Many people seem to think a war with Lebanon/Hezbollah and Israel is inevitable. There was a major strike into the Golan Heights over the weekend, which killed a number of children.
I have mentioned that I speak pretty much every day with friends and colleagues from the Israeli office, and they are all certain it is going to happen. Without saying too much, the office there is taking specific steps to prevent outages here if it should happen, and a number of our employees (reservists) are being sent north.
Foreign Affairs has an interesting read, free if you haven’t read too many this month.
I thought it makes sense to have an ongoing news and discussion thread for this topic.
If I’m not mistaken - all the deaths were in Arab families. Would they have Israeli citizenship in an occupied area? It’s a little surprising to me that Israel is giving them support by counter- attacking.
I read that they were Druze, and that Israel has offered the Druze citizenship, but most have declined.
From here
Most of the Druze residents of the Golan Heights consider themselves to be Syrians and refuse to take Israeli citizenship, instead holding Israeli permanent resident status
I have a personal interest in this. I’m not Jewish, nor Israeli, but I have many friends and colleagues there and my company relies on facilities located there.
I think this has the potential to blow up in a big way and it concerns me. If Iran gets pulled in I worry the US will too.
Some of the posters here see different sources than I do, and I thought they might have insights I missed.
But it’s not getting much attention, so if there’s no interest beyond mine I’ll let it drop.
The town of Majdal Shams - Arabic for “Tower of the Sun”, BTW - is an interesting place. It’s on the slope of Mt. Hermon, by far the highest ground controlled by Israel, and thus of paramount strategic importance. Its residents are Druze, a religious sect that has a strong minority presence in Lebanon and Syria as well. When Israel conquered the Golan in 1967, it offered its residents (currently about 20,000 in number) Israeli citizenship, which most of then rejected either out of loyalty to Syria, fear of their fate if the Golan was returned, or some other reason. Since then, the town has been an of in-between place, a quasi-neutral ground that has managed to stay out of all of the chaos around them. I’ve been there several times, on my way to the ski slopes on the Hermon; the place makes a lot of money off winter tourism.
The fact that it considered itself apart from the conflict is why, unlike in other Israeli and Lebanese border towns (many of which have been abandoned), life seemed to have been pretty normal there since the start of the war - including local youth league soccer meets like the one that was bombed. That’s also why it’s been such a major shock. Things like this weren’t supposed to happen there.
I think it’s a mistake to think of this as being a war between Israel and Lebanon, or the previous one as being a war between Israel and Palestine. Both of them are the same war, between Israel and Iran, just with different proxies for Iran.
Which is no comfort, of course, to all of the Lebanese and Palestinians, and Israelis for that matter, who are being killed.
I have learned not to expect impartial reporting from the once-respected NYTimes.
The Times today printed a big,detailed map marking in bright red the many sites which big bad Israel has bombed in Lebanon.
The map physically covers both countries equally, showing 30 miles on each side of the border between Lebanon and Israel.
But the bright red spots are only shown on the Lebanese side.
The Israeli side of the map is left white, nice and clean–Thus giving readers the impression that Hezbollah hasn’t attacked anywhere in Israel, never launched a single missile, never done any damage to Israel.
I liked Hezbollah’s narrative that it was a ‘treacherous’ airstrike, he was a martyr, all the other people killed by Zionists are martyrs. I love the black-and-white portrayal there - no shade of grey at all.
A year ago, Hamas decided the world was just not heading in a direction they liked. The Saudis are about to sign a deal with the Israelis. Other Arab Gulf states were chilling out a bit. Relations with Iran and its neighbors were not hot enough. But Hamas lacked the power to change any of this directly. But if they could only spark an increase in tensions, spark a general war and bring the whole temple down upon everyone’s head.
So they attacked Israel and everything since then has worked out in their favor. For the cost of thousands of deaths of people they do not care about they have gotten everything they wanted.
