- This article at Haaretz, an openly leftish, peacenik Israeli newspaper, covers some things I've been thinking about for a couple of weeks. To sum it up: if we want to show that this is a war against Hizbollah, not Lebanon, we need to put our money where our mouths are - a stable and financially successful Lebanon is far less of a threat to Israel, and far less of a breeding-ground for extremists than is Lebanon as a pile of smoking ruins. We, paradoxically, have an opportunity to prove that there is compassion, not hatred, for the Lebanese civilians (but see below) caught up in this, and back that up with humanitarian aid, starting about the point where the bombs stop falling. I'm not sure I quite agree with every word of the article, but I agree with the point - even if it's only a symbolic thing, a joint Jewish/Arab reconstruction fund should be put together, maintained by as close to a disinterested third party as we can find. It may not achieve a huge amount of actual reconstruction, but the point should be made.
- Israel, for better or worse, and for real or imagined, has been living under siege conditions for about 58 years now. Every building is built with security in mind - most apartment/office/institutional buildings have a bomb shelter, and pretty much all buildings have a 'security room' or 'safe room' - a reinforced room, with metal shutters on the window, pointed away from whatever the nearest threat is expected to be. Netuah, which has individual houses, has communal shelters, maintained by the regional council, and the dorm buildings I lived in in Jerusalem all had shelters in the basement. In my main school, I worked in a shelter, underground, for a few months, which was good in terms of the weather (cool in summer, warm in winter), but it was slightly odd to go in every day, open the heavy metal door and go down under the strongly-fortified roof. I wonder to what extent - if any - things are similar in Lebanon? Would some of the victims of the violence be alive or uninjured if they had communal protection because they have expected attack for years? It's not a nice thing - as I said in my first post on this subject - that people live like that, but maybe it's more realistic.
- Israel has a conscript/reserve army - most able-bodied non-Arab (Druze and Bedouins are the only Arabs groups which volunteer in large numbers for the army) citizens are members of the army. That does not mean - as suicide bombers have claimed on occasion - that all such citizens are valid military targets. When Israeli authorities announce casualties, they make a separation between civilians and soldiers, and most of the Israelis who have died so far have been soldiers - meaning they were on active service, in a uniform, at the time. Most of the Lebanese who have died have been civilians, meaning that they are not members of the Lebanese armed forces. Unfortunately, that may not mean very much, since the Lebanese armed forces aren't particularly participating in the current violence... So the question is, do the huge, tragic numbers of Lebanese civilians include Hizbollah soldiers/terrorists/militants/activists - whatever you want to call them? A quick look at the current BBC headline story shows:
More than 900 Lebanese, most of them civilians have been killed in the conflict, the Lebanese government says. More than 80 Israelis, most of them soldiers, have also been killed.
But yes, very few Lebanese soldiers have been killed because they're not attacking Israel. I don't know the answer to this one - again, just a wondering. - I've been getting emails from an old friend in northern Israel - the one who organised the program I did there in 1995. At some point, I may write more about what he's been saying, but one quote - the end of an email from last week - does pretty much sum up the point:
...it is our duty to ensure that we don't just survive and continue, but we create a society based on Justice and Righteousness so we fulfill the dreams of two thousand years "that from Zion the Torah will go forth and the word of G-d from Jerusalem" despite the current reality we must be strengthened by our belief that the day will come that "no nation will raise its sword against another nation, and the art of warfare will no longer be taught"
The quotes there, of course, are from the Bible, from the book of Micah. My friend is more religious than I am, but that is a pretty clear definition of Zionism and of mainstream Israeli thought. Yes, it's a bit messianic, but it really is the point. I don't particularly want to argue the nature of Zionism here...