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.
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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.
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