A WAR OR NOT A WAR?

A WAR OR NOT A WAR?

It was neither the intention of Israel or Lebanon to start a war between the two countries. However, a military conflict began in July 2006 when Hizbollah terrorists ambushed an Israeli army border patrol, kidnapping two Israeli soldiers and killing three others.

Stuart Palmer, one of my fellow residents in “Protea” (senior residence home), coined the above title in a booklet of his personal reflections. Stuart and his wife were living in Haifa, which was in the line of fire (together with Tiberias, Nazareth, Safed ), when the “war” broke out.

[Since retiring, Stuart has become the Northern Area Director of ICAN (Israeli Citizens Action Network) and a member of BIG (British Israel Group), whose organisations are actively involved in advocating Israel’s position in the conflict with the Palestinians and now Hizbollah.]

According to Stuart’s well-researched booklet: In the space of a few days, two million Israelis became under the threat of the thousands of rockets being fired by Hizbollah; over 300,000 were displaced from their homes; fifteen percent of the entire Israeli population were living in bomb shelters; Israeli’s tourist industry, which had finally started to recover from the Palestinian War, was again being ruined. Even when the missiles landed in open areas, they started forest fires or destroyed crops.

Alan Dershowitz (a prominent American lawyer and author known for his writings and media appearances in which he strongly, and often controversially, defended civil liberties) wrote:

“It should be obvious by now that Hizbollah and Hamas actually want the Israeli military to kill as many Lebanese and Palestinian civilians as possible. That is why they store their rockets underneath the beds of civilians; why they launch their missiles from crowded civilian neighborhoods and hide among civilians. They know that every civilian they induce Israel to kill hurts Israel in the media, and the international and human rights communities”.

Reporting on the scene from Lebanon, Greg Palcott from Fox News television wrote “Hizbollah knows that Lebanese deaths play very well in the media, mobilize popular anger, and bring new recruits”.

In comparison, the Israeli Army tried to minimize civilian casualties. It warned people living in southern Lebanon in advance of attack. Hizbollah stopped as many as it could from escaping, even setting up road blocks outside some villages. In others, they prevented the entrance of UN workers who wanted to help the people to leave.

While the war was still raging, the International Christian Zionist Centre in Jerusalem published the following article:

“In an honest and normal world, no-one would have been able to get away with as much terror, lynching, bloodshed and lying as the Hizballah and other Muslim terrorists have done had it not been for widespread anti-Semitism, especially among today’s journalists, and for Muslim-terror fearful media chiefs.

Here the Muslim terrorists, in accordance with their profession, target mainly the innocents sitting in planes or on buses, at their desks in the New York City trade towers, at dinner in their restaurants or, as Israel has just experienced, while just living in the cities at which thousands of rockets have been fired with the intention of killing and wounding as many men, women and children as possible. All this massacring and terrorizing combined does not earn an outcry equal to that directed against Israel when, against its wishes, it hits buildings from which many of these rockets have been fired – buildings and residents that have been cynically used as human shields by the Hizballah, as it shoots to kill civilians in northern Israel.”

In spite of all the resolutions and decrees of the United Nations no-one is ever brought to justice for what are quite clearly war crimes as defined in the UN Charter. Civilians have every right to be protected in war time, yet we only have to look at the war in Ukraine, to see how many civilians and civilian infrastructure have been targeted by the Russians.

Similarly in Israel, whether it be Hizbollah, Hamas or the PA, their terror tactics are primarily targeting civilians, and the world not only keeps silent, it often financially supports terrorism!