After killing 54 civilians in Qana, Lebanon this morning, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert hardly marked a conciliatory or apologetic tone.

He claimed that "all the inhabitants had been warned and we'd asked them to leave. No-one had had an order to fire on civilians, and we don't have as a policy killing civilians".

I wouldn't really have thought that Israel had a right to demand that you leave your home so that they can bomb it. Of course, Israel claims that anyone who doesn't leave their home must be linked to Hezbollah - you know, the elderly, disabled people, people without transport or money. Or indeed the 37 kids killed in Qana

The fact that Hezbollah use civilian areas to launch rockets is always the reason why bombing apartment blocks, hospitals and so on are thought to be acceptable.

In fact, Israel's willingness to attack civilian areas reveals an important truth in the conflict - Hezbollah assume that Israel will be too humane and morally upstanding to recklessly kill civilians, so use civilians as a kind of human shield.

Hezbollah therefore recognise Israel as a democratic power - but the Israeli government is betraying their expectations!

Incidentally, recently I read Slavoj Zizek making an "interesting" comment on how people on the Left complain about the oppression of [Palestinian] Arabs by Israel much more than they do about the oppression of Arabs in "Muslim states". Or indeed about the suffering of North Koreans under the Stalinist régime.

Zizek does not merely explain this through the obvious answer (people on the Left fetishise national liberation rather than focusing on oppression of women, gays, political dissidents), but points out an inverse racism in the minds of cultural relativists. They expect more of "Western","European" Jews than of other peoples -

"It is as if there is in the critique of the policies of the State of Israel an element of - not so much 'unfair' anti-Semitism but, rather, on the contrary - secret recognition of the higher special ethical standards of the Jews: how can you, of all peoples, behave like this?"