UPDATE 4: Sarkozy and Erdogan are still going at it:

Nicolas Sarkozy has belittled Nato's role in the military operations against Muammar Gaddafi, re-igniting the row over who replaces the Americans in charge of the campaign in Libya.

Senior Nato officials said the alliance would decide within days whether to take over the bombing campaign against Gaddafi's forces and David Cameron announced that Nato would "shortly be providing the command and control and the machinery" for the attacks on ground targets in Libya.

The Nato decision is expected by Monday, before foreign ministers meet in London on Tuesday to discuss Libya. Senior officials were confident that the alliance would agree to assume command of all three elements of the campaign against Gaddafi – the air assaults, as well as the no-fly zone and arms embargo already under Nato command.

Turkey and France have been embroiled in a bitter row all week, with Ankara demanding that the Nato alliance, of which it is the member with the second biggest army after the US, takes over and Sarkozy opposed.

Sarkocy wants NATO to provide the force, while leaving the decisions as to the deployment of it to the eleven countries taking part in operations, thus excluding Turkey. Is this an indication that ground troops may soon be necessary? What are the consequences for the future of NATO if Sarkozy prevails? Germany is already on the sidelines, and Turkey may soon find itself there.

UPDATE 3: Libyan airstrikes have brought the economic ambitions of competitors, such as Turkey's Recip Tayyip Erdogan and France's Nicholas Sarkozy to the surface:

The clash between Turkey and France over Libya is underpinned by acute frictions between Erdogan and Sarkozy, both impetuous and mercurial leaders who revel in the limelight, by fundamental disputes over Ankara's EU ambitions, and by economic interests in north Africa.

The confrontation is shaping up to be decisive in determining the outcome of the bitter infighting over who should inherit command of the Libyan air campaign from the Americans and could come to a head at a major conference in London next week of the parties involved.

Using incendiary language directed at France in a speech in Istanbul, Erdogan said: I wish that those who only see oil, gold mines and underground treasures when they look in [Libya's] direction, would see the region through glasses of conscience from now on.

President Gül reinforced the Turkish view that France and others were being driven primarily by economic interests. The aim [of the air campaign] is not the liberation of the Libyan people, he said. There are hidden agendas and different interests.

France is, of course, adamantly oppposed to the entry of Turkey into the European Union.

UPDATE 2: Oh, by the way, could someone just tell Dennis the Menace to shut up and go away? He seems to have forgotten that he further embarasses himself every time he purports to represent an ethical liberal position in public. He'll stick with his assertion that the President should be impeached over bombing Libya until . . well, you know, until the President takes him for a ride on Air Force One again. And, then, there are sell outs like Juan Cole and David Corn.

Cole has always been phony. Years ago, in 2006, I posted a comment on his blog in response to his post about his sadness over the fact that the son of the Israeli novelist David Grossman had been killed during the Israeli ground invasion of southern Lebanon, emphasizing Grossman's opposition to it. I responded with a comment to the effect that Grossman did not oppose the Israeli attacks upon Lebanon until he was afraid that his son was going to be ordered to participate in the pending invasion. I also observed that, according to press reports, Grossman expressed no remorse over the loss of Lebanese lives as a result of the Israeli air strikes and ground assault. Cole deleted it, of course, and I thereafter stopped paying attention to anything he had to say.

UPDATE 1: A provocative commentary by Vijay Prashad:

Such options are no longer central, or even on the table. Qaddafi’s rule might fall in a week or a month. In the interim, he is a caged animal, and his loyalists will not dissolve easily. In the short term, he may conduct some kind of spectacular attack on a tanker in the Mediterranean, or else, as he himself warned, inside Europe. This is precisely the kind of pretext that the warmongers seek. The Gulf of Sidra will stand in for the Gulf of Tonkin. Ships of war will dock at Benghazi, and the ground troops will slide along the road that was once the graveyard of Field Marshall Montgomery and Rommel (their half tracks and tanks still litter the road outside Tobruk). Such an assault, which might be inevitable, will revive the debacle in Iraq that lasted from 2003 to 2007, with loyalists now underground in a brutal insurgency against the foreign troops and the people of the east, a defense of their realm and a sectarian conflict at the same time. If this were the scenario, then, as Michael Walzer put it, it would extend, not stop, the bloodshed.

The forces of counter-revolution line up with the West. The Gulf Cooperation Council hastened to pledge its unequivocal support. The United Arab Emirates is sending twenty-four aircraft and Qatar will send as many as six. They will also help fund the between $1-2 billion/month cost of the enforcing the no-fly zone. Saudi Arabia’s troops remain in Bahrain. Their air force is geared up, and it too might fly alongside the French over Libyan skies. No Tunisian and Egyptian planes are on the offer. It is a telling sign that only the counter-revolutionary regimes are excited at the prospect of this battle. They know that it is precisely the best opportunity to stop the tide of the Arab Revolt of 2011.

Meanwhile, Germany is staying out of it as arguments over the mission erupt within NATO. And, not surprisingly, Steven Erlanger and Judy Dempsey of The New York Times are hysterical over this continuing newfound German assertion of independence from the US and France.

INITIAL POST: No doubt you've noticed that I haven't posted anything about the US, French and British airstrikes against Gaddafi's forces in Libya. There is a good reason for it. I don't understand it, so maybe some of you out there can help.

I've heard a number of explanations as to the objectives of the participants, but I've yet to be fully convinced of any of them. Let's go through them. First, there is the claim that the US, France and the British want to assist the rebels in overthrowing Gaddafi so as to increase their influence in the country, a country with the largest known oil reserves in Africa, with much of it being easily refineable, high quality crude. There is a superficial logic to this, except that the US and Europe had a good working relationship with Gaddafi, and Gaddafi was playing by the rules of the game by kleptocratically investing his oil profits in Europe, so much so that he counted former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and current Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi among his friends. He also provided assistance to Berlusconi in regard to preventing African immigrants from crossing the Mediterranean through Libya. As for the US, he was a staunch supporter of the so-called war on terror.

Perhaps, the US, the French and the British believe that they can cut a better deal on the sharing of profits from future oil exploration and sales than they had with Gaddafi. Much of the oil is supposedly in the eastern regions of Libya under rebel control, and, by this line of reasoning, a line in favor among some on the British left, they would be satisfied with a de facto partition of Libya that resulted in the rebels taking control of much of the country's oil reserves. Possibly. But there are some obvious problems with this, most importantly the fact that the rebels remain more unpredictable in their future dealings with the US and Europe than Gaddafi would have been. So, there is no certainty that the rebels would supply oil on terms more favorable than Gaddafi. Furthermore, there is also no certainty as to how the rebels would put their oil profits to use. There is still a possibility that they would put them to the sort of mischievous use for which Gaddafi and the Iranians have been known. One wonders if the US and Europe expect the rebels to conduct themselves in a manner similar to the mafiosos of Kosovo, with whom they have a good relationship.

Second, there is the belief that the Libyan airstrikes are a sort of camouflage, an intentional effort to distract attention from the US/Saudi efforts to suppress democratic movements in Yemen and Bahrain. Here, again, there is a superficial logic, but it assumes that there is a necessity for the effort, a necessity that I fail to perceive. In the US, there is no significant outcry about the violence inflicted upon protesters in Yemen and Bahrain, indeed, few Americans are even aware of it. To the extent that they are aware, they have, at least in regard to Bahrain, accepted the new propaganda line that the protesters must be suppressed to contain Iran. Apparently, even the Europeans have accepted it, with a European Union foreign policy advisor, Robert Cooper, recycling US fears of the Iranians by expressing alarm over the prospect of a Shia government there. As for the crackdown itself, he concluded accidents happen. His boss, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, is impressed by the offer of talks by the Crown Prince. No one has been willing to touch the most taboo subject of all, the question as to whether the Iranian social model, as seriously flawed as it is, would constitute a significant improvement in the lives of everyone in Bahrain with the exception of the wealthy elite that runs the country. In any event, there is no indication that a Libyan distraction is required.

Third, there is the possibility of another, potentially more compelling distraction. Both Europe and the US are imposing harsh austerity programs after having channeled trillions of dollars of through transnational finacial institutions to preserve them and the investments of the people who purchased their financial instruments. Clearly unable to resist the cuts of a Republican House of Representatives, President Obama shows that he can stand up to that evil African Gaddafi. Similarly, the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, is implementing a harsh austerity program that will inflict the most punishment upon the poorest people in society. Reminscent of Thatcher'as response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, he has also been the most strident advocate for military action. Meanwhile, the last member of the intervention triumvirate, the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, finds himself extremely unpopular, so he may believe that the airstrikes will improve his domestic political prospects. French pilots flew the first missions over Libya. It is, however, a doubled edged sword. In addition to the possibility that the intervention will fail, people are beginning to notice, at least in the US, that the military operation is substantially eroding the proposed savings from domestic budget cuts proposed by Republicans, placing the credibility of the austerity effort at risk. For now, though, it is merely an indication that the accumulation of capital through the military industrial complex still works as it has done since the beginning of World War II. After all, governments have to purchase those weapons somewhere.

Labels: American Empire, David Grossman, Europe, France, Germany, Gulf States, Libya, NATO, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe, United Kingdom

UPDATE: Quick, someone tell Grossman:

Statements by senior Israeli military commanders made in the Hebrew media days before the massacre revealed that the raid was planned over a week in advance by the Israeli military and was personally approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Ehud Barak. The elite Israeli commando unit known as Unit 13 was tasked with carrying out the mission and its role was known by the Israeli public well before the raid took place. Details of the plan show that the use of deadly force was authorized and calculated. The massacre of activists should not have been unexpected.

INITIAL POST: More liberal rationalizations of Israeli brutality by David Grossman, even as he engages in a pretense to the contrary:

No explanation can justify or whitewash the crime that was committed here, and no excuse can explain away the stupid actions of the government and the army. Israel did not send it soldiers to kill civilians in cold blood; indeed, this is the last thing it wanted. And yet, a small Turkish organization, fanatical in its religious views and radically hostile to Israel, recruited to its cause several hundred seekers of peace and justice, and managed to lure Israel into a trap, precisely because it knew how Israel would react, knew how Israel is destined and compelled, like a puppet on a string, to react the way it did.

How insecure, confused and panicky a country must be, to act as Israel acted! With a combination of excessive military force, and a fatal failure to anticipate the intensity of the reaction of those aboard the ship, it killed and wounded civilians, and did so – as if it were a band of pirates – outside Israel’s territorial waters. Clearly, this assessment does not imply agreement with the motives, overt or hidden, and often malicious, of some participants in the Gaza flotilla. Not all its people are peace-loving humanitarians, and the declarations of some of them regarding the destruction of the State of Israel are criminal. But these facts are simply not relevant at the moment: such opinions, so far as we know, do not deserve the death penalty.

Israel was lured into a trap? Israel, the powerless victim of a Turkish conspiracy? Pure nonsense, as Norm Finkelstein recognized the other day:

What happened with the Gaza flotilla was not an accident. You have to remember that the Israeli cabinet met for fully a week. All the cabinet ministers discussed and deliberated how they would handle the flotilla. There were numerous reports in the Israeli press, numerous suggestions, numerous recommendations about what to do. At the end of the day, they decided on a nighttime armed commando raid on a humanitarian convoy. Israel is now a lunatic state. It's a lunatic state with between two and three hundred nuclear devices. It is threatening war daily against Iran and against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah in Lebanon has already stated on several occasions: if Israel attacks it will retaliate in kind. Things are getting out of control.

Furthermore, it is essential to observe that the subject of concern in Grossman's article is Israel, and even more specifically, the IDF soldiers that were ordered to carry out the raid. He has perfected a style of literary expression that appears, at first glance, to recognize the autonomy of the Palestinians, but, upon closer inspection, subordinates them to the urgencies of the Zionist project at every turn. Like a kindly therapist, he seeks to identify the neurosis purportedly manipulated to such tragic ends by the Turks and propose appropriate treatment, in this case, the end of the siege of Gaza:

Israel’s actions yesterday are but the natural continuation of the shameful, ongoing closure of Gaza, which in turn is the perpetuation of the heavy-handed and condescending approach of the Israeli government, which is prepared to embitter the lives of a million and a half innocent people in the Gaza Strip, in order to obtain the release of one imprisoned soldier, precious and beloved though he may be; and this closure is the all-too-natural consequence of a clumsy and calcified policy, which again and again resorts by default to the use of massive and exaggerated force, at every decisive juncture, where wisdom and sensitivity and creative thinking are called for instead.

Admittedly, Grossman acknowledges that the populace of Gaza is innocent, but the issue of most pressing concern for him is that they will be even further embittered towards Israel because of the siege. There is a nationalistic narcissism on display here, wherein he hopes to relegitimize Israel, and, by extension, Zionism, as both a physical place and an abstract principle for ordering society, enabling people to wholeheartedly identify with them again: I would like to believe that the shock of yesterday’s frantic actions will lead to a re-evaluation of the whole idea of the closure, at last freeing the Palestinians from their suffering, and cleansing Israel of its moral stain.

Come again? Lifting the siege will free the Palestinians from their suffering? While settlement activity proceeds apace, and thousands of Palestinians remain detained within Israel? While settlers run amok in the West Bank, supported by millions of dollars of Israeli and American assistance, abusing an indigenous populace that lives in poverty? Paradoxically, it appears that Grossman craves a sort of special forces approach to the Palestinian problem, one that involves covert actions out of sight and out of mind even as he condemns such an action in the Mediterranean.

Beyond this obvious material aspect, there is the implicit characterization of the Palestinians as an inferior people only capable of achieving a live without suffering, like, say, feudal peasants, while the people of Israel, associated with the higher calling of Zionism, aspire to an attainment of moral perfection. Hence, Israelis are full bodied people, possessing all the human frailties of self-interest, morality and human agency. By contrast, Palestinians are merely passive participants who are either abused by Israelis as they play out their larger than life ambitions as the master builders of Palestine or irrational perpetrators of violence in response to these abuses. In short, they lack the capacity for self-determination.

But we shouldn't be surprised. He was more odious, lacking in any of the subtlety of expression encountered here, when speaking about the Israeli attack upon Lebanon in 2006, as related here and here. We should, however, be appreciative that, while he considers anti-Zionism a criminal offense ( . . the declarations of some of them regarding the destruction of the State of Israel are criminal . . ), he doesn't consider violations as warranting the death penalty. Perhaps, only 6 months county jail or work project, maybe he can elaborate in his next pronouncement. Fortunately, I live in the US, and for all of its obvious faults, it hasn't criminalized public expressions of anti-Zionism.

Labels: David Grossman, Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Zionism

UPDATE 2: Raed Jarrar of Raed in the Middle and Global Exchange, describing his recent experience in Lebanon on Democracy Now!:

And people were furious against the U.S., people were furious against Israel. And, I mean, even for me, I mean, it was such a, like, catch-22, because even for me as an Arab and Muslim who just immigrated to the U.S. last year, I was shouted at, because I’m a U.S. taxpayer, and I was accused with other people in the delegation who went to visit one shelter where Lebanese refugees were staying. We were accused of funding the war and buying these bombs by our money. So we were kicked out of these refugee camps, because they told us, “If you are good Americans, go and try to stop your government. Don't come here and apologize in our shelters.”

So you can feel that even the sense of anti-Americanism and, like, hatred to the U.S. increased very much in a very unfortunate way that even prevents us, as people who are representing the antiwar or peace and justice movement, from going there. It's like burned bridges with many countries in the Middle East. And like, you know, it made Israel and the U.S. less secure, made Hezbollah, as a means or tool for armed resistance, one of the only choices that people are supporting. So what happened there during the last one month’s war against Lebanon is so tragic. It’s just a tragic, devastating political mistake that turned the region into more extremism and into more potentiality to have violence.

If you click on the link for the interview, you can also read about how he was harassed by Jet Blue and airport security when he boarded a flight from D. C. to San Francisco, California.

UPDATE 1: Mike Whitney nails it:

The coverage of the Lebanon fiasco in the Israeli media is alternately narcissistic and hysterical. The details of the massive destruction to Lebanon’s civil infrastructure and environment are brushed aside as inconsequential; the 1,300 civilian deaths, irrelevant. The only thing that matters is Israeli suffering; everything else is trivial. While Lebanon is busy digging out another 300 or so corpses from the rubble of their destroyed homes, Israel is preoccupied with its loss of “deterrents” or its battered sense of “invincibility”.

It is an interesting study in the prevailing megalomania of Israeli society, a culture as pathologically self-absorbed as its American ally. It’s no wonder security is so hard to come by when people are so lacking in empathy.

INITIAL POST: On Monday, I posted about the hypocrisy of David Grossman, and associated intellectuals in the purported Israeli peace movement. Grossman, like his associates, Amos Oz and A. P. Yehoshua, supported the war in Lebanon, and, even worse, consigned the dead, the wounded and the displaced Lebanese to invisibility. Even as they spoke out for a ceasefire before last weekend's IDF ground invasion, they emphasized it in terms of the lives of Israelis, not Lebanese.

And, then, Grossman receives the shattering news: his son had died in Lebanon. Was this the personal motivation for his advocacy of a ceasefire all along? Fear about the safety of his son? Certainly, we can all strongly empathize with such a fear, and it would explain the paradox as to why Grossman supported the war in its initial stages, as necessary for the defense of Israel, despite the horrific consequences for the Lebanese, and then opposed the expansion of it, even though Hizbollah's effective resistance should have, according to Grossman's perspective, increased the threat.

All of this, if true, is understandable, an acceptable expression of human frailty that many of us might display in similar circumstances. Wrapped within a man's love for his son is, however, something sinister. Grossman, through his silence, his unwillingness to acknowledge what the IDF has done to the Lebanese, refuses to acknowledge that the Lebanese possess a similar humanity, that they suffer as he did when he learned of his son's death, as they have done over 1,300 times, and deserve our compassion for the hardships that they, unlike the Israelis, must still endure.

Today, the Observer published a translation of Grossman's eulogy for his son. As one reads it, the Lebanese remain invisible, as they will be the next time the IDF attacks Lebanon, and the intellectuals of the Israeli peace movement again choose cowardice and social acceptability over personal integrity. I can only hope that the translation provided by the Observer is a partial one, or that Grossman has made some highly visible public statements in recent days about the many personal tragedies experienced by the Lebanese as well, because, otherwise, there is a coldheartness, a self-centeredness in his remarks, when he could have reached out to those on the other side of the divide, people who have also lost loved ones.

In this respect, Grossman has become a tragic symbol of the narcissism of Zionism, a social doctrine that justifies the indiscriminate killing of the Lebanese in the name of power politics, but romanticizes the deaths of its own as the most profound personal loss. It echoes a similar moral myopia in this country, where the voluntary enlistees of an army that has inflicted the most unspeakable brutalities in Iraq have been transformed into victims, especially if they have been killed or maimed by the resistance, with the experiences of the Iraqis themselves relegated to a distant, secondary status. Hence, there is a peculiar logic to periodic Pentagon malapropisms that disassociate participants in the Iraqi resistance from their own country.

Labels: David Grossman, Israel, Israeli/Lebanese/US War, Lebanon, Zionism

UPDATE 2: From Updates on the Aggression Against Lebanon: more people that Grossman, Oz and Yehoshua, as intellectual and purportedly moral voices of the Israeli peace movement, seek to erase from our consciousness:

15:35 al-Jazeera: most bodies pulled out from under rubble in Ainata not identified yet

15:34 Red Cross: 11 bodies pulled out from under rubble in Ainata

14:08 al-Jazeera: 6 bodies pulled out from under rubble in al-Teebeh

00:20 Lebanese security forces say that 2 Lebanese civilians, including 1 child, killed and 5 wounded in southern Lebanon in cluster bomb explosions following implementation of ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israeli

And, from the Angry Arab News Service, the passionate, personal commentary of Hanady Salman, managing editor, As-Safir in Beirut:

As of yesterday, new stories will unveil : those returning to find .. nothing. Those returning to find their loved ones under the rubble. But returning anyway. 7 a.m. ( or 8) was the official time for the cease fire on Monday morning. People were on the roads at 7 sharp. I am so proud. Sad, hurt, but proud. Proud of my people, proud of their resistance, proud of their commitment and dignity. Hussein Ayoub, my colleague, finally found his mother today. Ten minutes ago actually. He went to Aynatha in the morning and the rescuers were able to pull her out of the rubble of a house where she, and some 17 other people had taken refuge. We don’t know when she was killed. But at least he was able to recognize her body. She was 75. His father was killed by the Israelis in 1972. We will be fine, I hope. We will burry our dead, the way they deserve to be buried, we will remember them as long as we live. We will tell their stories to our children; they will tell their own children the story: the story of a great people, one that never lost faith despite all the crimes, pains and injustices. One that started rebuilding the minute the fighting stopped. Rebuilding although they know that the enemy might destroy everything again, as it did so many times before. We will also tell them the stories of our enemy : how they killed our children, our elderly, how they hit us from the air, from the sea and from the ground and how we prevailed. How they starved our families in their villages, killed them on the roads, bombed their houses, their shelters, their hospitals, they even bombed vans carrying bread to them; and how in return we did not give up.

As for the rest of us, we should also remember those who professed to believe in peace, in non-violence, in the necessity of people of different cultures to live and work together, who, when confronted with the planned, systematic destruction of Lebanon, a deliberate effort to subordinate the identity of the Lebanese to the Zionist project, were not just mute, but publicly rationalized such brutality.

UPDATE 1: Yitzhak Laor, in the London Review of Books, evaluates the performance of Israel's peace activist intellectuals:

Amos Oz, on 20 July, when the destruction of Lebanon was already well underway, wrote in the Evening Standard: ‘This time, Israel is not invading Lebanon. It is defending itself from a daily harassment and bombardment of dozens of our towns and villages by attempting to smash Hizbullah wherever it lurks.’ Nothing here is distinguishable from Israeli state pronouncements. David Grossman wrote in the Guardian, again on 20 July, as if he were unaware of any bombardment in Lebanon: ‘There is no justification for the large-scale violence that Hizbullah unleashed this week, from Lebanese territory, on dozens of peaceful Israeli villages, towns and cities. No country in the world could remain silent and abandon its citizens when its neighbour strikes without any provocation.’ We can bomb, but if they respond they are responsible for both their suffering and ours. And it’s important to remember that ‘our suffering’ is that of poor people in the north who cannot leave their homes easily or quickly. ‘Our suffering’ is not that of the decision-makers or their friends in the media. Oz also wrote that ‘there can be no moral equation between Hizbullah and Israel. Hizbullah is targeting Israeli civilians wherever they are, while Israel is targeting mostly Hizbullah.’ At that time more than 300 Lebanese had been killed and 600 had been injured. Oz went on: ‘The Israeli peace movement should support Israel’s attempt at self-defence, pure and simple, as long as this operation targets mostly Hizbullah and spares, as much as possible, the lives of Lebanese civilians (this is not always an easy task, as Hizbullah missile-launchers often use Lebanese civilians as human sandbags).’

The truth behind this is that Israel must always be allowed to do as it likes even if this involves scorching its supremacy into Arab bodies. This supremacy is beyond discussion and it is simple to the point of madness. We have the right to abduct. You don’t. We have the right to arrest. You don’t. You are terrorists. We are virtuous. We have sovereignty. You don’t. We can ruin you. You cannot ruin us, even when you retaliate, because we are tied to the most powerful nation on earth. We are angels of death.

The entirety of the article is well worth reading for its insight into the IDF's cultural dominance of Israeli society, and the unwillingness of anyone to contest it. Hat tip to the Angry Arab News Service.

INITIAL POST: On July 20th, David Grossman, a novelist and Israeli peace activist, supported the Israeli attack upon Lebanon, an attack that has killed over 1,000 Lebanese, created over 900,000 refugees and destroyed much of the country's infrastructure and economy:

Hizbullah's surprise blitz against the Galilee, Israel's northern region, proves - if anyone needed proof - how sensitive and explosive this region is, and how little it takes to bring it to the brink of war. Israel has launched a counter-attack, and it has every right to do so. There is no justification for the large-scale violence that Hizbullah unleashed this week, from Lebanese territory, on dozens of peaceful Israeli villages, towns and cities. No country in the world could remain silent and abandon its citizens when its neighbour strikes without any provocation.

In language echoing Alan Dershowitz, Grossman rationalized the consequences upon the Lebanese people:

Israel has attacked Lebanon because that country is officially responsible for Hizbullah. It is also the address from which missiles are being fired at Israeli cities. Hizbullah's leaders are members of the Lebanese cabinet, and participate in setting the country's policies. Even those who hope for an immediate end to violence and the opening of negotiations must acknowledge that Hizbullah deliberately created the crisis.

On the date of the publication of Grossman's column in the Guardian, the IDF had already killed 306 Lebanese civilians, 20 during a notorious airstrike in southern Lebanon when it attacked a convoy of civilians fleeing their village after being warned to do so, and displaced approximately 500,000 people. The IDF had targeted homes, schools, village centers and vehicles, including ambulances. One-third of the dead were Lebanese children. As reported by NPR, in urbanized south Beirut, block after block, whole roads were choked with chunks of cement, twisted metal and wiring from buildings that crumbled under the barrage of Israeli ordnance.

Read Grossman's Guardian column carefully. Nowhere does he express the slightest remorse at what the IDF had already done to Lebanon, or express any compassion for what the Lebanese have experienced. Indeed, the entire subject goes unmentioned. A highly regarded novelist, known for his humanism, antiseptically writes with the emotion of a bureaucrat. His mind was sharp, but his heart was still.

To his credit, Grossman had, at least, awakened to the fact that no military victory was possible, even if he closed his eyes to the collective punishment of the Lebanese:

What began as a justified Israeli response to aggression now looks like a trap with two doors, one for each side. Neither can defeat the other, but neither can concede. As the popular saying in these parts goes, each adversary is willing to lose an eye if that is the price to pay for gouging both of its enemy's eyes. Now is precisely the moment when the international community must step in, mediate, formulate a compromise, and save both sides from self-destruction.

Sensing the peril from the escalation of the war through a massive invasion of ground forces, Grossman again expressed opposition to it about a week ago, but, again, in ambiguous, if not cynical fashion:

Acclaimed Israeli authors Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman publicly stated their opposition Thursday to the cabinet's decision to expand ground operations in Lebanon, calling for a diplomatic solution to the crisis based on the proposal put forth by Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.

This past Sunday, the literary giants published an advertisement in the press calling for a cease-fire and negotiations. Critics felt the demand for a halt in the fighting was late in coming, and that the advertisement was aimed both at justifying the war as well as an attempt to distance the authors from the war.

The three men convened a joint news conference with reporters Thursday afternoon, a rarity in the world of Israeli literature, a few meters from the Defense Ministry compound at the Kirya in Tel Aviv. Later Thursday evening, Meretz and Peace Now are to stage a large demonstration in the vicinity.

"The literary people who are sitting here thought that Israel initiated a just war," said the organizer of the joint briefing, Professor Nissim Calderon. "After yesterday's cabinet meeting, they feel that the decision to widen the war is mistaken, and that [we] need to go from a military operation to a diplomatic operation."

Again, if the linked Haaretz article accurately reflects the content of the advertisement and the remarks at the press conference, little, if any, alarm was expressed over the extent of the carnage inflicted by the IDF, which, by that time, included 759 known dead Lebanese civilians, through killings of refugees at Qana and farmworkers at Qaa, and increasing numbers of refugees, approaching the 900,000 currently reported. Nor was there any mention of the fact that Hizbollah has been killing significantly more IDF soldiers than Israeli civilians, while the IDF has been killing far more Lebanese civilians than Hizbollah.

Now, David Grossman's son is dead:

There were an estimated 30,000 Israeli Defence Force (IDF) troops in the 30km strip of Lebanon south of the Litani river yesterday. But last night they were still fighting battles with Hizbullah close to the Israeli border, and suffering their heaviest casualties to date - 24 dead on Saturday with another heavy toll expected yesterday.

Among the dead was staff sergeant Uri Grossman, the 20-year-old son of David Grossman, one of Israel's most celebrated authors and peace activists who three days ago issued a public appeal with two other writers for the government to end the war.

One must ask the impertinent question: Did David Grossman abandon his initial support for the war for any reason other than the prospect that the resilience of Hizbollah and its allies in southern Lebanon would result in the unanticipated deaths of large numbers of Israelis in combat? Robert Fisk reports 43 dead IDF soldiers within a 24 hour period on Sunday.

From the West Coast, the record is no doubt incomplete, but, based upon what we already know, it appears that the Lebanese have only been, at best, a fleeting presence in his thought. I empathize with his grief, but shudder at his apparent erasure of the far greater suffering of the people of Lebanon. Perhaps, there is something very telling in it, and, maybe, something hopeful as well, because Israelis will eventually discover that they cannot personally avoid what they have done to Lebanon. In other words, the return of the repressed, and the consequences are likely to be both unpredictable and profound.

Labels: David Grossman, Israel, Israeli/Lebanese/US War, Lebanon, Zionism