Common sense has prevailed. Most of the Israeli troops who were sent into south Lebanon last weekend have already retreated, and the last thousand or two will be back inside the Israeli frontier by next weekend. They are not waiting for the Lebanese army and the promised international peacekeeping force to come in and “disarm Hizbollah.” They are getting the hell out.

The last-minute decision to airlift Israeli troops deep into the 400 square miles of Lebanon made good sense politically. That way, Israel didn’t have to fight its way in and take the inevitable heavy casualties. It just exploited its total control of the air to fly its troops into areas not actively defended by Hizbollah just before the ceasefire, to create the impression that it had defeated the guerrillas and established control over southern Lebanon.

However, those isolated pockets of troops actually controlled nothing of value, and they were surrounded by undefeated Hizbollah fighters on almost every side. Hizbollah could not have resisted for long the temptation to attack the more exposed Israeli units, perhaps even forcing some to surrender. So the Israeli troops are coming out now in order to give Hizbollah no easy targets.

General Dan Halutz, the Israeli chief of staff, was right to make this decision, but it removes the last remote possibility that Israel can extract any political gains from the military stalemate in southern Lebanon. Hizbollah says it has no intention of disarming, and Lebanon says that it will not try to disarm Hizbollah.

There will probably be some kind of fudge in the end that allows at least token numbers of Lebanese army troops and a somewhat expanded UN force to operate in southern Lebanon, but Hizbollah is staying put and so are its weapons. Over a thousand people killed, much of Lebanon’s infrastructure destroyed, much damage in northern Israel too, and, at the end of it, Israel has achieved none of its objectives.

Advantage hardline

Israel’s assault on Hizbollah was as much a “war of choice” as the US invasion of Iraq. Seymour Hersh claims that the Bush administration approved it months ago, and the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a senior Israeli officer made presentations on the planned operation to selected Western audiences over a year ago.

But it didn’t work. The Israeli army has effectively been fought to a standstill by a lightly armed but highly trained and disciplined guerrilla force, and there will be major repercussions at home and abroad.

Israel’s humiliation might be a blessing in disguise if it persuaded enough Israeli voters that exclusive reliance on military force to smash and subdue their Arab neighbours is a political dead-end, but there is little chance of that. The Israeli politician likeliest to benefit from this mess is Benjamin Netanyahu, hardest of hard-liners, who flamboyantly quit the Likud Party last year in protest at Ariel Sharon’s policy of pulling out of the occupied Gaza Strip.

Much graver, in the long run, is the erosion of Israel’s myth of military invincibility. It is always more economical to frighten your enemies into submission than to fight them, but Arabs have been losing their fear of Israel of late. This defeat will accelerate the process, and there are a lot more Arabs than there are Israelis.

Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, summed up the matter brutally but accurately when he said that Israel is at “an historic crossroads. Either it moves towards peace and gives back (Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese) rights (to Israeli-occupied lands), or it faces chronic instability until (an Arab) generation comes and puts an end to the problem.” Of course, he didn’t mention that an Arab military victory over Israel would also effectively put an end to the Arabs, since Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons.