"The Israelis" and Georgia
I should declare my hand here. I am a supporter of the state of Israel, I find it amazing that its right to exist is questioned and, in what is I hope the highest sense of the term, I am a zionist and always was.
It's necessary to say that because the meme developing about the Ossetia war clearly is 'oh the Israelis were there' and various people on the left and the pro-war right have decided that this is the key to any argument on the issue. It isn't, but because I linked to debka.com's first reports, I wanted to include the following update.
There is not proof that the Israelis as a group of military advisers were in Georgia at the weekend, though the numbers suggested are so great that any involvement will ultimately be hard to hide. The Israeli Foreign Ministry itself has openly acknowledged the vast scale of Israeli arms supplies to Georgia. Israel's interest in Georgia's oil pipeline, which is a commercial and a strategic one and of course also part of private business, not state activity, has been long acknowledged.
Various messageboards, of which this one is a good example, are now pointing out that Debka com carried two stories within twenty four hours. One suggested that Israelis were aiding and abetting Georgia; another suggested, slightly more believably, that the Israelis realised how mad an ethnic cleansing and provocation of Russia was and tried to restrain the Georgians. It may be that the real, inevitably garbled story, is located somewhere between these poles, assuming that the Israelis were there and were anything more than observers, which is not yet acknowledged.
Haaretz, which is not always reliable in these matters, has reported that Israel is very keen to keep a low profile in the Ossetia matter, presumably because everyone and anyone with an agenda in Christendom and whatever the secularists call themselves is now going to weigh in. That is certainly supported by this minimal statement from the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
I have a feeling that Georgia's government is going to be left to hang in the wind for what it clearly is accountable for and that everyone else (including this 'unnamed US official') is backing away behind pictures of an humanitarian disaster, really quite fast.
I should declare my hand here. I am a supporter of the state of Israel, I find it amazing that its right to exist is questioned and, in what is I hope the highest sense of the term, I am a zionist and always was.
It's necessary to say that because the meme developing about the Ossetia war clearly is 'oh the Israelis were there' and various people on the left and the pro-war right have decided that this is the key to any argument on the issue. It isn't, but because I linked to debka.com's first reports, I wanted to include the following update.
There is not proof that the Israelis as a group of military advisers were in Georgia at the weekend, though the numbers suggested are so great that any involvement will ultimately be hard to hide. The Israeli Foreign Ministry itself has openly acknowledged the vast scale of Israeli arms supplies to Georgia. Israel's interest in Georgia's oil pipeline, which is a commercial and a strategic one and of course also part of private business, not state activity, has been long acknowledged.
Various messageboards, of which this one is a good example, are now pointing out that Debka com carried two stories within twenty four hours. One suggested that Israelis were aiding and abetting Georgia; another suggested, slightly more believably, that the Israelis realised how mad an ethnic cleansing and provocation of Russia was and tried to restrain the Georgians. It may be that the real, inevitably garbled story, is located somewhere between these poles, assuming that the Israelis were there and were anything more than observers, which is not yet acknowledged.
Haaretz, which is not always reliable in these matters, has reported that Israel is very keen to keep a low profile in the Ossetia matter, presumably because everyone and anyone with an agenda in Christendom and whatever the secularists call themselves is now going to weigh in. That is certainly supported by this minimal statement from the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
I have a feeling that Georgia's government is going to be left to hang in the wind for what it clearly is accountable for and that everyone else (including this 'unnamed US official') is backing away behind pictures of an humanitarian disaster, really quite fast.
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