Holy moly. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there are more people who are able to see this for what it truly is.
It doesn't take a right-winger to view the stakes as existential. "This is a different kind of war, and an old kind of war," rabbi and author Daniel Gordis, a peace activist during the Oslo period, wrote last week. "Rage has given way to sadness. Disbelief has given way to recognition. Because we've been here before. Because we'd once believed we wouldn't be back here again. And because we know why this war is happening."
Seriously, these are not victims of Fox News saying these things.
Orna Shimoni, whose son was killed during Israel's occupation of south Lebanon after the 1982 invasion, was one of the founders of the "Four Mothers" campaign that called for withdrawal. Even she, in a commentary for the Israeli Web site Ynet News, endorsed the current attacks. "It is clear that we were attacked inside our own sovereign territory, with no provocation at all," she wrote. "There is no question that we must now strengthen both the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] and our political echelon to allow them to obtain two main objectives: Bringing our kidnapped soldiers home and disarming Hezbollah, and pushing that organization away from the Israel-Lebanon border."
To all intents & purposes, that's like Cindy Sheehan calling on the president to send more troops to Iraq.
I would have supported Israel anyway. I've always admired the scrappy little country. But when presented with these facts, I can't understand why anyone, anywhere doesn't interpret what Israel is doing as a just act:
Compromise might have worked had the conflict indeed remained one that, like the Cold War, pitted two rational, secular adversaries against each other. But in Hezbollah, as well as in Hamas, Israel now faces an opponent that holds to the absolutism of religious doctrine, specifically the messianic martyrdom of jihadist Islam. The assaults by Hamas from Gaza and Hezbollah from Lebanon both came after Israeli withdrawals to borders accepted by the United Nations. For six years in south Lebanon and one year in Gaza, there has been no occupation, and Ehud Olmert built a centrist governing coalition in Israel on the promise of pulling out from most of the West Bank.
2 comments:
You're writing a lot. What are you home sick?
Interesting how even many on the liberal side are starting to realize that the issues that Israel is facing aren't just problems they caused themselves. Imagine if people of this ilk would start having that concept about the US.
If they were to follow a logic chain... uh... if they COULD follow a logic chain, then that's where they'd end up.
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