Ben had suggested to me a little bit ago that I post about the current conflict going on between Israel and Lebanon. I more or less backed away from this under the general excuse that I don’t know anywhere enough about Middle East politics to discuss it with great skill. But then I felt pretty led to comment on a Washington Post op-ed piece linked to from the Apt 3w blog. So now, rather than posting anything here, you can see my comments there.
For more background about the current conflict, I would recommend BBC’s coverage, which has profiles of Hezbollah, Lebanon, and Israel, as well as timelines about what has happened and discussion of how it relates to other tensions in the Middle East more generally.
Bitch Ph.D. (a feminist blog I read pretty frequently) has a good discussion of how criticism of Israel gets mixed up with anti-Semitism, mostly stemming from an editorial by Tony Judt in Haaretz, a daily newspaper in Israel. Judt suggests that the two may finally be disentangling themselves, now that we’re several generations away from WWII and a guilt trip for the wrongs of the Holocaust can longer serve as an excuse for bad behavior by Israel as a state.
