Let’s Bomb Each Other
By Paul
I just had to post the following about the craziness of the middle-east conflict by a Tel Aviv blogger;
“…Al Manar TV, Hezbollah television, is showing Zvi live while he is in the Tel Aviv studio. They are broadcasting our broadcast in real time, from Beirut, translating from Hebrew into Arabic what Zvi is saying, and responding in real time. "We can see you!" said the Al Manar moderator, mockingly, as he smiled into the camera.Zvi is listening to the whole thing via his earphone, and he even posed a question in Arabic.
This is just one example of how mad and complex this conflict is: We watch each other's television broadcasts, we talk to one another, and then...we bomb each other.
This morning a friend of mine called from Gaza. He's not a journalist, not a politician - just an ordinary Palestinian guy in his twenties. He lives down the street from the offices of Hamas's Ministry of the Interior in Gaza, which was bombed a few days ago by an Israeli fighter plane. He has about two hours of electricity a day in his house and about as much running water. But he called me to ask if I was okay, after he saw on Al Jazeera television that Nasrallah was threatening to bomb Tel Aviv. "I'm worried about you," he said.
And late, late last night I chatted via Instant Message with this Lebanese blogger, while he sat on the roof of his apartment building and watched Israeli fighter planes bomb Beirut.”
Related;
Israel and the Doctrine of Proportionality
Crisis in the Middle East: Bloggers Report
With Israeli Use of Force, Debate Over Proportion
A 'shadow war' performed for Western voyeurs;
“These latest clashes between Israel and Palestine look like a performance for an audience, rather than a real fight on behalf of a constituency. There is almost a complicity between both sides: the Palestinians need Israel to respond to the kidnapping with bombing raids in order to show that they face a spiteful and unreasonable neighbour, while Israel needs the Palestinians to hold Shalit for a bit longer so they can continue trying to make mileage out of it. Yet this performance is not only for a domestic audience – it is staged for international viewers too. Indeed, in many ways it is the internationalisation of Middle Eastern politics which today provokes these kinds of low-level violent scraps between Israel and Palestine.The conflict in the Middle East is no longer merely a clash over territory – rather it has become the most internationalised war on Earth, with everyone from the US to the UN, Russia to the EU, and numerous commentators, activists and academics around the world defining themselves and their missions on the back of the Israel-Palestine question. This has had the effect of upping the ante, and prolonging the conflict.”
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