Israel is now at war with Iran and Syria, which are waging war against Israel through their proxies Hezbollah and Hamas in pursuit of their declared aim to exterminate it. The 1000-plus rocket attacks from Gaza, the incursions into Israel and murder and kidnap of its soldiers, the murder and kidnap of more of its soldiers in northern Israel and the shelling of Israel’s northern towns from Lebanon, with two killed in Nahariya and Safed and more injured, and now the rocket attacks on Haifa, all are acts of war — in the latest of which which Lebanon itself is complicit — to which Israel has no option but to respond with force.
Yossi Klein Halevi writes:

The next Middle East war — Israel against genocidal Islamism — has begun…The war will go on for months, perhaps several years. There may be lulls in the fighting, perhaps even temporary agreements and prisoner exchanges. But those periods of calm will be mere respites.

At the very heart of this war is Iran. Earlier this week the Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrullah said the world would soon see the demise of Israel. What we are now seeing may be the start of a new offensive by Iran against the free world. Israel is our collective front line; Iran has made that plain enough, even though we have not had ears to listen. Thanks to the pusillanimity of the world, Iran is on a roll. It has repeatedly threatened to destroy Israel and wage war against the west and yet the free world has done nothing except wring its hands. Iran has watched with scarcely concealed contempt as Europe and the UN pursue their farcical attempts to pressure it into abandoning its nuclear weapons programme while America, the wounded behemoth, licks its wounds over Iraq.

In light of this fact, the reaction of the British and western media and chattering classes to Israel’s current behaviour is beyond farce. So blinded are they by their fixation that Israel is the aggressor and regional bully that even when Israel is plainly attacked in acts of unprovoked aggression they still blame Israel for causing the crisis.

The BBC, as ever, has been playing a sickening role in this propaganda. On the World Service, it denied the fact that Israeli soldiers had been kidnapped on Israel’s own soil, calling the kidnapping of Cpl Shalit a ‘capture in (sic) Gaza’ and the kidnap of the two soldiers in the north of Israel a capture in ‘south Lebanon’.

It has repeatedly presented the Israelis as the aggressors. BBC News Online described Israel’s actions as a ‘major offensive’. On the Today programme this morning (0810) it blamed Israel for ‘upping the ante’. The assumption is — fantastically —that it is Israel, rather than Iran, which is the danger to peace. Israel, it seems, must therefore not be allowed to defend itself when rockets are fired at its towns and cities. When it does so it is called ‘collective punishment’ or a ‘disproportionate response’ involving ‘massive collateral damage’, as was said on BBC Radio Four’s Moral Maze last night.

As this emergency escalates and the casualty toll inevitably mounts, let us just remind ourselves at this stage what this alleged ‘collective punishment’ or ‘disproportionate response’ in Gaza consisted of.

As this report notes:

At the Karni crossing [from Israel into Gaza], over 100 truckloads of food and 14 generators were allowed in and at the Nahal Oz fuel terminal, 500,000 litres of diesel, 100,000 litres of gasoline and 125 tons of natural gas were allowed in. Earlier in the week, more than 265 tons of food, a truckload of medicine, over a 1,000,000 liters of fuel, 65,000 litres of chlorine and additional supplies were transferred in. Last week, more than 200 truckloads of food, 1,500,000 litres of fuel, and over 400 tons of natural gas passed into Gaza. Israel also continues to provide Gaza with an uninterrupted supply of water.

The claims of a humanitarian disaster were therefore wholly untrue.

Much of the electricity supply which went down after the strike on Gaza’s power station was restored within hours. Gaza obtains fifty percent of its electricity from the Ashkelon power station in Israel — a plant which, incidentally, Hamas has repeatedly tried to hit —and following the strike on the Gaza power station Israel upped this percentage to compensate. Some collective punishment!

The Kassam rockets which were being fired into Israel from Gaza were dismissed (by Channel Four News’s Jon Snow and the BBC) as crude home made devices that threatened no-one. In fact, they have killed 13 Israelis and wounded more than forty others. By contrast, the vast majority of Palestinians who have been killed have been armed gunmen and terrorist godfathers. Yes, there have been Palestinian civilian casualties and these are always tragic. But in war, this happens. And the fact is that Israel has not gone in for indiscriminate bombing in Gaza. Indeed, this morning’s news was almost comic in the circumstances — that it had bombed the Gaza foreign ministry building at night when it was empty, precisely to avoid civilian casualties, only wounding three people.

This crisis has developed because the world has failed to deal with Iran and Syria. President Bush described Hezbollah as a ‘group of terrorists who want to stop the advance of peace’. Not so. Iran is a terrorist state and Hezbollah is its army. The US is sitting on its hands over Iran while urging ‘restraint’ upon Israel, its victim. The world will not be safe unless and until Iran and Syria are stopped. And there is only one country that can do that, and it is not Israel.