Appreciate the response. If I am reading it correctly, the analogy is not so much: Hezbollah==Jews and Israel==SS, but "the relationship of SS to Jews and the action/reaction" == "what the Israelis do to Lebanon/Palestine/Hezbollah and their actions and Hezbollah reaction". So even though the analogy does not hold very well by some measures (the Jews were not a military entity; they were attacked by their own state; Israel is a democracy with some level of respect for law, human rights; etc), here, from my naive outlook, are the similarities (just off the top of my head):
1. Both "victims" were set upon by the aggressor (in the case of Israel starting with the occupation)
2. Significant imbalance of power in favour of the aggressor
3. Indiscriminate mass targetting (dare I say murder?) by the aggressor
4. Any response from the victim arises out of and is a form of impotence (in terms of power). When this came up last, I used the analogy of the crimes of Palestinian boys throwing rocks.
I would suggest that in evaluating the analogy, it is irrelevant that Hezbollah has sources of money and weapons, or has a history (though I have found little evidence of it) of terrorist action. What is significant, IMHO, to the analogy is: is Hezbollah, akin to the Jews and the Palestinian boys, a weaker entity suffering aggression without [larger] cause, and most of all, without means to respond in a legitimate fashion?
When you are herded into ghettos or being marched to the gas chamber, or bombed to smithereens from 10,000 feet, what can you do? Nothing. You flail about. You kick and scream. You throw rocks. You lob rockets. Hezbollah or the Palestinian boys cannot be guilty of war crimes because they are incapable of participating in a war. They can either lie down and take it, or throw tantrums. Much like us leftists in the USA. ;-)
Now, you are smarter about these sort of things than me, so I look forward to seeing you punch holes in my argument!
--ravi
P.S: There is one more issue here: the definition of war crimes is based on certain institutions of which Israel is a powerful part and from which entities like Hezbollah are deliberately excluded, yes? Take the case of the businessman who was recently arrested in Florida for offering to provide a feed of Al-Mannar to an undercover FBI agent. By being declared a terrorist organisation at the outset, the Hezbollah are deprived of the means to offer their view, which might include a rebuttal of the accusation.
P.P.S: This could be the point where Ramesh from Nepal could remind us that Gandhi's incoherent advice to the Jews was to march into the gas chambers with pride, or some such.
-- Support something better than yourself: ;-) PeTA: http://www.peta.org/ GreenPeace: http://www.greenpeace.org/ If you have nothing better to do: http://platosbeard.org/