More boom for our buck

Published by Antony Loewenstein July 19th, 2006 in Israel

While dutiful Zionists mouth platitudes in the US (”We will stand with Israel, because Israel is standing for American values as well as Israeli ones”) and Rupert Murdoch serenades Hillary Clinton (they must both love the New York Mets), a more nuanced analysis of the Middle East conflict is essential.

Robert Blecher is a fellow at the Center for Human Rights at the University of Iowa and an editor of Middle East Report:

…Radical Islam is not the defining or unifying factor that links the south with the north: Hamas and Hizballah have different bones to pick with Israel. Hamas’ struggle is against occupation, and more specifically, about how to achieve a mutual cessation of hostilities and formalize, in one way or another, its right to govern the territories of the Palestinian Authority as the Palestinians’ elected government. Hizballah’s goals in the current fighting are more limited: to secure the release of Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails while simultaneously flexing the movement’s muscles to stave off pressure to disarm. By lumping together these different struggles, and tying them to Damascus and distant Tehran, Israeli casts resolvable political disagreements as unfathomable, irrational hatred, thereby justifying its broad and violent offensive.

Some, of course, hope and pray for a regional war.

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