Roulette Table: We Fight Why?
Israel's raid on common sense
Posted on Monday, July 17, 2006. By Ken Silverstein.
SourcesA column published Sunday in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz by Gideon Levy, former spokesman for Shimon Peres, compared the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to a neighborhood bully. “A soldier was abducted in Gaza? All of Gaza will pay,” wrote Levy. “Eight soldiers are killed and two abducted to Lebanon? All of Lebanon will pay. One and only one language is spoken by Israel, the language of force.”
Now contrast that with the Washington Post's lead editorial from last Friday: “[T]here can be no doubt that Iran and Syria, Hezbollah's chief sponsors, bear responsibility for what has instantly become the most lethal and dangerous eruption of cross-border fighting in the Middle East in recent years.” Aside from the dubious assertion that Hezbollah acted on the orders of Iran and Syria, the editorial reflects the general thrust of most American coverage of the latest fighting between Israel and its neighbors—namely that the history of the Middle East conflict can be traced to the recent capture of Israeli soldiers.
The Post's approach is fairly standard. Consider this line from a CNN story: “Israeli warplanes were blasting the southern suburbs of Beirut in an attempt to destroy Hezbollah strongholds.” Yes, the southern suburbs are a Hezbollah “stronghold” in the sense that many of its roughly half-million Shiite residents support or sympathize with the group—and in that sense Israel's bombing runs will only make it more of a stronghold. But does that mean it's just fine for Israel to pummel the neighborhood, as CNN seems to suggest?
I spoke to Bob Baer—a former CIA officer who spent most of his career in the Middle East and the author of the new book Blow the House Down—about Israel's attacks on Beirut's civilian infrastructure. “Hezbollah gets power from the power grid,” he said sarcastically. “I guess that makes the power grid a fair military target.”
And what will all this collective punishment in Lebanon buy Israel? Not much, wrote Henry Siegman, the former president of the American Jewish Congress and Senior Fellow and Director for the U.S./Middle East Project at the Council on Foreign Relations, in an interesting op-ed on the conflict published in the U.K.'s the Guardian. Siegman wrote that Israel's military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon will not provide protection to its citizens but “may well further undermine their security by destabilizing the wider region,” and that the country's “political and military leaders remain addicted to the notion that, whatever they have a right to do, they have a right to overdo.” Siegman also takes a longer view of history than most of the American media, saying, “No matter how one judges the rights and wrongs of the recent Hamas assaults and Israeli reprisals, in Gaza the fundamental casus belli is Israel's occupation that has now lasted for nearly 40 years.”
In his column, Gideon Levy called Israel's military campaign “unequivocally a war of choice” and asked, “Are we at war in Lebanon? With Hezbollah? Nobody knows for sure. If the goal is to remove Hezbollah from the border, did we try hard enough over the last two years through diplomatic channels? And what's the connection between destroying half of Lebanon and that goal?”
As to Gaza, he wrote, “[A] soldier is abducted from the army of a state that frequently abducts civilians from their homes and locks them up for years with or without a trial—but only we're allowed to do that. And only we're allowed to bomb civilian population centers . . . The concept that we have totally forgotten is proportionality. While we're in no hurry to get to the negotiating table, we're eager to get to the battlefield and the killing without delay.”
Levy and Siegman are hardly radicals, and viewpoints like theirs are commonly expressed in the media abroad. But I'd bet there are few major American newspapers that would have published their articles, and I'd be even more surprised to see either (especially Levy) appear on the wasteland of cable news.
And what of the Bush Administration's laissez-faire attitude toward Israel's military campaign? Ex-CIA officer Baer believes that Israel would never have embarked on its current course of action without first running it by the Bush Administration. “They have a green light from Rumsfeld and Cheney to flatten their enemies,” he said. “They're taking advantage of that now because they don't know what's coming after Bush. They might have to deal with a responsible secretary of state who doesn't think chaos in the Middle East is such a great idea.”
“Bush has basically mortgaged your house,” Baer said regarding the administration's general Middle East policy, “and now he's gone to the roulette table.”
Both Israel and Hezbollah should be condemned for the deaths of civilians, but the toll is far higher in Lebanon than in Israel, which you'd never know based on the photographs being run in U.S. newspapers. The Angry Arab website ran a series photos of victims in southern Lebanon, which were taken by the AP, according to the website, but which I have not seen thus far in U.S. newspapers.
Posted on Monday, July 17, 2006. By Ken Silverstein.
SourcesA column published Sunday in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz by Gideon Levy, former spokesman for Shimon Peres, compared the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to a neighborhood bully. “A soldier was abducted in Gaza? All of Gaza will pay,” wrote Levy. “Eight soldiers are killed and two abducted to Lebanon? All of Lebanon will pay. One and only one language is spoken by Israel, the language of force.”
Now contrast that with the Washington Post's lead editorial from last Friday: “[T]here can be no doubt that Iran and Syria, Hezbollah's chief sponsors, bear responsibility for what has instantly become the most lethal and dangerous eruption of cross-border fighting in the Middle East in recent years.” Aside from the dubious assertion that Hezbollah acted on the orders of Iran and Syria, the editorial reflects the general thrust of most American coverage of the latest fighting between Israel and its neighbors—namely that the history of the Middle East conflict can be traced to the recent capture of Israeli soldiers.
The Post's approach is fairly standard. Consider this line from a CNN story: “Israeli warplanes were blasting the southern suburbs of Beirut in an attempt to destroy Hezbollah strongholds.” Yes, the southern suburbs are a Hezbollah “stronghold” in the sense that many of its roughly half-million Shiite residents support or sympathize with the group—and in that sense Israel's bombing runs will only make it more of a stronghold. But does that mean it's just fine for Israel to pummel the neighborhood, as CNN seems to suggest?
I spoke to Bob Baer—a former CIA officer who spent most of his career in the Middle East and the author of the new book Blow the House Down—about Israel's attacks on Beirut's civilian infrastructure. “Hezbollah gets power from the power grid,” he said sarcastically. “I guess that makes the power grid a fair military target.”
And what will all this collective punishment in Lebanon buy Israel? Not much, wrote Henry Siegman, the former president of the American Jewish Congress and Senior Fellow and Director for the U.S./Middle East Project at the Council on Foreign Relations, in an interesting op-ed on the conflict published in the U.K.'s the Guardian. Siegman wrote that Israel's military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon will not provide protection to its citizens but “may well further undermine their security by destabilizing the wider region,” and that the country's “political and military leaders remain addicted to the notion that, whatever they have a right to do, they have a right to overdo.” Siegman also takes a longer view of history than most of the American media, saying, “No matter how one judges the rights and wrongs of the recent Hamas assaults and Israeli reprisals, in Gaza the fundamental casus belli is Israel's occupation that has now lasted for nearly 40 years.”
In his column, Gideon Levy called Israel's military campaign “unequivocally a war of choice” and asked, “Are we at war in Lebanon? With Hezbollah? Nobody knows for sure. If the goal is to remove Hezbollah from the border, did we try hard enough over the last two years through diplomatic channels? And what's the connection between destroying half of Lebanon and that goal?”
As to Gaza, he wrote, “[A] soldier is abducted from the army of a state that frequently abducts civilians from their homes and locks them up for years with or without a trial—but only we're allowed to do that. And only we're allowed to bomb civilian population centers . . . The concept that we have totally forgotten is proportionality. While we're in no hurry to get to the negotiating table, we're eager to get to the battlefield and the killing without delay.”
Levy and Siegman are hardly radicals, and viewpoints like theirs are commonly expressed in the media abroad. But I'd bet there are few major American newspapers that would have published their articles, and I'd be even more surprised to see either (especially Levy) appear on the wasteland of cable news.
And what of the Bush Administration's laissez-faire attitude toward Israel's military campaign? Ex-CIA officer Baer believes that Israel would never have embarked on its current course of action without first running it by the Bush Administration. “They have a green light from Rumsfeld and Cheney to flatten their enemies,” he said. “They're taking advantage of that now because they don't know what's coming after Bush. They might have to deal with a responsible secretary of state who doesn't think chaos in the Middle East is such a great idea.”
“Bush has basically mortgaged your house,” Baer said regarding the administration's general Middle East policy, “and now he's gone to the roulette table.”
Both Israel and Hezbollah should be condemned for the deaths of civilians, but the toll is far higher in Lebanon than in Israel, which you'd never know based on the photographs being run in U.S. newspapers. The Angry Arab website ran a series photos of victims in southern Lebanon, which were taken by the AP, according to the website, but which I have not seen thus far in U.S. newspapers.
