David Furst for AFP
So the government appointed no less than two committees - one headed by noted attorney Professor David Libai (who is also former co-counsel to - eechs - Moshe Katsav) - to waste taxpayer's money while they try to decide what we should call that deadly 35-day, um, conflict we had up on the northern border last summer.
[Meanwhile thousands of municipal workers throughout Israel are planning to strike because they haven't received their salaries for more than one year].
There are, it seems, a few problems.
Firstly, is it okay to call it a war if war was never declared? And if it is okay, then how to explain to the residents of the north why no state of emergency was declared and no government aid provided?
Secondly, the most popular name - actually, the de facto name - is the Second Lebanon War. But that's a bit problematic because the 1982 IDF invasion was never called a war, either: It was called Operation Peace for the Galilee, and it was officially a military operation. So if last summer's war was the Second Lebanon War, does that mean we have to declare that the 1982 invasion was a war, too? Other proposed names are "Peace in the North" (irony, anyone?) and "The Northern Shield War."
And thirdly, of course, Israel's position was supposedly that the, um, military operations in Lebanon were against Hezbollah, not Lebanon.
Bradley Burston has more on the name that war story (which he calls "outsourcing history"), here.
Oy, all these absurdities. Must dig out my old Kafka novellas.
Oh yes, and today at 2.00 p.m. sirens will sound for the biggest nation-wide civil defense drill ever. Except in Sderot and along the northern border, 'cause the government figures the drill would just add to the residents' post-traumatic stress disorder. To which Idan has this and this to say.
Theodore Herzl
I wonder what Herzl would've said if he'd known, way back in 1897, that nearly 60 years after the establishment of his Judenstaat, it would still be fighting wars with its neighbours on a regular basis?
