Shielding Humans

David Ben-Gurion saw the Litani as Israel's "natural" northern frontier, while Theodor Herzl assumed that Sidon and Tyre would be in his anticipated State, an assumption that rather amusingly depended on the borders of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Israel has therefore intervened in Southern Lebanon many times. That has never ended well for anyone, but here we go again.

You will soon be unable to take your phone, your tablet or your laptop onto any flight in the world, and you will not be laughing then. Sell your shares in any part of Israel's previously world-leading technology sector, because very soon no one will touch it, not out of political conviction, but for the sake of safety.

Who says that they were all Hezbollah? There are no nine-year-old girls in Hezbollah, and the same people said that there had been 40 beheaded babies on 7 October, that there had been mass rapes, that there had been a baby in an oven, that there had been babies cut from their mothers' wombs, that babies had been raped (the man who said that is now Britain's Foreign Secretary), and that there had been no use of the Hannibal Directive, if any such Directive had even existed. They are these people, who are these people.

Living in a residential area, or going to one's place of civilian work, or seeking medical attention, or accessing education, or using public or even private transport, or going shopping, or walking down the street, is now "hiding behind a human shield". As in Gaza, so on the West Bank, and so in Lebanon. And so, in principle, anywhere at all.