Lebanon has been integral to both cradles of civilizations and hotbeds of conflicts. A Semitic people, the Canaanites, occupied the littoral of Lebanon, out which emerged the Phoenician civilization that was held together by a string of independent Phoenician city-states from the north to the south of the country.

Abu Ali is a legendary Arab folk hero. He is the one that stands up for the weak and oppressed. Egypt’s former leader, Gamal abd al-Nasir, was also an Abu Ali, regardless of his repeated defeats and the calamities that he brought upon the Arabs. Yet this is so in a society that consecrates words at the expense of words, which blame others rather than itself. These days we have a new Abu Ali, in Hezbollah’s leader, Hasan Nasrallah.

Michael Walzer, a respected Princeton scholar and author of the book Just and Unjust Wars, has
called Israel’s recent pagers’ attacks on Hezbollah fighters  “war crimes” in a recent article
published by The New York Times.
Walzer, a committed Zionist who believes that Israel’s current war in Gaza against Hamas is
justified, believes that the operation that caused the explosion of Hezbollah’s operatives’
pager devices to explode was an act of terrorism.

Last weekend was a very tragic one for Israelis and Jews, as the IDF discovered the bodies of six hostages executed by Hamas in order to prevent them from being rescued and returned home.

The murder of the hostages triggered demonstrations against the Israeli government, which were further aggravated by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech delivered a day after the murders where he reaffirmed the need to control the Philadelphi Corridor. The Corridor is a strip of land approximately 8.5 miles long between Gaza and Egypt, which has been used to smuggle weapons, personnel, and equipment to Hamas for years.