Was Israel Justified?

My mom called last night to tentatively ask: "But do you think Israel is justified?" She knew the answer but didn't have the words.

Which is the genius of good framing. You ask a question in a way that forces even your opposition to be conflicted about identifying as the opposition.

A recent Israeli poll asked, among other questions, whether "[the] aerial campaign in Lebanon is justified," according to the Washington Post (The raw data isn't available). 90% of Israelis agreed that it was.

But the question leaves little wiggle room. What if a person believes that a targeted and extremely careful aerial campaign is "justified"? And what if a person is pissed at Hezbollah's attack and capture of Israeli officers but doesn't agree with Israel's response at all? That person is apt to put a check in the justified box too.

The same question dominates U.S. news coverage. Israel regularly employs...American P.R. agencies to help shape American public opinion as well as its own but there are so many avenues of information-sharing at this point between the two nations that the meme could've originated in any number of places...

The better question, the question, is: did Israel do the smart thing, the right thing?

The answer to that question is, of course, no.

The crux of the problem is the belief that problems can be solved by barreling in and destroying the enemy. Screw history, screw the fact that the enemy was created by a former mistaken belief in the problem-solving capabilities of violence itself.

Hamas and Hezbollah are both direct outgrowths of Israeli militarism. Hell, Hamas was nurtured by Israel.

Internal politics being what they are, however, Olmert almost has to be even more of a musclehead than Sharon whose militaristic chops were never in question. It'd be like questioning Cheney's devotion to regime change. Some things are a given.

So Israel pummels Lebanon swinging wildly like a bear at a beehive (again, of the well over 200 casualties only a fraction have been military and only a fraction of those are Hezbollah). It has the ill-considered odor of our very own Iraq War.

Al Qaeda couldn't topple us in a million years with arms yet they lured the most deficient among us -- in this case our leadership -- to lunge at them, in the process creating the monster they said we were before the eyes of much of the Arab world.

Israel wasn't threatened by Hezbollah (Iranian missiles or no). Lebanon's government was comprised of a fragile fabric of primarily three ethnicities (a sort of ethnic separation of powers). Fragile but with hope. Israel's lunge at Hezbollah, far from making the population rethink their tolerance of the militant group, has forced many to embrace them -- if only temporarily as the only hope for repelling Israeli attack.

The U.S., the U.N., the E.U. and other acronyms more or less sit on their hands. As Juan Cole says, "Peacekeeping is a ways off. The Israelis will fight their war first."

Of nations of enemies, Cole writes:

A wise Great Power can walk back such bad situations, as the US did in Europe and Japan after World War II. Unwise Powers get stuck with the Tar Baby.

**For some comic relief, go HERE

(JuanCole)

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