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Pity The Nation

Whatever else it may be, this is a war between palpable unequals: a giant nuclear-armed power with the most advanced western military hardware and a potential ground force of up to 650,000 trained men, against a tiny third-world guerrilla force of around 5,000 fighters, armed largely with second-hand former eastern bloc hardware (the first Katyusha […]

Whatever else it may be, this is a war between palpable unequals: a giant nuclear-armed power with the most advanced western military hardware and a potential ground force of up to 650,000 trained men, against a tiny third-world guerrilla force of around 5,000 fighters, armed largely with second-hand former eastern bloc hardware (the first Katyusha rockets were developed in the early 1940s) and castoffs from Iran and Syria.

The idea that the latter can pose an existential threat to the former, under any foreseeable circumstances, is risible at best and disingenuous at worst. While it can hardly be comfortable for northern Israel’s civilian population to be forced into shelters for four weeks, the physical safety of the overwhelming majority – unlike that of their counterparts in much of Lebanon – has never been seriously at stake. And while Hizbullah’s supposed targeting of Israeli civilians has yielded relatively few victims, Israel’s repeated “mistakes” in Lebanon have maintained a civilian death rate of about 100 Lebanese to every three Israelis. The opposite side of this coin is that while Israel’s hi-tech “surgical strikes” have killed hundreds more civilians than Hizbullah fighters, the Lebanese resistance’s low-tech weapons have killed about three times as many Israeli soldiers as civilians. ~Ahmad Samih Khalidi, The Guardian

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