“There is no military solution.”

These are the words of an Israeli citizen protesting her government’s rigid and murderous policy towards Lebanon.

The Israeli military seems eager to display, on mostly civilians and civilian infrastructure, their American made and American subsidized armaments.

With horror, I review the terrible human cost the Lebanese have been forced to pay; though, sadly, the worst may lie ahead, as Israeli forces ready for invasion of Southern Lebanon to create their “buffer zone”.

Gideon Levy of Haaertz writes: “The real appreciation is for the strong who don’t immediately use their strength. Regrettably, the Israel Defense Forces once again looks like the neighborhood bully. A soldier was abducted in Gaza? All of Gaza will pay. Eight soldiers are killed and two abducted to Lebanon? All of Lebanon will pay. One and only one language is spoken by Israel, the language of force.”

The idea of proportionality is especially important.

“Hezbollah is a cynical organization that exploits the misery of Palestinians for its own purposes,” he notes, but questions whether it justifies “the disproportionate reaction.” The answer, of course, is no.

He continues: “The concept that we have totally forgotten is proportionality. While we’re in no hurry to get to the negotiating table, we’re eager to get to the battlefield and the killing without delay, without taking any time to think. That deepens suspicions that we need a war every few years, with terrifying repetition, even if afterward we end up back in exactly the same position. The war we declared on Lebanon has already exacted from us, and of course from Lebanon, too, a heavy price. Did anyone give any thought to the question whether it should be paid?”

This is a wonderful piece, please read it in its entirety here.

On the topic of American sanction for Israeli war crimes, and the dominant perception that only Hezbollah’s crimes require exposure, Omar Barghouti writes that: “By expressing a nauseatingly unbalanced concern over loss of Israeli lives — military and civilian — while comparatively devaluing loss of life among Arab civilians in Lebanon and Gaza to little more than a nuisance that may potentially blemish Israel’s otherwise bright image, Western officials and most of the sheepish, corporate-controlled mainstream media in the West have betrayed a level of naked racism that many had thought extinct in these beacons of democracy and enlightenment.”

Back to the topic of proportionality, Rania Masri asks: “If I slap you, will you burn my family? Yes – if you want to burn my family from the start.” The idea that this latest military aggression by Israel was not an impulsive response to the kidnappings, but instead, a well thought-out scheme to have war, seems likely.

And though the Israeli PR campaign wants us to believe that the Israeli government wishes peace for Lebanese civilians, a myth eagerly accepted and promoted by CNN and Fox News, Masri says not so: “This war is consistent with previous Israeli policies of aggression. In 1993, for example, [former Israeli Prime Minister] Barak conducted a war specifically based on the bombardment of civilians, according to Sagi, former Israeli military intelligence chief. Same policy in the 1996 attacks on Lebanon’s civilians. And before that in 1982.”

“Israel once again is not distinguishing between a justified war against Hezbollah and an unjust and unwise war against the Lebanese nation,” writes Levy. That’s right.

We should also add that the US and its corporate media are also missing such clarity—though not by accident.