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Gray on Mon, Jul 31st 2006 11:06 AM


“There’s nobody in the country untouched by the war at the moment.”

And understandably so. Yet, one has to ask if Israel’s response to the Hizbullah raid and the kidnapping of two soldiers is proportionate. Was it justified to start a war against Lebanon, killing hundreds of Lebanese, ruining that country’s infrastructure, turning more than 700000 people into refugees and destabilizing the fragile democracy of the neighboring country?

This may sound cynical, but I wanted to put the ‘danger’ from Quassam rockets into relation. So I first checked the number of casualties so far. On day 19 of this war, 19 Israeli civilians lost their lives by terrorist missile attacks.
http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/15162381.htm

This is just one civilian casualty/day. Every single case is a tragedy, but the risk of being killed by a Hizbullah rocket doesn’t seem to be very high. How does this compare to other risks you face daily? I looked for numbers on car accident fatilities. The most recent data I found is from 2004. During that year, 480 people died on streets withing the green line.
http://bd.mot.gov.il/RoadSafety/English/Statistics.htm#casualties

This amounts to 1.3 people every day killed by Israeli traffic. So, the risk to be killed on the road is actually higher than that by terrorist rocket attacks. And I guess that’s the reason why Olmert hasn’t called for an evacuation of the north yet. This begs the question, if this isn’t an essential risk for Israel in any way, is it justified for the IAF to deliberately target Lebanese infrastructure and buildings when there is little to no evidence that there are really terrorists or weapons in them? What good are laser guided precision bombs for poinpoint attacks if you randomly use them against buildings when you simply guess a target could be in them? Doesn’t the disregard for ‘collateral damage’, more than 500 Lebanese civilians killed so far, make Olmert and Halutz worse terrorists than Nasrallah?

jennifer on Mon, Jul 31st 2006 4:03 PM


Not really.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/27/AR2006072701725.html

How you can presume to make a comparison between Israeli deaths due to Hizbollah rockets and Israeli traffic accidents is beyond me. There is a huge difference psychologically between the two.

Did DC area residents go about their daily routine when the DC sniper was picking people off in 2002? Not really.

Gray on Tue, Aug 1st 2006 12:13 AM


“There is a huge difference psychologically between the two.”

Well, the victims are dead, they don’t care anymore how they died. So the difference is just in the minds of the people, because humans aren’t good in evaluating abstract dangers. The numbers don’t lie, and they show that the population has an exaggerated fear of danger, when in reality the risk by being killed in a traffic accideent is even higher. Well, what are Israeli politicians doing to inform the public that the situation isn’t as bad as it may be received? Nothing. Instead, they are putting oil into the flames in order to exploit the emotions for their own political purposes.

As for Krauthammer – he’s a right wing nutcase who has been wrong on foreign issues in almost every single case in the last years. A quote by him is not really an argument. And pls note that in this piece he’s comparing a conventional war with the war on terror, he isn’t mentioning the unnecessary airstrikes north of Beirut (outside the range of Qassams, in christian or druze territory), and he doesn’t mention at all that it’s only a minority of the Lebanese who actively support Hizbullah, but that the Israeli response destabilizes the democratically elected government, the only long term chance for peace. Check his chain of arguments and you notice it’s all spin.

Most important, he choses to ignore the fact that Israel had six years to build a lasting peace with the Lebanese. But your politicians didn’t do anything to improve relations, there wasn’t any support for the new government and there haven’t been any contacts with Hizbullah. All that time, the Lebanese border was a hot one, with shooting incidents by the terrorists and with violations of sovereignty by the IDF. You didn’t had to be a mastermind to conclude that this was an unstable situation and that an escalation was in the air. Yet Israel relied on the deterrence by his weapons, because any attempt at peace with Hizbullah would have required to get into negotiations woth the palestinians first. And we all know why first Sharon and now Olmert effectively torpedoed any contract with them: Because the majority of Israelis want to keep most, if not all of the territories.

Land for peace? Israel only offers this for nations that are a real threat, Egypt and Jordan (I know Jordan’s military isn’t so dangerous, but the risk of a two front war is). Syria isn’t up to par with the IDF and Lebanon doesn’t have a regular army worth it’s name. But it will never be possible to enforce peace by military might, the hatred lingers on and fuels terrorism. Israel has to engage in a real peace process, better sooner than later. That’s the truth, and Krauthammer should be brave enough to say it, because Hizbullah as a popular movement can only be defeated by killing about half of Lebanon’s Shia. Even the most warmongering neocon should be able to see that this would be genocide and Israel can’t do it.

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