Saturday, August 4, 2007
It's the Arab/Israeli conflict, not the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Else why is Qatar protecting Hizballah and preventing a UN resolution demanding release of the prisoners whose capture started the war in the first place (and have been held incommunicado ever since): Qatar nixes UNSC call to free reservists
Following objections from Qatar, the United Nations Security Council decided late Friday to delay the publication of a presidential statement calling for Hizbullah to release captive reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev immediately and without preconditions, Israel Radio reported.
The statement, which was approved unanimously by 15 nations, also expressed concern that Hizbullah has not thus far released any information regarding the soldiers' condition...
...Hizbullah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah has consistently refused to confirm whether Goldwasser and Regev were alive...
I completely agree.
The habit of framing this as the "Israeli/Palestinian conflict" or even "Israel/Palestine" is misleading in the extreme. It also has the (probably intentional) effect of promoting the view of Israel as the aggressor and the more powerful party, which of course evokes pity and sorrow on behalf of the "underdog", ie the Palestinians, even though Israel is outnumbered by hundreds of millions of people and outsized by a similarly huge margin.
Also, the entire Arab League has had economic boycotts in place for generations, boycotts whose secondary and tertiary effects discriminate against Jewish people per se - and leads to yet another fact: the war against Israel has Muslim (and in some cases Christian) versus Jewish aspects.
In fact that might be the most sinister and dangerous fact of all, given the passion of religious belief and also the sheer numbers of Muslims and Christians vs. Jews - a matters of billions vs. a handful of millions.
This is plain to see in the UN, where ganging up on Israel is a fact of life especially in the so-called "Human Rights" area - a sick and ironic joke that ignores endemic and truly cruel abuses. Worst of all, every factor mentioned above perpetuates the violence and continues harming the innocent, rather than creating a framework for solving real-world problems rationally and peacefully.