This war is different

It all began on July 12, a day after the Mumbai blasts. Overshadowed by the grief at home, it never hit the headlines here. I have wanted to write on it for some time. But I held back hoping the crisis wouldn’t last long and there would be peace.

Peace and West Asia. They are so disparate as cheese and chalk. Like a square peg in round hole, one just doesn’t fit in the other. A lot of chiselling has been going on for nearly half a century, but the edges have only got more jagged.

On July 12, Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon fired rockets into Israel; kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, demanding release of a prisoner. In return, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert described the capture of the soldiers as "an act of war". Israeli planes bombed Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon and troops crossed into southern Lebanon for the first time since the military withdrawal of 2000.

It’s not the first time Israel is getting involved in the sort of situation that it is right now. A violent birth, a violent existence: its history is full of blood; ironically, though the nation is in the midst of a land that spells peace.

The Jewish state has been, to the region, like a foreign particle that the body is trying to expel. But the numerically inferior group has stayed on with single-minded determination. The stay has been long enough for a minority in the area to accept its presence as a fait accompli. But that’s all about it. Blood spills ceaselessly.

There are a few indicators to the fact that this two-week old trauma is much different from what we have seen in the past.

One, every time in the past, when Israeli pursuit of terrorists has had collateral civilian deaths, it heeded the politically correct suggestion and called off the aggression. This time, post-Qana (where 54 people, including 34 children died yesterday), Israeli PM today said it will not cease fire. Air raids are off for two days, but ground offensive supported by air force is on.

Two, this is the first major conflagration in the area post-9/11. Today the troubles, big and small, are no longer isolated phenomena scattered across the globe confined to national boundaries and politics. Regional catalysts have coalesced into a global uprising. The terrorists are well and truly in the open with their intent and methods. The sheer enormity of the conflict shows this isn’t the sort of battle that was waged before.

Three, this Israel-Hezbollah fight is seen as a proxy war between the US and Iran. During the Cold War era, in the conflicts of Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan etc, the US and the USSR were there by proxy. We never had a direct US-USSR conflict, though the world came perilously close to it many times. Much before this, the Spanish Civil War was seen as a precursor for Germany-Italy and the Soviets to gird up for the World War II.

Today, are we on the threshold of something similar?