IN THE end, Ehud Olmert got more or less what he wanted. But things did not quite work out the way he expected them to, and his days as Israel’s prime minister may now be numbered.

Writing in The New Yorker earlier this month, Seymour Hersh cited two sources — a Middle East expert and a US government consultant — as saying that Israeli officials on trips to Washington were seeking a green light for a “bombing campaign in response to the next Hezbollah provocation” well before the border skirmish that sparked the latest bout of Israeli aggression against Lebanon. The Israelis, Hersh was told, “repeatedly pointed to the war in Kosovo as an example of what Israel would try to achieve”. According to the government consultant, the Israelis said to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “You did it in about 70 days, but we need half of that — 35 days.”

Evidently the US and Britain kept the request in mind as they successfully strove to delay a ceasefire resolution at the UN Security Council, despite overwhelming evidence that the Israelis were raining death and destruction predominantly on Lebanese civilians and that children accounted for at least one-third of all casualties. A shaky truce came into force on the 34th day of the conflict, long after it had become clear that the Israelis had been flummoxed by Hezbollah’s resilience: the armed wing of the Shia movement kept a steady barrage of relatively crude rockets flying into northern Israel throughout the war (intriguingly, although Israeli civilians suffered, the majority of casualties were military), amid reports that the most potent weapon in its arsenal — the Iranian Zelzal, reputedly capable of reaching Tel Aviv — was never deployed.

This was a novel experience for Israel: the rain of Katyushas may have helped to underline the official pretence that the assault on Lebanon was part of an existential struggle, but at the same time it shattered the myth of Israeli invincibility. In previous military confrontations with the Arab world, Israel had little trouble in routing its foes within days. The bloody conquest of Lebanon in 1982 succeeded in one of its primary purposes: the PLO was driven out. This time, after nearly five weeks its claim of having substantially degraded Hezbollah’s war-making capabilities is greeted with scepticism even within Israel and is undermined by all the speculation about a second round of warfare. The ceasefire resolution more or less leaves it up to Israel to decide when its forces should leave southern Lebanon, which is supposed to come under the joint control of the Lebanese army and a heavily boosted UNIFIL, although the composition of the latter remains unclear, as does its mandate. Neither the army nor the UN force has any interest in trying to disarm Hezbollah: Lebanon’s prime minister, Fouad Siniora, says it is a resistance movement rather than a militia, hence Beirut is not obliged to strip it of its weaponry under Security Council resolution 1559 of 2004.

Before the recent conflagration, it was widely assumed that Hezbollah was a more formidable fighting force than the Lebanese army. Having withstood the Israeli assault, it has made itself even more unassailable. One of the reasons behind Israel’s targeting of Lebanese infrastructure and residential areas was to stir loathing for Hezbollah among Sunnis and Christians. Even this part of the plot backfired: an opinion poll some two weeks into the conflict suggested that up to 80 per cent of Christians and Sunnis (and 100 per cent of Shias) backed Hezbollah’s actions.

Back in the 1980s, Israel attracted collaborators — particularly the Phalange militias that pulled the triggers at Sabra and Chatila under Israeli supervision, but also among other sections of the community that resented the PLO’s presence. That scenario is unlikely to be repeated. As a fighter for Amal, a rival Shia party, told a reporter: “I hate them, those Hezbollah; they are arrogant and they believe they are holy because they fought Israel. Look at them walking the street as if they have liberated Jerusalem ... But if your town is attacked by the Israelis, everyone will fight, whether they are Amal, the communists or the nationalists.”

The terrorist label applied to Hezbollah by the US and Israel has never had much currency in Lebanon, and over the past month the organisation’s stock has inevitably risen throughout the Arab world, not least in countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, whose governments (all of which, not coincidentally, enjoy close relations with Washington) lashed out against Hezbollah at the outset of the conflict. The organisation’s cadres are now at the forefront of reconstruction efforts and are offering generous (presumably Iranian-funded) handouts to all those whose dwellings were reduced to rubble. It has been suggested that Hassan Nasrallah’s regional stature has risen to a level not witnessed since the days of Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Whether or not that is an exaggeration, there can be little question that Hezbollah bears no more than a passing resemblance to the Islamist monolith of popular western caricature: at the political level it operates in alliance with Christians, Sunnis and communists. Charles Glass, who was kidnapped by Hezbollah back in 1987, writes in the latest edition of the London Review of Books: “In the interval between its founding in 1982 and the victory of 2000 ... it jettisoned its early rhetoric about making Lebanon an Islamic republic and spoke of Christians, Muslims and Druze living in harmony. When it put up candidates for parliament, some of those on its electoral list were Christians.” Glass is also impressed by the fact that in 2000, when Israeli troops finally vacated southern Lebanon, Hezbollah did not murder the collaborators it captured: it handed them over to the government in Beirut.

Meanwhile, in an interview earlier this month with the Turkish Labour Party daily Evrensel, Nasrallah acknowledged: “What most of the Muslim states could not do has been done by [Hugo] Chavez, by the withdrawal of Venezuela’s ambassador to Israel.” He went on say: “We salute the leaders and the peoples of Latin America. They have resisted the American bandits heroically and been a source of moral strength to us. They are guiding the way for the oppressed peoples. Go and wander around our streets — you will witness how our people have embraced Chavez and Ernesto Che Guevara. Nearly in every house you will come across posters of Che or Chavez.”

These sentiments, again, don’t quite conform with the Islamist identikit, notwithstanding Nasrallah’s clerical garb. At the same time, lest they be too readily seduced by such images, leftists would do well to remember that while the Tudeh party and other socialist groups participated enthusiastically in the anti-Shah movement in Iran alongside the clergy, once the mullahs had consolidated their power, it was the secular radicals who bore the brunt of the Islamist dictatorship’s repression.

That’s an unlikely scenario in Lebanon, of course, and Hezbollah isn’t quite as tightly controlled by Tehran or Damascus as George W. Bush would have us believe. It is interesting that in the same Turkish interview, Nasrallah — coincidentally or otherwise — invokes the Israeli-favoured Yugoslav analogy by saying: “The imperialists of the West are seeking to make a second Kosovo out of Lebanon and our region.” Intriguingly, Olmert, when faced with mild European criticism of his army’s actions, hurled Kosovo back at his detractors, citing a hugely inflated number of casualties.

Olmert’s arrogance may have been bolstered by the fact that almost all Israelis (including some prominent “doves”) supported their country’s aggression against a weak neighbour. Many of them are now demanding his head along with that of the blustering defence minister, Amir Peretz, for their failure to score a victory. Unfortunately, the likeliest alternative to Olmert and Peretz is even worse than this scandalous pair: Likud’s Binyamin Netanyahu. An enlightening explication of the broad Israeli mentality, meanwhile, can be found in an essay by Yitzhak Laor in the aforementioned London Review of Books. “We now appear to be a lynch mob culture,” he writes, noting that “the army — which has always been the core of our state — determines the shape of our lives and the nature of our memories”. Although he does not designate it as such, Laor’s scathing analysis captures the essence of an entrenched fascist state.

In the early days of the war, some analysts ascribed Hezbollah’s provocation to a desire on Iran’s part to divert attention from its nuclear ambitions. What’s even more likely is that one of the factors behind the timing of the war was Israel’s anxiety to avert the international gaze from the atrocities it continues to commit in Gaza. That ploy may have worked temporarily, but Hezbollah’s attitude has once again served to underline the fact that the region will remain mired in mistrust and violence for as long as the Palestinian question remains unresolved. If Condi Rice indeed wants to witness the birth pangs of a new Middle East, it shouldn’t be hard to work out where to start. Unfortunately, in some respects not much has changed in the 40 years since Nasser described the US as “the chief defender of Israel” and Britain as “America’s lackey”.

If the US was counting on Israel to provide a template for an attack on Iran, it’ll have to think again. In unconvincing “mission accomplished” mode, Bush says Hezbollah has lost. He’s welcome to add that to his list of fantasies. One can only hope, though, that he won’t have the impertinence to look at the Lebanese and wonder out aloud, “Why do they hate us?”

E-mail: mahirali1@gmail.com