Dear Editor:

I certainly agree with Mr. Benn's conclusions - I believe I made a similar point in a letter to Salon on this topic back when the war was actually being fought. It's been obvious for a long time that Israel relies on its military superiority to avoid making peace with its neighbours or the Palestinians. One of the benefits of last year's Lebanon War is that it demonstrated that Israel could be beaten and this may be enough to convince future Israeli governments to resort to diplomacy and compromise before they try to pummel their enemies into submission. Moreover, this tactic of bullying the neighbours cannot only last so long - it's inevitable that other powers will arise in the region and that the Israeli advantage will eventually be compromised.

That being said, I would take issue with a couple of Mr. Benn's points. First, I think that the Israeli deterrent is alive and well. Most Arab states are still very aware that Israel can do terrible damage to them from the air and from the ground. It might be more difficult for Israel to defeat the Arab states than it had thought - more on that below - but even if those states manage to, somehow, hold off an Israeli military assault, they will still pay a terrible price. Note that well over a thousand people were killed by Israel in Lebanon, 30% of them children, and the country's infrastructure was smashed.It will take years, if not decades, to rebuild. Hezbollah may have won the war, but for Hezbollah a "win" was just surviving, and the costs were astronomically high. Even Sheik Nasrallah has indicated that he would not have ordered the kidnapping of the Israeli soldiers if he had anticipated the Israeli response.

Second, the article suggests that the Israeli army is not what it used to be and implies that the Israeli military of Entebbe or the Six Day War would have walked all over Hezbollah. It may be that the Israeli army is not up to snuff, but that is not the same as saying that any Israeli military could have beaten Hezbollah. The Arab resistance to Israel has evolved. Any conventional Arab military would be smashed by Israeli force in no time at all, and this was proven time and again in earlier conflicts. This fact required that Hezbollah adopt guerilla warfare tactics - the same tactics that drove Israel out of Lebanon in the first place. It's likely that the outcome of this war would have been the same regardless of anything the Israelis did. Again, this is not a bad thing - Israel needs to know that it can't rely only on the stick when dealing with its Arab adversaries.

At the end of the day, we can only hope that the Israeli experience in Lebanon, the Winograd report, and the failure of the US in Iraq all create the circumstances necessary for Israel and the US to seek diplomatic solutions to their problems with the Arab world rather than relying on their usual resort to force.

Sincerely,

Shaun Narine