Fresh analysis from my new correspondent AC, who declines even to reveal his nationality, but he's smart and interesting:
About that international community. Never such a fictive group did exist
- there is no international community when interests of powerful states
are involved. Israel-Lebanon 2006, the "international community" was
astoundingly in favor of a cease-fire, except of course Israel and
America. Some community. Although it must be said that it is rather
mellifluous. And so, silent, sterile, concerned with protocol and security
council sessions and press statements and the wording thereof – in
short, complicit – this [rockets from Lebanon on Israel] was bound to happen. Israel
knew it, America knew it. People all over were expecting it.
I was
speaking with a foreign correspondent a while back, well known, lots of
experience, good sources. He said he was sure Israel would not accept
its defeat in 2006. Indeed, Israel has been provoking this ever since the war of 2006 with repeated violations of the ceasefire in the form of sonic booms, ground incursions,
Israeli jets and unmanned aerial drones violating Lebanese airspace –
the most recent of which were reported one day after the Gaza
aggression, Dec. 28, and on Jan. 7. -, and even kidnappings of civilians. "The
United Nations has called on Israel to stop violating Lebanese
airspace. It says the overflights undermine the credibility of UN
peacekeepers stationed in southern Lebanon," reports AFP.
Now,
Israel will naturally attempt to justify these violations on the basis
that Hezbollah is rearming in southern Lebanon. But UNIFIL, the
international peacekeeping/monitoring force whose very function is to
know such things, categorically denies it. Regarding
the disarmament of the group, the Lebanese government and
Hezbollah have been treating the matter as an exclusively internal one,
and the former has practically recognized
the latter as a de facto defense force for southern Lebanon (the
Lebanese army is a joke, despite attempts to arm it by the U.S.) and a
resistance movement for the liberation of land occupied by Israel,
perhaps endowing it with a legitimate means to supply itself.
But all these violations by Israel are more or less common and
not sufficient, typically, to elicit a response on their own. The war
on Gaza, however, might be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
had Hezbollah consistently violated Israeli airspace, conducted land
invasions, and, yes, kidnapped Israeli soldiers, let alone civilians.
Hezbollah denied involvement in the recent attack. The perpetrators
were probably a Palestinian militant faction (e.g. PFLP-GC) acting in
outrage and defense of their co-nationalists in Gaza in the face of
international inaction. It's entirely possible that such attacks will
recur so long as the war on Gaza continues and in all likelihood might
be used as a pretext for war by Israel, numerous Israeli violations notwithstanding.
