Israel declares war!

2 thoughts on “Israel declares war!”

1. … I will do such things –
   What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be
   The terrors of the Earth
   -William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 2, scene 4.

   Dispatch from the Past*

   “Well, under the cover of a rocket attack on Israeli towns, Hezbollah men had crossed the border fence that morning and had seized two Israeli soldiers inside Israeli territory, killing three others as they did so.

   An Israeli tank that pursued the captors into Lebanese territory hit a mine, which killed another four Israeli troops. Then, an infantryman beside the tank was killed.

   By evening, the UN official, senior official in Lebanon, Geir Pedersen, was calling the Hezbollah attack a violent breach of the UN’s Blue Line, the hastily constructed version of the international frontier created in June 2000 by an over-ambitious UN civil servant.

   But in Beirut, many Lebanese were angered when squads of Hezbollah men drove through the streets of the capital to celebrate the border crossing. All that night, I heard the jets whispering high above the Mediterranean, waiting for dawn, for it was then that they descended.

   They came first to a little village of Dweir, near Nabatiyeh in southern Lebanon, where an Israeli plane dropped a bomb on the home of a Shia Muslim cleric. He was killed along with his wife and eight of his children.

   Then, the planes visited another home in Dweir and disposed of a family of seven. It was a brisk start to day two of Israel’s war on terror, a conflict that used some of the same language as George W. Bush’s larger war on terror.”

   Robert Fisk**
   in Night of Power: the Betrayal of the Middle East
   13 July 2006

   * WBT began posting on the 13th of July 2006 in response to Israel’s bombing of Beirut and its International Airport.
   **Robert Fisk covered the 1978 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the 1982 Israeli invasion and massacres at Shabra and Shatila, the 1993 Israeli bombardment, which was repeated in 1996 and again in 2006.

   On each occasion, only the dead were new.

   Hezbollah emerged as political resistance arising in response to Israeli invasions of Lebanon from 1982 onwards. A political organisation, Hezbollah developed an extensive network of:
   schools,
   clinics and hospitals,
   welfare and reconstruction programs,
   charities,
   and other social services,
   which became a major source of legitimacy among many Lebanese Shia, particularly in southern Lebanon, Beirut’s southern suburbs, and the Bekaa Valley.

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2. How far will Israel go with this power play?

   From the moment Israel started the attack on Gaza and the warplanes buzzed the the Syrian captial, Damascus, it was clear that the fight was going to widen.

   Remember the prediction (see New Year’s eve prediction book) that the invasion of Syria was going to occur this year.

   Is this the beginnning?

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