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July 17, 2006
The Altalena challenge
Hizbullah is Lebanon's Altalena, says Imshin.
I have been thinking of the Altalena incident myself, way back in th summer of ‘48, as a viable example of a weak, fledgling, endangered regime, riddled with internal discord, setting out the rules quite clearly, and very bravely, from the outset. As the Israeli Foreign Ministry puts it: “Despite the remaining bitterness, the incident made it clear that no “dissident” armed force would be tolerated.”As I see it, Altalena and the extremely unpopular dismantling of the Palmach, round about the same period - however one may feel about these two events, and whatever narrative of the events one may choose to adopt - were paramount to the survival of the State of Israel.
If the provisional Israeli government of the time could do it - and remember, we were in the middle of an awful, bloody war against the armies of five sovereign states who were out to destroy us, and we were armed with, more or less, sticks and stones - then the Lebanese government can too. No excuses.
The Telegraph article Imshin quotes from uses the Irish Free State as its example:
Israel's frontier with Syria is relatively stable and secure, despite Syria's undisguised loathing for its neighbour. Why? Because Syria, as a sovereign state, will not tolerate uncontrolled militias within its borders. This places it in a different category from the Palestinian and Lebanese administrations, whose writ does not run throughout their own territories.. . . . A parallel can be drawn with the first government of the Irish Free State, which acted more brutally against the IRA than Britain has ever done. It did so not out of love for Britain, or enthusiasm for the existence of Northern Ireland, but because it was determined that there should be only one legitimate army in the state.
I posted on this three years ago, in connection to the then Palestinian government avoiding the challenge of confronting and disarming Hamas. (Ah, the days when anyone talked about disarming Hamas . . . )
It provoked some controversy, which I linked to in updates to my post. There are still many Jews who think Ben Gurion was traitorous to his own people to sink the Altalena. (I appreciate being criticized from the right. It allows me to point out to those who can't tell the difference that I'm over here and the right is over there.)
I'm sure this kind of internal war was also controversial in Ireland, and will be so in Lebanon. But Imshin is right, and the consequences of letting independent militias roam free have been demonstrated repeatedly, in many national struggles. Even libertarians who aren't complete anarcho-capitalists understand that one of the few necessities of government is to have a monopoly on the use of force.
Judith | 07/17/06 at 07:23 PM | Categories: - The War of Dire Straits
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