My criticism of Israel is this. That I suspect a strong leader ( which Ehud Olmert is not ) would have refused to be provoked by the ambush and kidnapping on the Lebanese border. Terrorists operate by provoking their targets into over-reaction, and into starting wars they cannot possibly win. The only worthwhile victory for Israel in this war would be one that involved a renewed Israeli occupation up to the Litani river, the very arrangement Israel abandoned in 2000 and which I think is impossible now. No UN force would dare take on Hezbollah, and a buffer zone under UN control would quickly fill up with Hezbollah rocket sites once more. America and France have learned the hard way, by heavy casualties, that Western troops in Lebanon are more likely to be targets than enforcers.

Then there is the issue of proportion. I hate to agree with the liberals and the creepy foes of Israel who say that this war is ‘disproportionate’, but the fact that these people are what they are, doesn’t mean they are wrong. I was against the bombing of Belgrade, and the bombing of Baghdad (unlike Jack Straw, who managed to stay in the government drawing a cabinet salary while these things were going on, and whose objections to Israeli bombing are therefore worthless whining).

I was against them because I have in recent years found out what aerial bombing actually does. I grew up in a Britain which cheerfully accepted that it was right to bomb Germany to rubble, because they had started it. I entirely agreed with this view for many years. Then I began to read the full details of what happened when our bombs fell. I was particularly struck by the repeated accounts of the mad women, made insane by the loss of their homes and families, who roamed about Germany carrying their dead babies in suitcases; also by the reports of adult human figures, baked in airless cellars for so long during the Dresden firestorm that they were shrunk to the size of children; and of the great clouds of bluebottles gathered over the ruins of Hamburg after an RAF raid, so devastating that there was nobody to clear the wreckage or bury the huge numbers of civilian dead beneath the rubble. We may not have known then. We certainly know now. This is not a form of warfare that a Christian country can use. ~Peter Hitchens

On the question of proportionality and the use of aerial bombing of civilian centers, there are few better statements than this one.  It is such a relief to read a serious response to these events after the stacks of recent columns justifying the mass murders of Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, and on and on, or the ones that will keep returning to the fact that Hizbullah, a guerrilla group, hides among civilian populations, as if this freed other people of their obligations.  If a hostage-taker has a roomful of hostages, we do not typically regard it as successful or really excusable if the police storm the building and get many of the hostages killed in the process; if they cannot even manage to get the hostage-taker in the process, it is even more difficult to defend.  We wouldn’t stand for it in our own cities, so why should any of us apologise for it when one of our allies does it in another country? 

I give Mr. Hitchens quite a lot of credit for retaining his ability to discern and maintain the difference between having strong sympathy for Israel (he is a self-proclaimed Zionist) and giving approval, tacit or otherwise, to the methods of the Israeli campaign in Lebanon.  He applies a moral principle to this campaign as he has done to others in the past and shows an admirable consistency.