CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Sixth War

2006

OPERATION TRUE PROMISE

About 8.45 a.m., that fateful July day, seven men of the 91st Division, responsible for guarding Israel’s frontier with Lebanon, set out in two armoured Humvees on their daily patrol along the central sector. It was their last day in three and a half weeks of reserve duty, and they all had the happy ‘end-of-term’ feeling which the prospect of getting home again that evening induced. But it was not to be. Just after nine o’clock, when they reached a particularly exposed spot, Hizbullah special forces, lying in wait on the other side of the border, opened up with heavy machine-gun and anti-tank fire on the second of the vehicles, so as to prevent it from coming to the rescue of the first, about a hundred metres ahead of it. They killed its three occupants. Simultaneously, another Hizbullah party, who had cut their way through the barbed-wire security fence during the night, fired two rocket-propelled grenades into the first Humvee. They wounded two soldiers, who managed to hide in nearby bushes, and pulled out two others, also wounded. As Hizbullah positions unleashed a barrage of diversionary shelling, the raiders slipped unseen back across the frontier, taking their hostages, sergeants Udi Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, with them. It took the 91st Division, confused, clumsy and locally under-manned, nearly two hours to mount the mere semblance of a pursuit. But hardly had the single tank engaged in it crossed the border than it ran over a Hizbullah-laid mine; its four-man crew were killed outright. Yet another soldier - the eighth of the day - died in a hail of Hizbullah mortar fire.¹

Operation True Promise - as Hizbullah called it - came as no surprise. There had been a number of such attempts before, and the ‘promise’ it referred to was the one which Nasrallah had repeatedly, publicly made: that Hizbullah would not rest until it had secured the freedom of Samir Quntar, the longest-serving of Lebanese prisoners in Israel, and three others. Quntar was a Druze, not a Shiite, and the terror exploit for which he was convicted took place, in the service of a minor Palestinian guerilla organization, long before Hizbullah had even come into being. In a recent speech, Nasrallah had assured him that the hopes of freedom he had placed in the resistance were 06sound’ and that ‘the coming days and the spilled blood’ would ‘prove me right’.²

Immediately after the hostage-taking, Nasrallah told a press conference that Goldwasser and Regev would only be released, through indirect negotiations, in exchange for Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners. And he made it clear that, as far as he was concerned, Hizbullah’s coup de force fell within the strictly national, Lebanese objectives of its struggle; it therefore did not justify any Israeli response outside the post-withdrawal ‘rules of the game.’ The most he seems to have been expecting was that Israel would ‘just retaliate a bit, bomb a couple of targets and that would be the end of it’.³ What he actually got was - according to him - beyond his wildest imagining. Neither he nor any of his fifteen-man leadership had rated at higher than one per cent the chances that Israel would resort to violence on the scale it did. If it had been otherwise, he said, he would not have agreed to the operation, ‘nor would Hizbullah, the prisoners in Israel gaols or the families of the prisoners ... absolutely not, for humanitarian, moral, social, security, military and political reasons’.⁴ Certainly, all prior evidence did suggest that Nasrallah never wanted a full-scale war, and, to his listeners, these post-war revelations sounded very much like his mea culpa for bringing one about.

If error it truly was then it was an extraordinary one, especially on the part of a leader who made such a point of ‘knowing’ his enemy. The passivity with which the Israelis had tended to respond to all Hizbullah’s border operations in the six years since they withdrew had apparently bred in him and his colleagues an idée fixe, comparable to the conviction - held by Israeli generals before the 1973 Arab-Israeli War - that Egypt would never even dare to send its army across the Suez Canal.

‘WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?’

The Lebanese prime minister, for one, didn’t agree with it at all. ‘What have you done’? Fuad Siniora asked Hussein Khalil, an aide to Nasrallah whom he had called to his office. When Khalil assured him that ‘it will calm down in twenty-four to forty-eight hours’, Siniora pointed to the Gaza Strip, and what the Israelis had wrought there since Palestinian militants had abducted a soldier three weeks before. ‘Lebanon is not Gaza,’ Khalil calmly replied.⁵

But Lebanon was Gaza — and with a vengeance. Olmert may only have been waiting for a pretext to clobber Hizbullah, but the abduction was already provocation enough in its own right. Nothing exasperated the Israelis like the capture of their soldiers. Not only did this second one come hard on the heels of the first, the two, though carried out by different organizations on different fronts, were also clearly linked, politically, emotionally, and possibly even operationally. If the first already constituted a blow to Israel’s ‘deterrent power’, the second multiplied it greatly. In Lebanon, therefore, Israel would surely have to out-Gaza Gaza.

And Gaza was already quite something. The abduction, there, of Corporal Gilad Shalit had been an almost perfectly executed commando raid against a strictly military target. One of Israel’s more sober commentators called it ‘almost legitimate’.⁶ In their attack on an Israeli border position, a combined force of Hamas and other groups had killed two soldiers and spirited Shalit back to Gaza through the tunnel they had dug under the frontier for the purpose. This had come in the course of, and as express retaliation for, an Israeli military campaign in which some seventy-five Palestinians had already died, as compared with not one Israeli, be it among soldiers in combat or civilians exposed to the primitive, home-made Qassam rockets which the Palestinians had been firing into the border town of Sderot. Among its more recent victims had been the eight people - including three children - killed, and thirty-two wounded, in an artillery barrage that caught them picnicking on the beach.⁷

In response, Israel effectively re-invaded the Gaza from which it had ‘disengaged’, settlers and all, the year before. Its official aim - in Operation Summer Rains - was to secure Shalit’s unconditional release. But its real reasons were two-fold. The first was to restore its ‘deterrent power’, its dented aura of invincibility, ideally by a brilliant rescue of the hostage himself. The other was to use its overwhelming military superiority to engineer a wholesale change in its wider political and strategic environment - in this instance to overthrow, or thoroughly emasculate, the democratically installed, Hamas-controlled government of Gaza. Thus, regardless of the risk that Shalit’s captors might kill him in retaliation, it stepped up its already harsh military campaign, killing a further 300 Palestinians, many of them civilians, before it was over, arresting eight Hamas cabinet ministers and twenty newly elected parliamentarians, bombarding ministries, a university and the central power station, and turning what was already an internationally acknowledged ‘humanitarian crisis’ into something more like a ‘humanitarian catastrophe’.

Lebanon was also Gaza because Hizbullah itself had made it so. True, in keeping with his ‘national’ rationale for taking Israeli hostages, Nasrallah denied that the exploit had anything to do with the punishment Israel was visiting on the Palestinians. But that was a pro forma denial that few took seriously. ‘When the whole world does not react to Israel’s attacks‘, asked Abd al-Wahhab al-Badrakhan in the pan-Arab newspaper al-Hayat, ‘how do you expect resistance groups such as Hizbullah ... to react?’⁸ Solidarity with the Palestinian struggle had always constituted the main, practical expression of its universalist jibad. And if it had not done at least something to manifest that now it would have disappointed both itself and its army of admirers, Islamist or secular, everywhere. It would have begun to look not so very different from the Arab regimes it so despised. And they were doing almost nothing at all. Perhaps - as Talal Salman, the editor of the Beirut newspaper al-Safir, sardonically surmised - the kings and presidents were too busy watching the World Cup.⁹ At any rate, insofar as they did bestir themselves it was virtually to take Israel’s side. While failing to raise a whimper about the 10,000 prisoners in Israeli gaols, they were competing, through pressure on the Palestinians, to secure the release of the one and only Israeli one.

THE RETURN TO UNIVERSAL JIHAD

So when, to the consternation of the ‘moderate’ Arabs and the fury of the Israelis, Hizbullah proceeded to capture two more soldiers, it was, in effect, re-dedicating itself to the jihadist mission which, in its strictly Lebanese self, it had ostensibly renounced. And it was doing so, of course, as a spearhead of the Iranian-led, Islamo-nationalist camp to which, in its non-Lebanese self, it belonged. For the Israelis, this was the Middle East’s ‘new terror axis’ in action. Indeed, it was the very thing they had been expecting; in the early stages of their Gaza onslaught, their army had raised its level of alert on the Lebanese frontier from two to four on a scale of five. And it was specific information, not just strategic prognosis, that prompted this precaution. Signals intelligence had picked up conversations between Khalid al-Mesha‘al, the Hamas leader in Damascus, his counterparts in Gaza and Hizbullah in Lebanon. What they apparently revealed was that, even as Hamas was plotting its hostage-taking in the south, Hizbullah was preparing to ‘warm things up’ in the north.¹⁰

When Israel went to war on Lebanon its main, official objective was the rescue of its abducted soldiers. But, even more emphatically than in the case of Gaza, it was not the real one. That was not simply because, within a couple of hours, Israel knew that rescue would be all but impossible, or because, within a couple of days, it was pretty sure that both were already dead anyway, killed during the abduction or succumbing to their wounds soon after.¹¹ Israel, said Olmert, was now engaged in a two-front struggle whose objective was to create two ‘new orders’ on Israel’s borders, one in a Gaza without Hamas and the other in a Lebanon without Hizbullah.¹² It was the second of these tasks on which, with Operation Just Reward, it now impetuously embarked.

‘NASRALLAH MUST DIE’

Israel’s strategy for the destruction of Hizbullah came in two parts.¹³ One, exclusively military, was to take it on directly. The other - military in method but essentially political in purpose - was to inflict escalating pain and punishment on the Lebanese state and people until, turning against the delinquent in their midst, they disarmed it as Security Council Resolution 1559 required them to do. It was, in other words, the same strategy Israel had repeatedly used in Lebanon before, first against the Palestinians, and then against Hizbullah; it was those dress rehearsals - Operations Accountability, 1993, and Grapes of Wrath, 1996 — writ large.

‘We expected Hizbullah to break the rules,’ said Amir Peretz, the Israeli defence minister, ‘so now we will break it.’¹⁴ Israeli columnists, usually close reflectors, in military matters, of the mood and purpose on high, waxed bellicose about the fate awaiting the organization and its leader, who had by now achieved very special, demonic status in their nation’s always well-stocked pantheon of foreign villains. ‘Hizbullah’, Ben Kaspit, of Maariv newspaper, typically wrote, ‘must come out of this beaten, bruised, crawling, bleeding and screaming. It cannot be allowed to approach the border fence again. Its rocket storage facilities must be eliminated. The threat must be ended. Nasrallah must die.’ For was he not the father of the ‘spider’s web theory’, the one that said that ‘Israeli society was weakening, softening, about to collapse in the face of the great Islamic resistance ... The event through which [Israel was] now passing [would] determine its fate for years to come, maybe beyond ... Not for nothing [were] comparisons being made with ... World War 11, and the British resilience against Hitler’s blitz. Because Messrs Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah and Mesha’al [were] as dangerous as Hitler, maybe even more so.’¹⁵

This was a test in which Israel would be under scrutiny by ‘the entire Middle East’. Hence it was to the whole region, Iran and Syria in particular, that Israel had to send its reply: a display of ‘overwhelming military might’ telling it, in effect, that its ‘proxy wars against Israel [would] no longer be tolerated’.¹⁶

As for the other, ‘Lebanese’ part of its strategy, Israel had a simple rationale for that. What Hizbullah had done, it said, was not merely ‘a terrorist attack’; since Hizbullah was a part of the Lebanese government it was also an ‘act of war’ by one sovereign state against another. So Lebanon had to ‘bear the consequences of its action’. And these, said Olmert, would be ‘very, very, very painful’. One of his generals, Uzi Adam, commander of the northern front, said that ‘everything, not just the line of Hizbullah positions’, was now a ‘legitimate’ target. If the hostages were not returned, said Chief of Staff Dan Halutz, Israel would turn back ‘Lebanon’s clock by twenty years’. It would do this by hitting civilian, or ‘infrastructural’, targets. He did not explicitly spell that out at the time, though that is what he meant. His strong opinions were well known, and in the Israeli cabinet debate about whether - or rather to what extent - the army should go down that route, he was a constant advocate of its doing so.¹⁷ But spelling it out at such a time would have been impolitic; after all, he was the head of an institution which still styled itself ‘the most moral army in the world’.¹⁸ And more importantly, the Israelis knew from past experience that America’s tolerance of its excesses in Lebanon, though great, was not inexhaustible, that however much support they unfailingly secured from their superpower patron at the outset of their repeated military campaigns there, the more the civilian casualties they inflicted during them the more they risked eroding it in the end. In 1982, it had been General Sharon’s indiscriminate air, land and sea bombardment of Beirut which finally moved a very indulgent President Reagan to angry demands for a halt. And they certainly did not need another Qana, that massacre of more recent memory which, more than anything else, had brought Operation Grapes of Wrath to its wholly unsuccessful close.

’A WAR OF CHOICE WHICH WE STARTED’

Israel was a warrior-state. From Ben-Gurion, the ‘founder‘, to Sharon, last of the founders’ generation, its most famous leaders had mostly been military, or quasi-military, men. Neither Olmert nor his defence minister fitted into this mould. Yet no one had ever taken Israel into any of its wars so swiftly, decisively and with such apparent nonchalance as they did now. It was almost as if, said a Haaretz columnist, they ‘wanted to show that they were smarter, braver and more combative’ than the legendary ‘Arab-fighter’, felled by a stroke, into whose shoes Olmert had so accidentally stepped.¹⁹ In his last years, Sharon, mindful of his earlier, monumental misadventures there, had indeed been circumspect about Lebanon, resisting all temptation to go back in. How ironic, then, that his rookie of a successor was now, with Sharon-like boldness, doing precisely that.

However, neither Olmert - nor ‘a defence minister who didn’t have a clue about defence’²⁰ — derived their bravura entirely from themselves. They were heavily dependent for professional advice on the man who officially represented the military in their counsels. This was the chief of staff. And not only was Dan Halutz as eager for action as they were, as the first air force commander to hold that post he was the bearer of a particularly appealing message: that Israel could break Hizbullah with air power alone, and that a ground operation might not be needed at all.

With such authority behind them, they could not but be further emboldened down the headlong path on which they were already set. Not surprisingly, then, they devoted very little of a critical, three-hour, eve-of-war emergency cabinet meeting to the consideration of alternatives - diplomacy, negotiation, a limited local retaliation, or just a cool reflection on the situation. ‘We’re skipping the stage of threats’, said Peretz afterwards, ‘and going straight to action.’²¹ They did not actually say that this action would amount to war; it would only - they implied - be some very much larger, more aggressive kind of retaliatory operation than usual; ‘thundering’ was the epithet Olmert favoured.²² But war was what it would very quickly, and inevitably, prove to be. Not a ‘defensive’ war, still less a ‘war of survival’, though some politicians and pundits tried to suggest that it was, particularly in the context of Iran’s ambitions to ‘wipe Israel out’. No, basically, it was yet another of those ‘initiated’ wars in which Israel used ‘military force to achieve political goals’. That was how an official inquiry, the ‘Winograd commission‘, subsequently described it. Or it was another ‘war of choice’ which ‘we started’ - in the words of an officer who fought in it.²³

IT WAS GOING TO BE QUICK AND EASY

It was going to be cheap and easy. So at least the ministers believed - though they did have different ideas about just how long it might take. Peretz thought it would be ten to fourteen days, Olmert that ‘Lebanon would be pounded from the air for a few days, during which time Israel would weather Katyusha fire until Hizbullah sued for a ceasefire.’ Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni somehow persuaded herself that it would be all over by the following day.²⁴ But, whatever its length, it was going to be devastating - vintage ‘shock and awe’ — for the enemy. According to Maariv’s Amir Rapaport, that ‘well-oiled machine‘, the Israeli Defence Force, was ‘going to run amok ... in a very calculated manner. The brakes [were] off and soon it would be difficult to find any trace of Hizbullah conference halls in the heart of the “southern suburbs” where Nasrallah put on his arrogant performances.’²⁵ Alex Fishman, of Yediot Aharonot, forecast ‘a few days of firestorm, particularly from the sky, which [wouldn’t] leave a single Hizbullah installation standing. Every corner that [carried] the stamp of Hizbullah - command centres, camps, forts, convoys, warehouses, and offices - [would] be hit.’ The air force would also go after other ‘legitimate’ targets, ‘the interests of the Shiite community’ as well as [non-Shiite] ‘power centres’ which ‘don’t really care if an Israel soldier is kidnapped as long as they themselves aren’t harmed’.²⁶

In the eyes of its begetters, Just Reward began very well indeed. In the first few days, the F-16 fighter-bombers and the Apache helicopter gunships struck at a plethora of targets. Some were pre-eminently civilian and ‘Lebanese’; some were military/strategic/logistical and ‘Hizbullahi’. Some, in varying proportions, were both. A few seemed to make no sense at all. First among the high-profile, ‘infrastructural’ installations to be hit was Beirut’s brand-new international airport, its runways disabled in a dawn raid. Then came roads and bridges whose destruction was meant to impede Hizbullah’s movement of weapons and materiel. By day two, it was the turn of the Dablya, headquarters of Hizbullah, but also home to hundreds of thousands of ordinary Shiites. The warplanes were trying to kill Nasrallah and his leadership in what they supposed to be his subterranean bunker; they unleashed twenty-three tons of high explosives on it in a single raid. In the process, they reduced street upon street of apartment blocks - whose residents Hizbullah had already advised to leave - to a smoking rubble, a ‘ground zero, New York, writ large’.²⁷ Fifty-five people, overwhelmingly civilians, died in the first full day of fighting; more than 300 within a week. Sixteen perished in a single air strike on a convoy leaving the southern village of Marwaheen after Israeli leaflets had warned its inhabitants to get out while they could;²⁸ they were just a few of the unlucky ones among hundreds of thousands now fleeing northwards in this, the fifth such exodus since 1978. Twenty soldiers died in attacks on army barracks. Moving lorries became fair game; but those that paid the price were not transporting Hizbullah weaponry, only emergency supplies, such as medical equipment from the United Arab Emirates. It was a total land, sea and air blockade, and ports and jetties up and down the coast were targeted to enforce it. So were power plants, fuel depots, petrol stations, television masts, radar stations and a brand-new lighthouse off Beirut’s famous Corniche; three people, two of them Belgian technicians, died in the bombing of ‘Liban Lait’, a dairy factory in Baalbek.

‘WE’VE WON THE WAR’

The attackers’ one, indisputable achievement was perhaps their nearest thing — for all the ‘collateral damage’ — to a truly military one. It came in their very first operation. In the thirty-four minutes which - according to the Israeli account - this took, they destroyed fifty-nine stationary rocket launchers, as well as half to two-thirds of Hizbullah’s stock of medium-range rockets - mainly Iranian-built Fajrs - concealed in the homes of Hizbullah activists in south Lebanon.²⁹ As first reports of the raid came in, soon after midnight on 12/13 July, Halutz telephoned the prime minister and proudly informed him of the results. Then, after a short pause, he added: ‘We’ve won the war.‘³⁰ It must have been a major setback for Hizbullah. But whatever the demoralizing effect it might have had on it, this was hardly commensurate with the tonic it was for Olmert and Peretz. They were literally enchanted, and even likened it to that epic in the annals of modern warfare, the pre-emptive strike that all but completely destroyed the Arab air forces in the first few hours of the Six-Day War. They also deemed it incontestable proof of their own boldness, savvy and stern resolve. Olmert delivered a ‘Churchillian’ speech. When some people, sensing that it might not have been quite the decisive blow he thought, urged him to look for ways of ending hostilities before the tide of conflict turned to Israel’s disadvantage, he and his ministers were scornful. They were too caught up in the ‘euphoria of a mighty Israel exacting revenge on its enemies’ to listen to such advice.³¹ And who — asked a leading commentator - was this Nasrallah anyway? Who, indeed, but ‘a little man, frightened, fanatic, misleading and misled? Sometimes he’s a liar, usually a braggart. The mouse that roared. People are in hiding, his chain of command is paralyzed, and the world is against him.’ And his organization? ‘Not an army, not half, or quarter, of an army. Not even a brave guerilla group ... most of its efforts have been devoted to putting on marches in the streets of Beirut.‘³²

‘A SECOND WAR OF INDEPENDENCE’

If the war itself was going in Israel’s favour, so, at first, were most of the circumstances that surrounded it. Many Israelis had come to see their country’s earlier interventions in Lebanon as something like ‘their Vietnam’. But, according to the opinion polls, a good 95 per cent of the public, outraged by Hizbullah’s action, stood four-square behind this one, and most thought it should go on till Hizbullah had been wiped out.³³ Some persuaded themselves that it was tantamount to a ‘second war of independence’. The activist ‘peace camp’ was divided, with only a small minority coming out against it. Even after hundreds of Lebanese civilians had been killed, one of the movement’s intellectual luminaries, the novelist Amos Oz, wrote that ‘there could be no moral equation between Hizbullah and Israel‘, because ‘Hizbullah [was] targeting Israeli civilians wherever they [were], while Israel [was] targeting mainly Hizbullah.’³⁴ The day after the war’s only conscientious objector went to prison, the leader of Peace Now, Yariv Oppenheimer, told Haaretz newspaper that he felt like strangling him.³⁵

OUTRAGE IN LEBANON

Nor was it any secret that much of Lebanese public opinion was almost as outraged, from its perspective, as the Israelis were from theirs. The ‘14 March majority’ politicians and press were almost unanimous. They had long charged that of all the rights of a sovereign state which Hizbullah had effectively usurped the most fundamental, and dangerous, was the right to decide on matters of war and peace. And now here it was, acting on that ‘right’ without consulting anyone, including the government of which it was formally a part. In addition to the unilateral arrogance and irresponsibility of Hizbullah itself, they saw the malign hand of its regional supporters. This, said Jumblat, was both Ahmadinejad pursuing Iran’s nuclear trial of strength with Israel and the West, and Asad trying at any price to re-establish Syrian control of Lebanon and prevent the establishment of an international tribunal to try the killers of Rafiq Hariri. And why, asked Hariri’s son, Saad, should Lebanon always be ‘the front through which others seek to fight Israel’ when ‘their own fronts’ - by which he meant Syria’s Golan — had been absolutely quiet these thirty years?³⁶ The spurned and unconsulted government formally disassociated itself from the Israeli soldiers’ abduction. But privately - or so at least the Israelis believed - the ‘14 March’ camp actually went much further than that; it was ‘downright happy’ to see Israel attacking Hizbullah, and hoped that it would destroy it.³⁷

‘BREAK HIZBULLAH’S SPINE’

The larger Arab stance was no less gratifying to Israel. The day after the abduction Saudi Arabia announced that a distinction had to be made between ‘legitimate resistance’ and ‘uncalculated adventures’ undertaken by ‘elements inside Lebanon and those behind them’. These ‘elements’ were exposing Arab nations ‘to grave dangers’; it was up to them, and them alone, to ‘end the crisis which they [had] created’. The two other leading ‘moderate’ states, Egypt and Jordan, quickly followed suit. This was something quite unprecedented in the history of Arab-Israeli conflict: the first time that one group of Arabs, and a very significant one at that, was aligning itself more closely with ‘the Zionist foe’ than with other Arabs doing battle against it. Their concern was with Iran as much as it was with its Lebanese protégé. In Cairo, the editor of the government daily al-Gumhuriyah discerned nothing less than ‘an Iranian plan ... to destroy the Arab states from within ... and turn the entire Arab world into armed militias like Hizbullah’.³⁸ Sectarian incitement took an exceptionally virulent turn. In Saudi Arabia, bastion of extreme Sunni orthodoxy, leading ulema issued fatwas against Hizbullah and Shiite ‘apostates’ who stood with the enemies of Islam. Hizbullah was not ‘the party of God’, said one, but ‘the party of Satan’.³⁹ According to an Israeli account of the war, ‘moderate’ Arab ambassadors at the UN begged Israel to ‘break Hizbullah’s spine’.⁴⁰

‘THIS IS OUR WAR TOO’

Internationally, Israel was suddenly faring pretty well too. Not in forty years, it was said, had it received such consideration in quarters it regarded as endemically unfriendly - proof, said one commentator, that ‘the world is not always against us, that when Israel behaves with common sense, one can find common sense among the goyim and the “anti-Semites” too’.^4I It found its most gratifying expression in St Petersburg, where, assembled for their annual summit, the G8 leaders blamed ‘extremist forces’ - Hizbullah and Hamas - for both Lebanese and Gazan crises, and acknowledged Israel’s ‘right to self-defence’.

As usual, however, no one took Israel’s part like the US. The war-plan for which it had already won the Administration’s blessing must have had something to do with that,⁴² but so too did a pro-Israel militancy in high places that passed all previous bounds. The neo-conservatives led the field. ‘This is our war too’, proclaimed William Kristol, of the influential Weekly Standard, and he urged the Pentagon to counter ‘this act of Iranian aggression’ with an immediate military strike on its nuclear installations.⁴³ Another leading neoconservative, Michael Ledeen, said America should ‘go after’ Bashar al-Asad too.⁴⁴ For Newt Gingrich, a former Speaker of the House much given to hyperbole, the time had come to fight a ‘Third World War’ in ‘defense of civilization and America’.⁴⁵

The Administration did not follow this extreme advice. But, with powerful neoconservatives still entrenched within it, it did just about everything else it could on its protege’s behalf. It saw the war as a watershed moment, a new and critical point of collision between all that America was striving to achieve in the region and its enemies to forestall. ‘Tragic situations’, said Bush, sometimes bring ‘clarity’, and what this one made clear beyond all doubt was that ‘the root cause’ of the region’s woes was Hizbullah, and the ‘terrorism’ which it and the ‘nation-states’ behind it were practising against our ‘democratic friends and allies’. ‘Running through Damascus and the “southern suburbs” of Beirut to the Palestinians [of] Hamas’, said one of his officials, was ‘a hegemonic Persian threat’ that sought to ‘change the strategic playing field in the Middle East.’ However, with Hizbullah’s action, the threat had turned into a ‘unique moment’ of opportunity to strike back amid a ‘convergence of interests’ between Israel and the ‘moderate’ Arab states.⁴⁶ For Washington, Israel’s first task was to ‘break Hizbullah’s bones’.⁴⁷ But Bush also wanted it to do by proxy what some of the neo-conservatives would have had him do himself, and take on the ‘real’ enemies behind Hizbullah. If Iran was perhaps too distant and formidable a target, its Syrian ally was ‘weak and next door’ - and, in Bush’s mind, best able to ‘get Hizbullah to stop doing this shit’.⁴⁸

Unwilling to involve itself militarily, the US strove to furnish Israel with the diplomatic protection it needed to do so in it its stead. And before very long it was going to need a lot. For the sympathy the international community had exhibited at the beginning of the war was quickly dissipating as it saw how Israel waged it. Hizbullah’s hostage-taking may have been illegal, but it was not entirely unprovoked; moreover its targets were military only. But most of the G8 powers, and especially France, did not take kindly to the way in which Israel - with its ‘disproportionate’ attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure - interpreted its internationally acknowledged ‘right to self-defence’. So the UN, Europe, Russia, China and the Third World were soon pressing for a ceasefire. Only the Bush Administration, with the faithful Tony Blair in tow, stood resolutely against one. The casualties, said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, were ‘a terrible thing for the Lebanese people’; but - she daily, stubbornly reiterated - there was simply no point in a ceasefire that was ‘unsustainable’, or failed to tackle ‘root causes’. ‘What the world [was] witnessing’ was ‘the birth pangs of a new Middle East’. And it was time to show ‘those who [didn’t] want [one] .... that we will prevail - they will not’.⁴⁹

Flagrant double standards had always informed American responses to military encounters between Israel and Hizbullah.⁵⁰ But this time they were all but elevated into official policy. John Bolton, America’s ambassador to the UN and a devout neoconservative, was the first to spell it out. By the time some 200 Lebanese, overwhelmingly civilian, had died as compared with twelve Israelis, and Louise Arbour, the UN high commissioner for human rights, had already suggested that Israeli leaders could be charged with ‘war crimes’ - by that time he was still rejecting any idea of ‘moral equivalence’ between the protagonists, between casualties incurred as the ‘unfortunate consequences of self-defence’ and those which ‘terrorists’, targeting ‘innocent civilians’, actively ‘desire [d]‘⁵¹ Meanwhile, AIPAC, redoubtable arm of ‘the Lobby‘, had drawn up a resolution which it wanted the House of Representatives to pass. In violation of the UN Charter and international legal norms, this effectively justified Israel’s attacks on civilian targets even as it praised it for ‘minimizing civilian casualties’.⁵² Although a small group of congressmen sought inclusion of a clause urging ’all sides to protect civilian life and infrastructure’, AIPAC wouldn’t have it, and ‘our Knesset’ - as maverick Republican Patrick Buchanan called it - duly ratified the original draft, word for word, 418 to 8.⁵³

As for America’s fourth estate, its mainstream media at least did little but echo and embellish the standpoint of authority - though possibly a columnist such as Richard Cohen, of the Washington Post, did so more intemperately than most. It was Israel’s lot, he wrote, to be ‘unfortunately located’, to ‘gentrify ... a pretty bad neighbourhood’:

[... its] only way to ensure that babies don’t die in their cribs and old people in the streets is to make the Lebanese ... understand that if they, no matter how reluctantly, host those rockets, they will pay a very, very steep price ... These calls for proportionality rankle. They fall on my ears ... as ugly sentiments pregnant with antipathy toward the only democratic state in the Middle East.⁵⁴

Not much more intemperately, though, judging by the verdict of Britain’s Independent newspaper.’

There are two sides to every conflict [observed its correspondent in the US] unless you rely on the US media for information about the battle in Lebanon. Viewers have been fed a diet of partisan coverage which treats Israel as the good guys and their Hizbullah enemy as the incarnation of evil. Not only is there next to no debate but debate itself is considered unnecessary and suspect.⁵⁵

WAS ISRAEL JUST THE SPIDER’S WEB NASRALLAH SAID IT WAS?

Israel’s war did not go very well for long. And in the end it actually lost it, making this, the Sixth Arab-Israeli War, the first which, on points at least, the Arab side won. Its victory, said Alistair Crooke and Mark Perry in one of the first serious assessments of it, was ‘complete and decisive’.⁵⁶ Measured by the initial expectations of the protagonists, it certainly was. The Israelis failed utterly in their ambition to destroy Hizbullah and kill its leader. As for Hizbullah, it only had to survive in order to win, but, more than merely doing that, it emerged stronger from the contest than it went into it. What the victory would actually mean, for the region and the world, only time would tell. In its immediate aftermath, however, if there was one, dominant, and very widely shared, emotion, it surely had to be astonishment. How was it possible, asked friend, foe, and uninvolved observer alike? How was it possible that a clutch of clerics and a few ‘combatants of Islam’ had prevailed against one of the most powerful and best-equipped armies in the world?

Could it really mean that Israel was just the ‘spider’s web’ that Nasrallah said it was, its military prowess and ‘invincibility’ a myth only awaiting the man of destiny who would expose and puncture it? Hardly. But one thing, at least, was sure: Nasrallah had ‘read’ his enemy better than it read him. If he had made a fundamental mistake in provoking the war in the first place, Israel made an even greater one in overestimating its ability to prosecute it. There might have been some ground for its leaders’ ‘combination of arrogance, boastfulness, euphoria and contempt for the enemy’ - as one Israeli critic put it⁵⁷ - had it been facing one or more of the regular Arab armies; it had, after all, been its repeated, crushing and humiliating defeats of those inglorious institutions that largely accounted for the arrogance in the first place. But this was out of place in the case of Hizbullah. Perhaps it was the obtuseness that arrogance is apt to breed; in any case the fact was that, in spite of the two decades of very serious pain which Hizbullah had already inflicted on them, the Israelis evidently had little inkling of what this highly motivated, Islamically inspired, non-state guerilla force, this popular insurgency well versed in the skills and techniques of the new-style, ‘asymmetrical’ warfare, might be capable of in an all-out war against themselves. With his brutal attitude and inflated ego, his rush to combat, his assumption that it would all be over within a matter of days, and his failure to prepare for any alternative should it not be, Chief of Staff Halutz was the incarnation of that overweening hubris.⁵⁸

MILITARY FAILURE

Halutz was no less central to the other fundamental error that Israel made - the exclusive reliance on air power, both for ‘getting’ Hizbullah directly, and indirectly through the Lebanese. That was perhaps to be expected of a former pilot who - when asked what it would have felt like to drop a one-ton bomb on an apartment block and kill seventeen civilians, nine of them children - famously, or infamously, replied: ‘a slight shuddering of the left wing’.⁵⁹ He had also master-minded Israel’s aerial ‘war on terror’ in the occupied territories, its ‘targeted killings’ of Palestinian leaders and militants. But what was relatively simple and successful in the never-ending, low-intensity combat with Hamas or Islamic Jihad - the electronic intelligence or the tip-off from a collaborator followed by the single guided missile from on high - was far from being so in the periodic, high-intensity showdowns with Hizbullah. Besides, this singular faith in the efficacy of air power had been largely discredited not merely in universal experience - from the London Blitz to the jungles of Vietnam - but, with Accountability and Grapes of Wrath, in Israel’s own as well.

In addition to its supposed intrinsic merit, it possessed another, perhaps even more important, virtue in Israeli politicians’ and commanders’ eyes. It would spare them the need for a ground offensive and the cost in casualties it was liable to entail. Israel’s earlier experience in Lebanon had bred a deep-seated, obsessive fear of entering that murderous ‘quagmire’ again.⁶⁰

But when things did go wrong and re-entry was forced upon it, that exposed the third great mistake - or, more precisely, the institutional deterioration - of its vaunted war machine, which suddenly discovered that ‘it wasn’t ready to fight... didn’t know how to fight and ... didn’t even know what it was fighting for.’^6I It was, at bottom, arrogance - and another of its offspring, complacency - that accounted for this state of affairs as well. For over the years Israel had come to hold two basic, perhaps essentially intuitive, assumptions. One was that its armed forces would not in any foreseeable future be fighting a major war again, because, thanks to their awe-inspiring ‘deterrent power’, no Arab state would dare embark on one. The other was that their only serious role would continue to be the repression of the Palestinians. So, with the ‘air force chasing the enemies of Israel in their bedrooms’, and the army confined to being ‘a sub-contractor for the intelligence or a substitute for the police’, who needed tanks, artillery and large-scale infantry formations? Or, rather, who needed to train them for a real war that would never come to pass? Training of such a serious kind had therefore as good as ceased. No wonder, then, that the harvest which that eventual, exceedingly unwanted ground offensive yielded was a rich one - rich, that is to say, not in valour, though that was not lacking, but in its opposite, as well as ‘glaring deficiencies in basic soldiering’ of many kinds. ⁶²

And the rot went deeper yet. In the afternoon of 12 July, after the abduction of Goldwasser and Regev, and as more soldiers were dying in a futile bid to rescue them, Halutz found time to confer with his stockbroker and instruct him to dump a $36,000 investment portfolio liable to be adversely affected by the war into which, unbeknown to anyone else, he was about to send his nation. What more shameful and disturbing illustration, wailed the post-war Jeremiahs, of the mores of contemporary Israel, of the descent into materialism, hedonism, every-man-for-himself and their corrosive impact on that vital institution, the army, which had been traditionally revered above all others.

MISSILES WERE KING

The war which, in those first few hours of it, Halutz told Olmert that Israel had already won, Israel was in reality already losing - or very soon would be. The generals thought they knew where Hizbullah’s missile arsenals were, that in a few days of ‘shock and awe’ they could destroy the bulk of them. But they didn’t know, and if they did, they couldn’t get them from the air in any case. Ever since the 2000 withdrawal, they had been amassing intelligence for precisely this eventuality, this ‘second round’ against the only Arab enemy which had ever driven the Israeli army, unconditionally, from Arab soil. It may have served them quite well for the ‘night of the Fajrs’. But whatever the air force knocked out then, and in the two or three days and nights that followed, it represented a very small portion - perhaps 7 per cent - of Hizbullah’s overall military assets.⁶³ Nor was it just a question of missiles, or weaponry in general. They did not manage the ‘targeted killing’ of a single Hizbullah leader, or even a temporary silencing of al-Manar, the Hizbullah television station, in spite of repeated strikes against relay towers and antennae across the land.

But missiles were king. The 12,000 of them to which Nasrallah had publicly laid claim - but of which he seems to have had many more - came in various forms. The most formidable was the Iranian-supplied Zelzal-2, which, with a warhead of up to 600 kilograms and a range of 200 kilometres, could reach every major Israeli city. If he did indeed possess a few of those - for there was some doubt about that - he never fired them. Of the medium-size ones - Iranian-built Fajr-3s and 5s or Syrian Ouragans, between 43 and 100 km in range - that survived the initial Israeli onslaught, he made only occasional and judicious use. It was those old workhorses of Palestinian, then Islamist, missile warfare - the Katyusha-107s and 122s, with a maximum range of 11 and 20 km respectively — on which he chiefly relied; they, and particularly the 122S, were by far his most plentiful, and, being small and easily transported, the hardest for the Israelis to hit.

Since Ben-Gurion’s days, taking the war into enemy territory, tank-led Blitzkrieg-style, had been classic Israeli doctrine. And in all the wars that, since 1948, the Arab armies fought and lost they never, for all the ultra-modern, mainly Soviet-supplied weaponry at their disposal, penetrated Israel’s interior, or even struck it from afar. But now, with the new, ‘asymmetrical’, Islamist way of war, with non-state actors like Hizbullah and Hamas taking those armies’ place, the ‘home front’ became Israel’s most vulnerable one, its new, and disturbingly unfamiliar, Achilles heel.

Nasrallah may have been surprised by the scale of the Israeli onslaught, but he was prepared - far better than Israel itself - for the kind of battle which Israel proceeded to impose on him. To be sure, from the outset, he declared himself ready for a ceasefire, and indirect negotiations for the exchange of prisoners which had been his objective in the first place. ‘If‘, however, ‘the enemy want[ed] total war’ then he was ‘ready for that too - without any “red lines”.’ For him, missiles had always had a retaliatory role; if Israel hit Lebanese civilians, Hizbullah would hit Israeli ones in response. And that, albeit on an unprecedented scale, was how it would be now — ‘not only we who [would] pay the price ... our children killed, our people made homeless’.⁶⁴

The first missiles came on 13 July, immediately after the first Israeli air raids: 150 of them. They killed two Israelis in reprisal for fifty-five dead Lebanese, establishing the basic ratio, about twenty-five to one, which held good for the rest of the war. Some of them reached places, including Haifa, deeper inside Israel than Israelis had been warned to expect. That was a shock. But in the days to come, perhaps as great a shock as the projectiles themselves was the way in which Nasrallah promised, and then unfailingly delivered, them. It was a great reversal. The emptiest threats and vainest boasts were now coming mainly from the Israeli, not the Arab, side; and the ‘liar and braggart’ enjoyed greater credibility, even in Israel itself, than Olmert or Halutz.

The next day, 14 July, saw the first ‘surprises’ of which Nasrallah had earlier spoken. ‘They start now,’ he announced in his first wartime address from his bunker. ‘Now, at sea, the Israeli warship that attacked our infrastructure, homes and citizens - watch it burning and sink with dozens of Zionist soldiers aboard.’ The Israeli navy’s flagship, the Hanit, did not sink. But an Iranian-supplied C-802 shore-to-ship guided missile - which Israel had no idea Hizbullah possessed - did disable it, and kill four of its crew as it cruised 10 km offshore.

‘Bomb the Dahiya and we’ll bomb Haifa’ was the warning he delivered after Israel began its onslaught on the ‘southern suburbs’. And again, two days later, he kept his word with a barrage of Fajrs that killed eight workers at the city’s railway station.

Of course, the Israelis had expected quite a few missiles, but not for very long and not like this. But not only did they keep on coming, some 150 to 180 a day, they did so in swiftly executed, impressively coordinated, mass retaliatory salvos, clearly ordered from the top and betraying no sign of the breakdown in centralized command and control which Israeli officials kept forecasting or claiming to detect. And they crept further and further south - from Haifa to Tiberias, from Nazareth to Afoula and Beit Shean, and finally, on 4 August, to Hadera. Ninety kilometres south of the border, this coastal town, one of the earliest Zionist settlements, was struck by two or three Khaibar-is - Hizbullah’s name for the Syrian-built Ouragan - in almost instant response to an air raid that had killed twenty-three Syrian farm workers loading fruit and vegetables into a refrigerated container in the Beqa’a Valley. Towards the end of the war, Nasrallah said that if Israel hit central Beirut, which it was threatening to do, he would bomb Tel Aviv - a pledge which, by now, Israelis had every reason to believe he would keep, probably with his unused Zelzal-2S.

Only after it was all over did the Israelis grasp the full, formidable measure of what Hizbullah had arrayed against them, and especially what they dubbed its ‘nature reserves’. These were areas, usually in secluded, rocky ravines or patches of dense vegetation, where Hizbullah had established an extraordinary network of military installations and placed them out of bounds to Lebanese and UNIFIL alike. They consisted of scores, if not hundreds, of underground bunkers and tunnels. They were all located south of the Litani river, in what was formerly the Israeli ‘security zone’, and most were within three or four kilometres of the border. One, in fact, lay a mere 300 metres from an Israeli position on the other side of it, and within a mere 100 metres of a UNIFIL position on Lebanese territory; but such was the stealth and secrecy in which it had been excavated and furbished that neither even knew it was there. Forty metres below ground, with reinforced concrete roofs a metre thick, dormitories, bathrooms, hot and cold running water, medical facilities, ventilation and air conditioning, and stocks of food, it could comfortably sustain and accommodate large numbers of fighters for weeks on end.⁶⁵

It was in subterranean lairs such as these that they stored the bulk of their weapons and ammunition, part of an on-the-spot self-sufficiency in almost everything that reduced the Israelis’ frenetic bombardment of roads, bridges, homes and moving vehicles to a largely pointless exercise. And it was from the ‘nature reserves’ that they launched their short-range, steep-trajectory Katyushas to which the Israelis had no answer. They did so from cunningly devised firing positions, which might, for example, take the form of pneumatically powered retractable platforms. It took the Israeli air force a mere ninety seconds to detect an incoming missile and direct the planes to take out its launcher. But with years of practice, the firing teams had become too quick for them; they had learned to perform this whole operation - launching the rocket, lowering the platform back into the ground, covering it with a fire-retardant blanket to hide its tell-tale heat signature from the circling, unmanned surveillance drones, and taking cover themselves - in less than a minute.

NORTHERN ISRAEL SUFFERS TOO

What the Katyushas were doing to northern Israel hardly compared with what the F-16s and the Apache helicopters were doing to Lebanon as a whole. By the war’s end, up to 1,000 Lebanese civilians,⁶⁶ a third of them children, had died; nearly a million, a quarter of the population, had been forced to flee; whole villages and city neighbourhoods had been reduced to rubble, 77 bridges demolished, 900 commercial enterprises hit, 30,000 residential properties, offices, shops - and two hospitals - destroyed, 31 major public utilities, from ports to sewage treatment plants, destroyed or damaged. The Lebanese government put total losses at $6 billion. But northern Israel paid a price too. Forty-three civilians died. Some 300 buildings were destroyed and hundreds, perhaps thousands more were damaged. Maybe half a million people fled. Those were mainly the better-off, who, though likely to have private, well-appointed air-raid shelters of their own, preferred to stay in hotels - safely distant, if often extortionate in their over-charging - or with friends and relatives prepared to take them in. The 300,000 who remained behind, mainly the poor, the old and infirm, had to make do with public shelters. In the worst-hit towns, like Kiryat Shmona, they did so almost round the clock for at least a month. Thanks to long years of official neglect, the conditions inside the shelters were appalling - very hot, unhygienic and overcrowded. ‘I never imagined I’d witness scenes like this in Israel,’ said a French philanthropist, clearly shocked as he watched the hungry and the indigent, including women with babes in arms, shouting and brawling over the basic necessities - food, oil and milk - which he had come to distribute.⁶⁷ The authorities made no effort to evacuate them, and little to help in other ways; that was a source of resentment and discontent which they directed not merely at Hizbullah but at their own government, a further sign - of a piece with Halutz’s ‘insider trading’ - of the kind of society, less and less given to solidarity in war, which once idealist Israel was becoming.⁶⁸

Nothing like Lebanon, then, but these vicissitudes on the home front were nonetheless a demoralizing shock to an Israeli public accustomed to witnessing such things on the ‘other side’, never on their own. As for the Israeli leadership, what they mainly impressed on it was the need to deliver a decisive, crushing blow to Hizbullah. But the more pressing that need, the more painful was the realization that, with the patent failure of the air force, the ground forces would have to be sent in to inflict it. And these were already in difficulties as it was.

‘BY FAR THE GREATEST GUERILLA GROUP IN THE WORLD’

In fact, they had been in there almost from the beginning. This, in effect, was the outcome of a compromise, a genuflexion, on the part of Halutz and his political masters, in favour of those such as Meir Dagan, chief of the Mossad intelligence service, who had argued that air power could only be truly effective in conjunction with the troops on the ground, and that these should have gone in straight away. The compromise meant, however, that instead of a full-scale invasion of South Lebanon and the military resources required to accomplish it, only a few ‘special forces’ were to engage in ‘limited’ or ‘pinpoint’ operations, quick, in-and-out forays, to ‘mop up’ Hizbullah’s strongholds or weapons sites⁶⁹ as the air force performed the principal task of ‘degrading’ and breaking the organization from above.

It did not take the Israeli leadership very long to realize that the air force, on its own, had not yet won the war, and, on 17 July, four days after Halutz assured Olmert that it had, it was the ground forces’ turn to get a taste of what lay ahead for them. Eighteen men of the Maglan reconnaissance unit were the first to do so just a kilometre inside Lebanon, near a strategically located, hilltop village called Maroun al-Ras. They knew something - though not much - about the ‘nature reserves’. But they soon realized that they were in the middle of one. ‘We expected a tent and three Kalashnikovs,’ said a soldier called Gad, ‘that was the intelligence we were given.’ Instead, among the undergrowth, they found a hydraulic steel door and the network of tunnels behind it. ‘We didn’t know what hit us, in seconds we had two dead’ - struck down by grenades hurled from beneath their feet. As daylight broke the Maglans, one of the army’s finest units, came under attack from all sides by Hizbullah forces who startled them with their firepower and tenacity. ‘Evidently’, Gad went on, ‘they’d never heard that an Arab soldier is supposed to run away after a short engagement with the Israelis.’ As reinforcements from another elite unit, the Egoz, were sent to the rescue of their retreating comrades, several more men fell into a second ambush. Hours of battle ensued before Maglan and Egoz succeeded in dragging their dead and wounded back to Israel. But one thing was already obvious to military headquarters in Tel Aviv: this was going to be a much tougher fight than Halutz had bargained for.⁷⁰ In fact, what Israel was up against, said General Guy Zur, who commanded an armoured division in the war, was quite simply ‘by far the greatest guerilla group in the world’.⁷¹

Great, perhaps, but not very big. All told, if its volunteer reservists were taken into account, Hizbullah was said to number between 15,000 and 30,000 men. But it was apparently a force of only some 3,000, or even a good deal less, who confronted the Israelis in the 33-day war, without need of reinforcement throughout.⁷² They were split into two wings. One, the Nasr Brigade, was a full-time, uniformed group of experienced, highly disciplined fighters, a few hundred strong, who were deployed in the ‘nature reserves’ and other locations, and broken down into companies of fifteen to twenty men. The other was the ‘village guards’; part-timers, many of them veterans of the ‘liberation’ war of the 1990s, they stayed behind to defend their villages after most of the inhabitants had fled.

In addition to keeping the Katyushas coming, they had one main goal; this was not, Nasrallah explained, to ‘go in and conquer northern Palestine’, but to make the Israeli army bleed, ‘to inflict maximum casualties and damage to its capabilities’. To this end, they never tried to confront their vastly superior enemy head on, but to seek out its vulnerable points,⁷³ not to hold ground but to draw it forward and take it by surprise at times and places of their choosing. Everywhere they engaged it they were able to do so largely on their own terms. One reason for this, common to guerillas everywhere, was that, fighting on their own ground and among their own people, they knew every inch of the natural terrain, every nook and cranny of built-up areas. But another, special to Hizbullah, was those ‘nature reserves’ that were as invaluable for this kind of combat as for the firing of missiles. They correctly surmised that, with the failure of the air force, it would become the Israeli special forces’ task to take them and other targets out. They laid their mines and booby traps and prepared their ambushes accordingly. They had CCTV cameras to watch the advancing army’s every step.⁷⁴

And more than that - they had intelligence. Together with the ‘nature reserves’, their ability to crack the sophisticated, ‘frequency hopping’ system through which Israeli commanders communicated with one another was one of the great - and for the Israelis very unpleasant - surprises of the war. On the strength of it, they could divine the Israelis’ intentions in advance, an ability which, depriving them of the element of surprise, had a crucial impact on the war’s whole course. There was a wider, psychological dividend too: the Hizbullahi code-breakers managed to get word of Israeli casualties and announce them on al-Manar television even before the Israeli authorities did so themselves.⁷⁵

Not the least of Hizbullah’s assets was the one which they themselves most prized: their intense Islamic faith, and the readiness for ‘martyrdom’ it engendered. It was in close combat that this showed to greatest advantage. In best guerilla practice, they did not seek these face-to-face encounters,⁷⁶ and, when they happened, their losses were usually greater than the Israelis’. On the other hand, they also proved themselves their equal or their better, sometimes defeating them in the field, forcing them into sudden retreat - or rescue, in extremis, by intervention from the air. If, in asymmetrical warfare, personal courage was a characteristic strength by which guerillas could offset the firepower and technological superiority of the conventional armies they were fighting against, mastery of such low- or medium-tech weapons as they did possess was obviously no bad thing either. And, in that department, it was with their anti-tank missiles, above all, that Hizbullah excelled. They had a whole range of these, from the antique, Russian-built Sagger-3s they had so often used before to the latest, laser-guided Kornet-Es which they had just acquired. The Nasr Brigade’s hunter-killer missile teams made versatile use of them all, and not just against the latest Merkava-3s and 4s, and other armoured vehicles, of which they knocked out at least forty. They also used them on buildings in which enemy infantry had taken shelter - once killing nine in a single strike - as well as helicopters, bringing down a troop-carrying Sikorsky CH-53 and its five-man crew just moments after it had dropped off a thirty-man platoon. In all, they accounted for at least fifty of Israel’s 119 military fatalities of the war.⁷⁷

THE BATTLE OF BINT JBEIL

Eventually the Maglans and Egoz conquered Maroun al-Ras, or so at least, on 22 July, the Israelis claimed. They had killed quite a lot of Hizbullahis in the process. But the Hizbullahis had killed seven of them. Those were losses on a scale to which they were not accustomed; yet if that was already a steep price for the taking of a single village, how much more so when it turned out, as it shortly did, that it had not really been taken at all?

Nor did it augur well for what Maroun al-Ras was supposed to be: launching pad for a series of similar attacks on enemy positions just across the border, for a ‘ground-force pressure’ which, supplementary to the aerial and artillery blitz, was going to ‘push Hizbullah out without arriving at the point where we have to invade and occupy’.⁷⁸ And, sure enough, the name of this otherwise unremarkable Shiite frontier village was soon to be seared into Israeli consciousness, along with that of Bintjbeil, the ‘capital’ of the South, as painful emblems of Israel’s war now going wrong on the ground as it already had in the air.

As it did so, Israeli generals, active or retired, developed a host of disparaging terms - the semi-war, half-pregnant war, or luxury-war-without-casualties — for the strategy which had brought this about.⁷⁹ ‘Our brass’, said an infantry reserve major, ‘stupidly fell into the Hizbullah traps, [sending] us to attack as many villages as possible for no obvious reason.’⁸⁰ It made for a series of small campaigns that dissipated all the inherent advantages of a regular army - manpower, weaponry and technology - in favour of those of the other side. ⁸¹

The complete elimination of Hizbullah would have been the only possible objective, clear to all, of the full-scale invasion that Halutz continued systematically to reject. But the objectives of these lesser incursions, as officially formulated, seemed anything but clear to the soldiers called upon to accomplish them.⁸² The demolishing of so-called ‘symbols’ - with the objective of demoralizing the enemy - was the key, well-nigh obsessive, notion that inspired them.

Chief of symbols was Bint Jbeil. ‘Nasrallah delivered his victory speech [after Israel’s withdrawal in 2000] in Bint Jbeil,’ General Benny Gantz, one of his staff, told Halutz. ’We’re going to have to take that place apart. I would even consider a limited ground offensive in the area ... I’d place a film unit there to describe the speech and its current results, that is to say - to record the story to the end.’⁸³

Halutz liked the idea, and the day after the fall of Maroun al-Ras, he ordered special forces to take Bintjbeil in an operation - called Web of Steel in answer to Nasrallah’s contemptuous ‘spider’s web’ - that was to be completed within forty-eight hours, with the killing and capture of as many Hizbullahis as possible. Paratroopers were to attack the town from the west, the elite Golani Brigade from the east. Even as, on 24 July, they prepared to advance, they learned that Maroun al-Ras had not fallen after all; fighting for its possession had resumed; an Israeli tank had been set on fire. By nightfall of 25 July, however, Bint Jbeil was ’in [Israeli] hands’.⁸⁴ Or so at least a general of the Northern Command proclaimed.

And yet it wasn‘t- any more than Maroun al-Ras had been. With their superior intelligence, the Hizbullahis had read the signs well, and duly reinforced their presence in and around the town.⁸⁵ There were three times as many of them as the Israelis thought there were.⁸⁶ Apparently they had not actively sought the frontal confrontation which, in the early hours of 26 July, broke out between them and the Golanis occupying houses on the eastern edge of the town, but, once engaged in it, they were well placed to minimize their enemy’s technological advantages in a battle of ‘rifles, teeth and fingernails’. They lost a lot of men, but that was little consolation to the Israelis, who lost a further eight of their own.⁸⁷ On 28 July, the Hizbullahis staged a counter-offensive against paratroopers to the west. Again they suffered heavy casualties, but, on 30 July, the Israelis ended up by ceding what little of the town they had ever actually taken. For the rest of the war they rained down aerial destruction on Bint Jbeil, Maroun al-Ras, and a string of other places just across the border in which they suffered many dead - twenty-six in the village of Aita al-Shaab alone⁸⁸ - for very little, or even zero, territorial gain. But though they tried again and again, the army which had gone to Beirut in the 1982 war, and some had even forecast that it might do so again,⁸⁹ never truly conquered and occupied a single one of them.

For the post-war Winograd commission, the ‘battle of Bint Jbeil’ was one of the army’s two colossal failures of the war.⁹⁰ Web of Steel, and the other ‘limited operations’ of the kind, revealed just what corroded metal that once all-conquering military machine was now made from. There were the confused and contradictory orders from on high, which discontented commanders sought to annul or circumvent; the troops who, between battles, had to scavenge for food and water by breaking into village shops or the canteens of fallen Hizbullahis far better supplied than themselves; the reservists who either headed to the front with hardly any of their combat gear because of shortages in the quartermasters’ stores, or bought what they needed with their own money; the senior officers who did not cross the border with their soldiers, preferring to run their campaigns from secluded bunkers inside Israel instead; the signal lack of discipline among even the best-trained regulars, and reservists who were so much worse that commanders hesitated to put them into battle at all. There was the virtual mutiny on the outskirts of Bint Jbeil, when a certain Lieutenant Adam Kima, a combat engineer, was ordered to clear the way into the town. He refused, on grounds of unreasonable risk. He and his men were arrested by military police and sentenced to fourteen days in gaol. The men were very grateful: they said that Kima had saved their lives.⁹¹

Bint Jbeil shook the military and political leadership to the core. There were fierce recriminations. The deputy head of the Northern Command shouted at the chief of staff ‘The dead at Bint Jbeil are down to you.’⁹² As for Halutz himself, with the failure of his air force, and now these losses on the ground, his self-confidence appeared to crack, and twice he had to be briefly hospitalized.⁹³ For their part, the politicians lost faith in the promises of the military. In fact, quite early on in the war Olmert, while still exuding confidence in public, had already lamented in private: ‘I don’t see how the army is going to get me the victory I need.’⁹⁴

THE NATION RALLIES TO HIZBULLAH

If it was Hizbullah up, and Israel down, on the military front, so it was on others too.

Getting the Lebanese to ‘get’ Hizbullah, by bombing them as well, was the first and most important of these. This soon turned into the kind of fiasco, on a larger scale, that Accountability and Grapes of Wrath had clearly portended that it would.

The main target of Israel’s onslaught was of course the Shiites, in part deliberately, in part because it was they who, physically, stood most plainly in its way. But other communities, Sunnis, Druzes, Christians, were not spared either - and that, plus the attacks on ‘national’ assets, the army and the infrastructure, made it clear that everyone was to pay for what a special few had done.

Those others could not forget their initial grudge against Hizbullah, but, for the time being at least, they could, and did, subordinate it to another one. In place of anger against the party that provoked the war came a greater rage against Israel for the way it waged it. The more Israel bombed, the more savage and widespread its onslaught grew, the more the nation rallied to the only quarter that was not merely fighting back, but giving almost as good as it got. Public opinion polls demonstrated it. Before the war, with Hizbullah’s status increasingly challenged, only a 58 per cent - and overwhelmingly Shiite - segment of the populace considered that Hizbullah had the right to retain its arms. Now, a full 87 per cent supported its ‘resistance to Israeli aggression’; 96 per cent of the Shiites took that position, but other communities - 89 per cent of Sunnis, 80 per cent of Christians and Druzes - where anti-Hizbullah sentiment had formerly been strongest were not so far behind.⁹⁵ Street talk showed it too. ‘A week ago’, said one young man, ‘I would have told you I hated Nasrallah. But now I pray for victory.’ In Beirut’s staunchly Sunni quarter of Tarik Jadideh a group of card-playing youngsters likewise agreed that there was no longer any contradiction between supporting their own community chieftain, Saad Hariri, and Nasrallah: ‘We are all with the resistance now.’⁹⁶

For Nasrallah, such voices were the voices of the ‘good people’, of the ‘silent majority’, of those ‘who in hard times reveal their chivalry, honour, and patriotism’. And that, he could plausibly claim, was just what they were doing now, in Hizbullah’s favour and at the expense of a government on which, with its ‘illusory majority’, the Americans and Israelis had been counting to join them in dealing it the coup de grâce. Before the war, America had actually enjoyed very considerable goodwill in Lebanon; 38 per cent - a lot for an Arab country in these very anti-American times - deemed that it had played a constructive role on its behalf. But a Bush Administration which had leapt to the support of the ‘Cedar Revolution’ - and the new, ‘14 March’ regime it spawned - when Syria was Lebanon’s chief tormentor, was shamelessly abandoning it, fifteen months later, when Israel became its much greater one. With its tolerance, indeed active encouragement, of an onslaught that smote friends of the government and friends of Hizbullah alike, America threw all that goodwill away. Now, when asked whether it was being an ‘honest mediator’ in the conflict, 96 per cent of Shiites flatly asserted that it was not, an overwhelming verdict in which - more importantly - Sunnis and Christians, at 87 per cent, and Druzes at 81 per cent, were not so far behind. Furthermore, if the government had secretly hoped - as the Israelis said, and Nasrallah strongly suspected, it had - that Hizbullah would lose the war, then that had become a hope that not many people either shared, or expected to be fulfilled. Already, barely half-way through the war, 93 per cent of the Shiites thought that Hizbullah was on the way to winning it; and so did 72 per cent of the Sunnis, 54 per cent of the Druzes and 38 per cent of the Christians.⁹⁷

‘YOU AND THE WORLD DESCRIBED US AS INSANE - BUT WE THINK WE ARE WISE’

The prospect of a Hizbullah victory was perhaps less alarming to the Lebanese government than it was to the Sunni-dominated Arab establishment, and especially those ‘moderate’ friends of America -Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia - which had so incautiously taxed it with ‘uncalculated adventurism’ for starting it. For them, who had ‘participated in shedding the blood of the victim and covered the crimes of the executioner’, Nasrallah did not hide his disdain. Yes, he told them, ‘we are adventurous’ but in ways that ‘brought us nothing but pride, freedom, honour and the head held high.’ Yes, ‘you and the world described us as insane - but we think we [are] wise.’⁹⁸

And the ‘good people’ of the Arab world seemed to think so too. In every country but Lebanon, the Arab masses, unscathed themselves, could thrill almost unreservedly to the spectacle before them: a chubby, bespectacled, black-turbaned priest, in his bunker beneath the rubble, and his little band of mujahideen who were achieving what no Arab state, or combination of states, had come close to achieving before. And, in addition, they were wiping out at last those shaming images - of ‘Arab soldiers hurriedly taking off their shoes, dropping their weapons, and fleeing to the nearest refuge’⁹⁹- which repeated defeat had bequeathed.

Hizbullah deemed that it was fighting the ‘ Umma’s battle’. And much of the Umma seemed to see it that way too. Demonstrators, mainly Islamist but substantially secular too, took to the streets in almost every Arab capital. In Cairo they chanted ‘Nasrallah, our friend, hit and destroy Tel Aviv’ and ‘Khaybar, Khaybar,¹⁰⁰ Jews, the army of Muhammad will return.’ In Sudan, they called on the Umma to join Hizbullah in pan-Islamic jihad. In Yemen, they linked Hizbullah to Hamas with shouts of ‘no to the shameful official Arab stance towards the Palestinians and Lebanese’. An Iraq in the thick of its own civil war took time off to stage the largest rally of all; that was after their prime minister, Nouri Maliki, whom America had placed in power, so infuriated Congressmen during a visit to Washington that some of them demanded to know which side - America and Israel’s, or Hizbullah’s - he was on in ‘the war on terror’. And one of them, former presidential hopeful Howard Dean, called him an ‘anti-Semite’ pure and simple.

In Nasrallah, the Arabs found themselves a new icon, who - said Rasha Salti, a Lebanese writer - ‘displayed a persona, and a public behaviour, that were exactly opposite to those of Arab heads of states’. ‘There is the most powerful man in the Middle East,’ sighed an Arab deputy prime minister as, spell-bound like countless millions of others, he watched him address the Umma from his bomb-proof lair.¹⁰¹ He was the most trusted too. Three young Egyptians in a Cairo street were keen to make their views known. ‘He said he was going to bomb Haifa, and he did bomb Haifa,’ said one of them in a voice loud enough for passers-by to hear. ‘Nasrallah is a man of his word’, agreed his companion, ‘God protect him.’¹⁰² In Syria, the three-million Christian minority were as enthusiastic about him as their Muslim compatriots. Priests led prayers for him, and women lit candles. ‘I love him’, said seventy-year-old Mona Muzaber, ‘he is a patriot who doesn’t seek personal gain.’¹⁰³

For a while at least, Hizbullah transcended the great sectarian schism. The Sunni leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brothers called for 10,000 Egyptian mujahideen to join their Shiite brethren in Lebanon; Sunni masses took to Cairo’s streets on their behalf. ‘We are all Shiites now,’ said a radio station in Gaza. In vain did the pro-American ‘moderate’ regimes seek to mobilize their Sunni publics against Hizbullah’s sponsor, Shiite Iran. Their publics did not respond; for them the real enemy was Israel - and America - and nothing was going to impress them more than this Shiite stedfastness and willingness to fight and die in righteous combat against them. In Saudi Arabia arch-conservative Wahhabi scholars condemned the anti-Hizbullah fatwas of their colleagues. Even al-Qaeda, steeped in doctrinal antipathy for the ‘apostates’ and sponsor, in Iraq, of many a ghastly suicide attack against them, got into the act, with at least an implicit appeal for Sunni-Shiite unity against the ‘Zionist — Crusader’ alliance.

And, of course, all this adulation of Hizbullah was inextricably intertwined with hostility to the regimes. In Cairo, the weekly newspaper al-Dustur likened the Arab ‘kings and presidents’ to the medieval princes who had let the Crusaders eat away at Muslim lands until they controlled them all. In Palestine, these ‘helpless, pathetic, rotten Arab leaders’ were as virulently, as daily, reviled as the pristine new champion was glorified.¹⁰⁴ The position taken by Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, it was everywhere being said, was worse than mere weakness and pusillanimity: it was a stab in the back by servile Arabs of valiant ones.

EVEN UNTO THE LANDS OF BUSH AND BLAIR

On the international front, that European discomfiture with Israel, which had manifested itself in the wake of its first, indiscriminate air strikes, had only deepened since. The rot was spreading even to the Britain of Tony Blair, steadfast still in his adherence to the American contention that Israel should be permitted to go on bombing till the ‘terrorists’ and ‘extremists’, the enemies of ‘freedom and democracy‘, were sufficiently chastised, ‘root causes’ could be addressed, and Condoleezza Rice’s ‘new Middle East’ begin to see the light of day. This servility of Bush’s ‘poodle’, as the prime minister was frequently portrayed, on matters Middle Eastern was causing such unrest in the ranks of his ruling Labour Party that one MP would shortly publish an ‘open letter’ to him denouncing it as ‘stupid’ and ‘morally indefensible’.¹⁰⁵ Even a member of his cabinet, Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Howell, was moved to declare, during a visit to Beirut, that it was ‘very, very difficult to understand the kind of military tactics that have been used ... You know, if [you‘re] chasing Hizbullah, then go for Hizbullah. You don’t go for the entire Lebanese nation ... I very much hope the Americans understand what’s happening to Lebanon ... the death of so many children and so many people.’

But the Bush Administration did not yet understand, or, if it did, did not yet care enough to try to stop it. Yet even it was getting seriously upset with its Israeli protégé - albeit mainly for military and strategic, rather than moral, reasons. It was not simply that Israel had failed to expand the war on Hizbullah by attacking Syria too. For that is what ‘many parts’ of the Bush Administration, led by the passionately pro-Israeli neoconservative, National Security Adviser Elliot Abrams, had been urging it to do, and there was a ‘lot of anger’ in the White House that it hadn’t.¹⁰⁶ But never mind Syria - more disturbing was Israel’s poor performance against Hizbullah itself. This Administration, more even than others before it, set great store by Israel as a strategic asset, and, confident of its military prowess, it had assumed that it would easily accomplish the task which it had undertaken on America’s behalf as well as its own. But it was not long before the doubts, about both its strategy and capabilities, set in. These only deepened when, ten days into the war, the White House received a request for the emergency supply of large amounts of precision-guided munitions. Though immediately granted, the request dismayed top Pentagon officials because it seemed to indicate that, having failed - despite an already extravagant use of firepower - to do significant damage to Hizbullah itself, Israel was now gearing up for a yet greater onslaught on what remained of Lebanon’s infrastructure. They interpreted a first, small-scale call-up of reserves as another sign of things going wrong, and the adverse impression this made was only compounded by what one former US commander called the ‘unprepared, sloppy and demoralized’ air with which the reserves went about it.¹⁰⁷

None of these misgivings were made public, however. Outwardly at least, America was still as determined as ever to give Israel the time it needed ‘to finish the job’, as the president of AIPAC, with fulsome expressions of gratitude, put it.¹⁰⁸ And at a White House press conference on 28 July Bush and Blair stood shoulder to shoulder in their continued rejection of a ceasefire for which the rest of the world was clamouring. But two days later came Qana.

QANA-II

In the second massacre within a decade to befall the place where Christ is said to have performed his first miracle, the Israeli air force unleashed two bombs, American-made, 2,000-pound, precision-guided Mk 84s, on a three-storey building soon after midnight on 30/31 July. Twenty-eight people - at first it was thought that fifty-seven had died - were exhumed the following morning from the basement where they had been sleeping, in the tragic belief that this would be their safest refuge in their largely deserted village. Most of them were women and children, and most had died slow and agonizing deaths, screaming for help as they suffocated in the smoke, dirt and debris from the structure that had collapsed above them.

As after Qana-I, the Israeli government immediately claimed that Hizbullah was to blame, because it had been firing Katyushas from the village, and it distributed pictures of its fighters purportedly doing so. At the same time, The Israel Insider, a self-styled ‘independent, non-partisan online publication’, said it ‘looked like [the babies] had been dead for days’; Hizbullah operatives must have planted them there. A host of like-minded websites, mainly Israeli and American, instantly chimed in. It was all nothing but ‘a most revolting Hizbullah fraud’, in which- said The American Thinker, a popular conservative site — major media photographers had acted as ‘willing’ tools.¹⁰⁹ Such lurid conspiracy theories, widespread in the blogosphere, were apparently too outlandish for the mainstream Israeli media,¹¹⁰ hardly temperate though they were in the contempt for Nasrallah and his motives to which they nonetheless gave voice. For him, they contended, this tragedy inflicted on his own people was a ‘godsend’; he had been ‘praying for a victory of this kind, for pictures of dead children, so much so that, had it not happened, he would have had to invent it.’¹¹¹

It was appalling [said the Jerusalem Post] that Hizbullah would deliberately target Israel’s cities, and do so from civilian areas, hoping that Israel would kill greater numbers of Lebanese civilians ... appalling that this barbaric tactic - after some 5,000 Israeli bombing sorties - has proved ‘effective’, with tragic consequences for innocent Lebanese people, and producing the expected international fallout: not against Hizbullah, but against Israel. Are we powerless to overturn the bizarre moral calculus by which Israel is held accountable for the barbaric tactics of its enemies?¹¹²

Arguments like these were of a piece with Israel’s perception of itself as superior to its enemies not only in military prowess but in the altogether higher moral code - its ‘purity of arms’ - it observed in fighting them. If it hit civilians, it only did so by accident. By contrast, Hizbullah used its own people as a ‘human shield’; and, even as it exploited Israeli scruples about harming Lebanese civilians, it deliberately targeted Israeli ones.

But it could be argued that the ethical balance was really quite otherwise, that it was actually Hizbullah which, in effect if not perhaps intent, ended up showing a greater respect for the rules of war than the Israelis.¹¹³ For if, in fact, it did deliberately target those forty-three Israeli civilians who died in the course of the war, it did so in retaliation for the twenty-five times as many Lebanese civilians who ‘accidentally’ died at Israeli hands. But that was not all. There was plenty of evidence - which Israel’s wartime media restrictions prevented from being reported contemporaneously - that on many occasions Hizbullah was actually aiming at Israeli military targets, and that the civilians who died in consequence constituted precisely the same kind of ‘collateral’ damage, caused by notoriously inaccurate Katyusha fire, as did their Lebanese counterparts who died in Israel’s ‘surgical’ air strikes on Hizbullah’s bases and personnel. For Israel was no less given to locating its military installations near to population centres than Hizbullah was. If Hizbullah had its headquarters in Beirut’s populous southern suburbs, the Israeli army had its in the heart of Tel Aviv. Furthermore, it placed many of its temporary artillery positions close to, or even inside, civilian communities in the north. And most of these were Arab; in consequence, it was Arabs, only a fifth of Israel’s total population, who, with eighteen dead, accounted for more than a third of its civilian fatalities.¹¹⁴ In point of fact, as journalists and researchers on the spot reported, there was no sign that Hizbullah had used Qana as a firing point. Insofar as it did employ such tactics, that was very much the exception, not the rule. ‘In the overwhelming majority of destroyed or damaged buildings it examined‘, reported Amnesty International, ‘there was no evidence to indicate that [they] were being used by Hizbullah fighters as hide-outs or to store weapons.‘¹¹⁵ Similarly, Human Rights Watch reported that in the twenty-four cases of civilian casualties, covering about a third of the total, which it examined in detail, it found no evidence that ‘Hizbullah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory [Israeli] attack’.¹¹⁶ It had little need of them in any case; for it had its ‘nature reserves’.

The only ‘accidental’ thing about Qana-II was that it happened in exactly the same place as Qana-I. For something like this was inherently likely in any case. What really made it all but inevitable was that the Israelis were getting the worst of the war. And this was such an unexpected, unaccustomed state of affairs that it drove them, in their anger and perplexity, to extreme responses. A mere four days after the war began, when it was becoming obvious that Halutz’s aerial onslaught had done very little to ‘degrade’ Hizbullah’s missile capability, the Northern Command confessed that it had already exhausted its list of targets for attack. ‘Something’ had to be done, the commanders agreed, and they began a process of ‘target stretching’. What this meant in practice was the systematic hitting of schools, community centres, mosques and houses on the fringes of Southern villages in the hope that, since they had failed to find Hizbullah’s assets anywhere else, they would find them there.¹¹⁷

Qana was a direct consequence of this - as well as of the ground forces’ adversities in Bint Jbeil. The loss of eight soldiers in that town was such a shock that, coming on top of the missiles, it generated calls for the kind of massive, indiscriminate retaliation of which non-combatants were bound to be the main victims. Defence Minister Peretz issued a directive absolving the army of responsibility for the safety of civilians in South Lebanon.¹¹⁸ Trade and Industry Minister Eli Yishai, of the Shas religious party, proposed the ‘flattening’ of any villages from which Hizbullah fired on Israeli soldiers. ‘What do you need infantry for?’, asked a senior reserve air force officer, ‘when four F - I6s and cheap, old-fashioned bombs [can] eliminate Bint Jbeil completely?‘¹¹⁹ ‘What’s more correct,’ asked columnist Amnon Dankner, ‘to suffer the slaughter of our best sons ... so as to be the most moral army in the world, or to erase villages that serve as warehouses for Hizbollah terror, save our sons, and be considered less moral?‘¹²⁰ As for the frequently outspoken Minister of Justice Haim Ramon, it was his opinion that ‘everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist’ and that ‘we are allowed to have another Qana, we are allowed to destroy everything’.¹²¹

TURNING-POINT

Qana-II was the same great turning point in the war as Qana-I had been in Grapes of Wrath, and for very similar reasons. It was the point at which, failure looming, Israel began to seek as decent, as face-saving an exit from it as it could, and America, going into reverse too, helped it find one.

As it floundered around, with its penny-packet ground incursions and its futile air campaign, and as its intelligence agencies opined that, at the rate things were going, Hizbullah’s missiles would still be hitting the ‘home front’ for months to come,¹²² Israel’s leaders had already begun to scale down their original war aims. Sophistry had taken charge. It was less and less a victory, pure and simple, of which they now talked, merely the ‘narrative’, the ‘image’, or the ‘perception’ of one. It was no longer a question of securing the immediate, unconditional hand-over of sergeants Goldwasser and Regev. ‘That will take time,’ said Olmert; and it came to be understood that their freedom could only be secured through the negotiated exchange of prisoners that Nasrallah had asked for in the first place. Nor was it any longer a question of ‘destroying’, ‘obliterating’ or ‘smashing’ Hizbullah, but rather of ‘crippling’ and ‘weakening’ it, or, as one general put it, ‘disrupting [its] military logic’. A foreign ministry spokesman was more modest still. Israel’s ‘main objective today’, he said, was ‘neither the defeat of Hizbullah nor the depletion of its firepower.’ It was to ‘dissuade Hizbullah from renewing its attacks on the border’.¹²³

In the confusion of this retreat, different leaders said different things, but, in general, what were now termed ‘realistic’ objectives seemed to mean no more than pushing Hizbullah from the southern regions lying mainly between the Litani river and the border. This would put Israel beyond the reach of its short-range Katyushas - though not of its longer-range Fajrs and Zelzal-2S. But it was no longer Israel itself that would be doing this. Its only contribution would be to prepare the way, by occupying a small strip of territory along the border, for an international force to take its place.¹²⁴ At the beginning of the war, it had poured scorn on such an idea. But now, duly chastened, it was for the first time in its history signalling a readiness to place some, at least, of its defences in the hands of foreigners. They would, of course, have to be reliable foreigners, a good 20,000 of them, heavily armed, preferably from NATO countries; and unlike UNIFIL, which Israel held to be a feeble, pusillanimous if not frankly hostile lot, they would have to have a mandate, and a will, seriously to confront and fight Hizbullah. The force would also lend backing — and backbone - to the Lebanese army, as, for the first time in three decades, it deployed in strength in the southern regions to be evacuated by Hizbullah.

FROM STRATEGIC ASSET TO STRATEGIC LIABILITY

Qana-II might not have been so manifestly deliberate as Qana-I, and its casualty toll was substantially less, but, for America, the circumstances in which it happened rendered it a greater source of embarrassment and exasperation. Condoleezza Rice, who was meeting the Israeli defence minister in Jerusalem when her aides burst in to tell her about it, was furious, in part because the minister had not already told her, in part because of the thing itself. Wholly complicit in Israel’s military and strategic aims though the Americans were, they had repeatedly impressed on it the importance of keeping civilian casualties to a minimum.¹²⁵ Such massacres of innocents played very badly in the Arab world, at American expense of course, but also at that of their ‘moderate’ friends, such as Jordan. There, with his public already up in arms, King Abdullah rushed to excoriate this ‘ugly crime’. Meanwhile, in rare criticism of the United States, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and other high officials urged it not to be ‘led by Israel’s ambitions‘, to put a stop to the ‘massacres and war crimes’ it was committing ‘against the people, infrastructure and institutions of Lebanon’. Its veteran foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, told Rice that if this was her ‘new Middle East ... we would rather go back to the old’.¹²⁶

That was one thing. The other was the conclusion the Americans now emphatically drew that Israel was not even going to ‘deliver the goods’ on the all-important military and strategic front either.¹²⁷ At first Rice and her entourage suspected that it had knowingly bombed an inhabited building, but then, deeply sceptical about its performance as they already were, they put it down to something else - ‘the incredibly sloppy way [it] was handling the war’. ‘Qana’, said an American analyst, ‘convinced Washington that the Israeli Defense Forces could not succeed in Lebanon - and that America’s war by proxy there against Iran was doomed to failure.‘¹²⁸ It was therefore time to bring this whole ill-fated enterprise to a close, to ‘cut and bolt’ before the going got worse. America’s interest shifted from the military to the diplomatic arena - and to working actively for the ceasefire it had hitherto spurned.

SEARCH FOR A CEASEFIRE

What kind of ceasefire was it to be? That now became the question. Israel, America and Tony Blair’s Britain still wanted it to be a ‘sustainable’ one, reflecting so far as possible the military and strategic gains Israel had gone to war to achieve; Lebanon, the Arabs and most of the rest of the world wanted it to be an ‘immediate‘, and essentially unconditional, one. In the scramble to bring the war to a close, it was once again, as it had been after Qana-I, France which found itself as the counterweight to and chief interlocutor of the Americans. The ‘front line’ in this diplomatic contest was the office of the French ambassador to the UN, Jean-Marc de la Sablière, and the daily meetings he held there with his American counterpart, the rumbustious, militantly pro-Israeli neoconservative, John Bolton, who considered his boss, Condoleezza Rice, too well-disposed towards the Arabs.

Ceasefires generally have to reflect the balance of power on the ground in order to work. But, as with Grapes of Wrath, the United States, in its partisanship, began by seeking a diplomatic outcome out of all proportion to what Israel had achieved there. ‘Condoleezza Rice needs military cards’, said Israel’s leading military correspondent Zeev Schiff at the time, ‘but all that these now consist of is two villages the Israel Defence Forces have captured near the border.’¹²⁹ Nonetheless, the US persisted: the job of the international force in which Israel had acquiesced should be to complete what Israel had failed to accomplish itself. To this end it should go in under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which, authorizing ‘military action’ to ‘restore international peace and security’, would, in principle at least, have given it the right to use force both to disarm Hizbullah and prevent its re-armament with weapons smuggled across the border from Syria.

This was something which the other side simply could not countenance. To do so, it was said, would have re-ignited the Lebanese civil war. Formally speaking, this ‘other side’ meant the Lebanese state, embodied in Fuad Siniora’s ‘14 March majority’ government. But in practice it also - and mainly - meant Hizbullah, the state within that state, and the regional powers, Syria and Iran, which stood behind it. It was not that Hizbullah, in the pride of battlefield achievements, was wholly intransigent. On the contrary, it had paid heavily for those achievements - and caused the Lebanese state and people to pay heavily too - and, though ready to carry on the struggle, it was readier still to bring it to an end. Originally, it had objected to the very idea of the Lebanese army deploying in its place in the South; it had objected, too, to the deployment of an international force to help the army in its task, especially if it was to fall under the auspices of NATO and therefore, by extension, of America itself. But now, anxious to stem its losses, Hizbullah relented. It only did so, however, after receiving assurances, from UN officials who dealt directly with it, that the force would come in the form of an expanded UNIFIL, and operate under Chapter 6 of the UN Charter, which only authorizes the peaceful resolution of international conflicts.¹³⁰ That, in turn, enabled Hizbullah to agree to the deployment of the Lebanese army. For it knew that, though the army was supposed to be the country’s sole, legitimate military force, it did not have the will or means to disarm it on its own. Hizbullah would therefore have no difficulty in preserving itself as the independent militia-cum-political party which it had always been, albeit without any formal, visibly armed and organized presence in the buffer zone between the Litani river and the border.

Reduced though Israel’s war aims now were, however, it still had no assurance that diplomacy could achieve them in war’s stead. Moreover, making matters worse, Rice was so publicly angry with it, both on account of Qana itself and its violating of the 48-hour bombing pause she had arranged in its wake, that she urged President Bush to defy his neoconservative advisers and bring the war to a swift end, even at the price of ‘giving in to the French approach that we’ve been opposed to’.¹³¹ So at first - post-Qana — Israel not merely continued the war, it defiantly stepped it up.

‘THE WRITHING OF AN INJURED BEAST’

With the call-up of more reserves, Israel now had 10,000 men in action on its northern front. But all that these reinforcements yielded, in the first ten days of August, was more of the same, just more and greater floundering, or - to cite Israeli journalists Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff in their book 34 Days - the ‘writh[ing]’ of that ‘injured beast’, the Israeli army, in a war that ‘seemed to be going nowhere’.¹³²

Yet even as the beast was writhing, indeed precisely because it was, pressure had been building up inside it - and outside too - for that full-scale ground offensive which should have been undertaken from the beginning. True, there was opposition still, but most generals now wanted it ‘at almost any cost’. Defence Minister Peretz had come to see it as the only possible solution. On a visit to the Northern Command, Olmert had insisted that ‘we’re not going to stop, we have to end the Katyusha fire’, and, banging on the table, shouted at his commanders: ‘Hit them, destroy them.’ Even Halutz, the great procrastinator himself, had changed his mind as well, and, addressing the remaining doubters, warned them that ‘if you don’t want it carried out, then say so loud and clear. No half-way measures: we’re not going to go half-way, a quarter or a third [of the way].’¹³³ Told that the casualties might be heavy, he replied that - though well of aware of that - this war now ranked as Israel’s most important since the ‘War of Independence’, and if it ended ‘with the current whine, without a ground operation, with Nasrallah alive and kicking, it could lead to a process that [would] threaten the existence of the state’.¹³⁴

Two main reasons were now adduced for this belated, but fundamental, change of strategy. One was that, as Halutz said, the threat which Israel faced really was, in its ultimate dimensions, an existential one, that its army really did have to prove its mettle, and restore that ‘deterrent power’ which its dismal performance so far had brought to its lowest ever point.

The entire Arab world [said the Jerusalem Post] is watching to see whether Hizbullah is a match for the mighty Israeli army ... Hizbullah’s survival in the face of the best Israel can throw at it is the equivalent of throwing blood into a tank full of sharks. It would embolden the jihadis of the region and deal a terrible blow to those nascent forces that believe the Arab world ... must advance down the path of democracy and freedom rather than death and dictatorship.¹³⁵

The other reason was that a full-scale ground offensive should deal the ‘qualitative blow’ to Hizbullah that would enable Israel to dictate the terms of a ceasefire.

With 30,000 men now under arms, and their commanders raring to go, it became a race between what came first, the invasion itself, or a ceasefire resolution pleasing enough for Israel to call it off. In the event, there came both.

By 10 August, after a week of hectic diplomatic to and fro, the Americans and the French were still arguing, on the forty-fourth floor of a New York office block, about such things as whether Chapter 6 or 7 of the UN Charter should govern the mandate of the international force, and whether or not an arms embargo along the Lebanese-Syrian frontier could be forcibly imposed. While the French seemed to be getting the upper hand in that venue, in another one, Jerusalem itself, it seemed to be the other way round; there the Israelis had won the acquiescence of Rice’s envoy, David Welch, Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, to the altogether more ‘pro-Israeli’ draft of an eventual ceasefire resolution. But then, later in the day, the instructions which Rice sent to UN ambassador Bolton for further negotiations in New York seemed to be a far cry from what had been agreed in Jerusalem. And when, at five o’clock (Jerusalem time) in the morning of the following day, Friday, 11 August, Olmert and his staff perused the latest Franco-American draft, hot from New York, they called it a ‘disaster’. The French, they concluded, had won outright- a conclusion which could only have been reinforced when Bolton told the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman, to tell his masters that ‘Condi has sold out you guys to the French.’¹³⁶

They were actually wrong in this conclusion. However, on the strength of it, Olmert and Peretz decided that it was no longer enough simply to threaten the great ground offensive, as their government had already repeatedly been doing, it was time actually to embark on it. A few minutes before five o‘clock that Friday afternoon Olmert ordered the army to move. Three and a half hours later his office received the final Franco-American draft; a blend of chapters 6 and 7 of the UN Charter, or ‘six-and-a-half as some wit dubbed it, it was both ‘good for Israel’ - in Olmert and his foreign minister Tzipi Livni’s words - yet acceptable to Lebanon and Hizbullah too. In its main provision, the 15,000 men of a greatly expanded, robuster UNIFIL would, by ‘forceful means’ if necessary, establish a buffer zone between the Litani river and the Israeli frontier; and this zone would be ‘free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons’ - Hizbullah’s - other than UNIFIL’s own, and the 15,000 men of the Lebanese army it would help to deploy there. Some six hours after that, about 3 o’clock in the morning (Jerusalem time) of Saturday, 12 August, the Security Council, meeting in emergency session, unanimously approved it in the form of Resolution 1701. It was, however, too late for Olmert to halt his military juggernaut. Or so at least he and his cohorts contended. Their argument? Maybe the Lebanese or Hizbullah would go back on their acceptance. In truth, however, neither he - nor Peretz or Halutz - wanted to call their operation off. They wanted to redeem themselves, to end the war with a demonstrable accomplishment to their names. So ‘our sensitive prime minister decided that the army needed to push deep into enemy territory, to hoist the Israeli flag and to cry “Victory!” before bringing the troops back home; some of them safe and sound; others - as he could have predicted - in coffins.’¹³⁷

‘THE REAL WAR, WAR WITH A CAPITAL W’

Thirty-three of them did come back that way. It would have been twice that number had the Hizbullah anti-tank missile team which shot down that Sikorsky helicopter done so when it was landing with its thirty-odd soldiers aboard, instead of seconds later, when it was taking off with only its crew of five. But, in any case, those thirty-three, more than a quarter of the total for the whole war, were the entirely gratuitous victims of a ‘final, fruitless and extremely costly’ offensive, in which both political and military leaders had been ‘willing to risk soldiers’ lives for a goal whose benefit and chances of attainment were negligible from the start’.¹³⁸

For the army, this was at last the real war, ‘war with a capital W, war in all the meanings of the term’.¹³⁹ Its objective - insofar as it had a clear one at all - was to ‘cleanse’ Hizbullah and its missile-firing capability from southern Lebanon. But this real war was beginning just as Israel was agreeing that war of any kind was about to stop. Only a day before, the army had been asking for a full month or more to do the job properly;¹⁴⁰ now it had just sixty-three hours, from the time it had moved on Friday afternoon till the ceasefire set for 8.00 in the morning of Monday, 14 August.

In the event, it hardly even got to the Litani, let alone drove out Hizbullah, or knocked out any of its ‘nature reserves’ and missile launching sites. The downing of the helicopter was but one of a series of mishaps, generally as attributable to Israeli incompetence as to Hizbullah’s proficiency, which, on top of the great offensive’s inherent unfeasibility, compounded the fiasco into which it swiftly degenerated. The greatest mishap took place in the Wadi Salouqi, a ravine which a column of tanks had to traverse on its way to team up with Nahal infantrymen already airlifted to the village of Ghandouriyah on high ground not far from the Litani river. Together they were then supposed to have pushed westwards, linking up, around the port city of Tyre, with tank and infantry columns advancing up the coast. Hidden among the dense undergrowth of the wadi’s steep slopes, Hizbullah fighters destroyed the commander’s tank with a roadside bomb, and poured anti-tank missiles, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars into the rest of the column, hitting eleven tanks and killing eight crewmen. Altogether, seventeen men died, and fifty were wounded, in incidents directly or indirectly related to the Salouqi crossing, more than half the fatalities for the whole offensive.¹⁴¹ For the Northern Command headquarters, it seemed for a while as though everything that could go wrong did go wrong. ‘This was the Black Sabbath, a goddamned Sabbath‘, said an officer in the war room, ’every minute the teleprinter spat out another report ... a tank detonated, an IED [improvised explosive device], four killed. Casualties in Salouqi. Another soldier killed by friendly fire. Every line like this pushed us deeper into the ground.’¹⁴²

A GRAND FINALE OF CLUSTER BOMBS

But as the ground forces flailed and floundered, in this, their grand finale, just as they had in its lesser precursors, there was one department, the long-range, high-tech onslaught from land, sea and air, in which the Israeli war machine did not falter. It had made enormous efforts down the years to acquire and develop technologies for destroying an enemy from afar while keeping its own casualties to a minimum, and it was only to be expected that it would make copious use of them now. But it did more than that - it ran riot. Israel’s air force made as many combat sorties - 15,000, hitting 7,000 targets - as it had done in the whole of the 1973 war. But whereas in that ferocious, life-and-death struggle, the enemy had been the two most formidable and well-equipped of Arab armies launching all-out, simultaneous, surprise attacks on two broad fronts, this time it was a just a group of guerillas in the narrow strip of territory from which they lobbed their 4,228 missiles of the war. As for Israel’s ground artillery, whereas, over 24 days of October 1973, it had fired some 53,000 shells, the tally exceeded 180,000 in the 33 days of July and August 2006.¹⁴³ If, for the Palestinians, and later for Hizbullah, the Katyusha had always been the signature weapon of south Lebanese cross-border warfare, for Israel it was cluster bombs. It had turned to these wantonly inaccurate, but viciously effective, little devils in all its wars; after the 1982 invasion the Reagan Administration withheld any further supplies of them for six years because, in violation of express commitments, Israel had used them against populated areas.¹⁴⁴ But there were no such constraints this time. ‘What we did was insane and monstrous,’ said the head of a rocket unit,¹⁴⁵ referring to an estimated 4.6 million of them with which both army and air force had carpeted southern Lebanon, mostly in one last, wild, non-stop cannonade during the final ground offensive. The bomblets are supposed to explode just before they hit the ground. But since the old, outdated type which Israel used - mainly American and apparently part of the Bush Administration’s emergency, mid-war airlift of munitions - had an extraordinarily high failure rate, at least a million of them still lay about, unexploded, after the war was over - on roads and rooftops, in fields and orchards, around schools and hospitals, suspended from olive or banana trees. Innocuous-looking canisters, often enticingly similar to toys, they maimed or killed 200 people, mostly children, in the following eighteen months.¹⁴⁶

It was not clear what the artillery blitz was meant to achieve - some thought it was just vengeance and spite, some that it was part of a plan to depopulate the South of its Shiites - but it certainly did not help the ground offensive. In fact, under the demoralizing impact of the downed helicopter and the Wadi Salouqi casualties, this just faded away virtually of its own accord. By Sunday morning the political and military leadership had lost any appetite for further gains. If the advance to the Litani had proceeded, it obviously would not have achieved much in the time remaining and might easily have ended up incurring even greater losses. So a few hours before the ceasefire the men who had risked their lives to get nowhere in particular were ordered to go no further. Meanwhile, dramatizing the futility of it all, Hizbullah, for its last hurrah, fired 250 missiles into northern Israel, its largest single-day barrage of the war. As relieved but resentful reservists made their way back across the border with the Monday morning ceasefire taking hold, the Deputy Chief of Staff, Moshe Kaplinsky, managed to contact one of them, his son Or, who asked him: ‘What shall I tell the guys, dad?’ ‘Tell ‘em we won,’ came the reply.’¹⁴⁷