 interview with Iranian broadcaster Al Qawathar - invariably does Iran’s bidding, to the point of securing clearance for its operations from Iran’s leaders.
From my latest piece on The Huffington Post.
The IDF has released a photograph of Lt. Col. Dov Harari, who was killed today in an unprovoked attack against the IDF by the Lebanese army.
Note that Colonel Harari is standing here in front of a monument to the Warsaw Ghetto fighters. You can make out the name of Mordechai Anielewicz, who led the Ghetto’s fight against the Nazi occupiers. For those who don’t read Hebrew, the cover on the Torah scroll he is carrying bears the name of Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut who perished in the Columbia space shuttle disaster in 2003.
Continue reading ‘Dov Harari: Another Victim of Hezbollah and its Allies’
This morning’s deadly clash between the Lebanese army and the IDF isn’t the first time that fatalities on a contested border have resulted from attempts to deal with an inconveniently located tree.
Continue reading ‘Israel, Lebanon, Korea, Border Clashes And Trees’
This is piece by Kenneth Bandler of AJC is cross-posted from JTA.
Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah is not likely to take a seat at the U.N. Security Council’s horseshoe table, but the Hezbollah terrorist organization he has led since 1992 now has a toehold inside the world body’s most prestigious room.
Continue reading ‘Hezbollah gains a toehold inside U.N. Security Council’
War, when practised by Israel, is frequently seen as having paradoxical consequences. The more often it inflicts damage and defeat on its enemies the stronger they are held to become. Never mind that Egypt and Jordan long since grew sick of defeat and signed peace treaties with the Jewish state, never mind that Syria, with the partial exception of the First Lebanon War, hasn’t risked a direct confrontation with Israel since 1973 and never mind that part of the leadership of the Palestinians accepts Israel´s existence; victory is still seen as making Israel weak and its enemies strong.
1.
We often hear that violence breeds violence, that if states use it against their enemies then they only succeed in radicalizing those enemies and storing up trouble for the future. This view is usually held to be self-evidently correct and not to require either supporting argumentation or consideration of alternative analyses. It is a thesis frequently resorted to by those commenting on the use of force by Israel.
The anti-Syrian, anti-Iranian bloc has won around 70 of the 128 seats in Lebanon’s election. More here.
Writing in the Washington Post, former President Jimmy Carter says the advancement of human rights was a cornerstone of United States foreign policy until the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Continue reading ‘Jimmy Carter: Human Rights and the Middle East’
The appointment of Rahm Emanuel as Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff hasn’t taken long to bring the creepy crawlies of racial hatred out from under the nearest rock. An Argentine national newspaper has today headlined a piece about him with the words “The ‘Jewish Rahmbo’ brings more war.”
Israel, not before time, is switching from the cheap and nasty imported cluster munitions which have caused such problems for civilians in south Lebanon, to domestically produced alternatives which come closer to working as they are supposed to.
There’s an excellent paper here by Stephen Biddle and Jeffrey A. Friedman about the military performance of Hezbollah in its 2006 conflict with Israel. Its main focus is on the extent to which this performance represented a shift on the part of the Shiite militia from the sort of irregular warfare long practised by terrorists and guerillas, to a more conventional form of fighting, such as that which has usually been been the preserve of the armies of nation states.
