The games that Israel plays

Aug.8 2006

The games that Israel plays

STARTLING as it indeed is to many, it has been suggested that Israel has purposely left pockets of pockets of Hizbollah rockets in Lebanon with a view to allowing the Lebanese group to continue to lob projectiles at Israeli towns. The rationale is that as long as Israel is being rocketed, the Israeli armed forces could continue to have what their political and military leaders consider as moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon.
The suggestion has come not from the Arab World, but from someone as eminent as the Washington Post's Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks in an interview with Cable News Network.
"One of the things that is going on, according to some US military analysts, is that Israel purposely has left pockets of Hizbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they’re being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon," Ricks told CNN's Howard Kurtz.
Quoting military analysts, Ricks said Israel had deliberately allowed Hizbollah to retain some of it’s fire power, essentially for public relations purposes, because having Israeli civilians killed helps it in the public relations war.
As Ricks put it, "it helps you with the moral high ground problem, because you know your operations in Lebanon are going to be killing civilians as well."
The argument goes against the widely held conventional belief that Israel is "uncompromising" when it comes to the life and security of its people. It is often argued by regional pundits that the Israeli mindset is unable to accept the death of even one Israeli in a situation of conflict, and that is why Israel responds so violently and brutally in retaliation for fatal attacks against its people.
The pundits cite the heavily lopsided Israeli-Arab exchanges in the past, including the instances where Israel freed more than 4,000 Arab and non-Arab prisoners in exchange for four Israeli soldiers and the remains of a few others in the mid-80s and several other swaps since then under similar conditions but with a less number of prisoners freed.
In view of this record, it would seem improbable that Israel would ever expose its people to danger by allowing Hizbollah to continue to fire rockets at Israeli targets across the border.
But then one has to look far beyond the 80s to realise that giving up or even taking Israeli lives in order to serve the broader "Zionist cause" is nothing new to the Jewish state.
In fact, the history of the run-up to the creation of Israel and thereafter is bloody with Jewish blood spilled by Zionist leaders with a view to stampeding them into migrating to the Jewish state.
Some of today's Israeli elderly politicians and former ministers have admitted to having taking part in plotting bomb attacks and planting explosives in synagogues in Arab countries such as Iraq and Egypt in the 1940s. The bombs exploded and killed many, and they triggered panic among the entire Jewish communities there, and they,  with a bit of scary persuasion by the bombers, promptly fled the country, with most of them going to Israel.
Since then, Israel's publicly known and unknown history is full of incidents that establish that the Jewish state has always thrived on deception and would go to any extent to have its way. No price is too high if it serves Zionist interests, even if means a few Israeli lives — that is the bottom line for the Zionist leaders.
The suggestion that Israel has allowed Hizbollah to keep some of its rocket pockets might or might not be true, but it highlights the cunningness and mass deception that have always been part of the Israeli drive to get itself accepted as a legitimate member of the Middle Eastern order. It also offers an insight into how Israel managed to build itself as an unquestioned ally of the US, which has always overlooks the many unfriendly actions of the Jewish state, including spying in the US and exposing and damaging American interests all around. Even US presidents do not care to respond when Israeli leaders claim that they have more clout in the US Congress than the president of the country.
It also shows the enormity of the challenges facing the Arabs in trying to ensure fairness and justice in the Middle East.