Letters to the Editor | 29 July 2006

Lebanon: who’s to blame?

From Nicholas Millman
Sir: It was refreshing to read your editorial (22 July) after a week of witnessing the rest of the British media sadly misrepresent the Middle East crisis. In typical fashion Hezbollah has manipulated the journalists on the ground to the point where, for example, Channel 4 News must now be considered an effective extension of Hezbollah propaganda.

The constant talk here of a ‘disproportionate’ response by Israel is baffling. A gang of nasty thugs, with only a tenuous claim to represent a sovereign state, violate the border of a neighbouring sovereign state and kidnap her soldiers. In the meantime they continue to rain rockets indiscriminately on residential areas within that state and to send suicide bombers to cause death and mayhem to innocent civilians. I wonder at Israel’s remarkable restraint in the face of such provocation, and that she did not long ago resort to nuclear weapons to secure her borders.
Nicholas Millman
by email

From Simon Elliot
Sir: As Israel continues its senseless bombardment of Lebanon, of non-military targets such as milk factories and grain silos, your leading article last week looks more and more bankrupt and immoral. An immediate ceasefire ‘at any cost’ is imperative as the price now being paid, in humanitarian terms, is wholly unacceptable. Everyone agrees that it is, as you say, ‘ludicrous …that a sovereign state should never react against incursion’. But it is even more ludicrous to suggest what is happening now is justifiable retaliation.

Quite apart from the ethical objections to the hundreds of civilian casualties, the problem with using force and not diplomacy in this case is that it is highly unlikely to succeed. Will the annihilation of a state, the clinical dismantling of its infrastructure, the displacement of half a million people undermine support for Hezbollah and bring about a stable Middle East? The odds are stacked heavily against it.