The Thing in Itself
Via the Power Line comes this response to a reporter at the United Nations a couple days ago by Ambassador John Bolton (emphasis mine):
How you get a ceasefire between one entity, which is a government of a democratically elected state on the one hand, and another entity on the other which is a terrorist gang, no one has yet explained. The government of Israel, everybody says, has the right to exercise the right of self-defense, which even if there are criticisms of Israeli actions by some, they recognize the fundamental right to self-defense. That’s a legitimate right. Are there any activities that Hezbollah engages in, militarily that are legitimate? I don’t think so. All of its activities are terrorist and all of them are illegitimate, so I don’t see the balance or the parallelism between the two sides and therefore I think it’s a very fundamental question: how a terrorist group agrees to a ceasefire. You know in a democratically elected government, the theory is that the people ultimately can hold the government accountable when it does something and doesn’t live up to it. How do you hold a terrorist group accountable? Who runs the terrorist group? Who makes the commitment that a terrorist group will abide by a ceasefire? What does a terrorist group think a ceasefire is? These are - you can use the words “cessation of hostilities” or “truce” or “ceasefire.” Nobody has yet explained how a terrorist group and a democratic state come to a mutual ceasefire.
Now, as I have been reminded here, Hizballah was created in response to Israel’s invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982. Of course, Israel had a reason to do this: the PLO were using the south of Lebanon as a base of operations for terrorist attacks on northern Israel. The same thing is happening today, only it’s not the PLO or Fatah committing these acts of aggression in the north, but Hizballah —a Syrian and Iranian-sponsored terrorist army that acts as a law unto itself within Lebanese society.
If this weren’t the Zionist Entity we were talking about, but some other country that does have a right to self-defense, no one would be asking whether that country should suffer the constant threat of terror from a supposedly peaceful neighbor without responding.
That is to ask, what was the provocation this time that moved Hizballah to kill and capture several IDF soldiers and fire thousands of rockets into northern Israel?
