The "let's hide behind our women and babies war plan"

A week ago I wrote the post They Will All Go To Hell. In it I criticized Hezbollah for their unprovoked attack on Israel, and Israel for their military response.

Then I suggested in The Dead Baby that once the New York Times started featuring dead Lebanese babies on their front cover, the world opinion was about to change.

I know, based on the fifty or so comments that this post really touched home. I also know that my readers are divided in several camps, for and against Israel, for and against this war.

Which makes me the lonely guy in the middle. And I'm not taking this position because of my readers. Quite frankly, I've been a strong supporter of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East during most of my life.

But as I have started to reevaluate much of what I've supported in my life, and as I've traveled to Israel and seen both the situation from the Israeli point of view, as well as the Arab point of view, I came to the conclusion that my world view had been too simplistic.

Unfortunately, when you start studying any issue, this is often the conclusion you come to. You realize that what is right and wrong isn't really that easy. I realize Israel has been under attack for most of its existence and most of its neighbors want to finish what others started in the 30s. But I also realize that we have an unresolved situation with Arabs living in poverty and squalor, displaced by the new state. And I realize there is no perfect solution.

And absent a perfect solution, I don't think killing off each others babies is a good one. It's as simple as that.

And as I predicted world opinion has now changed.

The death of over fifty civilians, most of them women and children, in one building in Lebanon attacked by Israel has now led to Israel agreeing to halt bombings for 48 hours.

Only that promise didn't last long. The New York Times wrote an hour ago, "Israel continued to attack targets in Lebanon even after agreeing to a 48-hour halt to its broad bombing campaign in the face of an outcry over the air raid on Sunday that left dozens of Lebanese civilians dead."

But let's stop discussing the blame game.

And let's start discussing what's really going on here.

Hezbollah kidnapped Israeli soldiers using the excuse of a prison exchange. They knew Israel would refuse and that Israel was likely to attack.

This is what Hezbollah had planned for during the past twenty years, when they built bunkers, tunnels, and got tens of thousands of rockets and other goodies from Iran and Syria.

So now the stage was set.

Israel jumped up and down and took the bait. It was almost as easy as provoking a certain French football captain in the World Cup by insulting his mother.

The fight started.

And of course, with bunkers and rockets hidden in residential areas, the Lebanese death toll increased, until the number of dead children and babies made things unbearable for the international community.

That's exactly what Hezbollah had counted on. Meanwhile sympathy for Hezbollah, which has been somewhat of a fringe movement in the Arab world, exploded. That's also what Hezbollah hoped for.

As far as I can tell, Israel has played right into Hezbollah's hands.

It wouldn't be the first time in history a nation has fallen into that trap.

After all, that's how the expression a "Pyrrhic victory" was once coined. The phrase is more often reported as "Another such victory over the Romans and we are undone".

For the first time the Arab world has come up with a warfare model that Israel can't crush in six days using their tanks and airplanes.

It's a simple plan.

The plan is called the "let's hide behind our women and babies war plan."



And Israel just made that plan work, by blowing up all those babies, some of whom ended up on the first page of New York Times

Nice job, Israel and Condi.

Neither Condi nor Israel is a in a rush to stop the mayhem. After, all, Hezbollah are "terrorists" and this is the time to exterminate them. As if bombing a country back into the middle ages would accomplish that.

Truth is that the Jewish people survived one of the worst atrocities in recorded history, even though most of them didn't have a single gun to defend themselves against state orchestrated terror. Israel is going to be even less likely to exterminate the "terrorists" equipped with rockets and other modern warfare materiel. After all, even if they dumped atomic bombs onto every surrounding country they wouldn’t achieve that goal.

And that leaves only one workable solution. Make up and live in peace.

But something tells me neither Hezbollah nor Israel is willing to listen to that advice.