Miguel Sousa Tavares guarantees that Israel’s land occupation of Lebanon is inevitable and highlights that “the Lebanese army is paralyzed”. The critic also criticized Marta Demido and two other Socialists for voting against recognizing Edmundo González Urrutia as president of Venezuela.
Jornal Nacional, in his usual opinion piece in column 5, Miguel Sousa Tavares said he has no doubt that Israel will invade Lebanon with ground troops. “Unfortunately I think there will be a ground invasion,” he stressed, stressing that this would be the third time Israel has invaded Lebanon, Israel’s backyard.
For the commentator, the attitude with which Netanyahu arrived in New York illustrates this. “In fact, Netanyahu’s own visit to the United Nations General Assembly is interesting” because “Netanyahu has an arrest warrant from the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and will speak at the United Nations General Assembly. There is an arrest warrant against him. However, he adds, “the United Nations building is neutral. The territory is not US territory, and it is clear that the US is not a subscriber to the International Criminal Court like Israel.”
However, “it’s still a provocation that shows how much Netanyahu cares about what international law says and less about what the United Nations says.”
Souza Tavares points out that because Lebanon is an independent country, it doesn’t seem to be — “in fact, it’s a plaything in the hands of Israel and in the hands of Hezbollah.” However, “as an independent country, Lebanon has an army of 85 thousand men, which is more than the Hezbollah army, which according to estimates is between 40 and 50 thousand”. Simply put, the commentator continues, “Lebanon’s military reflects Lebanon’s own ethnic makeup, a nation divided among many ethnicities.”
In this way, he concludes, “the Lebanese army is paralyzed, because inside there are Druze, there are Maronite Christians, there are Palestinians, they don’t move”. In fact, he explains, Resolution 1701, which ordered the Lebanese Army to disarm Hezbollah, was never implemented. “Of course it never is, it will never happen, because that would lead to open war with Hezbollah, and they don’t want to do that.”
So, he highlights, “we see, in the case of a land occupation, probably the entire Lebanese army will stand idly by and watch their country be destroyed.”
Sousa Tavares also reflected on the support measures the government enacted this Thursday to support people and companies affected by the fires that devastated large parts of the country last week. Regarding these measures, the commentator highlights that “the government responded quickly and clearly, and the design of the measures seems appropriate to the situation and the budget involved seems adequate”.
He took the opportunity to criticize the vote against socialists Marta Demido, Ana Caterina Mendes and Bruno Gonçalves over the recognition of Edmundo González Urrutia as Venezuela’s legitimate and democratically elected president. Souza Tavares says the vote is inconsistent with other socialist benches, and he doesn’t understand “what else those who voted against recognize a slap in the face in the Venezuelan elections need.”
“Marta Demido said there was no evidence, but the Venezuelan opposition presented the evidence, presented the polling station counts, while on the government side, Maduro, to this day, has not presented the results of the polling stations he said. Now”, she recalled, in essence, “here is a faithful to the values of freedom. There is a socialist party, that is the party of Mario Soares, and a socialist party that facilitates it, that is the socialist party of Pedro Nuno Santos”.