In response to this (on a Usenet newsgroup)…

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You’re all targets, Israel tells Lebanese in South 28/07/2006 | The Telegraph

By Harry de Quetteville in Jerusalem

Everyone remaining in southern Lebanon will be regarded as a terrorist, Israel’s justice minister said yesterday as the military prepared to employ “huge firepower” from the air in its campaign to crush Hizbollah.

Haim Ramon issued the warning as the Israeli government decided against expanding ground operations after the death of nine soldiers in fighting on Wednesday.

“What we should do in southern Lebanon is employ huge firepower before a ground force goes in,” Mr Ramon said at a security cabinet meeting headed by Ehud Olmert, the prime minister. “Everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist and is connected to Hizbollah. Our great advantage vis-a-vis Hizbollah is our firepower, not in face-to-face combat.”

Mr Olmert promised that the army would “continue toward the established goals”.

Mr Ramon’s comments suggested that civilian casualties in Lebanon, which stand at about 600 after 16 days of bombardment, could rise yet higher.

The government’s unrelenting line has the backing of the Israeli media, which are demanding a harsh response to an ambush in the Hizbollah stronghold of Bint Jbeil, in which eight soldiers died.

The country’s biggest-selling paper, Yedioth Ahronoth, said the army had raised the threshold of response to Katyusha rockets.

“In other words: a village from which rockets are fired at Israel will simply be destroyed by fire,” it said.

“This decision should have been made and executed after the first Katyusha. But better late than never.”

Three divisions of reserve soldiers, up to 15,000 men, are to be called up.

Almost 50 Hizbollah missiles landed in northern Israel yesterday, wounding four people and bringing the total number of rockets fired into the country to about 1,400.

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I wrote:

Another dimension to all this that worries me are the *attitudes* many Jewish Israelis have towards Arabs in general, and Palestinian Arabs in particular. I’ve been to Israel twice, and talked with several Palestinian families, stayed in a Palestinian home, and was driven by a young Palestinian driver – and through various checkpoints. I learned that he was given different treatment by the young Israeli soldiers because there was a Westerner in his vehicle.

~~~ Machsom Watch, or Checkpoint Watch (also Women for Human Rights), is a group of Israeli women who monitor Palestinian human-rights at Israeli checkpoints. The self described “politically pluralistic” human rights organization is composed of Israeli women to the exclusion of men, with a “bias towards mature, professional women” who tend to have a “liberal or leftist background” . Machsom Watch claims to have 400 members, notably including Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s daughter Dana. The word machsom is Hebrew for “checkpoint,” referring to Israeli Defense Forces checkpoints whose stated purpose is to prevent Palestinian terrorists from the West Bank from entering Israel.

According to its website, the group’s aims are to monitor the behavior of soldiers and police at checkpoints; ensure that the human and civil rights of Palestinians attempting to enter Israel are protected; and record and report the results of their observations to the widest possible audience, from decision-makers to the general public. Some members also see their role as protesting against the existence of the checkpoints.

More…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machsom_Watch

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An article in Ha’aretz:

‘This hopeful sign of goodwill among Israelis towards Palestinians was begun because of concerns that many of the Israeli Defense Forces soldiers who man the various checkpoints in the West Bank do not see the Palestinians as equals.

‘We see examples of humiliation [of Palestinians] on an almost daily basis,’ says Adi Kuntsman, one of the founders of Machsom. ‘People have their IDs taken from them for checks… sometimes waiting an hour or two to get them back…’ She has seen people forced to stand with their hands in the air and their faces to the wall, or forced to sit in the baking sun or the rain.’

According to one of the observers, soldiers at the checkpoints assume that the problems of Palestinians ‘are not really so bad, their illness is not so serious, their families are not suffering… They can sit in the rain, never mind that they are old, never mind that they want to go home… their time doesn’t have value, their families don’t have value.’

James Wall, former editor of the respected journal Christian Century (to whom I’m indebted for this material) writes: ‘Thousands of Palestinian children have been shot, killed, wounded or left to die at checkpoints and in the streets of Gaza and the West Bank, not because Israeli soldiers are cruel, but because they carry out orders from a government that continues to dehumanize Palestinians in a desperate effort to cling to its own power to oppress’ (‘The Power of Good Will’, Christian Century, May 16, 2001, p. 29)

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Shalom! Rowland Croucher