Daily Blague

To read the Daily Blague lately, you might think me unaware of the trouble in Lebanon. Aside from a conviction that it's foolish to have opinions about such a volatile situation, I see right and wrong on both sides, and I decline to play Solomon until formally invited to do so. I paused, nevertheless, over an Op-Ed piece in yesterday's Times by Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and a student of terrorism. In his work on terrorism during the last Israeli occupation of Lebanon, he writes in "Ground to a Halt," he discovered that, of thirty-eight suicide bombers whose backgrounds he was able to examine, only eight were "Islamic fundamentalists." Three were Christian.

What these suicide attackers — and their heirs today — shared was not a religious or political ideology but simply a commitment to resisting a foreign occupation. Nearly two decades of Israeli military presence did not root out Hezbollah. The only thing that has proven to end suicide attacks, in Lebanon and elsewhere, is withdrawal by the occupying force.

Hatred of foreign occupation seems to be a universal human trait that in modern times has been given voice by communications and weapons technology. It was always there, but the strong could always overmaster the weak - until recently. It is taking the powers that be one hell of a long time to readjust their expectations, and, it may be, all of today's powerful men (and women) will have to die off in order to free us of a stubborn mindset. Occupation of foreign territory is always wrong. And you would think that Israelis know this best of all, having established their state with a healthy dose of terrorism (so to speak). Unfortunately, their determination to re-occupy their land two millennia after exile was contested. It does not seem to me that, in the past thirty years at least, Israel has done much in the way of coming to terms with its neighbors. I believe that Arabs and other Islamic people must accept the Israel of 1948, because I believe that a special case can be made for a Jewish state, reversing a wrong that ultimately sent millions of Jews to gas chambers. I also believe that Israel must end its occupation of the Occupied Territory - Palestine. I derive both positions from what I think we have all learned, if we would pay attention, about the grim determination of a certain kind of human dignity.

And perhaps I should make it clear here that I believe that there is only one race of human beings. 

And as for us, the US - but my views on our Iraqi misadventure and other ill-advised actions can easily be retrieved by means of the search engine in the sidebar.