in a military stalemate, and for Israel, that was a political and diplomatic loss.

Since the Yom Kippur war, nearly 35 years ago, Israel has been seen as an invincible first world military power that could easily thwart its backward and impoverished neighbors. In terms of military power, Israel’s relations with her neighbors were pretty much defined by the images of young men hurling rocks at tanks, a hopeless show of defiance. Israel pretty much attacked, invaded, and occupied as they pleased, bowing only to diplomatic pressures.

Israel could afford to make some concessions diplomatically. Militarily, it was Godzilla vs. Bambi. Israel would occasionally crush a town or two in Lebanon or Palestine to show that if the kids wanted to throw rocks at the tanks and risk scratching the paint, there might be consequences.

It used to be the other way around, of course. From 1948 through to after the Six Days’ War, the Israelis were seen as a plucky, brave little band of Holocaust survivors who had come to their ancient homeland to build a western Democracy among the backward, Soviet-leaning Musselmen. That there was considerable truth in the imagery didn’t hurt, of course. Plucky underdogs always played well with the public in much of the West, and Israel could always count on widespread American popular support.

But Israel went from underdog to overdog, and the other big reason to support Israel in the middle east, the Soviet Union, dried up and blew away. Something to do with unwise occupations of lands in West Asia, and growing anger among Moslem dissidents. Nothing to do with us, of course.

So Israel had lost much of its popular support, and if the US government was solidly in their corner. Nobody in Europe was. Over the past five years, the US had lost much of its once-mighty diplomatic clout, especially with moderate Arab nations such as Egypt.

Even with unparalleled support from Washington, Israel’s diplomatic and political status was considerably weakened from what it had been before. It knew it couldn’t count on any special assistance from the world at large.

Then, too, Israel didn’t feel it needed any. Between vast military superiority and the friendliest government in history in Washington, Israel figured it could pick a fight, spank Lebanon, Hezbollah and the Palestinians in one fell swoop, and have the Arab tide swept back for another 15 years before the UN could even react.

But it hasn’t worked out that way. Not this time.

The ferocity of the Israeli attacks on Lebanon brought a world outcry, including in the United States. Even those who felt that Hezbollah had legitimately precipitated an Israeli attack were disturbed by the Israeli use of bombs on civilian populations.

That wasn’t the worst of it, from the Israeli vantage point.

Not only did Israel fail to sweep Hezbollah out of existence with a few well-timed surgical strikes (aka “The Donald Rumsfeld fantasy”), but Hezbollah hit back, hard and effectively, with small, highly portable rocket launcher units, firing rockets deep into the heart of Israel. For the first time in over 30 years, Israel encountered a foe that not only could fight back, but was hitting Israeli cities themselves and doing significant damage to civilians. Israel couldn’t even raise a convincing cry against what normally would be considered a war crime, since they had been doing the same thing on an even bigger scale for several days, leveling much of Beirut’s downtown area.

Hezbollah not only hit back fairly hard, but gained considerable stature in the Arab world, and forced the west, America in particular, to realize that in this day of ever more sophisticated anti-personnel weaponry, pure military superiority isn’t enough.

It was a strategic and tactical blunder on Israel’s part, this war with Hezbollah, and the reason for the last minute savagery of the Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon is a last-ditch attempt to do as much damage as possible to Hezbollah before the cease fire goes into effect. They are hoping against hope that their opponent will at least be sporting a shiner the next day.

That probably isn’t going to happen, and instead, this last-minute escalation of the savagery will just sharpen world disgust with the Israeli government.

It’s been suggested in many quarters that the US, in alliance with Israel, has adopted a policy of sowing as much chaos and dislocation as possible in the middle east in order to increase their hegemony over the region. For Israel, it would be survival. For the US, it would be oil, and for some god-struck types, a helping hand to God, who apparently needs severe unrest in the Middle East before he can shut the universe down and start a new project. Certainly that would explain the seeming incompetence of the American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, where the Americans seemed to go out of their way to antagonize the subject peoples.

It used to be that Resistances and guerrilla movements were ineffective and ineffectual. But that was before cheap, reliable communication, and portable weaponry of incredible power. Now a resistance of several hundred so equipped can stop a first-world nation in its tracks.

Political hegemony in the Middle East would doubtlessly work to the advantage of both the US and Israel, but the notion of imposing it through military might is an obsolete approach.

Maybe it’s time to consider the notion that if the Palestinians, the Lebanese, the Syrians and others have enough of an economy to breed general satisfaction, they won’t need shoulder-mounted rocket launchers.

People with something to lose rarely do.