Tuesday July 24, 2007
The Guardian

When war broke out in Lebanon last summer there were few dissenting voices in Israel. Opinion polls showed unprecedented public support for the conflict. Politicians and pundits crowded television studios to argue that Israel was fighting for its survival in its battle to wipe out Hizbullah.

But one Israeli MP saw it differently. Hizbullah, he wrote, was a resistance movement, fighting a war brought on by an Israeli government led by "mediocrities, cowards and opportunists" who were responsible for "barbaric vandalism and the deliberate targeting of civilians".

After a decade as a member of parliament in the Knesset, Azmi Bishara, politician, author and academic, had long established a reputation as the most outspoken political figure to emerge from Israel's Arab minority. Soon after the war was over, Bishara and a handful of MPs from his Balad party travelled to Syria and Lebanon, both "enemy states", where he continued to denounce his government. He did not have to wait long for a reaction: in September the Israeli attorney general ordered police to begin a criminal investigation.

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