...Eric Lee is hardly a crackpot. And is Juan Cole a crackpot for suggesting that Hezbollah has engaged in war crimes? Get a grip.
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Juan Cole is exactly right to describe Hezbollah's rocket attacks on Israeli population centers as "war crimes" but I note he uses the term in a very even-handed and precise way: attacks against non-combatants are war crimes, this applies to both Israel and Hezbollah - end of story.
Eric Lee, on the other hand, is saying something else.
An excerpt from his blog:
The question facing socialists
The question is – do we socialists support or oppose Israel in its war of self defense following the Hamas and Hizbollah attacks?
There is no third way and no third camp. We could call for a “socialist federation of the Middle East” or for the workers of Israel, Palestine and Lebanon to overthrow their bosses and embrace each other as brothers and sisters. But if that were to be our position (and not just our dream) we would be living in a fantasy.
If you support Israel's right of self-defense as a socialist you offer that support critically, meaning that you support:
* limited war aims (putting Hizbollah and Hamas rockets out of range of Israeli civilians) *a diplomatic solution to the conflict
And you oppose:
* unnecessary civilian deaths (noting the difference between deliberately targetting civilians and collateral damage) * the re-occupation of Lebanon or Gaza by Israeli forces
What this means in practice is that while you might support a limited series of military actions by Israel today, were Israel to re-occupy Lebanon and Gaza, or deliberately target civilians as part of its strategy, or reject any possibility of a diplomatic solution – if Israel were to do any of those things, you could change your mind tomorrow.
And this is exactly what happened to the Israeli Left in 1982: initially the Labour Party supported the invasion, and within weeks – when it became clear what Begin and Sharon were up to – changed their views.
[...]
Here we're presented with a reasonably constructed argument built upon unreasonable premises.
For example, how could the IDF pursue its - in Lee's ideal world - "limited war aims" of pushing Hezbollah rockets "beyond the range of Israeli civilians" without waging war upon Lebanese civilians and, therefore, producing the very "unnecessary civilian deaths" he claims to object to?
There's a bit of confusion here - he supports militarism (but one that follows some sort of "socialist" version of 'just war theory') but opposes the inevitable results of military action.
.d.
The most important isotope of plutonium is 239Pu, with a half-life of 24,110 years.
...................... http://monroelab.net/blog/