Israel And The Palestinians (now with added Iran/Lebanon)

[welshbairn]

6 hours ago, Freedom Farter said:

Booby-trapped toys dropped on a Lebanese town by IDF planes in 1998. Children collected them and were blown up.

UK parliament report on it:

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200001/cmselect/cmfaff/78/7828.htm

Given the volume of corroborated evidence on other Israeli atrocities against civilians, and very little on this, I suspect the toys were actually cluster bomblets which children could easily mistake for toys. This comprehensive report mentions them but only through witness statements of children a period of time after, and from an adult repeating what children had told her. Page 38.

https://archive.crin.org/en/docs/resources/treaties/crc.31/Israel_Hariri_ngo_report.doc

[Freedom Farter]

This is from a Chomsky interview in 2013 and has proven very prescient after what we've seen happen in the last fortnight. 

He pointed out there that Israel would militarily defeat Hezbollah next time. Therefore, if Hezbollah were smart, they'd reorient their focus away from being primarily a military force to instead becoming primarily a social force. Were they to become a good government for their population, were they to meet their people's needs, that'd have created a better deterrent to Israeli invasion. Israel would've found it harder to gain US consent for attacking an organisation more focused on successful governance than on militancy.

Perhaps Hezbollah would've made that transition had they not chosen to intervene in Syria, thus coming more under the auspices of Iranian ambitions, which obviously didn't prioritise the people of southern Lebanon.

Edited 2 hours ago by Freedom Farter

[Freedom Farter]

On 24/09/2024 at 04:01, GordonS said:

It's tempting to see everything that happens in the Middle East as a consequence of Western action (or inaction). 

From that same interview, he made a similar point to you on Syria.