The Middle East Continues...

[Thorgal]

Originally posted by Cort Haus
Hasn't Egypt recieve more aid than Israel in recent years, though?

Nope (And meaningless for the point btw):

Direct US assistance to Israel, so no counting indirect assistence nor other countries assistence:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/U.S._Assistance_to_Israel1.html

Total international assistence to egypt:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/egyptaid.html

In any case any assistance to Egypt is a way of keeping it tied up and in the side of the "good guys", benefitting Israel.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
Spiff, I read Haaretz pretty regularly, and I dont the impression that anyone says ugly things are ok cause theyre "team" There are some folks who attack particular govt policies, and others who defend them cause they are needed for security. Its implicit in the latter that they are justified.

I also almost never get the same tone or approach from Israeli doves that I do from external critics of Israel. There is a much greater sense of reality, and of whats possible. A vastly different set of motivations.

Id say the difference is that Israelis are dealing with reality.

Yes, that's pretty much what I wanted to express, though my choice of words was poor. Israelis want to protect their safety and those of their loved ones, so they tend to have a "pragmatic" mindset about their security issues. My impression is that there's a tendancy to judge the government's action on the results it can bring (or has brought), and not on the morals of it.

As such, I feel that the Israelis think much less in term of "good guys" and "bad guys" than the rest of the world. They are more prone to think in terms of interests, and are thus more able to accept doing things that they might find not moral individually (when they feel they have to).

I also agree with you that most foreigners talking about Israel have an "idealist" mindset, in that they're more interested in morals than in results. For the very reason you said: foreigners tend not to have a personal stake in Israel.

And this is why I think the pro-Israeli sentiment in the US comes from the belief that Israel are the "good guys". Because if they weren't seen as the "good guys", but as a country that does what it takes to protect its interests, just like its neighbours, the US pro-Israeli support would falter.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Spiffor

Yes, that's pretty much what I wanted to express, though my choice of words was poor. Israelis want to protect their safety and those of their loved ones, so they tend to have a "pragmatic" mindset about their security issues. My impression is that there's a tendancy to judge the government's action on the results it can bring (or has brought), and not on the morals of it.

As such, I feel that the Israelis think much less in term of "good guys" and "bad guys" than the rest of the world. They are more prone to think in terms of interests, and are thus more able to accept doing things that they might find not moral individually (when they feel they have to).

I also agree with you that most foreigners talking about Israel have an "idealist" mindset, in that they're more interested in morals than in results. For the very reason you said: foreigners tend not to have a personal stake in Israel.

And this is why I think the pro-Israeli sentiment in the US comes from the belief that Israel are the "good guys". Because if they weren't seen as the "good guys", but as a country that does what it takes to protect its interests, just like its neighbours, the US pro-Israeli support would falter.

I dont think we agree as much as you think we do on this. I suspect every Israeli dove could imagine SOME things that Israel could do that would be flat out immoral, (like mass expulsion or deliberate killing of arab civilians) and would reject them as such. Now they would ALSO acknowledge that such actions are not pragmatic either, and so they might not be tested. But I think they WOULD, for the most part, assert that they are "good guys" and their cause is just.

Perhaps what you mean is that they DONT assert that the other side is "bad guys" and that while they assert that what they need to do is morally justified, they ALSO see that what the arabs do is morally justified from the arab standpoint - its a tragic conflict of rights.

To this I would respond - 1.AFAICT thats by no means true of ALL dovish Israelis - many in fact DO view the arab side as flat out wrong, but they accept that they need to compromise anyway. 2. For those who DO hold that view, its NOT held in regard to every player - IE most Israeli doves are understanding WRT to Abbas, but more judgemental wrt Hamas, Hezbollah, Assad, etc. Indeed there are so many players on the arab side, that its easy to have a great many gradations of Israeli dove in this regard.

But then thats true of Israel supporters beyond Israel to.

You know what I really think it is - selection bias. Among Israelis (and to a lesser extent diaspora Jews) you get a full range of opinion, from ultrahawk to centrist to ultradove. Among "outsiders" you mainly hear from those with more extreme opinions - the folks who are more nuanced, unless they very deeply into international relations, just arent interested enough to speak out that much, or if they do, dont pursue the same depth of knowledge.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Spiffor

And this is why I think the pro-Israeli sentiment in the US comes from the belief that Israel are the "good guys". Because if they weren't seen as the "good guys", but as a country that does what it takes to protect its interests, just like its neighbours, the US pro-Israeli support would falter.

Again, I think that if every American read Haaretz every day, there support for Israel overall (if not every policy) would increase, not decrease (and yes i realize thats not quite how you framed it)

[Arrian]

If only Haaretz, perhaps it would. I would, however, suggest that they also read the JP, the Lebanon Star, and perhaps dabble in some of the more "interesting" arab publications. Just for spice.

-Arrian

[GePap]

Originally posted by Sikander

It's not surprising then that even when we Americans and Europeans see the same news story, we have different reactions to it in general. Neither is it surprising when journalists from one place or the other report in accordance with their own experiences and prejudices. They are likely unaware that others will perceive a bias. This isn't brainwashing.

I agree its not brainwashing in the US, but the US media is still terrible.

The US media, being totally corporate, does everything it can to provide "what the customer wants", and the general customer of news does not seek balanced, nuanced analysis, but gut wrenching emotion and clear stories in black and white.

News as a source of information should provide facts, and educated analysis (which can certainly be biased, but that's fine as long as the author makes their bias clear early on and does not try to pass himself off as non-biased), and in the US that does not occur much sadly. Watching CNN is a joke, and FOX is, well, impossible.

[GePap]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/18/world/middleeast/18hezbollah.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&fta=y

A Girl’s Life Bound Close to Hezbollah
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: August 18, 2006

AINATA, Lebanon, Aug. 17 — For Zahra Fadlallah, a serious 17-year-old, Hezbollah was always family. Two of her brothers were fighters. Her mother was an activist. A distant relative is a hard-line Hezbollah member in Parliament.

When the war hit, she stayed in this village to help her mother bake bread for the fighters. Both were killed in an Israeli airstrike in late July. Their bodies were dug out of the rubble this week.

Israel’s goal of uprooting Hezbollah from southern Lebanon has frequently been questioned by critics who say the group is deeply woven into society and cannot simply be cut out. An afternoon with the Fadlallah family in this southern Lebanese village shows that the group not only is part of society, but also helps form the shape of life itself.

It has a vast social services network that pays for health care and education, performs weddings and reduces electric bills — important considerations for Shiites in the south, who are some of the country’s poorest citizens.

Israelis, noting that their troops left Lebanon six years ago, say that the southern Lebanese should have no basis for ill will toward them. But this is a culture of long memories, and six years is not a long time for the wounds of the 18-year occupation to heal.

When Zahra was 10, her mother was arrested. She watched while Lebanese working for Israeli authorities put a bag over her mother’s head and led her out of the house. Her father was taken on the same day, and Zahra spent three days in the house by herself. Her brothers and sisters, already military age and deeply involved with Hezbollah, had moved to Beirut, north of the Israeli zone. Later, she hid while soldiers searched the house for weapons.

“It made a wound in her,” said Ali Fadlallah, one of Zahra’s brothers, who spoke in the living room of their family house as mourners came and went through a central hallway.

She had to help care for her father, who returned several days later badly beaten; he was refused admission to the local hospital because he was suspected as a Hezbollah collaborator, Ali said.

Every year in Ainata, villagers hold a poetry reading to commemorate the date that the Israelis withdrew. Zahra was one of the organizers.

In 1982, when the Israeli military first came to this area, it was to uproot local Palestinian guerrilla bases. That was a military success in the short term. But the Palestinians were outsiders, and Hezbollah is homegrown. With the end of the war, Hezbollah has emerged militarily diminished but far stronger politically. That new power will make voices like the Fadlallahs’ even more important as the weak Lebanese state stumbles ahead.

“Hezbollah is from here,” said Zahra’s fiancé, a Hezbollah activist who would give only his first name, Fadhi. “It’s the families of Ainata. It’s not a stranger.”

Not every family has a fighter. Hezbollah will not disclose the number of its fighters, but it is believed to be relatively small. Even so, tens of thousands of Shiites across south Lebanon are involved with Hezbollah in other ways. They hang banners and teach religious studies. They help in hospitals. They keep watch in neighborhoods.

The story of Zahra is typical. She was born in 1989, the same year one of her brothers, a fighter named Ahmed, and her older sister, Raja, moved to southern Beirut. Ahmed had joined Hezbollah and had been secretly working against Israeli forces in the south, and the Israeli administration, with a Lebanese staff, had discovered his work.

At that time, Hezbollah members communicated by secret missives, Ali said, and Zahra was the most inventive member of the family when it came to hiding them so they would make it through Israeli checkpoints.

“She had a lot of suggestions,” said Ali, sitting in the living room. Photographs of family members standing with Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, hung on the walls. An empty, knee-high artillery shell stood in the corner, holding a spray of artificial flowers.

The occupation squeezed life into uncomfortable shapes, broadly increasing Hezbollah’s popular appeal throughout southern Lebanon. The Fadlallah family remained separated until 2000, when the Israelis withdrew. Zahra was 11.

“I didn’t see my family for six years,” said a high school teacher and Hezbollah member who had come to pay his respects. “That would motivate anybody to want to change things.”

Hezbollah views Israel as an enemy, saying that its very existence means that Muslim lands were taken, changing the region forever.

But while Hezbollah’s political rhetoric sometimes refers to coming to Jerusalem and routinely refuses to acknowledge Israel as a state — maps in bookstores here label northern Israel as Palestine — voices in towns and villages across the south talk not of destroying Israel but of defending themselves from what they see as its aggressiveness.

“All the wars with Israel we were fighting to keep our land only,” said Raja, Zahra’s older sister, sitting in a black smock and black hijab on the living room couch.

Another brother, Muhamed, said that Israel had taken Muslim lands and that he could never accept it until they were given back. But even he did not see the Palestinians as a cause for Lebanon to invade Israel with the goal of destroying the state.

The high school teacher chimed in: “People of this village don’t want anyone to come and take their land. Not Israel, not America, not even Iran.”

Iran started Hezbollah in the 1980’s, as part of its Islamic revolution. The group is believed to be responsible for the kidnapping of an American reporter, Terry Anderson, and for the bombing of a Marine barracks in 1983. The group later evolved, adopting a more moderate public face under the leadership of Mr. Nasrallah, who took over in 1992 and began deepening the party’s social network. Programs started small: at the height of the Lebanese civil war, the group distributed water in hard-hit areas.

It was in Hezbollah charity work that Zahra found herself, Raja said. She wanted to become a doctor to help villagers and fighters. She seemed old beyond her years. In her teens, she kept the family finances. She was organized and never lost things.

“If you told her a secret, she would keep it,” the teacher said, wearing a Dolce & Gabbana T-shirt and a pair of jeans.

The family kept resisting. Ahmed was killed in 1999 in the village of Haddata fighting Israeli soldiers. The living room where the relatives spoke had several machine guns propped in the corner behind a door. The fields and farmlands leading to the town are singed with black marks from Katyusha rocket launchings, perfectly round like giant cigarette burns.

When the war started, Zahra was planning her wedding. She approached it with her characteristic seriousness. Her purse, found in the crushed basement where she had been hiding when the bomb fell, contained a note she had written to herself, truths she felt she should live by once she became Fadhi’s wife.

“Men talk more than women,” she wrote in clear Arabic script. “Set priorities. Be frank. Talk everything through.”

Even in that part of her life, Hezbollah was present. A photograph of Zahra and Fadhi smiling with her parents, standing next to Mr. Nasrallah in front of green satin-looking curtains, is framed in the living room. It was taken when they were engaged.

Once the airstrikes began and several artillery shells punched through Zahra’s bedroom wall, she moved with her mother out of the house into a basement just down the hill. They continued to bake and cook, giving the food to men who then took it to the fighters.

Ali called many times, desperately trying to persuade her to leave the village. She would not. Soon after, telephone contact was lost.

By the end of the war, the house was still standing, relatively undamaged. The basement shelter, however, was smashed beyond recognition. Zahra, her mother and at least three others, including a 5-year-old boy, were killed in the room, according to the Red Cross.

Villagers, who used a 48-hour cease-fire part of the way through the war to get to Beirut, told Zahra’s family she had been killed. Another brother, Amir, was killed in Bint Jbail, a neighboring village that is Hezbollah’s traditional stronghold. He was working in the hospital there, Raja and Ali said.

On Wednesday, the house breathed a heavy sadness. Early in the afternoon, a new group of relatives arrived from out of town. Embraces were exchanged. Women wailed.

The family waited as the villagers and emergency workers continued to dig. A group of young men had dug a temporary grave on a small, leafy hill for Zahra the day before, but Fadhi had a different idea. He wanted to bury her next to her brother in the fighters’ cemetery.

“This is where she should be,” he said, looking down at the small plot, a yellow Hezbollah flag stuck through the metal of its gate.

[Jaakko]

An update - Israel decides to violate the ceasefire for ****s and giggles.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5265934.stm

[DinoDoc]

Why is France trying to torpedo the UN force they argued for?

[Az]

An update - Israel decides to violate the ceasefire for ****s and giggles.

umm, you mean a ceasefire that comes as a part of a UN resolution that is being completely overlooked?

[Jaakko]

Originally posted by Az
umm, you mean a ceasefire that comes as a part of a UN resolution that is being completely overlooked?

So it's ok to just restart the war?

[Az]

I've been calling for this since the 3rd day.

[Jaakko]

Originally posted by Az
I've been calling for this since the 3rd day.

Yeah, if the politicians would just let the army do its job, then glorious victory would be assured!

[Az]

Insanely enough, it's true.

In any case, the war started due to the non-implementation of 1559. 1701 has any viability or meaning only if it's implemented. If it's not, It's nothing but another harmful piece of paper.

[Jaakko]

Originally posted by Az
Insanely enough, it's true.

In any case, the war started due to the non-implementation of 1559. 1701 has any viability or meaning only if it's implemented. If it's not, It's nothing but another harmful piece of paper.

What exactly do you think is achieved by either invading Lebanon again or reducing the country again into a failed state? Or is the delusion still alive, that by Israel being tough enough the Arabs will be intimidated to submission?