TYRE: Unlike good children, Israel’s drones are heard but not seen. Officially called unmanned aerial vehicles, these ‘eyes in the sky’ circle south Lebanon day and night. Between six and 12 feet long, they are little more than cameras and a motor.

They usually fly too high to be spotted, but they make a noise so loud you cannot forget it, like a swarm of wasps on a summer afternoon. Their engines give the impression of being souped up, both as a warning to any Hezbollah rocket-launcher that Big Brother has you in his sights but also as a device to intimidate and madden an entire population — what torturers call ‘white noise’. Glued to the monitors that display live pictures from these irritating machines, Israel’s targeteers behold a fearsome picture. Whether it touches their consciences I do not know, but what unfolds before them is a tableau of massive devastation. Forget, for a moment, the columns of cars with refugees streaming north. Ignore, if you will, the corpses rotting in the open. Just concentrate on the physical inventory — roads disfigured by bomb craters, towns made uninhabitable, shopping parades gutted, houses collapsed like souffles gone horribly wrong.

For two days this week Israel offered a ‘humanitarian’ pause. Anyone foolish enough not to have heeded earlier warnings to leave the area would have a last chance to do so. Taking advantage of this kind truce, reporters poured into the villages as shellshocked people emerged from basements to search frantically for transport out of the area.

South Lebanon is classic diaspora country. Its economy no longer depends on local agriculture. Many of its houses are designed to impress, with ornate curved balconies and Grecian pillars. A large number were still half-built when the Israeli onslaught struck. They speak of money sent back by emigrants who started to make fortunes in business in west Africa almost a hundred years ago. Lebanon’s 14-year civil war, which began in 1976, sent new waves of people to Australia, western Europe and North America, and they invested in these homes that advertised success. No wonder so many Lebanese were here this summer, as parents brought children to get to know cousins and grandparents. They truly had holidays from hell — not the tabloid version, cruise ships with blocked toilets or shoddy Costa villas adjacent to construction sites. Families from Montreal, Malmo or Melbourne suddenly found themselves under a relentless rain of bombs, quaking in terror in underground shelters and wondering if their sanity would last as long as their food.

Now these people are dead or fled. The area has been emptied. The nearer to the Israeli border, the heavier the damage. In towns and villages such as Bint Jbeil, Ainata and Aitaroun scarcely any building is intact. In the West Bank and Gaza, Israel has been regularly criticised for demolishing the houses of suicide bombers to punish their families. In south Lebanon it has been conducting house demolition and collective punishment on a gargantuan scale.

Whether or not Israeli forces seek to occupy a strip of this territory north of the Israeli border over the coming days, they have already made it impossible for Lebanese to live in it for years to come. That much is certain, even though other consequences of this invasion are still shrouded in the fog of peace.

Hezbollah will emerge stronger in the Lebanese balance of political force, but not overwhelmingly so, and perhaps only for a short time. Tyre, for example, is run by Hezbollah’s forerunner, the Amal party. In the 2004 election Hezbollah took 15 per cent of the vote compared to Amal’s 75 per cent. Its military success in getting Israel to end its previous occupation in 2000 did not transfer to the ballot box. In the Tyre region 39 villages are Amal and 17 Hezbollah.

Hezbollah’s fierce resistance to Israeli ground troops has won it new admirers across the Lebanese spectrum, but in the villages civilians saw little evidence of Hezbollah helping the displaced. As families with children and old people struggled across rubble to flee this week, Hezbollah’s able-bodied young cadres did not assist the evacuation, though they could be seen standing about in wary groups in the less ruined towns.

In the wider Arab world this is irrelevant detail. Hezbollah is already the hero, a desperately longed-for proof of success. However this war ends, Israel’s image of invincibility has gone. Of course, the same was said in October 1973 in the hours after Egyptian troops crossed the Suez canal, surprising the Israeli army. Days later, Israel regained the upper hand.

No such tide-turning will happen this time. Even if Israel were to kill or capture Hezbollah’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, and destroy every Hezbollah rocket store, Hezbollah has won by holding out for three weeks and inflicting serious disruption and pain on Israel.

Can Hezbollah’s victory in Lebanon be the harbinger of other Arab victories to come? Unlikely. South Lebanon is rolling guerilla country, primed for ambushes. The cramped urban slums of Gaza are no match. The West Bank is more like Lebanon, but Israel’s control over the import of weaponry as well as the presence of hundreds of thousands of determined settler-occupiers give Palestinians only one military option, a slow and costly war of attrition. Negotiations are a better way.

Hezbollah’s victory may do less damage to Israel than to other Arab regimes. Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Jordan — and even in the medium term Syria, which has backed and armed Hezbollah — will feel the shockwaves running through the Arab street.

Israel’s Lebanese adventure, and the Bush-Blair folly in supporting it, have done the West damage that will last for many, many years.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service