“The first use of this doctrine was in Operation Din V’Hesbon in 1993: The IDF used massive artillery and air attacks against the civilians of South Lebanon, specifically aiming at a humanitarian crisis as an attempt to put pressure on the Beirut government.”
The journalist Robert Fisk was in Lebanon and he wrote about the piles of bodies – civilian bodies – he saw. I just never knew the name of the operation.
When you read Israeli history you have to ask yourself how it is that Israel gets away with the whole “the Arabs attack civilians” thing, they did it on a massive scale.
Maybe we should ask Jack Miles, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning “God: A Biography” about all this. He says….
A friend asked me, what was the biggest surprise you discovered in writing the book? I said, Allah is more merciful than Yahweh. Understand, we’re talking about the same being, but the presentation (in the Quran) stresses not just Allah’s mercy, but also the themes of repentance and forgiveness. I should say, these episodes that involve biblical material probably are no more than a quarter or a fifth of the overall material in the Quran. So, my comment that Allah is more merciful than Yahweh is confined to that portion of the Quran…I’ll give two examples. Adam and Eve in the Quranic version immediately repent of their sin and throw themselves on the mercy of Allah and Allah forgives them on the spot. They do have to leave paradise, but if they live a good life then at the Last Judgment they will ascend to the heavenly garden. Adam and Eve in the Bible never do repent…Similarly, the Israelites, just after crossing the Red Sea, create the Golden Calf and God decides to exterminate them as punishment. Moses dissuades him from that, but still there’s horrendous violence imposed on them, a mass slaughter of the lead offenders. In the Quran, the Israelites immediately repent and Allah forgives them.
https://religionnews.com/2019/01/22/more-merciful-than-yahweh-jack-miles-on-god-in-the-quran/
And there we have it: apparently the Jews worship a nastier Supreme Being than the Muslims.
@Hophmi: perhaps you can tell us what Israel’s “imperfections” are and what you would recommend doing about them.
I saw the segment on PBS last night and it was truly cringeworthy. I kept asking myself why the only guests they invited to discuss this issue were two Jews – it’s like running a story on the problems Latinos face in the U.S. and only having WASP guests on the panel.
@DeBakr: The article contains a number of concrete examples of how the New York Times fails to report accurately on the situation in Israel. Care to comment on any of them?
@DeBakr: What does your comment have to do with the point of the article – that the New York Times distorts events in Israels favor? Is it not valid to point out that Americas flagship news outlet doesn’t report accurately on this topic?
Wait a minute….isn’t Netanyahu proposing….collective punishment?
Right on. I met Mate a few years ago – he was in town to attend a conference on trauma and therapy (I can’t remember the exact topic) and there was a dinner afterwards – I sat not far from him and somehow the topic of Palestine came up (this was a conference on trauma, of course) and Mate could see a frown pass on my face. He asked me was wrong and I tentatively made some remarks on the suffering of the Palestinians, and he jumped right in – he knew exactly what was going on. Mate is a righteous mensch.
@DeBakr, just what do you want with regard to the whole “conflict”? Two states? One state? What we have now, a sort of creeping annexation that will end with the Palestinians living on reservations? I can’t see what you want through the thick fog of ad-hominem arguments.
About the whole security argument:
…Yair Golan is quite well known in Israel. He’s a very clear member of the Israeli military elite. He is respected and extremely high ranking. His prior position before he became vice to the chief of staff, was to be the high commander of the military forces in the occupied West Bank. So actually, he was a colonialist military officer in charge of controlling an occupied population….And I had the opportunity actually to listen to him when he gave the talk in the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, and he spoke about his job as the head of the military forces in the West Bank, and he said very frankly that they were building the wall of separation in the West Bank and that the instructions that the military received from the government were not to build the wall out of security consideration, because he said we could provide security by cheaper and better and more efficient means than the wall, but the wall was there to separate the populations….The wall was built in order to prevent Israeli and Palestinians from meeting each other, from becoming friends, from falling in love and getting married, from conducting business with each other. Those were his words. And everyone in the room when he said that were quite astounded. Not by the fact, because I think nobody, everyone in the audience was aware of this reality, but the fact that he acknowledged it, by the fact that he was so honest.