Jonathan Cook does good reporting, but I haven't read this piece... Interesting, in that specific case I presumed they were trying to hit Natzrat Ilit (a Jewish village overlooking Nazareth), it was obvious they weren't targeting the Palestinian Nazareth, but if Jonathan says so in this case, there is probably something to it, especially because he lives in Nazareth.
It is also interesting that, as Robert Fisk said, they tried to hit the Har Meron military tracking centre (which is obvious to anyone when you go hiking there, though never thought of its exact purpose), to facilitate hitting civilian targets like Haifa. "The long-range Iranian-made missiles which later exploded on Haifa had been preceded only a few weeks ago by a pilotless Hizbollah drone aircraft which surveyed northern Israel and then returned to land in eastern Lebanon after taking photographs during its flight. These pictures not only suggested a flight path for Hizbollah's rockets to Haifa; they also identified Israel's top-secret military air traffic control centre in Miron."
Without question however, the great majority of targets in Israel are civilian targets. That they would take a couple potshots (and miss miserably) at a few obvious military targets doesn't change that in the least.
Take Juan Cole's argument about this issue:
"Some readers have asked why I characterize Hizbullah's rocket launches as war crimes. It is because the Geneva Convention requires that in war you have to aim at enemy combatants. You can't deliberately target civilians, and you can't endanger civilians unnecessarily. The Hizbullah rockets have poor targeting, and so just firing them endangers civilians. The rockets themselves have apparently killed almost no Israeli troops, and almost all their victims have been innocent civilians, like that poor man who was just driving along in or near Haifa. That is, the Hizbullah rockets have been fired indiscriminately (the only way they can be fired) and mainly hit civilian targets, which a prudent person could foresee. Bingo. War crime.
See the statement of the International Commission of Jurists.
See also The Fourth Geneva Convention:
There is actually an argument to be made that both Hizbullah and Israel have taken the civilian population of their enemy hostage. Since hostage-taking is forbidden, both are war criminals. I heard former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski make a similar argument at a salon dinner in Washington, DC, last week, though the wording above is my own. "
The damned Zionist loving liberal... ;-)
Also by the way, if you haven't yet, read his recent piece in Salon "Israel's Maximal Option"
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/07/19/maximal/
It sounds even more plausible in the wake of Israeli Offense Minister Amir Peretz's statement today:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3281338,00.html
"'The primary effort is to create a security strip that will be in our control in the absence of a multinational force to take control over the border, or more accurately, in the absence of a multinational force with the power to enforce,' said Defense Minister, Amir Peretz, on Tuesday afternoon, during a visit to IDF Northern Command.' 'We will exercise military control against anyone nearing the strip; anyone approaching it will know that he is in danger of harm,'"
btw...Fisk also says that the the original capture of the soldiers was a cross border infiltration: "The original border crossing, the capture of the two soldiers..."
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www.leninology. blogspot.com wrote:
> Bryan wrote:
>
>> What military infrastructure have they hit in Israel?
>
> I'm really surprised you have to ask. Here's a couple of links for you:
>
> http://informationclearinghouse.info/article14006.htm__
> <http://informationclearinghouse.info/article14006.htm>
>
> http://www.antiwar.com/orig/cook.php?articleid=9333
>
> I would guess that even more goes on than gets out because of this:
>
> http://www.imemc.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20305&Itemid=173
> <http://www.imemc.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20305&Itemid=173>
>
> I hope that helps, and I'll try and furnish you with more information if
> you want. Right now it'd be worth checking the 'breaking news', though
> - Israel has busted up a UN station, according to MSNBC.
>