BHL Goes To Gaza
The HuffPo published a fascinating account by BHL, as Bernard-Henri Lévy is known in France. The whole thing is worth reading, especially if you'd like to get a good sense of the difference between the Israeli mindset and that of those who'd like to run them all into the sea. (Pay special notice to the words of the Cobra helicopter pilot, Ashaf, and what he does when he spots children in the firing line.) Here's an excerpt from BHL's piece:

Yovan Diskin is the head of Shin Bet, Israel's storied and formidable Security Agency. He has, to my knowledge, never spoken. Not since the beginning of this war, at any rate. He is about forty years old. He is tall. Massive. A military man belied by jeans, tennis shoes and a t-shirt. He welcomes me at dawn in his office north of Tel Aviv, which, with its widened embrasures, looks like a bunker. "All of this for Sderot?," I started. This flood of fire, these victims, to stop the Qassam missiles in Sderot and the other cities and kibbutzes in the south of the country? "Yes, of course," he answers me, quite irritated. "There is no other State in the world that would tolerate seeing shells fall on the heads of its citizens every day." Then, as I tell him that I know this, as I tell him that, every time I go to Israel, I go to Sderot out of principle and solidarity, and as I also tell him that there were perhaps means, in negotiating, to avoid arriving at this juncture, he interrupts himself, oddly shrugs his shoulders, and, in the tone of someone about to get into technical details, continues.

"You must understand, in this case, who the members of Hamas are. We know them here, better than anyone. Sometimes I have the impression that I can know in real time, sometimes even predict, what their most minor decisions are. We have now become aware of three things." Someone brings him a cup of coffee that he swallows in one gulp. "Their strategy, which is also that of the Muslim Brothers, of whom they are scions and who, over the course of time, plan to take power in Lebanon, in Jordan, in Israel..." I signal to him that I know what he's talking about. "Anyway. Then there is the alliance with Iran, which can seem counterintuitive because of how serious contentions between the Sunnis and Shiites are, but whose entire history we have seen." The date: 1993. The theater: a council of Syrian, Saudi, West Bank, and Gazan ulema. The inspirer: the Egyptian El Khardaoui, importer of the Shiite suicide attempt strategy into Sunni terrain. "And then, finally, the essential: the network of three hundred tunnels, dug under the Egyptian border with the tacit approval of Moubarak who, every time we talked to him about it, swore that he was going to see to the problem, but who unfortunately did nothing because he was too afraid to go against his national Muslim Brothers..." We could, as Israeli pacifists do, tell ourselves that the destruction of these tunnels would have been sufficient. As is the case with me, we could gather that, this war having already exposed the existence of these tunnels to the world, and thus having put the Egyptians up against the wall, Israel could stop there and, today, cease fire. What we can't ignore is this fact -- this context: Gaza which, evacuated, is becoming not the embryo of the so-desired Palestinian State, but the advance base of a total war against the Jewish State.

Continued at the link above...