January 2007

The Land of Milk

By Paul Larudee, August 2006

The name Lebanon literally means “land of milk”. It is one of the names given to a mythical earthly paradise in ancient times, usually located in one’s neighbor’s land, which typically justified the conquest of said neighbor, assumed to be barbarians.


Results of an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon. (credit: Paul Larudee)

Of course, such justification is no longer acceptable
today under the Geneva conventions. Merely coveting one’s neighbor’s land is not enough, even if those neighbors are barbarians (today’s term is “terrorist”) unworthy of life itself. A “terrorist threat” is therefore required as a pretext for Israel to take land that it and its founders have coveted since at least 1918, when David Ben Gurion first described Lebanon’s Litani river as Israel’s future “natural” border to the north.