On the one side, Israel has killed many more civilians than Hezbollah could ever dream of since the war began (about 7 to 1 now (only counting since Israel began its offensive and not including deaths by suicide bombers and pre-war rocket activity)). Not on purpose of course and probably not from carelessness either; the Israeli weapons and military operations are much more comprehensive… so more things get blown up. While they are killing a lot of civilians I still find it hard to get really upset with Israel because I have no sympathy for Hezbollah or any of its supporters. How could you possibly hope to eliminate a terrorist group without shooting a few people?
If the complaint is that Israel’s reaction is too extreme, then imagine some of the alternatives. If Mexico started shooting random rockets into the US they’d be a giant crater by the end of the week. The last time the US suffered one really bad terrorist attack they responded by overthrowing two countries, but Israel launches some minor ground offensives to root out some Hezbollah militants and everyone is busy scolding them for endangering a fragile democracy (so fragile that they have no control over the southern part of the country). You can’t expect Israel to sit on its hands and permit terrorists to lob rockets into its cities, so don’t get excited when they decide to shoot back.
But without getting straight-out racist about it, you can’t blame the Lebanese people for Hezbollah. People seem to convince themselves that the civilian casualties are tolerable by disassociating themselves from the Lebanese. But unless there is something fundamentally different about them, the same kind of terror group could have developed anywhere. While cultural and historical influences prevented it from occurring here, nothing but a birth lottery made it happen to them and not us. Because people can be blamed for the choices they make but not their environmental circumstances, blaming the Lebanese for Hezbollah isn’t fair. A civilian death is not less tragic because they live in a country half ruled by terrorists. Killing the militants is allowed, but each time a Lebanese civilian is killed it’s just as tragic as when an Israeli or American dies. There is a deeply rooted injustice inherent in even their accidental deaths.
A ceasefire is essentially designed to protect the Lebanese. Although it would stop Hezbollah from blowing up any more Israelis right now, in the long run it would probably be safer for Israel to shoot at Lebanon until they run out of militant radicals to kill (or decimate their population, whichever comes first). In a sense any cessation of hostilities trades Israeli lives for Lebanese; allowing some terrorists to survive means they will be back later to plan new attacks.
So, allowing Israel to keep shooting and killing civilians isn’t fair because the Lebanese people should not suffer as a whole for the crimes of a few, but stopping Israel means that the terrorists will return to kill them later. Getting back to the original question, frankly it’s impossible for me to tell if we’ve reached the point at which it’s better to stop the fighting or if doing so would only cause greater tragedy down the road. Not only am I not nearly well enough informed about what’s going on, but I’m not sure how to begin to calculate the balance between the lives lost on both sides. It’s really not fair to do a one to one math equation to see which event keeps the most people alive, I mean we wouldn’t want to say that maybe it would have been better to not have fought the Nazis since perhaps more people might be alive if we had surrendered and let them kill all the Jews; there’s something important about achieving justice too. The only conviction I feel certain about is that there is no side in this debate which is completely justified in its stance or actions.
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