Israel/Palestine
Related: About this forumWest Bank operation turns from farce into tragedy
Operation Brothers Keeper has entered its grotesque phase. If it didnt involve the lives, the honor and the liberty of Israelis and Palestinians, one could almost laugh.But in farce, as in farce - in the end, it always turns into tragedy. The events of the past week have long since passed beyond the sphere of concern for the kidnapped teens, and the grotesqueness of it all is only growing.
It is ridiculous to hear the goals of the operations as proclaimed with unfathomable gravity by politicians, generals and court commentators: To pulverize the Hamas infrastructure and dismember the Palestinian unity government, as if this were not a recurring nightmare that always ends with Israel losing the upper hand.
From Operation Cast Lead to Operation Pillar of Defense, from one operation to the next, Hamas only keeps getting stronger. It is ridiculous to listen to the finance minister talk of our children why not babies? Its ridiculous to watch as soldiers confiscate computers and office equipment from the offices of news organizations and charities and believe that they have the power to destroy this popular movement.
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.600214
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)Ridiculous to watch them stop farmers from reaching their fields and to think that this will bring the yeshiva students home. Ridiculous to see the displays of confiscated weapons: a few knives and rusty rifles laid out on an army blanket. Ridiculous to think that one of the most advanced armies in the world is pursuing a war against an army of barefoot peasants. Ridiculous to hear the heroic theories and the glorification of the power of the Israel Defense Forces and to know that despite its name and its reputation it is mainly a police force, with a missing persons department and a traffic department that mans roadblocks.
It is both ridiculous and depressing to see the local news coverage. IDF Spokesman Lt. Col. (res.) Roni Daniel, also known as the defense correspondent for Israel Channel 2 news, recommends extending the military operation indefinitely, no less. A different, daring and co-opted reporter from the channel, embedded with a unit on a deep raid, describes what he sees as if it were the Invasion of Normandy.
Its just Arura, a Palestinian village, described as the Hamas capital of the West Bank (I thought that was Hebron), during a wedding. Is a wedding a good thing? asks the brigade commander, Asher Ben Lulu, whose Kfir Brigade has a very checkered past of harassing civilians. So much for the wedding, but who cares. The brigade commander admits that his soldiers are now arresting activists, not wanted militants (he says theyve all been taken into custody already,) and pulls out the doomsday weapon: Every vase (in the home of a wanted man who is in exile in Turkey,) says Ben Lulu, the assessor, is worth a lot of money. The mans elderly mother was also arrested once. For what? Terror. But the soldiers get all its inhabitants out of the house before the cameras come, so as not to ruin the party of the televised raid.
A different reporter (from the Walla! news website) has a different sort of occasion in Jenin. He too has been conscripted for the propaganda effort; he calls the refugee camp there a hornets nest, even while noticing an ad for television sets, especially for the World Cup, targeting those vicious beasts. O, hornets nest, we have returned to you. And no one says a word about these peoples lives, which have once again been brutally turned upside down, about the anxieties of the children and the troubles of the parents. The Palestinian population is divided into terror cells. There are no terrified parents there, no children peeing themselves out of fear, no one with anxiety disorders.
An Israeli woman whose physician husband treats Palestinian children how noble suggests that he stop operating on them, and also casually recommends cutting off the power supply to Hebron. She is considered leftist. The killings of two Palestinian teens are considered a footnote to the main point, but who dares compare their lives (and deaths) with those of our yeshiva students.
The sharp scent of zaatar rises from the earth, rhapsodizes the Channel 2 reporter, against a background of images from the nights operations, in a place that in my decades of covering I never smelled the sharp scent of zaatar. But I did smell the sharp scent of something else: of that cursed disease that is running rampant.
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.600214
DetlefK
(16,423 posts)Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)shira
(30,109 posts)http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.598719
Not only does he excuse terrorists today, but future terrorists of tomorrow...
A child who has seen his house destroyed, his brother killed and his father humiliated will not forgive.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/the-idf-has-no-mercy-for-the-children-in-gaza-nursery-schools-1.268172
In the same article, Levy whitewashes Hamas' warcrimes, like their cynical use of using children as human shields...
What a humanitarian.