Madam, - While confusion still surrounds the precise series of events which led to the deaths of over 50 civilians in Qana last Sunday, an Israeli bomb will almost certainly prove to have been the tragedy's proximate cause - an indication that the IDF, while never intentionally targeting civilians, must do more to minimise non-combatant casualties.
However, this cannot be allowed to obscure the fact that ultimate responsibility for the killings in Qana lies not with the IDF but with Hizbullah, which is waging its war against Israel from behind the double-sided shield of Lebanon's civilian population and UN personnel. In what are just the latest examples, residents fleeing Ain Ebal angrily told the New York Times last weekend that Hizbullah was using the town as a rocket-launching base, firing them "from between houses" while a former south Lebanese Shia, writing in Berlin's Der Tagesspiegel, described Hizbullah's concealment of a weapons depot under a school in his village. Qana itself has been similarly exploited. The IDF has released footage of both the arrival of rocket launchers into the town and their subsequent firing from neighbourhoods including Hariva, in which Sunday's air strikes took place.
This "cowardly blending. . . among women and children" (as the UN's Jan Egeland described it last week) inevitably results in heavy Lebanese non-combatant casualties which are then adduced as evidence of Israel's "disproportionate" response. But Israel's response to Hizbullah's offensive is not disproportionate to the threat which it faces.
The principle of proportionality in war relates, not to provocation-reprisal ratios of scale, but to the proportion between the amount of force employed and the amount of force required to achieve legitimate military objectives, which must be determined with reference to the conflict's broader contexts. The objective of Israel's current operation in Lebanon is not solely the rescue of its two captured soldiers but the termination of the Iranian-sponsored cross-border campaign by Hizbullah, to which they and scores of other Israelis have fallen victim since May 2000.
Israel is determined to defeat this campaign because it represents not a mere localised terrorist assault but the front-line battle in Iran's 27-year war of annihilation against the Jewish state. Since its foundation in 1979, the Islamic Republic has officially held that the very existence of Israel "humiliates Islam, the Qu'ran, the government of Islam and the nation of Islam" and that it must be "eliminated from the pages of history". The present Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei has stated that "setting Israel on fire" topped Iran's foreign policy agenda while ex-President Rafsanjani has pledged that the Islamic world will "vomit it out from its midst". Most recently, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly demanded that Israel be "wiped off the map."
Those dismissing these statements as mere rhetorical sound and fury overlook the fact that Iran has spent the past 15 years working to achieve its ambition through the sponsorship of Palestinian terrorism, completely bankrolling Islamic Jihad, channelling significant logistical and financial support to Hamas and, since September 2000, increasing its associations with the Fatah-affiliated militias to the extent that, before the declaration of last year's "ceasefire", it had a hand in almost all of Al-Aqsa Martyrs' attacks. With regard to Hizbullah, Iran has spent around $100 million a year transforming it into an anti-Israel military force more like a national army than a terrorist militia.
This Jerusalem can no longer be expected to endure. On withdrawing from Lebanon six years ago, it warned that any future attacks from this territory would be met with a forceful response "based upon the pure, simple and compelling right to self-defence". Israel's current action is a legitimate and proportionate exercise of that right. - Yours, etc,
SEAN GANNON, Chairman, Irish Friends of Israel, Ontario Terrace, Dublin 6.
Madam, - Cathal McCann (August 1st) concludes his defence of Israel with the question: "What would you do in Israel's position?"
If I were prime minister of Israel, I would have proclaimed publicly to the world that Israel has no interest whatever in any territory beyond the 1967 borders. I would have offered to share Jerusalem with my Palestinian neighbours. I would have committed my country to the development of a truly democratic secular state; and I would have formally recognised Islam as being of equal status within the state as Judaism.
Having done all this, I doubt if "my citizens" would be dying in the street of Haifa, and I imagine that terrorist rhetoric and action would have been consigned to history.
But the government of Israel, in its wisdom, has not chosen this path. Instead, it insists that it has the right to retain some of the occupied territories in any peace treaty. It demands the right to develop a Jewish State for a Jewish people. It continues to build settlements in the occupied territories. It routinely assassinates and abducts persons it suspects of being members of militias; and it reacts to any resistance to these measures with the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians.
May I respond to Cathal McCann's question with one of my own: "What would you do in this situation if you were a Palestinian?" - Yours, etc,
JOHN McGRATH, Kilbride, Co Wicklow.
Madam, - Given that in recent days those who have found it difficult to condemn the actions that have led to so many civilian deaths have stopped just short of declaring the inevitability of a war between civilisations and belief systems, or more specifically between the West and Islam, it might be useful to recall the words of Prof Benjamin Barber in his book Jihad vs McWorld (1996):
"Jihad forges communities of blood rooted in exclusion and hatred, communities that slight democracy in favour of tyrannical paternalism or consensual tribalism. McWorld forges global markets rooted in consumption and profit, leaving to an untrustworthy, if not altogether fictitious, invisible hand issues of public interest and common goods that once might have been nurtured by democratic citizenries and their watchful governments. . . Today. . .we seem intent on recreating a world in which our only choices are the secular universalism of the cosmopolitan market and the everyday particularism of the fractious tribe. "
We desperately need a moral and intellectual commitment that does not lock us into such a desperate and arid choice. Cllr John McManus (August 1st) would be better seeing the task of the left in such a project rather than tacitly accepting the bogus inevitability of the clash of civilisations. Those of us who believe in undertaking the task of developing a position for the left in relation to the Middle East and the task of building peace are not offering a knee-jerk anti-Americanism. We do, however, regard it as an act of moral honesty to condemn the indiscriminate loss of civilian life.
Falling back on the cheap option of the easy accusation of anti-Americanism is something one might expect from Mr Alan Shatter, but not from a member of the left, even the revised left. - Yours, etc,
MICHAEL D. HIGGINS, Dáil Éireann, Dublin 2.
Madam, - John McManus (August 1st) has it about right when he says that there is an "unfortunate tendency on the left to identify all who oppose America as objectively progressive".
The present situation across the Middle East is clearly very complex, but the left is too ambiguous about those who want to bring the region back to the Middle Ages, and, as in Iraq, those who attempt to foment civil war to create a viciously repressive state. That war is over: there is a UN-recognised regime in place and the Iraqi people have voted far more frequently in recent years than we have. In their opposition to the US and the Bush regime in particular, many on the left turn a blind eye to what my party colleague, Mr McManus, has correctly identified as the rise of "theocracy and fanaticism".
The left has been indolent in the face of a number of international issues in recent years. Lazy cries for UN reform excuse international inaction in the face of atrocities from Bosnia to Darfur. We on the left were not even united in support of the Nato campaign to prevent further genocide in Kosovo.
On questions such as Cuba, a state which, according to Human Rights Watch, has an "undemocratic government that represses nearly all forms of political dissent" and in which a dictator of 40 years and more has just handed power to his brother, the left remains hopelessly soft.
John McManus says: "It is the job of all those on the left to be clear where they stand on the basic principles of liberty and equality". To state it more baldly, the Left must support democracy, respect for human rights, and the rule of law. - Yours, etc,
Cllr AIDAN CULHANE, Meadow Grove, Dublin 16.
Madam, - In the aftermath of the second Israeli massacre of innocent civilians at Qana, we read Charles Krauthammer lecturing us on how the world has lost its moral bearings by criticising Israel for its attacks on Lebanon (Opinion, August 31st).
Mr Krauthammer persists in his apologia for murder by asserting that Israel has no desire to kill Lebanese civilians. As proof of this, he says that if it really wanted to, Israel could flatten all of South Lebanon and Beirut. A moral stance indeed.
Mr Krauthammer and his ilk persist in demonising Hizbullah and blaming "Islamic terrorism" for the current crisis, thereby avoiding discussion of the fundamental cause of instability in the region: the injustice done to the Palestinian people at the creation of Israel. Similarly, they refuse to recognise that Hizbullah began as a defensive reaction to the 18-year illegal occupation of South Lebanon by the Israelis.
If there is to be peace in the region, Israel must recognise the validity of the claims of the Palestinians and allow the displaced to return. Israel must also recognise that its neighbours have a right to security that is equal to its own. Instead, Israeli actions create the impression that its attitude to its neighbours is that "two of ours are worth a thousand of yours". In other words, racism. - Yours, etc,
BARRA Ó DONNABHÁIN, Aghabullogue, Co Cork.
Madam, - Alan McPartland (August 1st) asks two questions that deserve a reply. The first amounts to an appeal to observe the same standards of criticism in matters concerning Israel as applied to other countries. The reply is that in order to do that one would have to study the fairly recent history of the region, say 100 years, as it is obvious that most of your correspondents are totally ignorant of that history. The second question was his wondering when "we" are going to stop feeling guilty about the Holocaust? I presume that the "we" in question are Christians and the answer to that is another question. Do you know how guilty you are? If you do I hope that you never forget it.
He then goes on to accuse "Israelis and Zionists" of using the Holocaust as a stick to beat public opinion as a cover for Israeli atrocities. What he really means to say is not Israelis or Zionists but Jews, but he lacks the courage to use the dreadful world. Let me assure Mr McPartland that we Jews do not use the Holocaust to remind you of your sins but to remind our fellow Jews that never fighting back against the murder, humiliation, rape and banishment we suffered for 16 centuries almost led to our obliteration. - Yours, etc,
MONTY ROSS, Templeogue Road, Dublin 6W.
Madam, - The national outcry over the Israeli bombing of innocent children and civilians in Lebanon must be matched with equal concern at the use of Irish-manufactured weapons support systems in the current military conflict.
As a long time republican and civil rights campaigner I am calling on the 26-county administration to ban the export of computer systems by Irish firms which assist American arms companies.
It is time for this Fianna Fáil-PD coalition to back up their words of condemnation with firm action against the Irish weapons industry. It is no use crying crocodile tears over the awful deaths of young children in Lebanon if Irish computer expertise is being used by American companies to make the weapons that cause these deaths. - Yours, etc,
DES LONG, Corbally, Limerick.