"Hiding Among Civilians" posted by Richard Seymour

Or not:

Throughout this now 16-day-old war, Israeli planes high above civilian areas make decisions on what to bomb. They send huge bombs capable of killing things for hundreds of meters around their targets, and then blame the inevitable civilian deaths -- the Lebanese government says 600 civilians have been killed so far -- on "terrorists" who callously use the civilian infrastructure for protection.

But this claim is almost always false. My own reporting and that of other journalists reveals that in fact Hezbollah fighters -- as opposed to the much more numerous Hezbollah political members, and the vastly more numerous Hezbollah sympathizers -- avoid civilians. Much smarter and better trained than the PLO and Hamas fighters, they know that if they mingle with civilians, they will sooner or later be betrayed by collaborators -- as so many Palestinian militants have been.

For their part, the Israelis seem to think that if they keep pounding civilians, they'll get some fighters, too.

Not that it matters any more anyway, since anyone in South Lebanon is a target. Not that it ever mattered anyway, because one does not bomb civilians in principled protest at their allegedly being used as human shields, particularly not when the bombers themselves have been known to engage in this practise.

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Israel is doing very badly on its own military criteria. Last week, the Jerusalem Post uncritically reported IDF claims that between 40 and 50% of Hezbollah's military capacity had been destroyed. So much horseshit. And notice that the Post simply goes from saying 'IDF sources say' to 'we have learned' within a few sentences. As the Angry Arab notes, "Israeli newspapers, especially in their military reports, read like Syrian newspapers at times of war. Notice how they just print uncritically Israeli military propaganda". The Israelis claim to have killed up to 250 Hezbollah fighters, but no one takes that seriously. The IDF have had to fight like hell for a small village and a small town and they still don't appear to have secured them.

Speaking of human shields, Chabert points out:

Anyone with the least sympathy for Israelis, Jewish and Gentile, has to hope for the swiftest possible defeat of the Israeli regime's policy and its immediate fall from power. That support for the Israeli regime's merciless rampages, obliteration of whole societies, cloaks itself in some righteous sympathy for five or ten percent of the victims of this bloodbath (and they too are Israel's and the US's victims, to be laid at the White House door; to hold the resistance fighters of Hezbollah alone accountable for any of this, for any of these deaths is, in truth, an obscenity) depends on the depraved confusion which only our current infinitely protean and agile fascist ideology could contrive to popularise and pass off as rational. This regime came to power and maintains power through terrorising its citizens (human shields for the State) - more delicately, more coyly, indirectly of course - while it pursues its unbridled onslaught against its uncitizened insect race taxpayers. Through its incessant assault on infinitely weaker neighbours facing relentless, genocidal aggression, the regime has consistently ensured just enough random explosions to gather its citizens, like sand bags, as a physical and moral wall of protection around the murderous, lawless entity which uses and disposes of them with a master's sense of entitlement and divine proprietorship.