What a week to have a week off. The news is boring: the same thing for the first 15 minutes of every bulletin, be it local, U.K. or from the U.S.
And it's just making me angrier, if it's possible to say that something that makes you angry is boring. (Maybe tedious was the word I had in mind.) No one is saying the things that should be said.
But in print, or at least in text, it's different.
Lawless in Gaza, Editorial, The Nation, July 14.It's currently member-only, but the points I wanted made — I believe this current escalation started with the shelling on the beach — are made in the paragraphs made available for free.
"In fact, the current cycle of violence was set off by weeks of Israeli shellings that culminated in the killing of eight Palestinian civilians on a Gaza beach. On a deeper level, the violence arises from the Israeli strategy of unilateralism, in which even the pretense of negotiations is abandoned and Israel alone decides its final borders, while maintaining control over the territories through closures, military assaults and assassination."
Friends Don't Let Friends Ruin Lebanon by John Nichols, The Nation, July 14."No serious participant in the contemporary discourse would deny that Israel has a right to protect itself. But no one in their right mind thinks Israel is going about the mission in a smart manner."
On the brink of chaos, Leader, The Guardian, July 17."Lebanon's government bears the signs of collapsing into a failed state. To expect it to successfully disarm Hizbullah's militants, while Israeli jets pound Tyre and Beirut as they did yesterday, inflicting collective punishment and undermining its fragile economy, is unrealistic."
The West Must Recognize That Israel's Agenda is in Conflict With its Own by David Clark, The Guardian, July 17"It's high time western governments grasped the fundamental truth that Israel is pursuing an agenda that conflicts directly with their own. In the context of the fight against terrorism and the need to promote international cooperation, the west's interest must be to remove the Palestinian question as a source of grievance among mainstream Muslims in a way that guarantees justice for the Palestinians and security for Israel."
This article has a lot of information that I
wasn't waiting for someone to say. That is, there's stuff in here that's new to the discussion. I did know that Israel encouraged (I've read "funded") Hamas, but the rest of the discussion is new in this context.
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