Andrew Sullivan sums up an outstanding column by Bernard-Henri Levy on the Lebanese/Israeli war with this observation:
For the first time, we're not really discussing a conflict over land or territory or even the treatment of individuals. We're not talking about Arab nationalism. We're not talking about the Palestinians. We're not even talking about the political existence of the Jewish state. We're talking about the divine mandate that the Islamists believe they are following, an eschatological struggle toward the End-Times, where the Jews must be destroyed as a people and as a sovereign state in order for the Apocalypse to occur.
Levy says many good things in his essay, but one of the most important is this:
...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.
Unless Israel completely defeats Hezbollah in Lebanon Hezbollah will just grow stronger and more determined to extirpate the Jews in the Middle East.
