An awful commentary in the October 8 edition of the Guardian by Jonathan Freedland, entitled "Impotence of power." He excuses the attack against Syria by repeating the tired old excuse of Israel's supposed desparation and vulnerability.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1058195,00.html

They remembered it well. Jews gathering in synagogues around the world on Monday to mark Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, found themselves thinking back to the same holy fast day three decades earlier. In 1973, word had spread around congregations from Newcastle to New York, whispering the dread news that Israel had been attacked, from Egypt in the south and Syria to the north. It was a surprise offensive and Israel had been caught badly off guard. Jews feared the worst that Yom Kippur, imagining the Jewish state, then just 25 years old, was about to be wiped off the map.

(Freedland fails to mention that the 1973 war aim of Syria and Egypt was to recapture their territory illegally conquered by Israel in its offensive of 1967, and subsequently almost all the fighting took place on the Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights. During the summer of 1973, before the war, a draft resolution submitted to the UN Security Council urged an Israeli withdrawal linked to an Egyptian peace pledge, and stressed respect for Palestinian rights. This was opposed by Israel, and on July 26 the US vetoed the resolution. 13 Security Council members supported it, China abstained.)

(Israel was not going to be "wiped off the map". Just a few days after the war began, a massive American airlift replaced Israel's losses, which enabled it to mount a counter-offensive. It also violated the ceasefire agreement - this was tacitly approved by former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, according to newly declassified documents released on the 30th anniversary of the war. Thus Israel made more war gains after the ceasefire and sparked a crisis between the US and Soviet Union.)

This time it was Israel that launched the daring, unexpected raid on Syria, rather than the other way round. Indeed, to most of the outside world, Sunday's air strike on the Ein Saheb camp - said to be a kind of campus of terror, housing training facilities for a variety of armed Palestinian groups - was a brash demonstration of Israel's might and complete military superiority over its neighbours.

(How is it "daring" to prove one's "might and complete military superiority"? Rather, it is unlawful and unwarranted, and the allegations made by Freedland about Ein Saheb come straight from the mouth of Israeli officials and are vehemently disputed by Syria and Palestinian groups.)

Viewed from inside Israel, Sunday's raid was the act of a nation driven half-mad with desperation and grief. On Saturday a suicide bomber had taken 19 lives in the Maxim restaurant in Haifa, Israel's most mixed city. Israelis look at that event and feel their spirit break. It's not just the bleak realisation that a family cannot even have a meal together before the holiest day of the year without their flesh being torn into pieces. It's the sense that nothing works.

(The nation Freedland talks of occupies and colonises Arab land, oppresses and disposseses Arab people, and is the only nuclear power in the Middle East. Pity Israel!)

(If desparation and grief warrant attacking your neighbours, Freedland has, unwittingly of course, justified Palestinian resistance against Israel, even, one could argue, suicide bombings. Do Palestinians not feel desparation and grief? Their's is the pain of the victim, not the oppressor. How can Israelis have the sense that "nothing works" when they have not tried the obvious - withdrawing from occupied land, respecting human rights and abiding by international law?)

So Israelis go quietly mad. For a country of 6 million, 19 dead is a huge calamity. Proportionally, that would mean a loss of 190 British lives.

(Let's see - 19 Palestinians killed in the occupied territories amount to almost 380 dead Britons, so if Palestinian fatalities during this intifada, mostly civilian, are almost 3,000, this would translate to 60,000 British deaths!)

They know that the rest of the world sees Israel's battle with the Palestinians as a straightforward contest of powerful against powerless. Many of them, in their cooler moments, see the logic in that view: they know Israel's occupation is a basic injustice and that Palestinian civilians die, in their twos and threes, every day. But that logic becomes harder to hold when every cafe is a cemetery, when every school bus is a potential death trap.

(Suicide bombings are caused by the occupation, not the other way round.)

In this, Sharon represents his countrymen. They too are frustrated, driven to desperate measures. They feel impotent to crush the threat that menaces their lives.