Canada to Israel "Go right ahead"

For those reading the papers today, the message that Canada has sent to Israel should, by now, be very clear now. Yesterday Israel’s Justice minister said that world leaders, in failing to call for an immediate cease-fire during the Rome summit, have given Israel a green light to push harder to wipe out the Lebanese guerrillas. While Israel continues to expand its bombing of Lebanon, it now has the green light to prepare a massive ground invasion of Lebanon. Preparations have begun in earnest, as Israel has announced its plans to call up 30,000 reserves to begin training.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said yesterday "everyone understands that a victory for Hezbollah is a victory for world terror". It's striking to see how closely our two Prime Ministers think. The Canadian government’s position mirrors that of Israel/US, which is despite the many dead and seriously injured Canadians, the situation does not merit a ceasefire. Whitehouse Press Secretary (and former FOXNEWS radio host) Tony Snow released a statement yesterday: "A ceasefire that would leave the status quo intact is absolutely unacceptable. A ceasefire that would leave intact a terrorist infrastructure is unacceptable. So what we're trying to do is work as best we can toward a cease-fire that is going to create not only the conditions, but the institutions for peace and democracy in the region."

The evacuation of Canadian-Lebanese citizens continues. The evacuation beginning 19 July to 25 July has thus far evacuated 8,739 citizens to Cyprus, Turkey or back to Canada. At this current rate, barring any further complications, it will still be several weeks before most of the estimated 40,000 citizens are completely evacuated. Potential complications are IDF harassment of refugee transports such as holding up ships for hours at a time -- reminiscent of the checkpoints many Palestinians have endured daily. This form of continued harassment is common despite Certificates of Safe Passage issued by the Israel Defence Forces for the international evacuation effort.

Expect more casualties. With such a large contingent of Canadians remaining in Lebanon as Israel further expands and intensifies its bombing of the country the likelihood that we will see further casualties is a near certainty. The recent bombing of a UN post, killing one Canadian, was condemned by Kofi Annan as "possibly deliberate" as dozens of desperate calls were placed by the UN observers at the post to the IDF to cease the attack. Israel’s attack continued during the rescue effort immediately after the bombing. The same disregard has been shown to Lebanese as they attempted to escape on bombed bridges and roads and are routinely targeted while fleeing. The IDF's continued disregard of civilian life will certainly continue to contribute to a quickly rising body count.

As the death toll grows exponentially, how will Canadians respond? So far the government has explicitly given the green light to Israel to continue the reckless bombing of civilians and crucial infrastructure unless it's politically impossible demands are met. It is not just the Canadian government that supports this destruction. Canadians are shown to be evenly split on Stephan Harper's stance on Lebanon according to an Ipos-Reid poll released Sunday.