Cong. Van Hollen

Petition to Congressman Chris Van Hollen
Expressing Concerns about his July 30, 2006 letter to Secretary Rice

We, the undersigned, are disturbed by your July 30, 2006 letter to Secretary of State Rice.
1.Your call for an immediate cease-fire was contrary to the then stated position of both Israel and the US. As a result of repeated attacks against Israel by Hezbollah over the previous 6 years and Lebanons failure to carry out UN Resolution 1559 that it replace and remove Hezbollah from south Lebanon, the US and Israeli position at the time of your letter was that Israel should first be given an opportunity to degrade Hezbollahs ability to continue its terror war against Israel before imposing a cease-fire.

2.Your letter, while criticizing Israel for damage to persons and property in Lebanon, was silent about the hundreds of thousands of Israeli refugees and the widespread damage to persons and property caused by thousands of Hezbollah rockets launched against Israel.

3.Your letter called for Israel to limit its attacks to clearly identifiable Hezbollah military targets, which would have been an impossibility, because Hezbollah, aided and abetted by the civilian population, intentionally stores, hides and fires its rockets near schoolyards, apartment complex roofs and hospitals. By saying nothing of the efforts of the Israeli military to avoid civilian casualties (even to the extent of endangering its own soldiers), like dropping leaflets calling for evacuation before attacking, doing house to house searches, and bed to bed searches in hospitals, you helped to perpetuate the myth of brutality Israels enemies commonly seek to attach to the Israeli Defense Forces. At the same time, you ignore the fact that Hezbollah deliberately seeks to kill Israeli civilians.

4.Finally, by tying resolution of this conflict to Israels dispute with Palestinians, you erroneously suggest that Hezbollah and its benefactors, Iran and Syria, seek merely to assist Palestinians in their conflict with Israel, rather than having as their goal the destruction of Israel and hegemony over the region.

We ask that you take a public stand in which you explicitly call for the UN and Lebanese forces to do what is necessary to remove Hezbollah from the south of Lebanon, disarm it in accordance with Security Council Resolutions 1559 and 1701,call for the civilian population in the south of Lebanon to stop aiding and abetting Hezbollah in its terror war against Israel, and acknowledge that with respect to Israels conduct of its war against Hezbollah, a well-armed terrorist force embedded among, hidden and aided by the civilian population, the notion of disproportionate force and the moral judgment it implies, has no legitimate application. We ask that you further call on the governments of Syria and Iran to obey both the letter and the spirit of Council Resolution 1701.