Headline: “Israel may open ‘Jesus tomb’ to public.”

An experienced Middle-East reporter of the Albany Times Union offers, ” 15 rules for understanding the Middle East.”

They are all so incisive and read-worthy (and short) that I’ll not bother to excerpt them. But if you wonder what’s going wrong (from our perspective) in Iraq and the ME generally, this is a primero primer.

Hat tip: The Braden Files, the best little-read blog out there (then again, he posts only twice per month or so).

… you become more like yourself than you ever were.

Having lived long enough - and having relatives who’ve lived much longer - to see a lot of people I know well reach far beyond middle aged (on both sides of our families, sweetheart), that was a conclusion I came to awhile back: that age intensifies primary personality traits.

Hence this caught my eye: “Is Carter an anti-Semite?” by Shmuel Rosner, Haaretz’s Chief U.S. Correspondent

Last Friday, at the reception for Natan Sharanski in the Israeli Embassy, I was surprised to hear the same argument from some people - Americans - who attended and debated Carter’s motivations. One of them said that he “never thought Carter was anti-Semitic,” but that now he feels that Carter is “trying to rally Christians against Jews.” Somebody else told me that he thought “the true Carter is coming out now” and explained this by hinting that people “when they get older, tend to reveal what they really think.”

Seems right to me.

Boy, I hope Jimmy Carter and Mel Gibson never knock back a few together.

OTOH, I’d like to hear Shuel explain this saga of a pregnant Bethlehem woman:

They stopped to collect her sister and mother and set out for the Hussein Hospital, 20 minutes away. But the road had been blocked by Israeli soldiers, who said nobody was allowed to pass until morning. “Obviously, we told them we couldn’t wait until the morning. I was bleeding very heavily on the back seat. One of the soldiers looked down at the blood and laughed. I still wake up in the night hearing that laugh. It was such a shock to me. I couldn’t understand.”

Her family begged the soldiers to let them through, but they would not relent. So at 1am, on the back seat next to a chilly checkpoint with no doctors and no nurses, Fadia delivered a tiny boy called Mahmoud and a tiny girl called Mariam. “I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in the hospital,” she says now. For two days, her family hid it from her that Mahmoud had died, and doctors said they could “certainly” have saved his life by getting him to an incubator.

… In the years since, she has been pregnant four times, but she keeps miscarrying. “I couldn’t bear to make another baby. I was convinced the same thing would happen to me again,” she explains. “When I see the [Israeli] soldiers I keep thinking - what did my baby do to Israel?”

Since Fadia’s delivery, in 2002, the United Nations confirms that a total of 36 babies have died because their mothers were detained during labour at Israeli checkpoints. All across Bethlehem - all across the West Bank - there are women whose pregnancies are being disturbed, or worse, by the military occupation of their land.

“Hark, the angels aren’t singing in Bethlehem,” at American Thinker details the exodus of Christians from Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus. Sixty years ago, Bethlehem was 85 percent Christian. Today only 12 percent of its residents are. Here’s a cite from a British newspaper article:

… the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, are to lead a joint delegation to Bethlehem this week to express their solidarity with the beleaguered Christian populace.

The town, according to the Cardinal, is being “steadily strangled”.

The sense of a creeping Islamic fundamentalism is all around in Bethlehem.

As late as last year, “the British archbishop of Canterbury and the resident Greek Orthodox cleric, blamed the Israelis-naturally-” for the slow elimination of Bethlehem Christians; one wonders what they will have to say this year. Thinker’s writer Ethel C. Fenig predicts,

Oh sure, as usual, the religious dignitaries will again blame the Israelis. And in the meantime, the manager of the Christian radio station prepares to leave because, “As Christians, we have no future here,” he says. “We are melting away.”

I have to wonder how long it will be before Jerusalem follows.

But man, work on your sense of timing!

Will Lebanese national soldiers take over southern Lebanon? That is one of the stated aims of Israel and appears to be an aim the US has adopted.

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is not yielding to international calls for a prompt cease-fire to end Israel’s devastating campaign against Hezbollah militia in Lebanon.

Instead, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is trying to drum up diplomatic support for what on Tuesday she called a cease-fire of “lasting value.” That is, one that would have the Lebanese army take over the south of the country where Hezbollah guerrillas have conducted a cross-border war against Israel for years.

This morning Yehudit hit on something that’s been nagging me for a few days, namely, is the Lebanese government actually capable of imposing its will on Hezbollah, as Israel insists it must?
(more…)

[Afghanistan veteran John Krenson is the author of Crossfire - A Time for Peace, War & Love. He’s contributed here in the past and I am very happy now to list him as a columnist at OHC — DS]

The shepherd tends his flock at night as the wolves are ever present. He increases his control of the space around his pastures to establish a buffer for his sheep; to keep the wolves out of range. Finally he yields some of that space back to the wolves only to see the attacks against his sheep increase to the point that he begins to lose them to the wolves. What do we expect shepherds to do? We expect them to protect their sheep - to provide tranquility for their grazing and to defend them from the wolves.

The Catholic Church clearly states that peace is not simply the absence of war and that it is indeed a “tranquility of order” that is described as basic freedom. Well, Israel has experienced neither to the extent that we know it here in the US or in much of the western world today - and yet in relative terms it is an island of peace compared to the lives that Arabs live throughout the Middle East and Muslims live in Central Asia at the hands of their own regimes. In fact, until the War on Terror, Israel was the only nation in the region to grant Arabs a legitimate right to vote.

Aquinas teaches us from centuries ago that a “peace” can exist that is so brutal and corrupt that only war can establish or restore true human dignity and respect. Indeed Aquinas addresses war not as justice but as charity - that is, an act of love. Thus we have not only a right but a duty to achieve true peace and to provide legitimate defense for peace. Our common Christian tradition applies our scriptures to our world in a way that we have discerned four primary conditions for a Just War to do just that. They are 1) the threat must be lasting, grave and certain; 2) other means to counter the threat are ineffective; 3) there is a likelihood of success; 4) the actions taken must be proportionate to the threat.

So let us examine this current crisis in the Middle East in the context of Just War conditions.
(more…)

Israel’s problem is not on the ground, it is in the air.
Israel confronts “broken windows” in Lebanon

Austin Bay expands on his earlier thoughts about Hezbollah’s rockets in his syndicated column of today. I have always admired Austin’s ability to take complex topics and present them in terms readily accessible to lay readers without “dumbing down” the subject. Read the whole thing.

Israeli vice prime minister Shimon Peres says that Israel will not invade Lebanon in an interview conducted before this morning’s ground incursion by IDF forces into the country. So far, I would not count the incursion as an “invasion” since the ground forces are punitively directed against Hezbollah - the operation is a force-on-force mission not intended to establish Israeli units as an occupying force. Speaking perhaps prospectively, Peres said,

Is Israel’s objective now to destroy Hezbollah militarily?
Our objective is to stop the missile attacks by Hezbollah and enable the Lebanese military to take over and prevent Hezbollah from ever again returning to the border of Israel — as the U.N. resolution stipulates. Our objective also remains the release of our soldiers.

What will determine when Israel stops?
When the attacks stop, Israel will stop.

Will there be a ground invasion of Lebanon by Israel?
No. The problem is not in the ground. It is in the air. If we create a buffer zone, will they get longer range missiles to fire from behind that line? What will then stop Hezbollah from getting longer range missiles from Iran or Syria?

Here is a key point: asked about the utility of an international force in southern Lebanon to stand between Israel and Hezbollah, peres replied,

They are mistaken. The confrontation is not on the ground. It is in the air. If these U.N. forces can stop Hezbollah from firing missiles and rockets, that is one thing. If they are going to fight Hezbollah, fine. But there is no point to have people on the ground to observe the missiles flying overhead. That is useless.

That is why Israel must press on to the bitter end in destroying Hezbollah as a highly lethal threat to Israel’s hme territory. Hezbollah itself, as an organization, will survive and recontitute to some level after Israel’s offensive actions cease. But a defanged Hezbollah that is incapable of launching increasingly long-ranged, increasingly deadly rockets at Israel’s cities is infinitely preferable to what Israel faces today.
(more…)