THE ATTACK

In the August 11 edition of the Israeli paper Ha'aretz, the leading military analyst Zev Schiff noted that the "Hezbollah uses anti-aircraft aimed to explode over Israeli communities and not hit Israeli planes," and went on to say that "Hezbollah also set the shells fired from the cannon to detonate relatively low and thus increase the chances of casualties and damage."

If you live in Israel's northern Galilee like we used to, or if you have a son who serves in an IDF unit like we  do now,  then you know very well that attacks on Israel's northern civilian communities have been going on for the past year and a half, and you know that a war is ensuing on Israel's northern frontier - despite Israel's hasty redeployment from Southern Lebanon three years ago.

So much for the illusion that Israel's May 2000 redeployment to the 1949 armistice lines with Lebanon would facilitate international and even Lebanese recognition for Israel's northern border and salve the appetite of Palestinian Arabs or Islamic fundamentalists to attack Israel.

The IDF spokesman's computer recounts that 109 attacks occurred against Israel's civilian communities in the North since January, 2002.

Such attacks portend a military campaign which Israel is ill prepared to cope with on Israel's northern frontier.

So much for the news reports over the past year and a half which gave the Israeli public the impression anti-aircraft fire was  only being fired by Hezbollah against Israeli aircraft while the news media neglected to report that Israeli planes rarely fly over southern Lebanon.

Such myths were shattered when a Hezbollah missile decapitated a sixteen-year-old Israeli boy in the northern Israeli town of Shlomi yesterday.

THE CONTEXT

Few people realize is that the lines which demarcate Israel and Lebanon are not "borders"; they  are only "armistice lines" that Israel and Lebanon agreed to after the not-yet-resolved 1948 war, after the combined military forces Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia  tried to eradicate the nascent State of Israel. The only border ever been defined between Israeli and a neighboring country is with Egypt.

The unresolved 1948 war simmers with Israel's other neighboring countries who now host 4 million  Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendants who wallow in the squalor of UN Arab refugee camps, under the UN specious mandate of the "right of return" to 1948 Arab villages that no longer exist in present-day Israel.

THE CAULDRON

Nowhere does the UN Arab refugee camp issue fester with greater lethal capacity than in Lebanon, the only refugee "host" country that forbids their 320,000 Palestinian Arab refugees and descendants from working in more than 100 defined professions, while disenfranchising them from  representation in the Lebanese parliament.

UN refugee camps in Lebanon have become virtual military training camps for the Hezbollah and various factions of the PLO who use these UN facilities to train thousands of Arab refugees for their eventual crusade to retake northern Israel.

The Ein Hilwe UN refugee camp, some 70 kilometers from Israel, conducts daily military parades, with rival armed  Palestinian Arab factions fighting for control of the camp.  An aside: armed militias have been dispatched from Ein Hilwe over the last six months to conduct guerrilla warfare attacks against U.S. troops stationed in Iraq.

The U.S. covers 30 percent of the budget for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Work Agency, the agency which runs the UN Arab refugee camp in Ein Hilwe and the 58 other Arab refugee camps. The rest of UNRWA's funding comes from 38 other western nations.

So there you have it. UNRWA stirs the cauldron of the "right of return," while the forces of radical Islam energize the Palestinian Arab refugee population to prepare for the next battle to "liberate Palestine" - spearheaded by Hezbollah, armed and trained by Syria and Iran.