Middle East question.

[curiouswombat]

I am puzzled. My husband and daughter were equally puzzled when they heard the same thing on TV whilst we ate.

I have seen an Israeli government spokesman who told us that they were having a 48 hour cessation of bombing of the Lebanon 'Except to back up our ground forces and to hit at Hezzbollah fighters'.

But isn't that exactly what they have been telling us is all that they have been doing for the last two or three weeks?

Also 'Israel rejects any idea of a cease-fire until an international force is in place'. But if they keep shooting won't members of any international force be killed whilst it gets into place? Which is presumably why the UN says it cannot put such a force into place before there is a ceasefire.

(My daughter, with that bright logic of the eighteen year old, has concluded that Lebanese children are in fact a legitimate target for the Israeli government - the horrors that they see around them will make them more likely to want to join Hezbollah - and so killing them now prevents them doing Israel any harm in the future. She says, after all, if she was Lebanese she would be joining Hezbollah right now - even though she is a practising Christian, because nobody else seems to be doing anything about the death of the innocents - and if she thinks that way, she reckons it is fairly obvious that Lebanese children and young people will use the same logic.)

Comments

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

It seems fairly obvious to me that the current attack by Israel is the best recruiting drive Hezbollah could have - if people are fairly content with the way things are they see no reason to join a 'freedom' movement to improve their lot whilst risking themselves. But if someone razes your house to the ground, kills your granny and your kid brother, and destroy the industry in which you were working, you suddenly find those who are out to get revenge very desirable.

I would guess that 'The Real IRA' (which I have often thought the IRA should do under either copywrite or trades-description legislation) have fewer new recruits these days than they would have had twenty years ago, whatever they were called then. So if Tony Blair pushed non-violence as a solution in NI, why does he not push for it in the Middle East? What awful secret does GWB know about him?