stuff about lebanon, israel, and why the washington post editorial page is to laugh

LI must confess that we haven’t been doing the rounds of the blogs lately. We go to the news, and wonder how to make comments that are at all equal to the task – watching the rightwing in Israel, which has grown in tandem with the right wing in the U.S., commit the kind of crimes and blunders that are so characteristic of the Bush era, is painful to watch – more painful, I imagine, if you are watching from under the burning wheels of a van struck by an Israeli bomb, after the kindly dropping of pamphlets to tell you that Israel is going to violate the sovereignty of Lebanon and destroy all you possess, so flee down the road. Then we go to our new secret vice, the Google Book search. We look at Walter Savage Landor, or Ruskin’s Praeterita, instead of looking at Atrios, or Crooked Timber.

So: the best opinion piece about Israel/America’s war against Lebanon is, surprisingly, an op ed on the NYT: The Tribes of War by Abbas El Zein. He does a coldly angry rundown of Israel’s last war with Lebanon – the dead, which number more than the richly valued, much reported Israeli dead over the past fifty years – the Israeli insouciance about national boundaries, about proportional force, etc., etc.

El Zein begins with a faux pas – the story of how Israeli planes murdered his grandmother. Please, we can hear the letters now, how about the suicide bomber who blew up my aunt? Those are the polite ones. The others will be of the LGF/Washington Post editorial kind, where the blood is never washed out of the mouth. Even though, curiously, it is proxy blood – no rightwing yahoo in his right mind is going to be fighting in this war, or any other, but some will make brave little tourist trips, like Michael Totten, to assure the lobotomized at home that democracy is our cause, and the people are with us! Except the 90 some percent, the extermination fodder. Of course, the exterminated, nowadays, have something to say about their extermination. Ambushes and nuclear weaponry seem to be on the rise. Globalization, you know. First you get the mcdonalds, then you get the nuclear tipped missile.

El Zein:
“When the civil war in Lebanon ended, in 1990, we took a while to believe it. It could restart at any time, an inner voice told us. A few years later, peace became the norm. Everyone believed in it and belief made it more real. We never suspected that, years later, our original skepticism would be cruelly validated, and the fragility of collective sanity in the Middle East would be exposed once again.
The estimated death toll from the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon was 18,000, about 0.5 percent of the population. Twenty-four years later, I have yet to hear any sign of remorse emanating from Israeli society. Nor were there any reparations for the carnage wrought by the Israeli Army. When the Israeli press, politicians and intellectuals speak with regret about the ''Lebanon War,'' it is usually to say the cost to Israel was too high or to point out that the invasion failed to achieve its objectives. The Lebanese fatalities are rarely discussed.
A joke went around during the civil war that it was safer to be a target of the Israeli warplanes than to be exposed to the ineffectual anti-aircraft fire directed against them. Lebanese bullets seemed certain to hit you if you fled, whereas if you stayed put, the Israeli missiles would probably land in your neighbor's house, not yours.
Since then, air strikes have grown more precise and the Israeli Air Force appears to have expanded its range: planes now target your neighbor's house and your own. Recent images from Lebanon are chillingly familiar -- fathers watching their children die, mothers expiring in children's laps. Dozens of stories like my grandmother's are being re-enacted. Dozens of new graves are being dug.”

I would contrast this with something from the WAPO editorial page, but I don’t have the proxy poxy heart at the moment. The Washington Post has been a good crusader for years, and the El Zein’s of the world aren’t worth a good Georgetown chuckle – how could the plaints of the barbarians even be heard when you are a D.C. mover and shaker, privileged perhaps, to lunch with Charles Krauthammer himself on oysters, martinis and rabies medicine?

For laughs, however, I recommend reading Peter Baker’s analysis, a GOP sob story written as though by a high school YAF member about Bush’s bounce and why the third coming of the Crawford messiah has been delayed. A shame too, for, as Baker observes often in the piece, the President needs to rally the world – for instance, against Iran. The president has successfully created rallies in many parts of the world, at least that part is true. But Baker, being a dimwit (imagine a writer who makes Adam Nagourney look like A.J. Liebling), is in many ways a good reporter to read – the childish superhero motif isn’t hidden in his prose, but comes right to the surface. These people think like ten year old boys. Alas, they are equipped with real thermonuclear weapons.