Envy surrounds no country on Earth like the state of Israel, and with good reason: by objective measures, Israel is the happiest nation on Earth at the 60th anniversary of its founding. It is one of the wealthiest, freest and best-educated; and it enjoys a higher life expectancy than Germany or the Netherlands. But most remarkable is that Israelis appear to love life and hate death more than any other nation. If history is made not by rational design but by the demands of the human heart, as I argued last week , the light heart of the Israelis in face of continuous danger is a singularity worthy of a closer look.

Can it be a coincidence that this most ancient of nations [1], and the only nation persuaded that it was summoned into history for God's service, consists of individuals who appear to love life more than any other people? As a simple index of life-preference, I plot the fertility rate versus the suicide rate of 35 industrial countries, that is, the proportion of people who choose to create new life against the proportion who choose to destroy their own. Israel stands alone, positioned in the upper-left-hand-quadrant, or life-loving, portion of the chart [2]. Those who believe in Israel's divine election might see a special grace reflected in its love of life...

...Israel is surrounded by neighbors willing to kill themselves in order to destroy it. "As much as you love life, we love death," Muslim clerics teach; the same formula is found in a Palestinian textbook for second graders. Apart from the fact that the Arabs are among the least free, least educated, and (apart from the oil states) poorest peoples in the world, they also are the unhappiest, even in their wealthiest kingdoms...

“So, we know that Hezbollah's well-trained fighters are in control of most of west Beirut. The decision taken by Walid Jumblat and Saad al-Hariri not to fight back in Beirut, but rather hand most of their positions to the army ended any illusion regarding the sanctity of the “resistance” - that it would never turn its weapons inward, for now its hands are dripping with the blood of innocent Lebanese. But it's different in the Chouf where Jumblatt's forces bloodied Hezbollah.

The fighting in the town of Chouweifat calmed late Sunday after Druse leader Walid Jumblatt called on his Druse opponents, who are allied with Hezbollah, to mediate a cease-fire and hand over the region to Lebanese troops.

Iran's state-run Press TV reported on its Web site that 17 opposition fighters were killed in the mountain clashes. It did not elaborate, and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia refused to comment.

Officials could not immediately provide casualty figures from other mountain towns where fighting also raged a day earlier. But the latest deaths pushed to 54 the number of people killed since violence erupted Wednesday, in the worst internal clashes since the end of the 1975-90 civil war.

A Druse woman, Yessra Halawi, reacts after her house burned Sunday during clashes between pro-government supporters of Druse leader Walid Jumblatt and Shiite gunmen and their allies in Chouweifat, south of Beirut, Lebanon, Monday May 12, 2008. Lebanese soldiers deployed across mountains overlooking the Lebanese capital Monday after at least 11 people were killed in fierce clashes between pro-Syrian gunmen and government supporters entrenched in the hilly plateau, security officials and paramedics said. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

..“After taking over West Beirut, Hezbollah tried to move to the Shouf, where there are two Shiite towns, Kayfoun and Qmatiyye. Hezbollah is trying to link them up to the Dahieh through the Karameh road, which links Dahieh to Choueifat-Aramoun-Doha-Deir Qoubel-Aytat-Kayfoun and Qmatiye, so that it can make encroachments, maintain access routes and not allow the Druze to surround the two Shiite towns.

“That was the plan, but Hezbollah got a severe beating in the Shouf. They were not able to penetrate anything, relying instead - for the first time in the current fighting - on artillery/mortar fire. To no avail. Yesterday alone we heard that seven Hezbollah fighters who tried to infiltrate got killed.

...to invoke the spectre of a campaign, a front mobilised with aforethought to defame anyone who speaks ill of Israel. Indeed, accusing your detractors of carrying out a campaign often amounts to carrying out one in return - for it is a smear in itself to accuse people who disagree with you of acting out of no other motive than malice. He who says I smear him when I don't smears me.

Something else doesn't feel quite right to me about Johann Hari's unearthing of this "campaign", and that is his assertion that "it is an attempt to intimidate and silence - and to a large degree it works". To my ear, that answers intimidation with intimidation, since it impugns the intellectual honour of those of whom he speaks, and coerces us into thinking the worst of them.

Furthermore, it is patently untrue that "intimidation" has worked. Johann himself is demonstrably not intimidated. Nor is it easy to see who else is. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, it cannot surely be argued that the Palestinian case is not heard...

...The Lebanese army watches the Hizbollah road-blocks. And does nothing. As a Tehran versus Washington conflict, Iran has won, at least for now. Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader and MP and a pro-American supporter of Mr Siniora's government, is isolated in his home in west Beirut, but has not been harmed. The same applies to Saad Hariri, one of the most prominent government MPs and the son of the murdered former prime minister Rafik Hariri. He remains in his west Beirut palace in Koreitem, guarded by police and soldiers but unable to move without Hizbollah's approval. The symbolism is everything.

When Hamas became part of the Palestinian government, the West rejected it. So Hamas took over Gaza. When the Hizbollah became part of the Lebanese government, the Americans rejected it. Now Hizbollah has taken over west Beirut...

...The "best" are often too innocent indeed, sunk in constant self-criticism, persuading themselves they must atone for having done too much in the past by doing nothing in the present, trying to convince the other side of their niceness and sensitivity. Their priority is to ensure no one will accuse them of being imperialistic. And to prove it they will let another country fall into the enemy camp...

...While Iran and Syria provide guns and strong backing to their friends, the West responds with words backed by nothing. Who can blame Hizballah and Damascus and Tehran for laughing with contempt, believing they are the tide of the future, assuming their "passionate intensity" will inevitably triumph over the weak-willed West?

The historic great powers act as pitiful, helpless giants but their enemies will take no pity on them...

...Why should Lebanese Sunni, Druze, and Christians risk their lives when the West doesn't help them? Every Israeli speaking nonsense about Syria making peace; every American claiming Damascus might split from Tehran; every European preaching appeasement has in fact been engaged in confidence-breaking measures...

Politicians are always looking for an edge to be seen to be doing something; especially if it involves children. Never is it more likely that during an election year or the lead up to a general election. Politicians all over the Anglosphere are eyeing the video game industry with ill intent.

US government leaders examining slapping extra taxes on game transactions, justified by the supposed link between video games with violent behavior - which also bolsters the cries for censorship. The latter is occuring despite the fact there is evidence that video games do not lend themselves to encouraging bad behavior. There is a recent study shows that video game paranoids are completely off base...

...all the generations of dispersion that followed, the Jews never lost their self-awareness as a nation or their connection to the land of Israel. They expressed their longing for it in daily prayer and turned toward it when they worshiped. They collected charity to support the minority of Jews who had never left the land; and over the years others made their way back as well, often in response to Christian or Muslim persecution. By the 1860s, a majority of Jerusalem's population was Jewish once more. Zionism - an organized movement to renew Jewish independence in the Jewish homeland - was formally launched in 1897. Five decades later, against steep odds and every historical precedent, Israel was reborn.

It was an incredible achievement, made even more incredible by the fact that it occurred in the wake of a genocide that had wiped out one-third of the Jewish people...

Following are excerpts from an interview with Sheik Ali Al-Faqir, former Jordanian minister of religious endowment, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on May 2, 2008.

Sheik Ali Al-Faqir: We must declare that Palestine, from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea, is an Islamic land, and that Spain - Andalusia - is also the land of Islam. Islamic lands that were occupied by the enemies will once again become Islamic. Furthermore, we will reach beyond these countries, which are lost at one point. We proclaim that we will conquer Rome, like Constantinople was conquered once, and as it will be conquered again.

Interviewer: Allah willing.

Sheik Ali Al-Faqir: We will rule the world, as has been said by the Prophet Muhammad...

...We will face a battlefront that is broader and stronger. Its beginnings were in Palestine, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in Chechnya. What has begun will be completed. It will not stop...

...The Zionist entity reached completion, and it is beginning to decline, until it will wane and come to its end. Similarly, America has occupied, thundered, and foamed with rage, and proclaimed, like Pharoah, "I am your supreme God," but it will come to its end, and they have begun to realize that their end is near. We have begun to read in American and European newspapers that "our glory is on the wane, and there is nothing we can do about it." This morning on Al-Jazeera TV, I saw American scientists and strategic theoreticians, who said that America would soon come to its end. They said it before about the USSR, and, indeed, it has come to its end, and we say now that America and the EU will come to an end, and only the rising force of Islam will prevail.

Bedouin lighter of 60th anniversary torch suffers ironic twist of fate as her car is torched by unknown persons. Celebratory torch and car torching connected, husband says

Sana Elbaz, the daughter of a Bedouin family from Tel Sheva who lit a celebratory torch at Israel's 60th anniversary ceremony in Jerusalem, saw her car set ablaze by unknown persons outside of her house on Thursday night. A molotov cocktail was also thrown at her door, but her house remained undamaged...

...WFP [World Food Program] internal documents show that the major oil producing nations of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) gives almost nothing to the food organization, even as skyrocketing oil prices and swollen oil revenues contribute to the very crisis that the U.N. claims could soon add 100 million more people to the world’s starving masses.

The overwhelming bulk of the burden in feeding the world’s starving poor remains with the United States and a small group of other predominately Western nations, a situation that the WFP has done little so far to change, even as it has asked for another $775 million in donations to ease the crisis.

Donor listings on WFP’s website show that this year, as in every year since 1999, the U.S. is far and away the biggest aid provider to WFP. Since 2001, U.S. donations to the food agency have averaged more than $1.16 billion annually -- or more than five times as much as the next biggest donor, the European Commission.

This year, the U.S. had contributed $362.7 million to WFP just through May 4, according to the website. That figure does not include another $250 million above the planned yearly contribution that was promised by President George W. Bush in the wake of WFP’s April warning that a “silent tsunami” of rising food costs would add dramatically to the world population living in hunger. Nor does it include another $770 million in food aid that President Bush has asked Congress to provide as soon as possible.

On the other hand, Saudi Arabia, with oil revenues last year of $164 billion, does not even appear on the website donor list for 2008...

...The OPEC total amounts to roughly one minute and 10 seconds worth of the organization’s estimated $674 billion in annual oil revenues in 2007 -- revenues that will be vastly exceeded in 2008 with the continuing spiral in world oil prices.

The only other major oil exporter who made the WFP list of 2008 donors was the United Arab Emirates, which kicked in $50,000. UAE oil revenues in 2007 were $63 billion...

Wilder says he didn't call 911 because he didn't think help would arrive in time. So, the 55-year-old says, he got a steak knife from the kitchen and made a small hole in his throat, allowing air to gush in.

Wilder suffered from throat cancer and related breathing problems several years ago. About that time, he had an episode where he couldn't breathe because his air passages swelled shut. He says that's what happened this time around.

Doctors don't expect Wilder to suffer any adverse effects from the tracheotomy once it's healed.

Nudel, 77, is a famous former refusenik who battled the Soviet Union for 16 years - four of them from exile in Siberia - for the right to immigrate to Israel, which Moscow finally granted in 1987. Sa'ad, 25, is a Palestinian policeman who was sentenced to death by a Palestinian Authority court in Hebron last week. His crime: alerting Israeli authorities to the whereabouts of four Palestinian terrorists, who were subsequently killed by Israeli forces.

In assisting Israeli counterterrorism, Sa'ad may have saved scores of innocent lives. For doing so, he was charged with "collaboration," and will face a firing squad unless international pressure forces Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, to commute his sentence. Or unless Israel, as Nudel urges in a letter to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, "launch[es] a rescue operation to extract the prisoner from his cell."

Hundreds of Palestinian dissidents have been murdered through the years as "collaborators." During the intifadah of the late 1980s, so many Palestinians were butchered by fellow Palestinians that the internecine violence came to be called the "intrafadah."...

Hezbollah's militant takeover of Beirut and its systematic destruction of the authority of the state and freedom of the press suggests a sophisticated and planned campaign to take power. There is no hiding the violence Hezbollah used to seize Beirut and cut it off from the rest of the country. But as their media campaign is already showing, Hezbollah is employing subtle and sophisticated mechanisms to take over the rest of Lebanon. All news which could be construed as negative behaviors, such as the blatant destruction and corruption of Lebanese institutions, is hidden beneath a Hezbollah-dominated media blackout....

Targeting the Lebanese Christians

Hezbollah seems to be making a concerted effort to placate the Christian population. Ashrafieh was not attacked, and life is relatively normal in the Christian suburbs north of Beirut.

Al Jazeera is claiming that Hezbollah has made a "concession" by opening the airport road. As was told to me by a veteran Lebanese reporter, all of the journalists and news agencies reporting right now have been vetted by Hezbollah. Even if the news is true, it is written to present Hezbollah's actions as gracious.

Michel Aoun just gave an interview claiming that the crisis will be over soon. He even noted that the illegal occupation of Beirut's downtown by opposition militants will end soon. Many who watched his interview are happy to hear this news, despite it coming from a politician who appears to be Hezbollah's Christian spokesman. Once again, this sounds like propaganda that no other Lebanese faction is in a position to challenge...

..Depressing Conclusion

At the moment, it feels a bit like fall 2004 when the Syrians bullied all Lebanese factions into voting for a three year extension of Emile Lahoud's term in office. Rafiq al-Hariri resigned from office, and Lebanese parliamentarians and democratic activists kept their mouths shut while Syria appointed a government made up of its Lebanese cronies. When Lebanese politicians began to stir a bit, Druze parliamentarian Marwan Hamade was targetted for assassination, and barely survived.

According to NOW Lebanon online newspaper, pro-government websites are being attacked. So, we'll see what happens to this blog. The government's telecommunications company has probably been fully overrun by Hezbollah, and all of our calls and internet traffic could be monitored. A source in the pro-Hezbollah Syrian Social Nationalist Party claims that everything is being monitored right now. Good luck getting reliable news from Lebanon.

Third, in simple economic terms, Hezbo* is taking over an economy they are ill-equipped to control. When the parasite takes over the host, it kills the host and dies with it. While the thugs were taking over their positions, people were changing their Lebanese liras back to dollars.

Finally, in simple national terms, the defeat of the government would represent a defeat of the UN. With no chance of being implemented, UN resolution 1559 will wither away and Hezbo will keep their cherished weapons. But Resolution 1559 is now part of 1701, which also links the resolution to the armistice agreement with Israel and, more importantly, to Lebanon’s border demarcation. So Nasrallah will get to keep his weapons, and the Israelis will get to “redefine” the border.

As a result, we Lebanese may end up with a resistance without a people, an economy, or a land.

What are we fighting about, then?

* Jeha lives in Beirut and blogs at Jeha’s Nail. He refers to Hezbollah as “Hezbo” because he doesn’t believe in a “Party of God.”

...The research uses a long record of great tits in a breeding site at Wytham Woods near Oxford, where observations began in 1947...

The following are excerpts from an interview with Saudi anthropologist Sa'd Al-Sowayan, which aired on Al-Arabiya TV on April 25, 2008

...Sa'd Al-Sowayan: "The text is static, but the way people interpret it is not. You can interpret the text in a way that corresponds with the age in which you live."

Interviewer: "So you have no problem with people interpreting the text differently in each age?"

Sa'd Al-Sowayan: "As long as it is compatible with the spirit of the text."

Interviewer: "In other words, the spirit of the text remains, and in each age, there is an adaptation [of the text]."

Sa'd Al-Sowayan: "For example, I do not think - and I might be going off on a tangent here - that it is in the best interest of the Islamic religion that we insist on continuing to live as if we were in the historical age of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions. Everything has changed, and I believe that we must inevitably understand this change and respond to it. Otherwise, the physical existence of Muslims as Muslims will ultimately be jeopardized. Isn't it important for Muslims to continue to exist as a strong nation, which influences the world in which we live? How can this happen if we relate to things as if we were living 1,400 years ago?"[...]