Israelis See Their Own Nation As "Neighborhood Bully"...

[bridgit]

'You can see Lebanon from my sister’s backyard. She and her family and thousands of others in northern Israel live with a constant roar of gunfire -- mostly from Israeli cannons aiming to kill Lebanese, occasionally from a Hezbollah shell that might land on them.

But the real threat to Israel doesn’t come from Lebanese rockets. The real threat comes from the Israelis themselves -- and the rest of the world -- forgetting how and why this war started.

Israel does not go to war just to retrieve kidnapped soldiers. In the past, it has been ready to ransom them by returning Palestinian and Lebanese captives that it holds, just as the kidnappers ask. So why war now? For answers I’ve turned to Jewish writers in Israel’s top newspaper, Ha’aretz.'

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0719-33.htm

[IndyOp]

1. Israel must give up the fiction that it is an innocent victim...

"merely responding to unprovoked aggression, and the vain hope that brutal force can restore an insecure bully’s wounded pride."

True for Israel and True for the U.S.

[Junkdrawer]

2. Key quote:

For the Israeli government, another Ha’aretz columnist wrote, “it is best that the Palestinians remain extremists because then no one will ask the government of Israel to negotiate with them. How do we ensure that the Palestinians remain radical? We simply strike at them, over and over.” So Israel responded to the Palestinian offer of negotiated peace with an allout assault on Gaza. That’s how and why it all began.

Peace = concessions.

But:

Perpetual Terror Attacks = expansion and inhuman repression = Perpetual Terror Attacks etc., etc.

Same old same old.

[bridgit]

3. something akin an oppressive husband, israel seems to be good...

with casting her neighbors into barefoot squalor