Dying for a Second Round

Israel's New Plan to Attack Lebanon

By ALLAN NAIRN
CounterPunch

"Last Friday I asked a top-level Israeli, a former IDF (Israel Defense Forces) elite unit man and prime-ministerial confidante, whether the assassination of Hezbollah's Imad Mughniyeh could have been done by a Lebanese group.

He snorted at the preposterous notion. This was "way too sophisticated," he said. "This [the car bombing] was a precisely orchestrated international operation," and this was the "third or fourth or fifth time in a year that Israel has carried out a military operation in Syria."

When I asked him to repeat that last part he added the word "allegedly."

But the message, or at least the boast, was clear. So why is Israel doing this?

The man said of his colleagues: "There are a lot of [Israeli] military and cabinet people just dying for a second round with Lebanon. If given the opportunity they'll take it," i.e. attack Lebanon again, not in spite of "but because of" the perception that their '06 attack failed......

The problem -- for the to-be-killed, and for the notion of murder law, not to mention (and few do) decency -- is that the Israeli body politic is now set this way: demanding -- with a few, brave, exceptions -- not just daily, routine, killings of Palestinians, but periodic dramatic strikes that thrill and let them strut like hero/ victims.

It's as if the inhabitants of a US Fox News studio had multiplied and become a nation......."