Marcus Wood

Lebanon -now what?

I am scheduled to make a fact-finding trip to Israel in November to see for myself the situation in the Middle East.

I am not currently a member of the Conservative Friends of Israel group who are organising the trip but I am generally sympathetic to Israels plight and believe that they have a right to defend themselves from attack.

However the recent Lebanon war in my view exceeds what is a fair and rightful response to the attack from Hezbollah. The best analogy I can think of is that if you had neighbours whose kids were throwing stones at your cat, would you be entitled to break into their house, trash their furniture and beat up the parents?

How would the world have reacted if, during the 1970's IRA attacks in London, the RAF had bombed bridges and power stations in Dublin?

In the modern age of 24 hour tv news overwhelming brute force is often less useful than winning the war of hearts and minds. Unfortunately Hezbollah have come out of this as the underdog heroes and are now stronger and more powerful than ever, in my view.

The shame of it is that the Israeli's, like the Americans after 9/11, have over-reacted exactly as the Arab extremists intended making the terrorists much stronger and free democracies weaker.

Perhaps the fact that the Israeli's appear to have lost this war might in the long run serve a useful purpose. The realisation that having the strongest army in the region is not enough to beat a determined unsurgency might persuade the Israelis that they have to consider occasionally turning the other cheek when provoked by their enemies.

I will know more when I return.