Re: From: Peace
"So, again, why would Israel feel any sense of needing to attend peace talks when they know that the day after the talks, Hezbollah will be upto the same old crap again?"

I know, I know. I was at an anti-war rally today, and the organisers, though criticising Israel for their onslaught into Lebanon, in the same breath said that even if Hizbullah were to win and control an independent palestine, it would be very unlikely to produce a governemnet dedicated to personal freedom, and be more along the lines of the Taliban, or the House of Saud (which adds deep corruption to fundamentalism). They also pointed out that while Israel has the right to defend itself, it has gone far beyond that in Lebanon - e.g it has bombed cities far north of the area where Hizbullah have operated, has destroyed most of the infrastructure - infrastructure which Lebanon painstakingly rebuilt for 15 years after their civil war and a previous Israeli occupation ended - and in effect, punished the Lebanese population. Furthermore there is the issue of the Shaaba farms, the source of the Litani river, which as I already said, is one of the aims of Israel. Israel still refuses to hand these back to lebanon.
Hizbullah and the other extremists can be marginalised and deafeated even, but not in the way Ehud Olmert and Bush want to go about it. they are applying the military solution, but the only way that can achieve its aim is through genocide. The more you apply it, the more you marginalise and destroy people's lives, and the more you radicalise them. After all, if you've lost your job / livelihood, your house, your hobbies, your whole life, and maybe even some of your friends and family, there's nothing left except radical politics. Your life becomes cheap and you want revenge for the wrongs that have been done to you. You can see it also in Israelis who have been targeted by Hizbullah rockets - blind support for Olmert and the IDF, perhaps a burning resentment towards Muslims, aho come to be associated with hizbullah etc.,
My suggestion is that terrorism can, contrary to popular logic, be defeated by kindness. It's a radical idea, I know, but one that still remains to be tried. Sure, you will always have a small percentagefor whom mayhem is a chosen way of life, but they can be greatly marginalised by giving the population as a whole hope and a standard of living. Their faith needs to be restored in the mechanisms of democracy and dialogue. At present, that is not the case, and the White House administartion - especially Cheney, Rice and other eminence grises bear a lot of the blame (Israel would not be so self-confidently attacking left right and centre if it did not feel supported by the White House for one thing). Rice et al, have helped make the UN security council a talk shop or puppet, for enforcing the will of the powerful nations. Israel has ignored plenty of UN resolutions, and the US made a joke of them by calling for a UN resolution to sanction an invasion of Iraq, but going ahead and invading it anyway before one was forthcoming. This shows that the real function of the UN is to give the gloss of respectability to what the powerful nations want to do. There was a cartoon in one of the papers here about Rice, when she said the time wasn't right for a ceasefire. It showed her standing with lebanon in the background being slowly reduced to rubble, and saying 'not yet.....not yet...." and finally, when everything was destroyed 'now!'. Palestinians, Hizbullah and most of the Arab world are no less intelligent than we in the west and they can see this blatant bias and hypocrisy a mile away. While arab governements may not do much, it is their young population who get indignant, so indignant that they go and sign up to HJzbullah or the taliban or whatever, making western accustaions of 'arab terrorism' a self-fulfilling prophecy. The US gives over $1 billion in aid to Israel every year. If some of that money was diverted to alleviating suffering in palestine (the US was giving SOME money to palestine, but a pittance compared to what Israel got, and none now that the palestinians have used their democratic vote 'incorrectly' to elect Hamas as their leadership) and to rebuild lebanon, you would see much goodwill generated in the arab world. The funds could be carefully monitored to ensure they did not go into armaments etc., Israel could make the moves I suggested above, and the US could start acting more impartially. All of this would, believe me, bring about a dramatic change. It would need to be open and transparent and honest though. The benefits would be peace in the middle east, far better security around the world, far fewer terrorist attacks, if any, and a good deal for everyone. As long as arabs in the region see that UN resolutions are enforced only with respect to them, and that all the funding goes to one side only, and that Israel is allowed to grab land, get away with having nuclear weapons etc., while they are not, their dignity if not their survival will demand thgat they fight.
If the weak countries are the only ones obliged to paly by the rules and must make all the moves, and the first moves, nothing will be achieved. That is because it will impossible to escape the conclusion that they had to do so BECAUSE they were weak. On the the other hand, if the powerful countries, like the US, Britain and Israel were to show some generosity of spirit, real progress could be made, and the confidence of the arab people rebuilt.
This is not likely to happen though. Bush, Rice, Olmert are too short-sighted to see there are no real winners in the way they are going, and that it will mean an ever more unstable world. Moreover, it would interfere with their stated aim of creating a new middle east - one with its people and oil very much under US domination (e.g look at Iraq: with its recently elected puppet government. The White House tolerated Saddam the monster for years until he went 'rogue' and bit the hand that fed him). Condoleeza Rice disgustingly called all these deaths in Lebanon - including the deaths of hundreds of children - 'the birth pangs of a new middle east' Birth pangs are normally associated with something good - birth, new life - but in Rice's twisted mind, she sees it as death clearing away unwanted Arabs and reshaping their lands - in short, Lebensraum. Like I said in an earlier post, the Nazi mentality is not confined to the Nazis alone, though the flags and slogans and symbols may be different. I don't wish to offend anyone by this statement, just call a spade a spade. They (US, Israel and Britain) are enboldened in this project by the collapse of the old Soviet Union (which would have blocked some of this exapansion in the middle east long ago, had the cold war still been in force). Don't just take my word for it, check out for example But it may yet come into conflict with China - who is casting equally covetous eyes on the middleast's oil, vital for its accelerating eceonomy. Thanks to all these myopic warmongerers, we may yet see World War Three in our lifetimes. I hope not.