I’ll start by doing a copy from my posting of July 27th about Haim Ramon Israel’s Justice Minister :
Meet Haim Ramon. He’s Israel’s minister for justice. He used to be in the Israeli Labour Party but ditched them for Kadima when Ariel Sharon, the man the Kahan commission* found to be responsible for the mass murder of civilians at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps the last time Israel invaded Lebanon left Likud and founded Kadima. He’s generally reckoned to be very close to Israel’s Prime minister Ehud Olmert. Note Ramon’s branch of service. Like Donald Rumsfeld he’s an Air Force man in Ramon’s case he never made it beyond captain. Not a particularly impressive record. This is what he had to say today on Israeli Army Radio:
“We received yesterday in the Rome conference permission, in effect, from the world, part of it gritting its teeth and part of it granting its blessing, to continue the operation, this war, until Hezbollah’s presence is erased in Lebanon and it is disarmed,” Source
According to Haaretz today he said this:
“We have a internationally recognized document which bears great potential to entirely change [the state of affairs that existed] prior to July 12th and that was the objective of the war.”
I’m not going to spend time today analysing Resolution 1701. The world, his wife, and their pet tortoise have all blogged about it endlessly and anyone with half a wit can see that it’s a “finger pointing” resolution. Suffice it to say that:
- Everyone affected by it can drive either a Merkava tank or Katyusha rocket launching platform through it whenever they feel like it.
- As they do so they can point their finger at somebody else and say “they started it.”
If I was an Israeli officer I’d send a special forces team into the Ramon’s office armed with enough duct tape to permanently get the man to STFU. He keeps on giving the game away on Israeli Army Radio. He’s just admitted that there’s now an legally binding international agreement with a “terrorist organisation.” Don’t think that his little slip of the tongue won’t be noticed and seized upon for future use in the appropriate quarters. It will.
markfromireland
No tag for this post.
Mark,
I think one could spend his entire life pinning down the contradictions of the discourse of israeli officials between the beginning and the end of the current Irsaeli agression on Lebanon. The idea they are conveying is the following: we didn’t win the war with our military but we won it thanks to our friends in Washington and in the UN (Bolton) and we hope that they are going to hunt Hezbollah down with this resolution. The only thing is that they tried before with resolution 1559 championed by the late Hariri and 1559 gave way to the current war. So with every UN resolution they don’t solve things in the ME, they only add grief and grievances ! The only way they can make their resolution respected is to ask all parties including israel to respect all UN resolutions conernoing the Israeli-Arab coonlfict starting with 242 ! The Ontario Labor Union voted a boycott last winter based on this demand and the FTQ, the Quebec first labor union is going in this direction but they didn’t voted the boycott yet, Quebecers being afraid of accusations of anti-semitism which were already thrown at them in the past !
Sophia - agreed about the resolutions. As to boycotts they’re coming here too. The vote in the UK for the academic boycott broke the ice. I’m in favour for the same reason that I was in favour of boycotting apartheid era South Africa. I’m getting more than a little tired of this “light unto the nations” song and dance routine that they go into as they ramp up yet another pogrom. The good thing is that their economy is in such a mess because of their spensing on war that they’re now vulnerable.
I’m also hoping that the conference in Stockholm of aid donors will shove a much needed boost into the Lebanese economy. I for one am convinced that a large part of the Israeli motivation for the war is that they couldn’t tolerate having a successful neighbour. - That’s wreck their dreams of hegemony.
Mark,
They were eager to destroy lebanon’s economy. My brother told me that the dairy factory they destroyed in Beyrouth was a direct competitor to them on the Arab market (Jordan and Egypt) they did it on the first day and just before the cease fire they destroyed Ghandour, a biscuit and sweets factory, lebanon’s oldest. I used to eat Ghandour’s biscuits when I was a child…
Who is going to believe that a dairy factory and a sweet factory are ‘terrorist targets’ ?
Israel should want a peaceful and stable neighbour to their north. Why would anyone prefer a nation in ruins, filled with angry jihadis?
Nothing about this invasion made the slightest degree of sense. It just reinforces my belief in Groucho Marx’s opinion that ‘military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.’