Ian Osbourne:
"If you try to start with a violent incident, you can guarantee wherever you start and whoever you blame for starting it, you could point to a violent action by the other side which happened a little earlier. So let's start at the beginning and work forwards.
1: Adam met Eve..."
Very true.
It is misleading to look at what happened recently in Lebanon, and what is happening in Gaza now without taking into account the preceeding events.
As for Lebanon, The Hezbollah raid was just another in an exchange of tit-for-tat incursions by both sides -as UNIFIL has documented and George Monbiot has written about.
(
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists...39282,00.html; http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/G...f?OpenElement).
As for Gaza, there is the the little reported fact that the day before the abduction of Shalit, the IDF abducted two Palestinians, who they claimed were Hamas members. So much for the Israelis withdrawing from Gaza.
Also neglected by the press is the killing of Palestinians in the weeks that preceeded the abuduction of Shalit.
June 8, IDF assassinate the Palestinian head of the security forces of the Interior Ministry, Jamal Abu Samhadana along with 3 other people.
June 9, Israeli shell a beach at Beit Lahiya, 7 killed and 32 injured.
June 13, Israeli missile hits a street in Gaza killing 11 people.
June 20, IDF kill 3 Palestinian children and more wounded in another missile attack.
June 21, IDF kill 35-year old pregnant woman, her brother, 1 others wounded.
It`s only the abduction of Shalit however that merits reports of "the rapid escalation of the crisis sparked by last Sunday's kidnap" as reported in the FT(Ferry Biedermann and Roula Khalaf, 'Abbas appeals to UN over arrests,' Financial Times, June 30, 2006), or the BBC’s Alan Johnstone in Gaza telling us that “a major escalation in cross-border tensions” was afoot because a member of the IDF had been abducted. (BBC World news, 10am GMT, 25 June 2006).
It`s worth quoting Norman Finkelstein (the notorious self-hating Jew to some here), Professor of Political Science at DePaul University in Chicago here.
"Since Israel withdrew from Gaza in September 2005 'til today, the estimates run between 7,000 and 9,000 heavy artillery shells have been shot and fired into Gaza. On the Palestinian side, the estimates are approximately 1,000 Kassam missiles, crude missiles, have been fired into Israel. So we have a ratio of between seven and nine to one.
"Let's look at casualties. In the last six months, approximately 80 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza due to Israel artillery firing... There have been exactly eight Israelis killed in the last five years from the Kassam missiles. Again, we have a huge disproportion, a huge discrepancy." ('AIPAC v. Norman Finkelstein: A Debate on Israel's Assault on Gaza,' June 29, 2006;
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/29/1420258)
And on hostages, Finkelstein says:
"let's talk about those 9,000 Palestinians who are effectively hostages being held by Israel. 1,000 of them are administrative detainees... Administrative detainees who are being held without any charges or trial. And the other 8,000 are being held after military courts have convicted them, almost always on the basis of confessions which were extracted by torture. So if we're going to look simply at the numbers, we have one hostage on the Palestinian side, and effectively we have about 9,000 on the Israeli side."
But, as we have seen, the abduction of one IDF soldier near Gaza, or two in Lebanon is enough for the press to start talking about a "crisis" and "escalations" as Israel is always the victim.
