Israel and Lebanon

It is terrible what is happening in Lebanon. Innocent people are being killed, stranded and a whole country is being destroyed by Israel. Below is a summary of an article by Robert Blecher on the politics of the Isreali attack on Palestine and Lebanon.

For many in Israel, and apparently also in the Bush administration, the
escalating wars in Lebanon and Gaza are conjoined in a single war against a
unified "axis of terror" linking Hizballah and Hamas to Damascus and distant
Tehran. By lumping together the different struggles of Hizballah and Hamas,
Israel casts resolvable political crises as unfathomable, irrational hatred,
in an attempt to justify its massive bombing campaigns.

As Robert Blecher argues, the dual conflicts are indeed linked by more than
captive Israeli soldiers -- not by radical Islam, but by Israel's plan to
"disengage" unilaterally from much of the West Bank to manage its conflict
with the Palestinians. With its two-front war, the Israeli government has
set out to prove to the Israeli public that disengagement is not a mistake.
Blecher's article, "Converging Upon War," is now posted at Middle East
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