On its editorial page at least the Wall Street Journal is consistent. It never fails to disappoint or miss an opportunity to misinform its readers. The August 16 article by the right wing Hoover Institution George Shultz Senior Fellow and former US State Department legal advisor in the 1980s Abraham Sofaer is just the latest example. The article is a typical Journal litany of propaganda, distortion, and deliberate misstatement of facts. It’s what we’ve come to expect from an editorial page only hard right supporters and proponents of empire would love. It’s not what we should expect from a former Columbia University School of Law professor who surely knows the law well and shouldn’t twist it to misinform his readers when he writes about it.

The article is titled ‘Solution and Resolution’ so before even reading it it’s clear Mr. Sofaer is mis-portraying truth and reality. He begins by saying UN Resolution 1701 ‘contains the bases upon which a lasting peace could be established along the Lebanon/Israel border, and true sovereign authority transferred to Lebanon’s government. But these objectives will succeed only if the resolution’s demands are met.’ With that opening salvo, it’s hard not being breathless and needing to pause before reading on.

First off, what on earth does Mr. Sofaer mean by ‘true sovereign authority transferred to Lebanon’s government.’ Doesn’t this distinguished Fellow know Lebanon is a sovereign state and the issue at hand is not about a transference of anything except the right of the Lebanese government to ‘transfer’ the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) back to Israel. As for the Security Council action on August 11, Resolution 1701 was a revised version of the original one jointly proposed by the US and France and with all provisions in it agreed to in advance by Israel before being put to a vote. Neither Lebanon nor Hezbollah were afforded the same right, and it showed in what passed unanimously as the demands of Israel and the US were met but not those of the country and its people the IDF attacked preemptively.

By having passed this resolution, the Security Council once again showed the world the UN is little more than a servile agent of US imperial foreign policy and that of its allies. As it did so often in the past, this international body failed in the primary mission it was set up for as stated in its Charter: ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, to maintain international peace and security, (and to suppress) acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace.’ By its vote on August 11, the Security Council, in fact, did the opposite. In effect, it sanctioned an illegal war of aggression and in doing so violated the most fundamental principle of its own Charter. It’s clear the distinguished law professor and author of this article wholeheartedly approves.

He no doubt also approves and certainly understands that the one thing this resolution will never guarantee is peace in the region, justifiable retribution and justice for the victims or any possible outcome other than continued conflict. It’s also likely it was designed with that in mind as a ‘lasting peace’ would undermine Israel’s hardened position to oppose any political solution and is only able to avoid one in a state of conflict against an adversary it portrays as terrorists even though it and its members are not. Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir explained it in the 1980s (which Mr. Sofaer surely must know) when he admitted his country went to war with Lebanon in 1982 because there was ‘a terrible danger….not so much a military one as a political one.’ But Israel couldn’t invade the country without good reason to do it. It found none so it invented one after the terrorist Abu Nidal organization attempted to assassinate the Israeli Ambassador to the UK in London. The Israelis blamed it on the PLO and Yassar Arafat based in Lebanon that had nothing to do with it, falsely claimed it was acting to protect its citizens from PLO attacks when there were none, went to war based on a lie and killed 18,000 mostly civilian Lebanese and Palestinians before it ended – and all to avoid a political solution.

Mr. Sofaer goes on to state successful implementation of the resolution ‘depends on convincing Syria to end its policy of allowing Hezbollah to be used by Iran to destabilize Israel’s security.’ Once again one must pause for breath-catching as Mr. Sofaer has inverted reality. He seems not to understand that Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and oppressive occupation gave birth to Hezbollah. It was formed as a legitimate resistance to it and is now part of the
democratically elected Lebanese government. But Hezbollah is also determined to free its country from a foreign occupier. To do so it became a formidable adversary and finally succeeded in forcing the IDF to withdraw mostly from the country in May, 2000, only remaining in the 25 square kilometer Shebaa Farms area in the South. Ever since Hezbollah has been a bulwark of defense serving and protecting its people in South Lebanon against the Israelis that since withdrawing have made near-daily illegal cross-border incursions, repeated violations of the country’s airspace, and have forcibly abducted and now hold in indefinite detention over 10,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, many administratively without charge.

Hizbollah has every right to seek and receive aid from other countries willing to supply it just as Israel receives billions of dollars of military and economic aid annually from the US and with it built the world’s fourth most powerful military with nearly every modern weapon including a large nuclear arsenal. But there’s a difference in Hezbollah’s purpose and that of the Israelis. For Hezbollah it’s for self-defense, but for Israel it’s for intimidation, occupation and preemptive illegal aggression. Mr. Sofaer seems not to know or admit that Hezbollah never first attacked Israel after the IDF mostly withdrew from Lebanon. And it only ever claims the legitimate right to do so in response to the IDF’s illegal occupation of sovereign Lebanese territory. Otherwise, it only responds to Israeli attacks against its forces or the people of Lebanon which Israel has a long history of provocatively making while falsely claiming it only does so in retaliation for what Hezbollah or the Palestinians initiate.

Mr. Sofaer then goes on to make one misstatement after another. He stresses that the IDF must withdraw from Lebanon only after ‘the Lebanese Army and an expanded United Nations force assume control.’ He fails to note the resolution only asks Israel to stop ‘all offensive military operations’ without defining what that means and sets no fixed timetable for the IDF withdrawal. This was the language Israel wanted and now has stated its forces may remain in the country for many months. If they do, this will be a deliberate provocation to reignite the conflict after which the IDF will claim it has the right to strike back.

The resolution also calls on Hezbollah to cease ‘all attacks’ immediately but only implies without explicitly stating it must disarm. Mr. Sofaer falsely claims it calls for ‘Hezbollah’s disarmament’ and an ‘end to the importation of weapons.’ False on both counts as just stated on count one and in the resolution’s language on count two that says ‘no weapons (are allowed) without the consent of the government of Lebanon and no authority other than that of the government of Lebanon.’ Someone should inform Mr. Sofaer that Hezbollah is a legitimate part of that government, its members comprise a large portion of the Lebanese Army, and thus according to the resolution may have weapons and certainly according to the UN Charter can use them in self-defense. It only must refrain from using them offensively as Israel does all the time under the fraudulent cover of self-defense.

Mr. Sofaer also falsely accuses Hezbollah by implication of initiating the attack on Israel on July 12 and abducting its soldiers. It did neither. Hezbollah responded to repeated IDF attacks on its territory and people and captured (not ‘abducted’) two IDF soldiers. It’s believed they illegally crossed the UN-monitored ‘blue line’ into Lebanon as the IDF has routinely done almost daily since withdrawing from the country in May, 2000. Further, Mr. Sofaer is incorrect in saying the resolution will not ‘allow Israel to act in its reasonable self-defense.’ In fact, it gives Israel every right to do it by permitting the IDF the right to initiate further assaults any time it believes, true or not and with no corroborating evidence, an imminent threat against the Jewish state exists. In so doing, this provision violates the UN Charter that only allows a nation to use force under two conditions: when authorized to do it by the Security Council or under Article 51 that allows a nation to respond to an attack by another nation. Does this distinguished former law professor not understand this?

Mr. Sofaer also claims Hezbollah has no right to seek arms from allies like Syria and Iran or any other legitimate supplier for its self-defense or to protect the people of Lebanon as it was formed to do. He makes no similar demand of Israel, which is far more heavily armed by the US and replenished as needed, that has a long history of deliberate provocation and belligerence against its neighbors including the Palestinians for nearly six decades. It’s done it as well against the Lebanese since 1968 when the IDF conducted terror raids and military aggression against the country that included attacking the Beirut airport and destroying 13 civilian planes on the ground claiming, without evidence, it was in retaliation for an attack by Lebanese trained Palestinians targeting an Israeli airliner in Athens.

Mr. Sofaer also disingenuously accuses Syria of ‘using Hezbollah to create instability’ and in mentioning what he calls Israel’s ‘legitimate concerns in surrendering the Golan Heights,’ never explaining that Israel wanted that Syrian territory in the first place for its water resources and having seized it almost 40 years ago never intends to negotiate seriously to relinquish it. He shamelessly goes on to say Israel only will withdraw from ‘non-Israeli territory (if it can be done) without causing increased insecurity and danger for its people……(and) the Israeli people……have shown a willingness to return territory for peace’ as it did when signing peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan. By this statement Mr.
Sofaer inverts history again by failing to acknowledge that Israel has been expansionist throughout its short existence and that Arab attacks against it only occurred in response to IDF first-strike aggressive assaults or after considerable IDF provocation. He never even considers the possibility that if Israel really wanted to live in peace with its neighbors all it need do is to stop attacking them and invading their territory. The fact that it hasn’t through the years shows it won’t and doesn’t want to because, as explained earlier, it won’t tolerate a political solution to conflict in the region that could not be avoided in an atmosphere of peace, security and stability.

Mr. Sofaer continues to go from bad to worse by claiming former Prime Minister Aerial Sharon established a policy of withdrawing from Gaza and ‘building a fence to separate Israelis from Palestinian areas’ because ‘it became clear….the Palestinians were determined to make war on Israel.’ This is an utter absurdity on its face, Mr. Sofaer must know it with his distinguished credentials, but nonetheless puts this outrageous misstatement of fact in his column. As he surely understands well, the IDF never withdrew from Gaza but only redeployed to new occupation positions from which it could and has reentered the territory at will. He also knows the ‘separation’ wall is being built not for security but as a land-grab policy to seize additional areas from the Palestinians for Israeli settlements. In so doing, Israel is in violation of UN Resolutions 465 and 476 that condemned Israel’s policy of ‘settling parts of its population and new immigrants in those territories (and said doing so constituted) a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the protection of civilian persons in time of war and also constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.’ It called on the government of Israel to ‘dismantle the existing settlements and in particular to cease….the establishment, construction and planning of (new) settlements in the Arab territories since 1967, including Jerusalem.’

Mr. Sofaer also ignores the World Court decision in July, 2004 that the so-called ‘separation wall’ is ‘contrary to international law (because it) destroyed and confiscated property, greatly restricts Palestinian movement, and severely impedes the exercise by the Palestinian people of (the) right to self-determination.’ The Court ruled 14 – 1 that construction must end at once, the existing portion already built must be taken down, and affected Palestinians must be compensated for their losses. In its ruling the Court cited binding international law codified in the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Fourth Geneva Convention cited above. It went on to rule that Israel was required to comply with the international humanitarian law in the Regulation and Article 49 of the Convention. Israel ignored the ruling and the UN General Assembly that voted 150 – 6 calling on the Jewish state to obey the World Court decision. Surely a distinguished former law professor understands this.

Mr. Sofaer never once mentions in his one-sided pro-Israel article that it was not Hezbollah but Israel that intiated the attack on July 12 using the capture of two of its soldiers as the pretext to do it – hardly a justifiable reason to go to war (a word missing from UN Resolution 1701). He thus fails to acknowledge that under the provisions of the UN Charter cited above, Israel undertook a war of illegal aggression against Lebanon and in so doing is guilty of the ‘supreme international crime’ according to the Nuremberg Charter. It’s that crime that convicted Nazis after WW II were hanged for. He further fails to admit or understand that by its actions Israel is guilty of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity not just against the Lebanese but also against the Palestinians who aren’t even mentioned in UN Resolution 1701. That conflict is unresolved and continues to rage daily.

The resolution also fails to state in its text that what Israel has done is an act of war or that post-July 12 Hezbollah acted justifiably in self-defense. Mr. Sofaer concludes quite the opposite claiming Hezbollah is the enemy in the (fraudulent) ‘war on terror’ meaning it has no right of self-defense or likely any other rights as well. Resolution 1701 affirms that view granting all rights to the aggressor and none to its victims. As a result, it’s little more than an outrageous and illegal expression of victor’s justice. But that’s quite acceptable to Mr. Sofaer and why wouldn’t it be. He’s paid to represent the interests of the far right Hoover Institution that never met an aggressive imperial policy it didn’t love because those policies are good for business when they work as intended. In the case of Lebanon and Palestine and Iraq for the US, it looks so far like Israel and the US are big losers as their victims have thus far prevailed.

At this stage it’s still early in the game for Israel, further along for their close US ally, partner, paymaster and benefactor and too soon to predict or know the final outcome for either country. But at least one thing’s for sure. Mr. Sofaer and the empire builders he represents are on the defensive, are facing two humiliating defeats for their mighty military machines against determined guerilla resistance, and are relying on the power of their disingenuous message to convince people otherwise. So far, from what we’re learning from the streets, it doesn’t seem to be working as planned.

Stephen Lendman can be reached at [email protected]. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Learning from Its Mistakes: Charles Glass on Hizbullah

London Review of Books

In his memoir, Not So Wild a Dream, the famous CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid recalled watching the execution of six Nazi collaborators in the newly liberated city of Grenoble in 1944.

When the police van arrived and the six who were to die stepped out, a tremendous and awful cry arose from the crowd. The six young men walked firmly to the iron posts, and as their hands were tied behind the shafts they held their bare heads upright, one or two with closed eyes, the others staring over the line of the buildings and the crowd into the lowering clouds . . . There was the jarring, metallic noise of rifle bolts and then the sharp report. The six young men slid slowly to their knees, their heads falling to one side. An officer ran with frantic haste from one to the other, giving the coup de grâce with a revolver, and one of the victims was seen to work his mouth as though trying to say something to the executioner. As the last shot was fired, the terrible, savage cry rose again from the crowd. Mothers with babies rushed forward to look on the bodies at close range, and small boys ran from one to the other spitting upon the bodies. The crowd dispersed, men and women laughing and shouting at one another.

Barbarous?

Such events were part of what the French described as the épuration – the purification or purging of France after four years of German occupation. The number of French men and women killed by the Resistance or kangaroo courts is usually put at ten thousand. Camus called this ‘human justice with all its defects’. The American forces that liberated France tolerated local vengeance against those who had worked for a brutal occupier. Thousands of French people, encouraged by a government in Vichy that they believed to be legitimate, had collaborated. Many, like the Milices, fascist gangs armed by Vichy, went further and killed Frenchmen. When Vichy’s foreign sponsors withdrew and its government fell, the killing began. Accounts were settled with similar violence in other provinces of the former Third Reich – countries which, along with Britain and the United States, we now think of as the civilised world.

From 1978 to 2000 Israel occupied slices of Lebanon from their common border right up to Beirut and back again. To reduce the burden on its own forces, the Israelis created a species of Milice in the form of the locally recruited South Lebanon Army – first under Major Saad Haddad, who had broken from the Lebanese army in 1976 with a few hundred men, and later under General Antoine Lahad. Both were Christians, and their troops – armed, trained, fed and clothed by Israel – were mainly Shia Muslims from the south. About a third of the force, which grew to almost 10,000, were Christians. Some joined because they resented the Palestinians’ armed presence in south Lebanon. Others enlisted because they needed the money: the region has always been Lebanon’s poorest. The SLA had a reputation for cruelty, confirmed when its torture chambers at Khiam were opened after the Israeli withdrawal in 2000, and for a high rate of desertions.

As Israel pulled back from Beirut, the high-water mark reached during its 1982 invasion, its share of Lebanon contracted further and further. Having seized 3560 square kilometres, about a third of the country, containing around 800 towns and villages, Israel found itself in 1985 with only 500 square kilometres and 61 villages, mostly deserted. Hizbullah, which led the resistance that had forced the Israelis to abandon most of their conquest, demanded the unconditional return of all Lebanese territory. Its attacks intensified, resulting in a loss of IDF soldiers that became unpalatable to most Israelis. The Israeli army placed the SLA between itself and Hizbullah so that it could pay the price that Israel had decided it could not afford. Hizbullah kidnapped SLA men, and the SLA and Israelis kidnapped Shias. The two sides killed each other, as well as many civilians, and blood feuds were born. On 17 May 1999, Israelis elected Ehud Barak on the strength of his promise to reverse Ariel Sharon’s Lebanon adventure, which had by then cost around a thousand Israeli lives.

Barak announced that Israel would pull out in an orderly fashion in July 2000, provided that Lebanon agreed to certain conditions. The Lebanese government, urged by Hizbullah, rejected these conditions and demanded full Israeli withdrawal in accordance with UN Resolutions 425 and 426 of 1978. Barak abandoned Lebanon two months ahead of schedule, suddenly and without advance warning, on 23 May 2000. His SLA clients and other Lebanese who had worked for the occupation over the previous 22 years were caught off guard. A few escaped into Israel, but most remained. UN personnel made urgent appeals for help to avert a massacre by Hizbullah. Hizbullah went in, but nothing happened.

The deputy secretary-general and co-founder of Hizbullah, Sheikh Naim Qassem, wrote a fascinating if partisan account of the creation and rise of Hizbullah. His version of the events in 2000 is, however, borne out by eyewitnesses from other Lebanese sects – including some who stood to lose their lives – and the UN. ‘It is no secret that some young combatants, as well as some of the region’s citizens, had a desire for vengeance – especially those who were aware of what collaborators and their families had inflicted on the mujahedin and their next of kin across the occupied villages,’ Qassem wrote in Hizbullah: The Story from Within. ‘Resistance leadership issued a strict warning forbidding any such action and vowing to discipline those who took it whatever the justifications.’ Hizbullah captured Israeli weapons, which it is now using against Israel, and turned over SLA militiamen to the government without murdering any of them.

Barbarous?

Naim Qassem called the liberation of south Lebanon ‘the grandest and most important victory over Israel since it commenced its occupation [of Palestine] fifty years before – a liberation that was achieved at the hands of the weakest of nations, of a resistance operating through the most modest of means, not at the hands of armies with powerful military arsenals.’ But what impressed most Lebanese as much as Hizbullah’s victory over Israel was its refusal to murder collaborators – a triumph over the tribalism that has plagued and divided Lebanese society since its founding. Christians I knew in the Lebanese army admitted that their own side would have committed atrocities. Hizbullah may have been playing politics in Lebanon, but it refused to play Lebanese politics. What it sought in south Lebanon was not revenge, but votes. In the interval between its founding in 1982 and the victory of 2000, Hizbullah had become – as well as an armed force – a sophisticated and successful political party. It jettisoned its early rhetoric about making Lebanon an Islamic republic, and spoke of Christians, Muslims and Druze living in harmony. When it put up candidates for parliament, some of those on its electoral list were Christians. It won 14 seats.

Like Israel’s previous enemies, Hizbullah relies on the weapons of the weak: car bombs, ambushes, occasional flurries of small rockets and suicide bombers. The difference is that it uses them intelligently, in conjunction with an uncompromising political programme. Against Israel’s thousand dead on the Lebanese field, Hizbullah gave up 1276 ‘martyrs’. That is the closest any Arab group has ever come to parity in casualties with Israel. The PLO usually lost hundreds of dead commandos to Israel’s tens, and Hamas has seen most of its leaders assassinated and thousands of its cadres captured with little to show for it. Hizbullah’s achievement, perhaps ironically for a religious party headed by men in turbans, is that it belongs to the modern age. It videotaped its ambushes of Israeli convoys for broadcast the same evening. It captured Israeli soldiers and made Israel give up hundreds of prisoners to get them back. It used stage-set cardboard boulders that blew up when Israeli patrols passed. It flew drones over Israel to take reconnaissance photographs – just as the Israelis did in Lebanon. It had a website that was short on traditional Arab bombast and long on facts. If Israelis had faced an enemy like Hizbullah in 1948, the outcome of its War of Independence might have been different. Israel, whose military respect Hizbullah, is well aware of this.

That is why, having failed to eliminate Hizbullah while it occupied Lebanon, Israel is trying to destroy it now. Hizbullah’s unpardonable sin in Israel’s view is its military success. Israel may portray Hizbullah as the cat’s-paw of Syria and Iran, but its support base is Lebanese. Moreover, it does one thing that Syria and Iran do not: it fights for the Palestinians. On 12 July Hizbullah attacked an Israeli army unit, capturing two soldiers. It said it would negotiate indirectly to exchange them for Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners in Israel, as it has done in the past. It made clear that its attack was in support of the Palestinians under siege in Gaza after the capture of another Israeli soldier a week earlier. The whole Arab world had remained silent when Israel reoccupied the Gaza settlements and bombed the territory. Hizbullah’s response humiliated the Arab regimes, most of which condemned its actions, as much as it humiliated Israel. No one need have been surprised. Hizbullah has a long history of supporting the Palestinians. Many of its original fighters were trained by the PLO in the 1970s when the Shias had no militias of their own. Hizbullah risked the anger of Syria in 1986 when it sided against another Shia group which was attacking Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut. Hizbullah has never abandoned the Palestinian cause. Its capture last month of the two Israeli soldiers sent a message to Israel that it could not attack Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank without expecting a reaction.

On this occasion Israel, which regards its treatment of Palestinians under occupation as an internal affair in which neither the UN nor the Arab countries have any right to interfere, calibrated its response in such a way that it could not win. Instead of doing a quiet deal with Hizbullah to free its soldiers, it launched an all-out assault on Lebanon. Reports indicate that Israel has already dropped a greater tonnage of bombs on the country than it did during Sharon’s invasion in 1982. The stated purpose was to force a significant portion of the Lebanese to demand that the government disarm Hizbullah once and for all. That failed to happen. Israel’s massive destruction of Lebanon has had the effect of improving Hizbullah’s standing in the country. Its popularity had been low since last year, when it alone refused to demand the evacuation of the Syrian army after the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. Hizbullah sensed that Washington was orchestrating the anti-Syrian campaign for its own – rather than Lebanon’s – benefit.

Syria had, after all, helped found Hizbullah after Israel’s invasion – and encouraged it to face down and defeat the occupation, as well as to drive the Americans from Lebanon. Syria in turn allowed Iran, whose religious leaders gave direction to Hizbullah and whose Revolutionary Guards provided valuable tactical instruction, to send weapons through its territory to Lebanon. Hizbullah’s leaders nevertheless have sufficiently strong support to assert their independence of both sponsors whenever their interests or philosophies clash. (I have first-hand, if minor, experience of this. When Hizbullah kidnapped me in full view of a Syrian army checkpoint in 1987, Syria insisted that I be released to show that Syrian control of Lebanon could not be flouted. Hizbullah, unfortunately, ignored the request.) Despite occasional Syrian pressure, Hizbullah has refused to go into combat against any other Lebanese militia. It remained aloof from the civil war and concentrated on defeating Israel and its SLA surrogates.

Hizbullah’s unspectacular showing in the first post-Syrian parliamentary elections was largely due to changes in electoral law but may also be traced in part to its perceived pro-Syrian stance. Now, Israel has rescued Hizbullah and made its secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, not only the most popular man in Lebanon – but in the whole Arab world. An opinion poll commissioned by the Beirut Centre for Research and Information found that 80 per cent of Lebanese Christians supported Hizbullah; the figure for other communities was even higher. It was not insignificant that, when false reports came in that Hizbullah had sunk a second Israeli warship, the area that fired the loudest celebratory shots in the air was Ashrafieh, the heart of Christian East Beirut. Unlike in 1982, when it could rely on some of the Christian militias, Israel now has no friends in Lebanon.

Israel misjudged Lebanon’s response to its assaults, just as Hizbullah misjudged Israeli opinion. Firing its rockets into Israel did not, as it may have planned, divide Israelis and make them call for an end to the war. Israelis, like the Lebanese, rallied to their fighters in a contest that is taking on life and death proportions for both countries. Unlike Israel, which has repeatedly played out the same failed scenario in Lebanon since its first attack on Beirut in 1968, Hizbullah has a history of learning from its mistakes. Seeing the Israeli response to his rocket bombardment of Haifa and Netanya in the north, Nasrallah has not carried out his threat to send rockets as far as Tel Aviv. He now says he will do this only if Israel targets the centre of Beirut.

If the UN had any power, or the United States exercised its power responsibly, there would have been an unconditional ceasefire weeks ago and an exchange of prisoners. The Middle East could then have awaited the next crisis. Crises will inevitably recur until the Palestine problem is solved. But Lebanon would not have been demolished, hundreds of people would not have died and the hatred between Lebanese and Israelis would not have become so bitter.

On 31 July, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said: ‘This is a unique opportunity to change the rules in Lebanon.’ Yet Israel itself is playing by the same old unsuccessful rules. It is ordering Lebanon to disarm Hizbullah or face destruction, just as in 1975 it demanded the dismantling of the PLO. Then, many Lebanese fought the PLO and destroyed the country from within. Now, they reason, better war than another civil war: better that the Israelis kill us than that we kill ourselves. What else can Israel do to them? It has bombed comprehensively, destroyed the country’s expensively restored infrastructure, laid siege to it and sent its troops back in. Israel still insists that it will destroy Hizbullah in a few weeks, although it did not manage to do so between 1982 and 2000 when it had thousands of troops on the ground and a local proxy force to help it. What is its secret weapon this time?

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