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The executive order would affect doctors and hospitals serving the Medicare population of elderly Americans and people served by any other federally financed service.

It would require those health providers to join with the government to standardize the requirements for information technology systems coming into their facilities; set standards for care of specific health problems; and develop uniform methods of measuring and reporting the outcomes of treatments.

The brazen nature of the initial Hizbollah operation, coupled with the fact that it closely followed Hamas’s capture of one of its soldiers, lent it, in Israeli eyes, an entirely new meaning. Fearing a dangerous erosion of its military deterrence on two fronts simultaneously, the new government quickly escalated in an effort to achieve decisive outcomes against its adversaries. Hizbollah followed suit, for the first time launching rockets deep into Israel. Step by rapid step, the stakes and nature of the conflict have shifted: Israel increasingly sees it as a battle for its and the region’s future; Hizbollah – torn between its identity as a Lebanese/Shiite movement and a messianic Arab-Islamist one – has increasingly slipped into the latter. On both sides, a tactical fight is metamorphosing into an existential war.

The key to managing this conflict, therefore, is to ensure it reverts to more manageable size by producing a ceasefire that puts an immediate, reciprocal end to attacks.

AMY GOODMAN: And the rationale of the Israeli government in Lebanon, that Hezbollah has been raining down missiles in northern Israel and that they have to protect the Israeli people and protect them for all time by routing out Hezbollah?

YONATAN SHAPIRA: You know, it's insanity, and it's a lie because my government now is refusing to cease fire. How can you in one hand cry about missiles that are attacking yourself, you, your family in Haifa, in Afula, in Kiryat Shmona, and at the same time refuse to cease fire? The same aspiration, the same idea that you can just kill and annihilate all of Hezbollah is the same logic of Nasrallah, that will kill all Israel or this kind of nonsense. And there is a lot of mental disorder issues here. And that's why I don't think that the solution for this situation will come from within the Israeli politics. That's why we have to work both from external pressure and internal pressure. The external pressure will be led by Israelis and Jewish people around the world with all the other human rights activists, and the internal pressure will be led by soldiers who refuse to participate in these war crimes.