Unprovoked? Since when?

I deplore violence by anyone, including Hezbollah. However, it grates on me that my Government should be sucked into this dispute making statements like the following:

We condemn in the strongest terms Hezbollah's unprovoked attack on Israel and the kidnapping of the two Israeli soldiers," National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones said as President Bush flew here for a visit. He said Hezbollah had also launched unprovoked rocket attacks on civilian targets in Israel as part of its offensive. (emphasis added)

First of all it is a flat out untruth to claim that these strikes are unprovoked. Israel has been provoking its neighbor's ever since it came into existence. Israel repeatedly has attacked civilians in the surrounding territories with sophisticated weapons. It has repeatedly killed civilians in its pursuit of those it labels terrorists (one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter). It has committed so many outrages (like bombing a the only power plant in Gaza, a clear war crime) that it is impossible to catalogue them. And it has sucked us into its malevolent whirlpool.

Israel also was the cause of this family outing to turn into carnage:




There will never be any winners in the midEast. Unfortunately, Palestinian children will always be the losers: