LONDON: Whatever we think of Israel’s assault on Lebanon, all of us seem to agree about one fact: that it was a response, however disproportionate, to an unprovoked attack by Hezbollah. I repeated this “fact” in my last column, when I wrote that “Hezbollah fired the first shots”.

This being so, the Israeli government’s supporters ask peaceniks like me, what would you have done? It’s an important question. But its premise, I have now discovered, is flawed.

Since Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000, there have been hundreds of violations of the “blue line” between the two countries. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) reports that Israeli aircraft crossed the line “on an almost daily basis” between 2001 and 2003, and “persistently” until 2006. These incursions “caused great concern to the civilian population, particularly low-altitude flights that break the sound barrier over populated areas”. On some occasions, Hezbollah tried to shoot them down with anti-aircraft guns.

In October 2000, the Israel Defence Forces shot at unarmed Palestinian demonstrators on the border, killing three and wounding 20. In response, Hezbollah crossed the line and kidnapped three Israeli soldiers. On several occasions, Hezbollah fired missiles and mortar rounds at IDF positions, and the IDF responded with heavy artillery and sometimes aerial bombardment.

Incidents like this killed three Israelis and three Lebanese in 2003; one Israeli soldier and two Hezbullah fighters in 2005; and two Lebanese people and three Israeli soldiers in February 2006. Rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel several times in 2004, 2005 and 2006, on some occasions by Hezbollah. But, the UN records, “none of the incidents resulted in a military escalation”.

On May 26 this year, two officials of Islamic Jihad — Nidal and Mahmoud Majzoub — were killed by a car bomb in the Lebanese city of Sidon. This was widely assumed in Lebanon and Israel to be the work of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. In June, a man named Mahmoud Rafeh confessed to the killings and admitted that he had been working for Mossad since 1994. Guerillas in southern Lebanon responded, on the day of the bombing, by launching eight rockets into Israel. One soldier was lightly wounded. There was a major bust-up on the border, during which one member of Hezbollah was killed and several wounded, and one Israeli soldier wounded. But while the border region “remained tense and volatile”, Unifil says it was “generally quiet” until July 12.

There has been a heated debate on the internet about whether the two Israeli soldiers “kidnapped” by Hezbollah that day were captured in Israel or in Lebanon, but it now seems pretty clear that they were captured in Israel. This is what the UN says, and even Hezbollah seems to have forgotten that they were supposed to have been found sneaking around the outskirts of the Lebanese village of Aita al-Shaab. Now it simply states that “the Islamic resistance captured two Israeli soldiers at the border with occupied Palestine.”

Three other Israeli soldiers were killed by the guerillas. There is also some dispute about when, on July 12, Hezbollah first fired its rockets; but Unifil makes it clear that the firing took place at the same time as the raid — 9am. Its purpose seems to have been to create a diversion. No one was hit.

But there is no serious debate about why the two soldiers were captured: Hezbollah was seeking to exchange them for the 15 “prisoners of war” taken by the Israelis during the occupation of Lebanon and (in breach of Article 118 of the Third Geneva Convention) never released. It seems clear that if Israel had handed over the prisoners, it would — without the spillage of any more blood — have retrieved its men and reduced the likelihood of further kidnappings. But the Israeli government refused to negotiate. Instead — well, we all know what happened instead. Almost 1,000 Lebanese and 33 Israeli civilians have been killed so far, and a million Lebanese displaced from their homes.

On July 12, in other words, Hezbollah fired the first shots. But that “act of aggression” was simply one instance in a long sequence of incursions and attacks over the past six years by both sides. So why was the Israeli response so different from all that preceded it? The answer is that it was not a reaction to the events of that day. The assault had been planned for months.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that “more than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to US and other diplomats, journalists and think-tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail”.

The attack, he said, would last for three weeks. It would begin with bombing and culminate in a ground invasion. Gerald Steinberg, Professor of Political Science at Bar-Ilan University, told the paper that “of all of Israel’s wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared ... By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we’re seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it’s been simulated and rehearsed across the board”.

A senior Israeli official told the Washington Post that the raid by Hezbollah provided Israel with a “unique moment” for wiping out the organisation. The New Statesman’s editor, John Kampfner, says he was told by more than one official source that the US government knew in advance of Israel’s intention to take military action in Lebanon. The Bush administration told the British government.

Israel’s assault, then, was premeditated: it was simply waiting for an appropriate excuse. It was also unnecessary. It is true that Hezbollah had been building up munitions close to the border, as its current rocket attacks show. But so had Israel. Just as Israel could assert that it was seeking to deter incursions by Hezbollah, Hezbollah could say — also with justification — that it was trying to deter incursions by Israel. The Lebanese army is certainly incapable of doing so. Yes, Hezbollah should have been pulled back from the Israeli border by the Lebanese government and disarmed. Yes, the raid and the rocket attack on July 12 were unjustified, like just about everything that has taken place around the border for the past six years.

But the suggestion that Hezbollah could launch an invasion of Israel or that it constitutes an existential threat to the state is preposterous. Since the occupation ended, all its acts of war have been minor ones, and nearly all of them reactive. So it is not hard to answer the question of what we would have done. First, stop recruiting enemies, by withdrawing from the occupied territories in Palestine and Syria. Second, stop provoking the armed groups in Lebanon with violations of the blue line — in particular the persistent flights across the border. Third, release the prisoners of war who remain unlawfully incarcerated in Israel.

Fourth, continue to defend the border, while maintaining the diplomatic pressure on Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah (as anyone can see, this would be much more feasible if the occupations were to end). Here then is my challenge to the supporters of the Israeli government: do you dare to contend that this programme would have caused more death and destruction than the current adventure has done? —Dawn/The Guardian News Service

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TOKYO: Makoto Koga was 2 years old when his father, a soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army, died in battle on the island of Leyte in the Philippines. After visiting the island a few years ago, Koga — now 66 and head of a powerful group of relatives of Japanese war dead — spoke of how his father must have felt facing certain death.

“We have no food. We have old guns, but we have no ammunition. Why am I here and why must I die?” Koga imagined his father thinking as he waited to die.

More than six decades after Japan’s defeat in World War Two, its people have yet to agree on an assessment of who was to blame for the nation’s role in the conflict, which killed millions in Asia and wrought devastation at home.

That lack of domestic consensus — as much as outraged reactions by China and South Korea — lies at the core of a debate over politicians’ visits to Yasukuni Shrine, where 14 wartime leaders convicted as Class A war criminals by an Allied tribunal are honoured with the nation’s 2.5 million war dead.

“In the post-World War Two discourse on history and Japan’s identity, the issue of war responsibility has been one of the most difficult issues about which there is no answer, no consensus and even no direction,” Kazuhiko Togo, a former diplomat and grandson of wartime foreign minister Shigenori Togo, wrote recently.

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has paid his respects at the Shinto shrine each year since taking office in 2001.

Speculation is mounting that he will visit next week on the emotive Aug 15 anniversary of the Japan’s surrender, his last chance to do so before stepping down in September.

Koizumi’s heir apparent, Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, has backed Koizumi’s pilgrimages and visited the shrine himself last Aug 15. Media reports say he secretly did so again in April.

Abe, like Koizumi, says he wants to honour Japan’s war dead, not glorify war. But critics argue that the visits imply approval of Yasukuni’s view of the war as one that Japan was forced to fight in self-defence, and of the war criminals as martyrs.

A museum on the shrine’s grounds is often criticised as glorifying the war while ignoring atrocities committed in Asia.

“They have no intention of addressing the pending issues from World War Two,” said Andrew Horvat, a visiting professor at Tokyo Keizai University, referring to Abe and other neo-conservatives.

“They want to be in control of their definition of history — that it was a war fought to liberate Asia from Western imperialism and that it was a just war.”

The only formal accounting of Japan’s war responsibility is the Allies’ International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which in 1948 found 28 Japanese leaders guilty of plotting wars of aggression or failing to prevent atrocities, or both.

Among them were the 14 Class A war criminals honoured at Yasukuni, including wartime prime minister Hideki Tojo, who with six others was executed by hanging. Seven others died in prison.

Scholars have pointed to what they say are flaws in the Tokyo trials, including the absence of the crime of conspiracy in international law before 1945, the failure to charge other key figures such as leaders of ultra-right groups or industrialists, and a decision by the Allies not to try the late emperor Hirohito, in whose name the war was fought.

While some Japanese have regarded the trials as a valid, if imperfect, verdict on those who led the nation into a disastrous war, ultra-conservatives reject it entirely as victors’ justice.

“The Pacific War was not Japan’s fault,” argues popular nationalist cartoonist Yoshinori Kobayashi in his latest “manga” comic on the war, entitled “So-called ‘Class A War Criminals’”.

“There are no ‘Class A war criminals’ in Japan. As long as we do not clear away the notion of ‘war criminals’ imposed by the Allies, the Japanese race cannot be independent.”

Abe himself has said the matter of wartime leaders’ responsibility should be left for history to judge.

In a book published last month, he noted some Class A war criminals were pardoned and became lawmakers and cabinet ministers after the war.

“That’s because it was decided by public consensus that they are not considered criminals under domestic law,” Abe wrote.

The debate has split the conservative camp, with some opinion leaders urging Japan to assess war responsibility on its own.

“It’s very important for the Japanese to investigate and determine just who was responsible for the atrocity of the war, who bore true responsibility,” Tsuneo Watanabe, chairman of the conservative Yomiuri newspaper, said earlier this year.

Watanabe’s proposal has put him in a rare alliance with the liberal Asahi newspaper, which last week took Koizumi to task for dodging the question of who to blame for the war.—Reuters

KIRYAT SHEMONA (Israel): Late last week while guarding a house in southern Lebanon that Israeli forces were using as a command post, Cpl. Matan Tyler received an unusual order from his commander: Watch out for guys wearing Israeli uniforms.

A day earlier, a nearby regiment had been approached by fighters wearing familiar olive shirts and vests with Hebrew writing, Tyler said he was told. The fighters — Hezbollah militiamen disguised as Israelis — opened fire on a house full of Israeli soldiers.

“You really can’t underestimate the Hezbollah,” said Tyler, 20, a member of the army’s Nahal Brigade. “They are the masters of the field. They know the area better than us. They know where to hide and when to move. They always know where we are.”

The incident is just one among dozens of examples of an enemy that has proven more resilient and better-equipped than Israeli military forces anticipated. After nearly four weeks of massive air attacks and ground combat, Israeli military officials say that they have killed only a small fraction of Hezbollah’s fighters and that the group still has hundreds of launchers and thousands of rockets at its disposal.

“What we face is an infantry division with state-of-the-art weaponry — night-vision gear, advanced rifles, well-equipped — deployed along our border,” said Brig. Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, who until last month was director of analysis for Israeli military intelligence. “They have some of the most advanced anti-tank missiles in the world.”

In more than two dozen interviews at army bases, hotels, artillery batteries and staging points for their entry into Lebanon since the heaviest ground fighting began last week, Israeli soldiers expressed confidence in their superiority over Hezbollah, but frustration that they are fighting an elusive enemy as difficult to find as it is to defeat.

“Most of the time we only see them when they want to draw attention to themselves, then they kick us from behind,” said Tyler, who was resting with his battalion at a lakefront hotel near Tiberias after a week in southern Lebanon. “It’s horrible, yes. You feel — not weak, but how do you say it, threatened? There is always, always uncertainty.”

Several soldiers said they were surprised by how long the operation has taken. When Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982, they reached to within 10 miles of Beirut in two days. In the current conflict, after more than three weeks of fighting, the heaviest ground combat is still in a string of towns along the border.

“It’s so slow and you’re just going crazy. You’re not really getting very far in there and it’s brutally hot just sitting in those houses,” said Cpl. David Gross, 22, of Livingston, N.J., who moved to Israel two years ago to join the army.

“Look, we’re all smart enough to know it’s probably best that they do it this way. Fewer people get killed,” he added. “But it’s also hard because I don’t know if we will ever be able to stop the rocket attacks. You just feel like we’ll keep pushing them back and they’ll just shoot the rockets farther. Is that frustrating? Yes.”

The soldiers described a battlefield littered with booby traps and fortified by fighters who have been preparing to repel a ground invasion since Israeli withdrew from southern Lebanon six years ago, after an 18-year occupation.

Master Sgt. Yusaf, a scout for the army’s Baram Brigade who spent 16 years fighting in southern Lebanon during the 1980s and 1990s and who spoke on the condition that only his first name be used, said comparing Hezbollah’s capabilities then and now “is like talking about the difference between men who have guns and an army.”

Moving at the front of an advancing infantry platoon, he is always on the lookout for traps and hiding places, he said during an interview at a base in Shomera, near the border, hours after leaving a village in southern Lebanon. He described one bunker near the Lebanese town of Maroun al-Ras that was more than 25 feet deep and contained a network of tunnels linking several large storage rooms and multiple entrances and exits. He said it was equipped with a camera at the entrance, linked to a monitor below to help Hezbollah fighters ambush Israeli soldiers.

Israeli soldiers and commanders are quick to point out that Israel is winning by most traditional measures, such as equipment destroyed, territory seized and casualties — 61 Israeli soldiers have died in the fighting, along with about 450 Hezbollah fighters, by Israel’s count. But in comments that echo those of earlier guerrilla conflicts, they also acknowledge that the two sides have different standards of success.

“All they have to do is survive and some people will say they won,” one soldier said in a recent interview near the Israeli border town of Avivim. First Sgt. Dekel Peled, who suffered cuts to his head and hands in a Lebanese village 10 days ago when a mortar shell struck a house in which he was waiting, said he is fighting in a “a war that no one can be mentally prepared for.”

He was interviewed at an army-run hotel in Kiryat Shemona this week as he returned to his unit, though he still can’t fight because he lost feeling in his trigger finger.

“Some days it seems like it is going to be over tomorrow, and on other days I get the impression it can last another month,” he said. Few said they had experienced sustained firefights. Rather, they said, there were long hours of edgy anticipation, and short bursts of intense combat. The most feared weapons in Hezbollah’s arsenal, they said, are the antitank missiles that have been responsible for dozens of Israeli casualties, blasting through the armor of the most advanced Merkava tanks.—Dawn/Washington Post News Service

VIENNA: Heaps of dumplings and schnitzels. Free drinks. A three-man band. It’s party time at a Vienna retirement home — but two women in the silver-haired crowd just can’t get into the mood.

“What’s the world coming to? It’s all about work and money nowadays,” says 86-year-old Elfriede Kobsa. “Yes, whatever happened to having a family and children?” sighs Elisabeth Nagl.

The statistics speak for themselves. By 2010 — just four years from now — there will be more 55- to 64-year-olds than 15- to 24-year-olds in the European Union, Austria’s social affairs minister warns.

The growing number of older Europeans, coupled with low birth rates across the 25-nation bloc, is giving lawmakers a big headache. At issue is how to financially shoulder the burden of an aging society while staying competitive globally and finding workable incentives for people to have more babies.

“It’s getting worse and worse. If things continue like this, no one is ever going to get to retire,” said Roni Howath, 56, a former Vienna postal worker who retired early and now drives a cab from time to time to supplement his monthly pension.

In the past, European taxpayers relied on generous national pension plans fuelled in part by those still working. But in recent years, many governments have made severe cutbacks amid fears that with fewer people paying into the system, there will be less money to dole out.

Experts say the impact of an ever-grayer Europe will be felt throughout society.

According to a recent EU report, the bloc’s working age population is projected to fall by 48 million, or 16 per cent, between 2010 and 2050, while the number of seniors is expected to rise sharply by 58 million, or 77 per cent.

Europe will go from having four people of working age for every senior citizen to a ratio of two to one by 2050, predicts the report by the Economic Policy Committee and the European Commission.

“Without exaggeration, one could say that what is going to happen on average in the next 25 years is really something we have never seen before,” said Bernd Marin, executive director of the Vienna-based European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research. “It has implications for everything.”

Already, it’s clear that people will have to work longer before retiring.

“If there is no increase in the labour market, if unemployment of older workers doesn’t increase, then we will have dramatic changes in who pays contributions and who receives pensions,” said Andreas Motel-Klingebiel of the German Centre of Gerontology in Berlin.

Most companies think older workers are “inflexible” and prefer hiring younger workers instead of retraining or retaining older ones, he added.

That trend could add pressure to younger people struggling to balance job responsibilities against the need to play a bigger role in caring for aging parents.

“Younger people are going to do a lot more in formal care. They will have to struggle hard with work and taking care of family. There’s going to be a collision of pressures here,” said Peter Taylor-Gooby, professor of social policy at the University of Kent in England.

Chances are they’ll also be doing more for less.

Because general taxation is expected to come up short to pay for seniors’ retirement benefits and health care, governments are looking into options such as mandatory retirement savings and insurance programs — or even spending less on the younger generation.

Grim prospects about re-entering the job market after taking time off, a lack of affordable childcare and a late start to motherhood are all putting a damper on birth rates, said Hubert Krieger, a demographics researcher at the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions in Dublin, Ireland.

“Delaying the time you have your first child has serious implications on how many children you may have,” said Krieger, author of a recent study on demographic changes in Europe and its implications on family policy.

The changing demographics could put Europe at a competitive disadvantage with the United States, where birth rates haven’t taken a nosedive — in part because of the growing Hispanic population.

Hispanics accounted for almost one-half (1.3 million or 49 Per cent) of the US nationwide population growth of 2.8 million between July 2004 and July 2005, according to US Census Bureau figures.

Overall, women in the United States with lower incomes and education levels had higher fertility rates than those who had college degrees and were more secure financially.

The overall fertility rate for American women in 2005 was near 2.1 births per woman, compared to an estimated rate of 1.5 in Europe in 2004. A rate of about 2.1 is what it takes to replace a population in the developed world.

But America is also getting older, too, threatening both private pensions and Social Security, the government pension programme. Experts say, however, that the US is unlikely to age as significantly as Europe anytime soon.

The situation is quite different in Japan, which has an even lower fertility rate than most European countries.

The Japanese government announced in early June that more than one in five Japanese is now 65 or older, and that ratio could rise to one in four in the next decade. The country’s fertility rate is 1.25.

But unlike Europe, Japan has found ways to keep seniors in the job market, said Wolfgang Lutz, director of the Vienna Institute of Demography. Upon retirement, seniors often return to their former companies as consultants and receive a government pension in addition to a reduced salary, Lutz said.

Some experts point to immigration in Europe as the key to solving the problems caused by an aging society and a dwindling work force. Immigrants long have been relied on to fill low-paying jobs in the service and health care sectors.

“Without migration, it won’t be possible,” said Guenther Leiner of the Austria-based European Health Forum.

“We will see them as helpers and saviours.”—AP

ROME: First there were pensioner holidays with Saga. Then came singles packages with Club 18-30. Now an Italian seaside resort has taken speciality tourism into new territory in an effort to combine the delights of sun, sea and sand with a respect for sharia law.

The Council of Riccione on the Adriatic riviera was reported to have altered its bylaws to allow a section of its famed beach to be closed off and made women-only.

That way Muslim women on holiday in the area could swim and enjoy themselves on the beach while respecting Islam’s injunctions against mixed bathing and displaying their bodies to members of the opposite sex. Some women-only beaches already exist along the Italian coast, but they are visible from mixed areas.

Loretta Villa, the councillor responsible for the initiative, told Corriere della Sera newspaper: “Riccione is a city that lives off tourism. We need to be in a position to respond to the demands of our guests. And in this case the motives are not superficial, but cultural and religious. We have already had some indirect requests for separate beach areas.”

The proposed beach zone would also have an all-female staff, including women lifeguards. The initiative appeared to have been prompted by a sharp increase in the number of free-spending tourists coming to Riccione from the Arabian peninsula. Corriere della Sera reported that recent guests at the five-star Grand Hotel Des Bains had included a member of the Saudi royal family and the owner of a Saudi television channel, both of whom arrived with substantial entourages. The hotel told the paper it had met the demand for women-only swimming facilities by reserving the indoor pool for them.

—Dawn/The Guardian News Service

LONDON: The UN Security Council will almost certainly adopt a ceasefire resolution this week, in spite of objections from Lebanon and others in the Arab world. But diplomats and analysts were united in despair on Monday, expressing doubts that the resolution could stop the fighting.

“It does not look good,” one European diplomat said. “There is nobody interested in stopping now. Hezbollah has no reason to stop. The discrepancy between what is being discussed at the diplomatic table and what is happening on the ground is terrible.”

They fear the draft resolution may have come too late. There is concern it is too weighted towards Israel and risks destabilising Lebanon’s moderate government. Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, said on Sunday that once there was a resolution in place, it would be clear who was interested in peace and who was not. The assumption behind her words was that Israel would obey the ceasefire call and Hezbollah might not.

But the reality may be that neither side will obey a ceasefire call. The draft resolution would allow Israel to continue “defensive” operations against Hezbollah and for its forces to remain in southern Lebanon. It is doubtful if Israel could, at this stage, accept a ceasefire when Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister, has so little to show to his people for almost four weeks of fighting.

Hezbollah could welcome a ceasefire and declare itself victorious, having stood up to the Israelis longer than any Arab army. But the group has said it would not accept any deal that leaves Israel occupying southern Lebanon. There are face-saving measures available for both sides. If Israel were to secure the release of the two soldiers held by Hezbollah, that would help Mr Olmert persuade the Israeli public the war was justified. If Israel was to hand over Sheba’a Farms, a pocket of land it held after its withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah could claim a symbolic victory. But a deal on either is not in the draft resolution.

Nadim Shehadi, a specialist on Lebanon at the think-tank, Chatham House, was pessimistic. His estimate was that the draft resolution had a “less than 50% chance of success”.

He said the resolution offered a chance to contain the conflict locally but that might be too late. The danger was of a wider regional engagement of Syria and Iran. In that case the Bush administration had two choices: make a deal with Syria, which would be a high price to pay, or go to war.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service