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Depends- was this an initiation of hostilities, or a retaliation of a non-state group conducting military activities from Lebanese territory, which the state is alternatively unable/unwilling to stop, but the incapacity of a state to maintain a monopoly on organized violence does not negate the sovereign right of other states to retaliate against belligerents?
Or are we going to conflate 'attack' between the contextual of 'who started it and bears moral onus' and tactical 'a retaliation is an attack'? I enjoy a good motte and bailey as much as anyone, but I will fully acknoweldge starting in the motte on this semantic dispute, as I am and was using the former sense of instigation rather than later. We can restart from that if you'd like.
Given your choice reubtal to Lebanon not being under attack was a conflict not started by Israel but from actors within Lebanon nearly two decades ago, I would propose that accusation of gaslighting would be a demonstration of gaslighting.
Whether Hezbollah is state or non-state seems fairly irrelevant to me, as they surely must enjoy broad popular support to function. (Something like 90% among Shiites, who are a majority in the parts adjacent to Israel) For all means and purposes, I think they can be modelled as a shadow government prosecuting a continuing low-key war against Israel on behalf of their people.
Lebanon and Palestine/Israel were separated by enemy action, and up until the colonization it is difficult to see the residents in the south of the French Mandate and the north of the British Mandate as separate peoples. Thus, it may be formally correct, according to the "rules-based international order"/maps drawn up by Anglos and their allies, that the 1948 war constituted an initial attack by the Lebanese against Israel, but if you don't put much stock in Western mapmaking then it is easy to instead see as a desperate attempt by a people to resist the occupation of part of their lands. This brings us back to the original question - why do Arabs not get accorded this right? I would be happy, in the sense of seeing a "master morality" system that is at least honest if not necessarily agreeable, if proponents of continued support for Israel simply argued that Israel is an ally, a superior civilisation and strong enough to deserve victory. However, its supporters can't seem to be able to stop to make their argument on the "slave morality" basis, saying that Israel deserves our support because they have been unfairly oppressed, undeservedly attacked and we owe them a moral debt (...to help them steal from and slaughter a third party?). I don't see how the latter can be done without trickery.
(...but all that being said, I now remember that we have basically opposite value systems and preferences regarding anything to do with international politics, and so it is probably not particularly productive for us to continue this discussion as we will both just get upset with no resulting shift in beliefs. Ceasefire?)
That rules based international order is what gives them any rights in the first place. Without it, they're peasants who need to be taught their place, so complaining about them being attacked by the greater power is foolish. If they didn't want to be hurt, they should have stayed out the way, like the little people have been doing for millennia.
Are you saying that you don't think states or peoples have moral rights beyond what the Americans grant them? I would be curious if most people (in the West? in the US?) actually see it that way. It seems to echo a sentiment that used to be featured in those sneering-at-fundamentalists collections that were popular in the 200Xes frequently, where Christians would assert that without God there are no moral principles or rights (and so Atheists are scary/probably only pretending to have morality and ready to rob and murder you whenever nobody is watching).
No, I'm saying the moral foundations on which that international order are built are the same as the moral foundations on which a rights based worldview are built. Throwing out the one costs you the other.
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If Hezbollah is a government prosecuting a war against Israel, then that makes the claim that Israel is attacking Lebanon weaker, since you've now abandoned the Motte that Israel bombing Lebanon violates Lebanese sovereignty since Hezbollah is not the government, and chosen a position (and historical examples) in which the government of Lebanon attacked Israel first.
Which, as a matter of customary and formal international law, absolutely entitles Israel to self-defense. Of which characterizing it as an attack is gaslighting over who started the conflict in question.
For the same reason the Americans are not accorded the right to invade Cuba on the grounds it was once a close part of their sphere of influence, and the Russians are not accorded the right to conquer their neighbors on grounds of the Russian Empire, and the Chinese are not accorded the right to dictate sea borders on the grounds of alleged naval trade influence, the Turks are not entitled to Syria, the Venezuelans are not accorded the right to Guayana, and countless other examples.
There is no general right to historical revanchism. The Arabs who seek such are not uniquely denied.
Possibly because you are someone who unironically uses terms like master and slave morality.
This is not an insult, but a point that your subscribed frameworks blind you to the foundations and implicit understandings of other people's positions and renders you unable to communicate yours to others in terms and framings they would recognize and accept. Instead you argue by a awkward jury rigging of trying to invoke their belief systems (framing Israel as an attacker with the negative connotations that brings as implying an aggressor), but without respecting the importance of associated aspects of their systems (that someone who was attacked and retaliates is a defender, not the aggressor, and that different models and moral judgements apply).
By rejecting widely-held and generally understood frameworks (like the fundamentals of post-WW2 international law on conflicts between states), and substituting niche frameworks instead that are often niche because of the limitations or past discreditations of them (Nietsch is a historical mess, particularly as a foreign policy paradigm), it's natural you would not only not understand other's positions, but regularly find yourself confused by them- especially when you distil large and diverse groups of actors and interests into oversimplified units of analysis, which necessarily requires dropping contexts such as differing views and contradictory motivations in even 'shared' group positions.
There is no trickery if person A from Group Z has a different motivation from person B of Group Z. They are different people. This is part of the fallacy of composition, of assuming what is true of part of a group (views on israel) is true for the whole group.
In the spirit of it being an appropriate metaphor for the Hezbollah role in the current conflict, feel free to stop shooting at any time. You initiated this exchange, and you can leave without the last shot at any time.
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