A Level Gaze

A Level Gaze

"What effect must it have on a nation if it learns no foreign languages? Probably much the same as that which a total withdrawal from society has upon an individual."
--G.C. Lichtenberg

Monday, July 24, 2006

Assholes

From Gideon Levy in Ha'aretz (don't click just yet):

Collective punishment is illegitimate and it does not have a smidgeon of intelligence. Where will the inhabitants...run? With typical hardheartedness the military reporters say they were not "expelled" but that it was "recommended" they leave, for the benefit, of course, of those running for their lives. And what will this inhumane step lead to? Support for the Israeli government? Their enlistment as informants and collaborators for the Shin Bet? Can the miserable farmers...do anything about the Qassam rocket-launching cells?

...

Will the blackout...bring down the...government or cause the population to rally around it? And even if the...government falls...what will happen on the day after? These are questions for which nobody has any real answers. As usual here: Quiet, we're shooting. But this time we are not only shooting. We are bombing and shelling, darkening and destroying, imposing a siege...like the worst of terrorists and nobody breaks the silence to ask, what the hell for, and according to what right?

Levy was not talking about Lebanon. This piece appeared on July 3, nine days before the Hezbollah raid in which three Israeli soldiers were killed and two kidnapped, and which formed the pretext for the current Israeli action against Lebanon.

He was talking about Israeli actions against the residents of Gaza, which, coincidentally, have also been attributed to a kidnapping, that of Gilad Shalit by Palestinian militants on June 25. The response to the kidnapping included forcing 20,000 people from their homes, cutting off the electricity to another 750,000, taking a quarter of the Palestinian parliament into custody, and Israeli fighters buzzing the Syrian (!?) presidential palace.

Although heavy-handed, at least there was some kind of rationale behind these actions: for no reason, one of their own had been taken from them, and they were going to do whatever it took to get him back. Fair enough, no?

No:

The legitimate basis for the IDF's operation was stripped away the moment it began. It's no accident that nobody mentions the day before the attack on the Kerem Shalom fort, when the IDF kidnapped two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from their home in Gaza. The difference between us and them? We kidnapped civilians and they captured a soldier, we are a state and they are a terror organization. How ridiculously pathetic Amos Gilad sounds when he says that the capture of Shalit was "illegitimate and illegal," unlike when the IDF grabs civilians from their homes. How can a senior official in the defense ministry claim that "the head of the snake" is in Damascus, when the IDF uses the exact same methods?

Shalit's freedom could have been secured by the tried and true expedient of a prisoner exchange. The Gazans would not have had to be made to suffer (more), Hezbollah would not have been given the pretext to go on their kidnapping raid, and Lebanon would not now lay in ruins, 500,000 of her citizens refugees.

Israel does what Israel wants. But this time it should be known its pathetic fig leaf of a justification isn't worth the shit remaining in Ariel Sharon's decaying, war criminal bowels.

Left-wing blogger, signing off.

posted by David at 7/24/2006 10:53:00 PM ::

HOME

Links