Mercury Rising

While reading this profile of DFL-endorsed Congressional candidate Keith Ellison in the local Pulse weekly, I ran across this passage concerning the origins of the latest Israel/Lebanon crisis:

The latest crisis began when Israeli forces abducted two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from Gaza. The following day the Palestinians captured an Israeli soldier—and proposed a negotiated exchange.

Hmmm. I didn't recall any of the US TV news programs -- where most Americans get their news -- mentioning that particular casus belli. So I decided to do a little digging. Turns out that the only US-based media outlet -- besides Pulse -- to mention this was Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!, in the context of an interview with Noam Chomsky, whose words now follow:

What's happening in Gaza, to start with that -- well, basically the current stage of what's going on -- there's a lot more -- begins with the Hamas election, back the end of January. Israel and the United States at once announced that they were going to punish the people of Palestine for voting the wrong way in a free election. And the punishment has been severe. At the same time, it's partly in Gaza, and sort of hidden in a way, but even more extreme in the West Bank, where Olmert announced his annexation program, what’s euphemistically called “convergence” and described here often as a “withdrawal,” but in fact it’s a formalization of the program of annexing the valuable lands, most of the resources, including water, of the West Bank and cantonizing the rest and imprisoning it, since he also announced that Israel would take over the Jordan Valley. Well, that proceeds without extreme violence or nothing much said about it. Gaza, itself, the latest phase, began on June 24. It was when Israel abducted two Gaza civilians, a doctor and his brother. We don't know their names. You don’t know the names of victims. They were taken to Israel, presumably, and nobody knows their fate. The next day, something happened, which we do know about, a lot. Militants in Gaza, probably Islamic Jihad, abducted an Israeli soldier across the border. That’s Corporal Gilad Shalit. And that's well known; first abduction is not. Then followed the escalation of Israeli attacks on Gaza, which I don’t have to repeat. It’s reported on adequately. The next stage was Hezbollah's abduction of two Israeli soldiers, they say on the border. Their official reason for this is that they are aiming for prisoner release. There are a few, nobody knows how many. Officially, there are three Lebanese prisoners in Israel. There's allegedly a couple hundred people missing. Who knows where they are? But the real reason, I think it's generally agreed by analysts, is that -- I’ll read from the Financial Times, which happens to be right in front of me. “The timing and scale of its attack suggest it was partly intended to reduce the pressure on Palestinians by forcing Israel to fight on two fronts simultaneously.” David Hearst, who knows this area well, describes it, I think this morning, as a display of solidarity with suffering people, the clinching impulse. It's a very -- mind you -- very irresponsible act. It subjects Lebanese to possible -- certainly to plenty of terror and possible extreme disaster. Whether it can achieve any result, either in the secondary question of freeing prisoners or the primary question of some form of solidarity with the people of Gaza, I hope so, but I wouldn't rank the probabilities very high.

Note that Chomsky, who the right-wingers would have you believe is an anti-Semite because they want you to confuse backing Likud/Kadima with backing Israel (just as they want you to think that disagreeing with Republicans and their politics is treason), puts blame squarely on both sides in this conflicts. (He also goes on to debunk the GOP/Media's "Iran/Syria are behind all of this!" nonsense.)