It would take a book to answer all the questions and criticisms that followed the publication of this article. I’ve decided to attempt short answers to a dozen of these.<\/p>\n
It would take a book to answer all the questions and criticisms that followed the publication of this article. I’ve decided to attempt short answers to a dozen of these.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n1. “Why does one of the most powerful military countries in the world, supported by the single superpower NEED the left?”<\/strong>
\nIsrael does not<\/em> need the support of the Left. But the Left needs to support Israel. If it does not do so, it has lost its moral compass<\/em>.
\n2. “But how do you measure\/judge whether Israel has gone overboard in its use of overwhelming military power in Lebanon?”<\/strong>
\nThat’s a hard question to answer. By definition, the waging of warfare by modern armies is terrifying, and will always appear to be overwhelming. But while there are many grey areas, sometimes the picture is quite clear. For example, the massacre of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in 1982 by Israel’s Lebanese Christian allies with the IDF standing idly by was clearly a war crime. But putting some craters into an airport runway or imposing a naval blockade is perfectly legitimate. Let us judge each Israeli action separately, and let us be prepared to criticize the IDF when it does use excessive force.
\n3. “How does using phrases like Islamo-fascist help?”<\/strong>
\nIt helps because it makes the issue clearer. Israel is fighting a battle against forces with which we democratic socialists have nothing in common. Nothing.
\nOddly enough, at least one of my critics actually seems to support Hamas, and writes: “The reason why the Hamas result was a bad one for Israel is that Hamas will not settle for an unfair deal, like Arafat would have (and almost did). A peace settlement with Hamas will involve much less Palestinian compromise then a settlement made with Fatah.”
\nMost of you do seem to understand that we on the Left have nothing in common with Hamas and Hizbollah.
\n4. “Destroying civilian infrastructure (and it is civilian infrastructure even if terrorists use it) will not by itself stop Hizballah attacks.”<\/strong>
\nThat is correct. Destroying Hizbollah means blowing up its mobile rocket launchers, killing its leaders, flattening its South Beirut headquarters, knocking its television station off the air, cutting off its access to Syrian and Iranian arms — all of which the IDF is currently doing. The critical thing is to understand that Hizbollah has a limited number of missiles, and cannot be re-supplied so long as Lebanon is cut off.<\/em> This is why the naval blockade and the closing down of Beirut airport are so significant.
\n5. “Hezbollah might be a purely south Lebanese phenomenon.”<\/strong>
\nIf Hizbollah had merely been a local “resistance” to real or imagined Israeli oppression, it would not have posed a military threat to the Jewish state. But it is clearly a proxy army fighting on behalf of much larger and more powerful forces.
\n6. “Do you really think that the current action will result in the overwhelming defeat of either of these movements?”<\/strong>
\nI hope so, yes. The military defeat of Hizbollah and Hamas would be a good thing.
\n7. “How does supporting either side help?”<\/strong>
\nBecause the victory of the wrong side would be such a disaster that it must be prevented. Hizbollah’s victory — indeed, its very survival as a military force — would be a disaster first and foremost for the people of Lebanon<\/em>. That must be prevented. Hizbollah’s aggression started this war, and by supporting Israel, we are helping to bring the fighting to an end.
\n8. “Disgusting. Not a word about the suffering of the Lebanese.”<\/strong>
\nI wrote: “We should be giving our full support to Israel, while of course insisting that the Israeli military behave according to international law and keep civilian casualties to a minimum.”
\nI also wrote: “It [Israel] is hitting back with all the firepower at its disposal, but doing so in a way to minimize civilian casualties. That is why it decided to flatten Hamas’ foreign ministry building at 2:00 in the morning, when it was unoccupied. Or used targetted aerial bombardment to create craters in the runways of Beirut airport, rather than bombing terminals crammed with people. (Either way, they would have shut down the airport — but they chose a way that saved innocent lives.)”
\nOf course the suffering of innocent civilians in Lebanon, Palestine and Israel concerns me — which is why I support a swift and decisive victory for Israel.
\n9. “Images of children killed by the Israeli Air force … Is this what you want the left to support Mr Lee?”<\/strong>
\nNo. And I could show image of innocent civilians, including children, killed by Israel’s enemies. The point of this war is to stop the Hizbollah and Hamas terrorists from causing any more deaths of innocents, whether they be Israelis or Arabs.
\n10. “The mind boggles at any attempt to characterise a government that is turning whole swathes of the Middle East into a walled concentration camp as ‘left’!”<\/strong>
\nI never wrote that the Israeli government was a Left government; I did say that the Left was part of the coalition, and it is. The Israel Labour Party is a member of the Socialist International, and a sister party of the British and Australian Labour Parties, the Canadian New Democrats, Democratic Socialists of America, the African National Congress, etc.
\n11. “To act as if Israel is facing a threat to its existence is ludicrous.”<\/strong>
\nThat’s very easy to say from the comfort of living in Europe or North America. But that’s not how it feels to people today in Sderot, Haifa, Afula, Tiberias, Nahariya, and Kiryat Shemona. And it’s not just their subjective take on things. Iran does pose an existential threat to Israel, and not only to Israel, once it becomes a nuclear power. The Iranian threat is very real, and has been recognized as such by the international community.
\n12. “There is an implicit assumption in your post, and in much writing on this topic: that there must be some legitimate response to terrorism. This assumption is false. Not all problems have solutions.”<\/strong>
\nIn other words, learn to live with terrorism? I think Israel is right to at least make the attempt<\/em> to deal with the problem.
\nThough I would hesitate to add — as I wrote in my original article — “We should insist that at the end of the fighting, Israeli forces be pulled back to the international border with Lebanon, and withdrawn from Gaza. And we should support a renewal of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians leading to a withdrawal from the West Bank.”
\nOnly the creation of an independent, viable, democratic Palestinian state living side by side with Israel offers the hope of a long-term solution to the problem of terrorism.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"