What are the chances the folks now suddenly taking notice of Lebanon have spent any time over the last eight months lashing Hezbollah and Iran for bringing us to this point? One-third of Metula is literally demolished from rocket fire. 80,000 Israelis haven’t been able to go home for eight months because their communities are under relentless shelling and targeted missile attacks. Along the northern border road, town after town, village after village are either deserted or in various states of demolition. And this was Hezbollah’s purpose. It published videos of its fighters literally aiming into the windows of civilian homes, apparently secure in the knowledge that western moralizing won’t bat a goddamn eyelash. If you’ve spent eight months using passive language about Hezbollah, as though its sustained bombardments are a force of nature rather than a systemic war crime, you don’t get to suddenly discover “a major Israeli war on Lebanon.” I sometimes try to follow Lebanese social media. It isn’t easy. When it isn’t virulently anti-Israel, it’s heartbreaking. For eight long months, people from all over Lebanon have been terrified at the war they see Hezbollah bringing down on their heads. I’m afraid of the coming war. If it comes, it will be terrible for both sides. My family will be under massive missile fire. Hezbollah knows how to overwhelm Iron Dome. Some of my family will be in uniform heading into gunbattles with Hezbollah, who are far better trained and armed than anything Hamas can field. Yet still, this upgraded version of “Saladin’s heirs” in Gaza have the same basic plan as Hamas: to fight like mole rats, hiding under women and children and hoping to be saved by their “strategically necessary” deaths. So I pity the Lebanese more than myself. Their fear is already immense, their sense of helplessness as Hezbollah carries their nation to the brink in the service of a distant empire is already overwhelming in many parts of the country. But eight months of shelling Israeli towns brought us here, not some unexplained Israeli belligerence toward Lebanon. The fact that relatively little western media attention was focused on that bombardment or that no war-crimes accusations were leveled at Lebanon or Iran for these crimes from the international-law faithful doesn’t mean it didn’t happen - isn’t happening. So Israel must do the job. And when the world’s lawyer-activists, op-ed writers and UN bureaucrats suddenly find your mysteriously lost voices once the Israeli response begins, please don’t once again feign surprise when we don’t believe you. https://bird.makeup/@mazmhussain/1801858853086044258
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