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Eyeless in Qana
It is easy to figure out who started the war. Hezbollah chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah wanted a fight and he got it.
When the latest conflict in West Asia started nearly a month ago with Hezbollah fighters attacking Israel and kidnapping two soldiers, it was easy to figure out who started the war. Hezbollah chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah wanted a fight and he got it. Apart from supporters within his own organisation and cheerleaders in Syria and Iran, very few people, even in the Arab Street, sympathised with the actions and the ideology of the terrorist leader. Israel’s response to Hezbollah, however, has changed things considerably. While Tel Aviv may not bother about world opinion and cite threat to its existence as reason enough to pound Lebanon, Hezbollah’s hide-out in its war against Israel, its ‘offence as defence’ policy has swiftly changed the perception of who is aggressor and who is victim.
Sunday’s attack on the southern Lebanese town of Qana, which has left 54 civilians, including scores of children, dead, may be seen as a clearly defined turning point. One is not naive enough to believe that only those on either side with guns are in the line of fire. But with Qana, one senses that the Israelis’ definition of ‘collateral damage’ has started to bear a striking resemblance to that of the very terrorist organisation that they are keen to destroy.
What has bothered everyone from the very start of this bloody and continuing conflict is that Israel could have approached its legitimate need to strike against the Hezbollah differently. The United States, egging on Israel’s disproportionate reaction to the kidnappings by refusing to call for a ceasefire, seems to be on its own join-the-dots adventure that it hopes will ultimately lead to Syria and Iran. At a time when Washington needs to show the Arab world — and by that we mean its people, not only its States — that outfits like Hezbollah are feeding off Arab despair to bloat themselves into importance, the civilian deaths in Lebanon are acting as recruitment drives for these very terrorist groups. War can be a means to peace; not, as both Israel and Hezbollah believe, an end in itself. Militarily, Israel can destroy Lebanon. But that will hardly take care of Israel ridding itself of its enemies.
