Ariel Ilan Roth maintains that Israel’s objection to Iran acquiring nuclear weapons is not based on a fear that those weapons would be used against it as he believes that the certainty of a devastating Israeli response is likely to deter the ayatollahs.
Just a note to direct readers to an interesting piece in Tuesday’s New York Times about Iran’s use of tunnels to protect its nuclear facilities. The article quotes Israel’s defense minister Ehud Barak as saying that the plant near Qom is
… located in bunkers that cannot be destroyed through a conventional attack.
Quite so.
“If western feminists who have staked out a ‘troops out’ position remembered to ask Afghan women their views, they would find that rather than bristling at ‘masculine militarization,’ ‘cultural imperialism,’ or any other in-vogue sin found on the placards waved at rallies, many Afghan women are haunted by the memory of the Taliban’s public stoning to death of women,” write Wazhma Frogh and Lauryn Oates in a superb piece for The Calgary Herald. Read it in full here. Via Terry Glavin, whose commitment to the principles of genuine solidarity and internationalism never wavers.
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.
Much is being made in the public prints about the two conditions set out by Netanyahu for Palestinian statehood in his recent speech at Bar Ilan University. One is a demand for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and the other is that the future Palestinian state be demilitarized. I’ll leave the former for another day and say something about the question of what a demilitarized state might actually mean in practice.
Paul Rogers here speculates about the possibility of Iran testing a basic nuclear device before its presidential election in June.
Max Hastings doesn’t love Israel or Israelis anymore. That’s the general drift of this article in which starts by describing his coverage of the Yom Kippur War as a war correspondent.
This is a guest post by AJC’s Ed Rettig in Israel.
In late January, a Spanish magistrate decided to launch an investigation against senior Israeli leaders for crimes against humanity. Charges center on the July 2002 killing of Hamas military commander Salah Shehadeh (pictured,) perpetrator in chief of the Pi Glilot terror attack.
This is a guest post by Michelle Sieff of the American Jewish Committee.
Today, buried in the New York Times, Somini Sengupta reports that in Sri Lanka UN workers and their families came under heavy shelling during recent fighting between government troops and rebel Tamil Tigers. Nine civilians died and more than twenty were wounded. She describes the UN response:
In Basra in 2003 the USA and the UK chose to use extreme force against locations that had been fortified by the Ba’ath Party, in order to spare our troops and the people of Basra the horror of a drawn-out street battle. It appears that the IDF made the same choice in Gaza.
Thanks to Petra Marquardt-Bigman for directing us to this piece.
Writing about the recent conflict in Gaza, Martin Shaw says that,
In military terms it more resembles the pulverising of the cities of Germany and Japan in the Second World War that was intended to shatter the morale of the civilian population and destroy the political basis of the regime. But the lesson of the period is that such violence - utterly immoral and outside the laws of war - “works” in political terms only when it is used without limit and with a view to unconditional surrender. These circumstances cannot be made to apply in Gaza.
The above photograph is not from Gaza. More about that at the end, though. I want to begin with Anthony H. Cordesman, who is one of the leading thinkers on military strategy in the US. Consequently, his views on the Gaza conflict will be taken seriously, even when they are found to be analytically suspect, as is the case with this article.
El País occasionally deigns to run an op-ed piece not totally unfavorable to Israel. Today is one of those days and André Glucksman, the leading French philosopher, gets to extend himself on the supposedly disproportional nature of Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Continue reading ‘André Glucksmann on Proportionality in Gaza’
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