Dr. Freedman explains the Israeli consensus behind this war as due to the existential nature of the threat facing Israel today: essentially, he's claiming that Israel is today facing non-rational actors bent on the country's destruction, and so the normal calculus of war and peace doesn't apply.

Problem is, we've heard all of this before. In every military crisis that Israel has been involved in since 1967 at least, the same sense of crisis is invoked: this is a new situation, this time it's _really_ a threat to Israel's survival, this group of opponents really is nuts, we have to take the gloves off. And some converted doves are (yet again) trotted out as justification.

Over this period, Israel's strategic situation has steadily improved, to the point where today it faces no serious military threat to its existence from anywhere and where its main security challenge has been dealing with people whose land the Israeli state annexed in 1967. And so the Middle East is back to the same exchange: 10 Israeli artillery shells reply to each incoming rocket (whether in Gaza or Lebanon), the IDF practises Schrecklichkeit over the roads of southern Lebanon, and the only justification is: but this time the threat is really serious!

Fortunately or unfortunately for Israel, the threat has changed. The state of Israel is not the underdog any more. Now Israel is more like Britain during the Mandate, flailing around in the ruins of the King David Hotel and wondering about the irrationality of the terrorists it's itself produced.

Ok, pardon my confusion, but here you have a group of displaced Western Europeans, there because of some historical myth, that happened to take the homes of a bunch of folks who already lived in a given place-- with the same fencing-in of those people, and economic hostility directed toward them, and they're not supposed to get mad?

And then we have the same state, once again of Western Europeans clinging to a supremely dysfunctional myth as a "Chosen People", losing two individuals, and using it as a justification to create hundreds of thousands of refugees, and kill hundreds, maybe thousands of innocent people?

More than anything else the current invasion shows that religious states are inherently failed states-- on both sides of the border. It profoundly shows the failure of treating terrorism as a war. It shows, once again profoundly, of the West's dismal lack of concern for basic living conditions of anyone outside Europe, the US, and Canada. It doesn't matter to us if a city of 2 million (or 20 million) has no clean water or electricity-- more bombs are on the way.

I believe profoundly in holding individuals responsible for their actions-- that includes the leaders of Hezbollah, as well as the leaders of Israel. But what do we really think we are accomplishing when we furnish a state such as Israel more bombs on an expedited basis while at the same time sending over Condoleeza Rice for the proposition of impossible plans for stopping the conflict?

How insane have we become? And how long before we stop supporting religiously based states of any stripe? Before, or after, we end up being part of an annihilated world?

You can't view all of these terrorists as existential threats and then turn around and greet, as Benjamin Netanyahu did last week, new US immigrants to Israel with the statement that Israel is the safets place in the world for any Jewish person to live.

I get the sense I’m hearing something similar to what we heard here in America after 9/11. This attack is so different that no rules apply, or in the words of Dick Cheney, “we have to take off the gloves, go to the dark side.”

And in the assertion that this war is most like Israel’s war of independence I hear echos of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum trying to convince Americans that we are now fighting WWIII.

After having lived through 9/11 in the United States and all that came after with our own homegrown conservative authoritarians, who would have thought I would have come out on the far side with less sympathy for righteous violent defenders, not more.

My liberal values would be best expressed if there were a leader in America right now like former liberal Democratic senator George Mitchell, who went to Northern Ireland and helped broker the Belfast Peace Agreement in 1998. Someone who would use the great power of this nation and our liberal traditions to halt the destruction that will only lead to a cycle of more destruction.

Of course, Israel has a right to defend itself, but reverting Lebanon into a failed state is disproportionate, grossly immoral and will ultimately make Israelis less safe.

In 1946, Israel became a recognized state and took land that belonged to someone else. Israel has always been supported by the USA. The countries who suffered this loss of land were very angry. Unable to fight as powerfully as the USA, these bitterly angry countries became so pissed off, that they began to fight the only way they could. Hatred towards the USA escalated because of the oppression these people endured by the USA supporting the murdering, "land stealers".

Columbus did a similar thing in the late 1400's to the indigenious people of America. He took their land and began killing them. So many were killed and the ones left had little resources when it came to battle, comparitively, that they fled for their lives.

Metaphorically speaking, one can talk about "two wrongs don't make a right" all one wants. However that does little to squelch feelings of rage, hatred and revenge. I feel that in the future, if an alien nation came to the U.S., claimed a dozen states as their own, with the backing of a threatening superpower, and began murdering our citizens, forcing them out of their own homes, towns and cities, I can say with 99.99% CERTAINTY that our people and government would feel justified in striking back, by ANY means they could.

PLEASE !! Feel free to add information as I have over simplified the situation. Very few people know the truth, for some odd reason. I can only speculate that the reason is our nation's leaders have put some sort of pro-American, pro-Israel spin on this death-dance scenario.