Lebanon: more on Nazrallah; and three interesting points of view - from a critical American Jew, Beirut resident Robert Fisk, and the very French BHL

1. Arab World Finds Icon in Leader of Hezbollah -- by NEIL MacFARQUHAR

DAMASCUS, Syria, Aug. 6 — The success or failure of any cease-fire in Lebanon will largely hinge on the opinion of one figure: Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah, who has seen his own aura and that of his party enhanced immeasurably by battling the Israeli Army for nearly four weeks.

With Israeli troops operating in southern Lebanon, Sheik Nasrallah can continue fighting on the grounds that he seeks to expel an occupier, much as he did in the years preceding Israel’s withdrawal in 2000.

Or he can accept a cease-fire — perhaps to try to rearm — and earn the gratitude of Lebanon and much of the world.

Analysts expect some kind of middle outcome, with the large-scale rocket attacks stopping but Hezbollah guerrillas still attacking soldiers so that Israel still feels pain.

In any case, the Arab world has a new icon.

Gone are the empty threats made by President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s official radio station during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war to push the Jews into the sea even as Israel seized Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula.

Gone is Saddam Hussein ’s idle vow to “burn half of Israel,” only to launch limited volleys of sputtering Scuds. Gone too are the unfulfilled promises of Yasir Arafat to lead the Palestinians back into Jerusalem.

Now there is Sheik Nasrallah, a 46-year-old Lebanese militia chieftain hiding in a bunker, combining the scripted logic of a clergyman with the steely resolve of a general to completely rewrite the rules of the Arab-Israeli land feud.

“There is the most powerful man in the Middle East,” sighed the deputy prime minister of an Arab state, watching one of Sheik Nasrallah’s four televised speeches since the war began, during an off-the-record meeting. “He’s the only Arab leader who actually does what he says he’s going to do.”

Days after the current war started, he ended a speech by quietly noting that Hezbollah had just attacked an Israeli warship off Lebanon, a feat considered inconceivable for his group. Those who rushed outside saw a glow visible from the damaged vessel offshore, setting off celebrations around Beirut.

The departure represented by Sheik Nasrallah — his black turban marking him as a sayyid, a cleric who can trace his lineage back to the Prophet Muhammad — has been particularly evident in those speeches. He makes no promises to destroy Israel with its superior military might, but to make it bleed and offer concessions.

“When he says to the people: I am your voice, I am your will, I am your conscience, I am your resistance, he combines both a sense of humility and of being anointed for the task,” said Waddah Sharara, a Lebanese sociology professor and a descendant of Shiite clerics. “He’s like the circus magician who pulls the rabbit out of his hat and always knows exactly who is his audience.”

Some call it his “Disney touch.”

In many ways, this war is the moment that Sheik Nasrallah has been preparing for ever since he was first elected to run Hezbollah at age 32 in 1992, after an Israeli rocket incinerated his predecessor.

In his broadcasts he appears tranquil, assured, sincere and well informed, in command of both the facts and the situation, utterly dedicated to his cause and to his men. He is aloof yet tries to lend his secretive, heavily armed organization an air of transparency by sharing battlefield details.

On Thursday, he offered to stop firing missiles if Israel halted its attacks, saying Hezbollah preferred ground combat. Hezbollah’s position on any cease-fire, echoed by the Lebanese government, is that none is possible as long as Israeli soldiers remain inside the country.

“He has all the power; the government has no cards in its hand,” said Jad al-Akhaoui, the media adviser to a Lebanese cabinet minister. “He keeps saying that he supports the prime minister, but there has been no translation in the field, nothing has stopped. The decision is still Hezbollah’s decision.”

It is not even clear how such decisions are formulated. Even though Hezbollah has two cabinet ministers, proposals are passed through Nabih Berri, the head of the Amal Party and Hezbollah’s onetime rival as the voice of the Shiite Muslim working class.

Lebanese officials said that once Mr. Berri passed on the proposals, nobody was quite sure what happened. Hezbollah officials are either unreachable or mum.

But Sheik Nasrallah is definitely in touch. He gloats over the evident confusion reflected in the Israeli news media about their military offensive. He is known to have read the autobiographies of Israel’s prime ministers. He always calls Israel “the Zionist entity,” maintaining that all Jewish immigrants should return to their countries of origin and that there should be one Palestine with equality for Muslims, Jews and Christians.

In the past, when Israel advanced into Lebanon against Palestinian fighters, the Palestinians would defend fixed positions, then retreat toward Beirut as each line fell.

Analysts say Sheik Nasrallah’s genius was to train hundreds of grass-roots fighters — school teachers and butchers and truck drivers — then to use religion to inspire them to fight until death, with a guaranteed spot in heaven.

Sheik Nasrallah outlined some tactics in Thursday’s speech.

“It is not our policy to hang on to territory; we do not want all our mujahedeen and youths to be killed defending a post, hill or village,” he said, sitting in a studio with the flags of Lebanon and Hezbollah behind him. The idea is to lure elite Israeli soldiers into a trap by having them walk into villages before his guerrillas open fire.

In a world where fathers are known by the name of their eldest son, Sheik Nasrallah is known as Abu Hadi or father of Hadi, after his eldest son, who died in September 1997, age 18, in a firefight with the Israelis. The name instantly reminds everyone of his personal credibility and commitment to the fight.

On that September day, Sheik Nasrallah was scheduled to deliver a speech in Haret Hreik, the unkempt southern Beirut suburb dense with apartment houses that Israel has just turned largely to rubble. But he said nothing of his loss until the crowd started chanting for him to speak about the “martyrs.” He eulogized Hadi as part of a great victory.

In interviews, he said that he would not give his enemies the satisfaction of seeing him weep publicly but that he mourned privately.

He has a daughter and two surviving sons. The eldest, Jawad, around 26, is believed to be fighting in southern Lebanon.

Sheik Nasrallah takes obvious pride in standing up to Israel on the battlefield. All his wartime speeches have been laced with references to restoring lost Arab virility, a big sell in a region long suffering from a sense of impotence. He called the three southern villages where the fiercest clashes erupted “the triangle of heroism, manhood, courage and gallantry.”

He can be by turns avuncular and menacing.

Walid Jumblat, the chieftain of the Druse sect and one of Sheik Nasrallah’s more outspoken critics, said he found the combination unsettling. “Sometimes the eyes of people betray them,” Mr. Jumblat said in an interview in his mountain castle. “When he’s calm, he’s laughing. He’s very nice. But when he’s a little bit squeezed, he looks at you in the eyes fiercely with fiery eyes.”

In the hierarchical rankings of Shiite Muslim clergy, Sheik Nasrallah is a rather ordinary hojatolislam, one step below an ayatollah, and far below being a mujtahid, or “source of emulation” to be followed as a guide.

Yet the Shiite faithful in Lebanon revere him, both as a religious figure and as a leader who gained for them a modicum of respect in the country’s sectarian political system long dominated by Christians and Sunni Muslim barons. Families who evacuated their homes in Beirut’s southern suburbs seemed invariably to leave behind an open Koran with Sheik Nasrallah’s picture propped up nearby, in the hope that the holy verses would protect their homes and their leader.

He is believed to live modestly and rarely socializes outside Hezbollah’s ruling circles. He avoids the telephone for safety reasons, but has met thousands of constituents and dispatches personal messengers to congratulate them for weddings and births.

Aside from Hezbollah’s secretive military operations, the state within a state that he helped build with Iranian and expatriate financing includes hospitals, schools and other social services.

Sheik Nasrallah is a powerful orator with a robust command of classical Arabic, yet he makes himself widely understood by using some Lebanese dialect in every speech. He has coined numerous popular phrases, like calling Israel “more feeble than a spider’s web.”

He comes across as far less dour than most Shiite clerics partly due to his roly-poly figure and slight lisp. But he also — very unusually — cracks jokes.

Prof. Nizar Hamzeh, who teaches international relations at the American University of Kuwait and has written a book on Hezbollah, recalled a Nasrallah speech from last year, given while Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in the region. A helicopter happened to clatter overhead at some point while he was criticizing United States meddling, and the sheik quipped, “You might be able to catch a glimpse of her now; I hope she sees us as well.” The crowd roared.

He has never pushed hard-line Islamic rules like veils for women in the neighborhoods that Hezbollah controls, which analysts attribute to his exposure to many of Lebanon’s 17 sects.

Born in 1960 in Beirut, Sheik Nasrallah grew up in the Karanteena district of eastern Beirut, a mixed neighborhood of impoverished Christian Armenians, Druse, Palestinians and Shiites.

His father had a small vegetable stand, but the 1975 eruption of the civil war forced the family to flee to their native southern village.

The oldest of nine children and long entranced by the mosque, he decamped for the most famous Shiite hawza, or seminary, in Najaf, Iraq. He fled in 1978 one step ahead of Saddam Hussein’s secret police, returning to Lebanon to join Amal, then a new Shiite militia. He became the Bekaa Valley commander in his early 20’s.

But he considered the Islamic Revolution in Iran led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 to be the real model for Shiites to end their traditional second-class status and moved to Hezbollah as it coalesced in the early 1980’s. He studied in a seminary in Qum, Iran, briefly in 1989.

How much a religious figure can appeal to Lebanon’s generally cosmopolitan population has never been clear, and it is particularly murky now that he has provoked a war. Some Lebanese say he has sold his soul to Damascus and Tehran.

“I used to think of Nasrallah as the smartest politician in Lebanon, but this last operation changed my mind,” said Roula Haddad, a 33-year-old administrative secretary, shopping at the upscale ABC mall in the predominantly Christian Ashrafiyeh neighborhood. “It was a huge mistake and he is solely responsible for all the destruction. He proved that he does not care about Lebanese interests; he revealed his true Iranian skin.”

Political analysts said that Lebanon should have seen it coming, but that Sheik Nasrallah proved a rather skillful hypnotist. “Lebanese politics, especially since Nasrallah carved out his role, has become his very own circus,” said Professor Sharara, the Lebanese sociologist. “He built this circus on a foundation of pageantry, lies, fear, crazy hopes and unreal dreams.

“He sold Lebanese on the certainty that he would not abandon them, he would not undertake anything that would cause them harm or destruction, and at the same time he instilled fear, fear of himself,” Professor Sharara said. “He has known this was going to happen for the past 15 years. How can you believe someone who says, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t do anything,’ even while he was building this hellish machine? He knew people would be credulous, would be seduced.”

(Hassan M. Fattah contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, for this article.)


2. I Am Pro-Israel, Therefore I Criticize Israel -- by Ira Chernus

I am pro-Israel. That’s why I criticize Israel’s violence in Palestine and Lebanon every chance I get.

I don’t say much about the immorality of Israeli actions. They are shockingly immoral. But talking about it won’t make much difference. So I appeal to naked self-interest. I point out the obvious: Every time a Palestinian or Lebanese is hit by an Israeli bomb or bullet, it spells more risk for the safety of Israel.

Most Jews who say they are pro-Israel act as if they are deaf to the moral arguments, anyway. They do have hearts and consciences. They are not unmoved by the TV pictures of the carnage their military creates. But precisely because they are touched by the suffering of their foes, they’ve become very skilled in rationalizing Israeli violence. For every moral criticism they have a rebuttal ready at hand to ease their consciences. They and their ancestors have being doing it for over a century now, so they have a whole arsenal of moral justifications.

In living rooms, town meetings, and op-ed pages, the morality of Israeli policy ends up like a ping-pong ball, batted back and forth by both sides. Since there is no objective referee to keep score, the game just goes on forever. While we all have the right and duty to speak the moral truth as we see it, that’s not likely to change anyone’s mind very soon.

So it seems more fruitful to set the ethical issues aside and appeal to the self-interest of Israeli Jews and their pro-Israel American supporters. What they want most, they say, is for the Jewish state and all of its citizens to be able to live normal lives, free from worry about terrorist rockets and suicide attacks. It’s a perfectly understandable, indeed laudable, goal. Who would argue with it?

In that sense, I am pro-Israel too -- not least because I have close family living there, just a few miles from Lebanon, within easy rocket range. And that’s precisely why I criticize Israel’s actions in Palestine and Lebanon every chance I get -- because every day, those actions make it harder and harder for Israeli Jews to live normal lives, free from worry.

The latest development in the conflict is a perfect example. Diplomats at the UN have finally hammered out a resolution to end hostilities in Lebanon. According to Aluf Benn, the top diplomatic correspondent for the top Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, “diplomatic sources in Jerusalem expressed satisfaction with the draft” resolution. And well they should, because it is, as Benn says, “asymmetric.” It puts all blame for the conflict on Hezbollah. Though it calls on Israel to halt its assault, it gives Israel the right to keep shooting in “self-defense,” while it demands that Hezbollah must cease fire completely, as if the Lebanese were not defending themselves.

Moreover, it says that all forces should remain where they are, meaning that the Israelis can stay in Lebanon. And it calls for an international force (in effect controlled by the U.S. and France) to join the Israelis there. So it would leave Hezbollah fighters seeing their own towns and villages occupied by armed foreigners, while they themselves are required to stop using their weapons completely. It’s hardly surprising that Hezbollah, and the Lebanese government, have rejected this draft plan.

What is more surprising is that, according to Aluf Benn, “Israel was very involved in its formulation. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's chief of staff, Yoram Turbowicz, conducted talks with the Americans and French from Jerusalem; Tal Becker, an advisor to Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, flew to New York to take part in talks conducted at the UN.” These Israelis surely knew that the resolution they helped to draft would be rejected. They knew that this would delay an end to hostilities. That means more days, perhaps weeks or even months, of Hezbollah rockets falling on Israeli Jews. Yet they call this a diplomatic victory.

Israelis are well aware of what’s happening. It’s now taken as a given that Israel’s original aim of destroying Hezbollah won’t happen. The fighting will end in a negotiated compromise that removes all Israeli troops from Lebanon. So why not make that final deal now? Why not go back to the way things have been in Israel for the last five years, with no fear of Hezbollah rockets because there were virtually none fired?

In a column titled “Cease Fire Immediately,” Haaretz journalist Uzi Benziman makes the argument succinctly: “The experience of the past three days, in which a broader ground operation has unfolded, has also involved an increase in the number of Israeli losses -- both at the front and the rear -- and in the number of rockets landing inside the country. … In this confrontation, we will not emerge clear winners. Hezbollah is about to emerge from the battle smoke with the aura of one who did not succumb to the IDF. In view of the fact that this is the expected outcome of the battle, it is best to end it immediately.”

Unfortunately few Jews, in Israel or the U.S., will admit that the Israeli government’s effort to postpone peace is just another example of a long-standing pattern. When offered a chance to reduce the violence and make its own people safer, the government typically responds in ways that perpetuate the violence against their own people. This summer’s conflict was set in motion when the elected political leaders of Hamas clearly signaled their willingness to accept Israel’s existence, start an immediate cease-fire, and then negotiate a lasting peace. Israel responded with a massive bombing campaign. The rest is tragic history: Israelis have spent weeks running to bomb shelters and living in fear, and their own government's policies insure that there’s no end of it in sight.

The practical argument for peace is one that most pro-Israeli people can easily understand. Arguments about who is more justified and more ethical will put them on the defensive. They’ll dig in their intellectual heels and just stop listening. But arguments based on the pro-Israel concern about safety and security are turning the tide of Israeli public opinion. One Israeli journalist predicts that “very soon, it won't be just the Four Mothers [a group that sparked the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000] who will be tired of this deterrence, bur rather thousands of families.”

If those of us who speak out for peace stress the pragmatic benefits, we may turn the tide of American opinion, too. By focusing on the very concrete benefits of an end to the shooting, we can stand in solidarity with Israelis and Jews everywhere. We can make it clear that we are pro-Israel. And at the same time we can be solidly pro-Lebanese, pro-Palestinian, pro-everyone in the Middle East.

(Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea and the forthcoming book " Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin." He can be contacted at chernus@colorado.edu)


3. Robert Fisk: A terrible thought occurs to me - that there will be another 9/11

The room shook. Not since the 1983 earthquake has my apartment rocked from side to side. That was the force of the Israeli explosions in the southern suburbs of Beirut - three miles from my home - and the air pressure changed in the house yesterday morning and outside in the street the palm trees moved.

Is it to be like this every day? How many civilians can you make homeless before you start a revolution? And what is next? Are the Israelis to bomb the centre of Beirut? The Corniche? Is this why all the foreign warships came and took their citizens away, to make Beirut safe to destroy?

Yesterday, needless to say, was another day of massacres, great and small. The largest appeared to be 40 farm workers in northern Lebanon, some of them Kurds - a people who do not even have a country. An Israeli missile was reported to have exploded among them as they loaded vegetables on to a refrigerated truck near Al-Qaa, a small village east of Hermel in the far north. The wounded were taken to hospital in Syria because the roads of Lebanon have now all been cratered by Israeli bomb-bursts. Later we learnt that an air strike on a house in the village of Taibeh in the south had killed seven civilians and wounded 10 seeking shelter from attack.

In Israel two civilians were killed by Hizbollah missiles but, as usual, Lebanon bore the brunt of the day's attacks which centred - incredibly - on the Christian heartland that has traditionally shown great sympathy towards Israel. It was the Christian Maronite community whose Phalangist militiamen were Israel's closest allies in its 1982 invasion of Lebanon yet Israel's air force yesterday attacked three highway bridges north of Beirut and - again as usual - it was the little people who died.

One of them was Joseph Bassil, 65, a Christian man who had gone out on his daily jogging exercise with four friends north of Jounieh. "His friends packed up after four rounds of the bridge because it was hot," a member of his family told us later. "Joseph decided to do one more jog on the bridge. That was what killed him." The Israelis gave no reason for the attacks - no Hizbollah fighters would ever enter this Christian Maronite stronghold and the only hindrance was caused to humanitarian convoys - and there were growing fears in Lebanon that the latest air raids were a sign of Israel's frustration rather any serious military planning.

Indeed, as the Lebanon war continues to destroy innocent lives - most of them Lebanese - the conflict seems to be increasingly aimless. The Israeli air force has succeeded in killing perhaps 50 Hizbollah members and 600 civilians and has destroyed bridges, milk factories, gas stations, fuel storage depots, airport runways and thousands of homes. But to what purpose?

Does the United States any longer believe Israel's claims that it will destroy Hizbollah when its army clearly cannot do anything of the kind? Does Washington not realise that when Israel grows tired of this war, it will plead for a ceasefire - which only Washington can deliver by doing what it most loathes to do: by taking the road to Damascus and asking for help from President Bashar al-Assad of Syria?

What in the meanwhile is happening to Lebanon? Bridges and buildings can be reconstructed - with European Union loans, no doubt - but many Lebanese are now questioning the institutions of the democracy for which the US was itself so full of praise last year. What is the point of a democratically elected Lebanese government which cannot protect its people? What is the point of a 75,000-member Lebanese army which cannot protect its nation, which cannot be sent to the border, which does not fire on Lebanon's enemies and which cannot disarm Hizbollah? Indeed, for many Lebanese Shias, Hizbollah is now the Lebanese army.

So fierce has been Hizbollah's resistance - and so determined its attacks on Israeli ground troops in Lebanon - that many people here no longer recall that it was Hizbollah which provoked this latest war by crossing the border on 12 July, killing three Israeli soldiers and capturing two others. Israel's threats of enlarging the conflict even further are now met with amusement rather than horror by a Lebanese population which has been listening to Israel's warnings for 30 years with ever greater weariness. And yet they fear for their lives. If Tel Aviv is hit, will Beirut be spared. Or if central Beirut is hit, will Tel Aviv be spared? Hizbollah now uses Israel's language of an eye for an eye. Every Israeli taunt is met by a Hizbollah taunt.

And do the Israelis realise that they are legitimising Hizbollah, that a rag-tag army of guerrillas is winning its spurs against an Israeli army and air force whose targets - if intended - prove them to be war criminals and if unintended suggest that they are a rif-raff little better than the Arab armies they have been fighting, on and off, for more than half a century? Extraordinary precedents are being set in this Lebanon war.

In fact, one of the most profound changes in the region these past three decades has been the growing unwillingness of Arabs to be afraid. Their leaders - our "moderate" pro-Western Arab leaders such as King Abdullah of Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt - may be afraid. But their peoples are not. And once a people have lost their terror, they cannot be re-injected with fear. Thus Israel's consistent policy of smashing Arabs into submission no longer works. It is a policy whose bankruptcy the Americans are now discovering in Iraq.

And all across the Muslim world, "we" - the West, America, Israel - are fighting not nationalists but Islamists. And watching the martyrdom of Lebanon this week - its slaughtered children in Qana packed into plastic bags until the bags ran out and their corpses had to be wrapped in carpets - a terrible and daunting thought occurs to me, day by day. That there will be another 9/11.


4. Pondering, Discussing, Traveling Amid and Defending the Inevitable War
By BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY

When I arrived in Israel , it was the anniversary of the day the Spanish Civil War began. It was 70 years ago that the Spanish generals set off the war — civil, ideological and international — that the fascist governments of the time wanted. And I could not help thinking about this as I landed in Tel Aviv. Syria in the wings … Ahmadinejad’s Iran maneuvering… Hezbollah, which everyone knows is a little Iran, or a little tyrant, taking Lebanon and its people hostage … And behind the scenes, a fascism with an Islamist face, a third fascism, which is to our generation what the other fascism, and then communist totalitarianism, were to our elders’. As soon as I arrived; yes, from the very first moment I visited with my old friends in Tel Aviv, whom I had not seen so tense or so anxious since 1967; from my first conversation with Denis Charbit, an ardent peace activist who did not, it seemed to me, doubt the legitimacy of this war of self-defense; from my first discussion with Tzipi Livni, the young and talented Israeli foreign minister, whom I found strangely disoriented in this new geopolitics, I sensed that something new, something unprecedented in the history of Israeli wars, was being enacted. It was as if Israelis were no longer in the framework of Israel and the Arabs alone. It was as if the international context, the game of hide-and-seek between visible and invisible players, the role of Iran and its Hezbollah ally, gave the whole crisis a flavor, a look, a perspective that were entirely new.

Before I went to the northern front, near the border with Lebanon, I traveled to Sderot — the martyred city of Sderot — to the south, on the border with Gaza. Yes, the martyred city. Because the images that reach us from Lebanon are so terrible, and because the suffering of Lebanese civilian victims is so unbearable to the conscience and the heart, it is hard to imagine, I know, that an Israeli city could also be a martyred city. And yet … these empty streets … these gutted houses, riddled by shrapnel … this mountain of exploded rockets piled up in the courtyard of the police headquarters, all of which fell in the last few weeks … Even that day (it was July 18), a rain of new bombs fell on the center of town and forced the few people who wanted to take advantage of the summer breeze to scurry back down into their basements …

And then, finally, piously pinned on a black-cloth-covered board in the office of Mayor Eli Moyal, these photos of young people, some of them children, who have died under fire from Palestinian artillery. One thing obviously doesn’t erase the other. And I’m not one to play the dirty little game of counting corpses. But why shouldn’t what is due to some also be due to others? How come we hear so little, at least in the European press, of those Jewish victims who have died since Israel pulled out of Gaza? I have spent my life fighting against the idea that there are good deaths and bad deaths, deserving victims and privileged bombs. I have always agitated for the Israeli state to leave the occupied territories and, in exchange, win security and peace. For me, then, there is a question here of integrity and fairness: devastation, death, life in bomb shelters, existences broken by the death of a child, these are also the lot of Israel.

Haifa. My favorite Israeli city. The big cosmopolitan city where Jews and Arabs have lived together ever since the country was founded. It, too, is now a dead city. It, too, is a ghost city. And here, too, from the tree-covered heights of Mount Carmel down to the sea, the wailing of sirens forces the rare cars to stop and the last passers-by to rush into the subway entrances. Here, too, it is clear that this is the worst nightmare in 40 years for Israelis.

Zivit Seri is a tiny woman, a mother, who speaks with clumsy, defenseless gestures as she guides me through the destroyed buildings of Bat Galim — literally “daughter of the waves,” the Haifa neighborhood that has suffered most from the shellings. The problem, she explains, is not just the people killed: Israel is used to that. It’s not even the fact that here the enemy is aiming not at military objectives but deliberately at civilian targets — that, too, is no surprise. No, the problem, the real one, is that these incoming rockets make us see what will happen on the day — not necessarily far off — when the rockets are ones with new capabilities: first, they will become more accurate and be able to threaten, for example, the petrochemical facilities you see there, on the harbor, down below; second, they may come equipped with chemical weapons that can create a desolation compared with which Chernobyl and Sept. 11 together will seem like a mild prelude. For that, in fact, is the situation. As seen from Haifa, this is what is at stake in the operation in southern Lebanon. Israel did not go to war because its borders had been violated. It did not send its planes over southern Lebanon for the pleasure of punishing a country that permitted Hezbollah to construct its state-within-a-state. It reacted with such vigor because the Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel to be wiped off the map and his drive for a nuclear weapon came simultaneously with the provocations of Hamas and Hezbollah. The conjunction, for the first time, of a clearly annihilating will with the weapons to go with it created a new situation. We should listen to the Israelis when they tell us they had no other choice anymore. We should listen to Zivit Seri tell us, in front of a crushed building whose concrete slabs are balancing on tips of twisted metal, that, for Israel, it was five minutes to midnight.

We should also listen to the bitterness of Sheik Muhammad Sharif Ouda, the leader in Haifa of the little Ahmadi community, a Muslim sect; his family has lived here for six generations, and he welcomes me into his home, in the hilly Kababir neighborhood, dressed in a Pakistani turban and shalwar kameez. Hezbollah’s crime, he says, was its decision to strike indiscriminately. It was to kill Jews and Arabs alike — consider the massacre at Haifa’s train depot, where there were 8 dead and more than 20 wounded. And it was also to establish a climate of terror, of anxiety every instant, as in Sarajevo, where people used to speculate about the fact that all it took was a stroke of luck, a change of plans at the last minute, a meeting that went on longer than expected, or that was cut short, or that miraculously changed its venue, to escape being at the point of impact when a rocket landed. Creating such conditions is a crime.

Ouda insists, however, that there is another crime: Hezbollah has in effect relegated the Palestinian question to the background. As indifferent as the traditional Arab leaders may have been, in their innermost selves, to the fate of the inhabitants of Gaza and Nablus, at least they still pretended they cared. Whereas the Hezbollah leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, doesn’t even try to pretend. The suffering and rights of the Palestinians are no longer, in his own Islamo-fascist geopolitics, either a cause to fight for or even an alibi. You just have to read the very charter of his movement, or listen to his proclamations on Al Manar, the Hezbollah TV channel, to see that he has little concern with that relic from ancient eras that is Arab nationalism in general and Palestinian nationalism in particular. (Only the naked hatred remains.) Instead, he dreams of a reconciled Islamic community, a new umma, with Iran as the base, Syria the armed branch and Hezbollah the invading spear tip. He will employ the means of war without the usual practical goals of war. There remain the three neglected casualties of this new Iranian-style jihad: Israel, Lebanon and Palestine.

More rockets. I have traveled from Haifa to Acre and then, along the Lebanese border, to a succession of villages and kibbutzes and other cooperatives that have lived, for 10 days by this point, under Hezbollah fire. There’s a veritable rain of fire today over these biblical landscapes of Upper Galilee, not to speak of a storm of steel. “I’ve never really known what you should do in these cases,” Lt. Col. Olivier Rafovitch says to me, forcing himself to laugh, as we approach the border town of Avivim and as the noise of the explosions seems also to be coming closer. “You tend to speed up, don’t you? You tend to think that the only thing to do is get away as fast as possible from this hell. But that’s stupid, really. For who can tell if it isn’t exactly by speeding up that you come right to where it’s …?” In response, we speed up all the same. We rumble through a deserted Druze village, then a big farming town and a completely open zone where a Katyusha rocket has just smashed up the highway.

The damage these rockets can do, when you see them up close, is insane. And insane, too, is the racket you hear when you’ve stopped talking and are just waiting for the sound they make to blend with the noise of the car’s engine. A rocket that falls in the distance leaves a dull thud; when it goes over your head, it creates a shrill, almost whining detonation; and when it bursts nearby, it shakes everything and leaves a long vibration, which is sustained like a bass note. Maybe we shouldn’t say “rocket” anymore. In French, at least, the word seems to belittle the thing, and implies an entire biased vision of this war. In Franglais, for example, we call a yapping dog a rocket, roquet; the word conjures a little dog whose bark is worse than his bite and who nibbles at your ankles … So why not say “bomb”? Or “missile”? Why not try, using the right word, to restore the barbaric, fanatical violence to this war that was desired by Hezbollah and by it alone? The politics of words. The geopolitics of metaphor. Semantics, in this region, is now more than ever a matter of morality.

The Israelis aren’t saints. Obviously they are capable in war of Machiavellian stratagems, operations, even denials. In this war, though, there is a sign that they did not want it and that it landed on them like an evil fate. And this sign is the Israeli government’s choice of Amir Peretz as defense minister: a former activist for Peace Now, long committed to the cause of sharing the land with the Palestinians, Peretz was head of the trade union Histadrut and was in principle much better prepared to organize strikes than to wage war. “I didn’t sleep a wink all night,” he tells me, very pale, his eyes red, in the little office in Tel Aviv where he welcomes me, along with Daniel Ben-Simon, a writer for the Israeli paper Haaretz. This office is not at the ministry but at the headquarters of the Labor Party. “I haven’t slept because I spent all night waiting for news of a unit of our boys who were caught in an ambush yesterday afternoon in Lebanese territory.” Then a young aide-de-camp who also looks like a union activist holds out to him a field telephone. Without a word, his eyes lowered, his big mustache trembling with ill-contained emotion, Peretz receives the news he has been dreading. He looks up at us and says: “Don’t spread the news right away, please, since the families don’t know yet — but three of them died, and we still haven’t heard about the fourth one. It’s terrible …”

I have known many of Israel’s defense ministers over the past 40 years. From Moshe Dayan to Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon and others, I have seen heroes, demi-heroes, tacticians of genius and talent, skillful or poor or mediocre men succeed one another. What I have never seen before is a minister who was so — I won’t say “human” (the sanctification of the life of every soldier fallen in combat is a constant in the country’s history), or even “civilian” (Shimon Peres, after all, didn’t really have a military past either), but one so apparently unprepared to command an army in wartime (wasn’t his first decision, unique in the annals of Israeli history, to cut the budget of his own ministry by 5 percent?). What I have never seen before is a defense minister answering so exactly to the famous saying by Malraux about those miraculous commanders who “wage war without loving it” and who, for this very reason, always end up winning.

Amir Peretz, like Malraux’s commanders, will probably win. He’s facing a tougher enemy than expected; he will experience heavier casualties as well; there will be growing doubts, throughout the country, about the wisdom of his strategy; but he will probably win. And in any case, the point is here: the very fact that he was appointed to the post shows that Israel believed that after withdrawing from Lebanon and Gaza it was entering a new era when it would have to wage not war but peace.

I met another war leader, also a member of the Labor Party and a supporter, like Peretz, of a negotiated peace with the Palestinians. It was in the field that I met him, near the Lebanese border, in a place called Koah Junction, which means “junction of the force” and is for the kabbalists one of the places where, when the day comes, the Messiah will become manifest and pass through. His name is Ephraim Sneh. In his youth he was a medical officer with the paratroopers, the commander of an elite army unit and then commander of the Southern Lebanon Military Zone from 1981 until 1983. And he has the air of a calm father, at once friendly and gruff, that reserve generals often have in Israel when they come back to the service — which in the present circumstances takes the form of a kind of inspection mission for the defense committee of the Knesset. Why this meeting? Why here, in this landscape of dry stone, brought to a white heat by the sun, to which he has invited me but where I can’t see a living soul aside from ourselves? Does he want to show me something? Explain to me some detail of army strategy that would be visible to me only here? Will he take me to Avivim, less than a mile north of here, where a battle is taking place? Does he want to talk to me about politics? Will he, like Peretz, like Livni, like almost everyone in fact, tell me about Israel’s disappointment with France, which could have played a great role in the region by pushing for the refoundation of the Land of the Cedars and for the disarmament of Hezbollah, as demanded by United Nations Resolution 1559, but which prefers, alas, to confine itself to opening up humanitarian corridors?

Yes, he does tell me that. A little of it. In passing. But I quickly see that he had me come here to talk, first of all, about a matter that is not related, at least apparently, to the present war: nothing other than my book about the kidnapping, captivity and decapitation of Daniel Pearl … A conversation about Danny Pearl at a stone’s throw from a battlefield … An officer with a literary bent deciding that, with our two cars immobilized in the blazing scree, nothing is more urgent than discussing jihad, enlightenment Islam, the trouble with Huntington’s theory of the clash of civilizations, Karachi and its terrorist mosques … I had never seen anything like this before — for it to be conceivable, it took this expedition to the front lines of a war in which Israel and the world are entangled as never before.

At the same time … It would seem that history has, sometimes, less imagination than we would like, and that old generals don’t have such bad reflexes after all. For the fact is that a few miles to the south, in the commune of Mitzpe Hila, near Maalot, I will not long after experience a deeply moving reminder of the Pearl affair. I visit the home of the parents of the soldier Gilad Shalit, whose capture by Hamas near the town of Kerem Shalom, along the border with Gaza, on June 25, was one of the things that brought about this war. I wonder about the irony of history, which has placed this young man, without any special distinctions, just an ordinary individual, at the origin of this enormous affair. We are sitting now in the sun on the lawn where Shalit played as a child and where you can hear, very close, a few hundred yards away maybe, Katyusha rockets falling, to which his parents seem to have stopped paying attention. We are sitting outside around a garden table, discussing the latest news brought by the U.N. envoy who visited the Shalits just before me, and I find myself thinking that if this war has to last — if the Iranian factor will, as I have sensed since the instant I arrived, give it new scope and duration — then this modest army corporal will be the new Franz Ferdinand of a Sarajevo that will bear the name Kerem Shalom …

What is happening, then? Is it his mother Aviva ’s expression when I ask her about what she knows of her son’s captivity? Or his father Noam’s look when he tries to explain to me, a faint gleam of hope in his eyes, that the young man has a French grandmother, Jacqueline, who was born in Marseille, and that he hopes my government — that of France —will link its efforts with Israel’s? Is it the debate, which I can guess is raging inside Noam, between the father who is prepared for any kind of bargaining to get his son back and the former army soldier who, out of principle, will not give in to blackmail by terrorists? Is it my visit to the corporal’s childhood bedroom? Is it the house itself, so similar, all of a sudden, to Danny Pearl’s house, in Encino, Calif.? Whatever the reason, I am overcome by a feeling of déjà vu; over the faces of this man and this woman it seems to me as if the faces of Ruth and Judea Pearl, my friends, have been superimposed, the courageous mother and father of another young man, like this one, kidnapped by religious fanatics whose ideological program wasn’t very different, either, from that of Hamas …

Up north again, near the Lebanese border, I travel from Avivim to Manara, where the Israelis have set up, in a crater 200 yards in diameter, an artillery field where two enormous batteries mounted on caterpillar treads bombard the command post and rocket launchers and arsenals in Marun al-Ras on the other side of the border. Three things here strike me. First, the extreme youth of the artillerymen: they are 20 years old, maybe 18. I notice their stunned look at each discharge, as if every time were the first time; their childlike teasing when their comrade hasn’t had time to block his ears and the detonation deafens him; and then at the same time their serious, earnest side, the sobriety of people who know they’re participating in an immense drama that surpasses them — and know, too, they may soon pay a steep price in blood and life. Second, I note the relaxed — I was about to say unrestrained and even carefree — aspect of the little troop. It reminds me of reading about the joyful scramble of those battalions of young republicans in Spain described, once again, by Malraux: an army that is more friendly than it is martial; more democratic than self-assured and dominating; an army that, here, in any case, in Manara, seems to me the exact opposite of those battalions of brutes or unprincipled pitiless terminators that are so often described in media portraits of Israel. And then, finally, I note a strange vehicle. It resembles the two self-propelled cannons, but it is stationed far behind them and doesn’t shoot: this is a mobile command post that you enter, as in a submarine, through a central turret and down a ladder; there are six men in it, seven on some days, and they are busy working with a battery of computers, radar screens and other transmission devices. Their role is to determine the parameters of the firing by collecting information that will be transmitted to the artillerymen. Here, at the root of Israeli firepower, is a veritable laboratory of war where soldier-scholars deploy their intelligence, noses glued to the screens, trying to integrate even the most imponderable facts about the terrain into their calculations. Their goal is to establish the distance to the target and how fast the target moves, as well as to consider the proximity of the civilians, whom they want to avoid at all cost.

Does it work? And are these soldier-scholars infallible? Of course not! There is no way, everybody knows, to wage a clean war. And the fact that Hezbollah long ago made the strategic choice to establish its fighters in the most populated areas and thus to transform Lebanese civilians into human shields obviously doesn’t help matters. The fact remains that at least an effort is being made to avoid civilian targets. Here at least, in Manara, that is the Israeli approach. And, as distressed as we may be by the suffering of the Lebanese civilian population, the terrible deaths of hundreds, you cannot conclude that the Israelis have the strategic intention or the will to harm civilians.

When I met David Grossman, it was in an open-air restaurant in the Arab village of Abu Gosh, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, which seems like a garden of Eden after the hell of the last few days — bright sunshine, the buzz of insects rather than airplanes or tanks, a casualness in the air, a light breeze.. . .We talk about his latest book, which is a retelling of the myth of Samson. We talk about his son, who was just called up for duty in a tank unit, and about whom he trembles with anxiety. We talk about a statistic he has just read, which worries him: almost a third of young Israelis have lost faith in Zionism and have found tricks to try to get themselves exempted from military service.

And then of course we discuss the war and the huge distress it seems to have plunged him into, along with other progressive intellectuals in the country.. . .For on one hand, he explains to me, there is the terrible extent of the destruction, women and children killed, the humanitarian catastrophe under way, the risk of civil war and of Lebanon burning — and the government’s mistake of, at first, setting the bar so high (destroy Hezbollah, render its infrastructure and its army incapable of doing any more harm) that even a semi-victory, when it comes, risks having a whiff of defeat. But, on the other hand, there is Israel’s right, like any other state in the world, not to sit by in the face of such crazy, groundless, gratuitous aggression; there is the fact, he adds, that Lebanon plays host to Hezbollah and permits it to participate in its government: where could an Israeli counterattack have taken place but on Lebanese soil?. . .I observe David Grossman. I examine his handsome face, the face of the former enfant terrible of Israeli literature, who has aged too quickly and is devoured by melancholy. He is not just one of the greatest Israeli novelists today. He is also, along with Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and a few others, one of the country’s moral consciences. And I think that his testimony, his firmness, his way of not yielding, despite everything, on the essential soundness of Israel’s cause, ought to convince even the most hesitant.

And then, finally, Shimon Peres. More than ever I did not want to end this journey without going, as I do each time, to visit Peres — the country’s elder statesman. I met him in the company of Daniel Saada, an old friend and founding member of the French progressive organization SOS Racisme, who has now settled in Israel and become a diplomat as well as a friend of Peres. Shimon, as everyone here calls him, is now 82 years old. But he hasn’t lost any of his handsomeness. Or the look of a prince-priest of Zionism. He still has the same face, all forehead and mouth, that emphasizes the melodious authority of his voice. And I even have the impression, at times, that he has adopted a few of the mannerisms of his old rival Yitzhak Rabin: a slight bitterness in his smile, a gleam in his eyes, a way of carrying himself and, sometimes, of shading his words …

“The whole problem,” he begins, “is the failure of what one of your great writers called the strategy of the general staff. No one, today, controls anyone else. No one has the power to stop or overpower anyone else. So that we, Israel, have never had so many friends, but never in our history have they been so useless. Except …”

He asks his daughter, who is present as we talk, to go to the neighboring office and find two letters, one from Mahmoud Abbas and one from Bill Clinton . “Yes, except for the fact that you have them,” he then continues. “The men of good will. My friends. The friends of enlightenment and peace. The ones who will never renounce peace because of terrorism, or nihilism, or defeatism. We have a plan, you know.Still the same plan for prosperity, for shared development, which will end up triumphing.Listen …”

Shimon, a young man who is 82 years old, has had a dream. His invincible dream has lasted, in fact, for 30 years; the present impasse, far from discouraging him, seems mysteriously to stimulate him. So I listen to him. I listen to this Wise Man of Israel explain to me that his country must simultaneously “win this war,” foil this “quartet of evil” made up by Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah and clear the way for “paths of speech and dialogue” that will, one day, lead the Middle East somewhere. And as I listen to him, and let myself be lulled by his oft-repeated, indefinite prophecies, I find that, today, for some reason, those prophecies have a new coefficient of obviousness and force. I, too, catch myself imagining the glory of a Jewish state that would dare, at the same time, almost in the same gesture and with the same movement, to deliver two things at once: to some, alas, war; to others, a real declaration of peace that would be recognized as such and accepted.

(Bernard-Henri Lévy, a French philosopher and writer, is the author, most recently, of “American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville.”)