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A surge of anger
Aug 3rd 2006 | BEIRUT
From The Economist print edition

The longer the war goes on, the stronger the Islamists and those who reject peace with Israel are becoming across the region

Cairenes cheering for HizbullahTHE al-Jazeera satellite channel, prime viewing for millions of Arabs, labels this the Sixth War, after the Arab-Israeli conflicts of 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. On the ground it still looks smaller than those earlier conflicts. It pits Israel, the perpetual protagonist, not against massed armour and multiple countries but against a single force which, though seasoned, spirited and armed with rockets, numbers only a few thousand men.

Yet this war has produced a potential for change that is at least as great as those other wars. This is not because the fighting has struck Israel's own cities or because its toll on Lebanon's civilians has been so shockingly high or because it has now, after three weeks, gone on longer than in any Arab-Israeli war since the first one.

Increasingly, this conflict has come to be seen by the combatants as one of survival. For Hizbullah, the aim is not just to bloody the nose of a more powerful adversary but to thwart the perceived evil intention of Israel's staunchest backer, the United States, to dominate the region.

This notion of a wider dimension has taken hold around the region. To many it is a proxy war between Hizbullah's main sponsor, Iran, and America. But it may also herald the re-emergence, after a decades-long trend among Israel's neighbours to accommodate the Jewish state, of a broad rejectionist front, this time inspired by pan-Islamist feeling rather than the pan-Arab nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s.

Anger has risen steadily across the region as the blood flows. This week, in the wake of the slaughter at Qana, it surged to new heights. But Israel, this time, is not the only target of fury. “May God inflict on the children of Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia what He has inflicted on the children of Lebanon,” said a placard brandished by a protester in Beirut, pointing to America's closest Arab allies as complicit, by virtue of silence and inaction, in Israel's crime.

“People [across the region] see Hassan Nasrallah as the leader they've been waiting for for five decades,” says Marwan Kabalan, a Syrian academic, of Hizbullah's turbaned and telegenic chief. With American policy now “in tatters,” he—like many other observers—foresees American influence in the region being rolled right back. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, the first Arab country to make peace with Israel, who now faces daily demonstrations calling for Mr Nasrallah to “destroy Tel Aviv”, speaks of the imminent collapse of any vestige of a peace process.

In Iraq, too, pro-American politicians give warning that, as Lebanon's Shias suffer, their Iraqi brethren may well join Sunnis in a full-scale uprising. Even in stridently Sunni Saudi Arabia, conservative clerics who denounced Hizbullah as an Iranian tool have faced a furious backlash of calls for Muslim unity in jihad.

In Lebanon itself, the large, pro-Western liberal elite is palpably at a loss. Many have left the country, their hopes shattered after being raised by the drama of a year in which a movement with broad support across the many religious groups had united behind calls for peaceful change, and ended years of domination by neighbouring Syria. “We were the only people in the Arab world to truly and honestly believe in the American programme for democracy,” says Osama Safa, a Shia analyst who has been critical of Hizbullah. “Now we've driven into a wall at 150 miles per hour.”

Before the war, Hizbullah had been increasingly isolated in its insistence on maintaining its bellicosity to Israel. With most Lebanese, including many Shias, just beginning to taste the fruits of reconstruction, and with a record summer tourist season in prospect, the Islamists were widely regarded as a dangerous anomaly. Though many respected its toughness and reputation for probity, Hizbullah seemed to promote an agenda that benefited Syria and Iran more than its fellow Lebanese.

Such doubts and fears have not gone, but criticising Hizbullah in public has become a taboo. Commentators concur that, in the short run at least, Israel's attempt to blame Mr Nasrallah for Lebanon's destruction has backfired. Instead, Israel's bombing of bridges, factories and traffic far from the front is seen as indiscriminate revenge. Israeli strikes against the Lebanese army, which represents all sects and has not joined the fighting, are felt as a national humiliation. The wave of northbound refugees—more than 800,000 people, mostly poor Shias, are thought to have been displaced—has prompted an outpouring of cross-sectarian sympathy and charity.

Lebanon's shaky coalition government, hamstrung by sectarianism, has been weakened by its physical impotence in the face of Israel's onslaught and by its failure to win diplomatic support for an immediate, unconditional ceasefire. Many think the prime minister, Fouad Siniora, brave and capable but doomed by too close an association with the West. Even if Hizbullah emerges militarily weaker, it may become more popular and more extreme, empowering those who now condemn Mr Siniora and his allies as traitors.

As for the wider region, whether Hizbullah emerges as victor or vanquished, it has proved an inspirational model for change. “When the dust settles, we'll be facing a new strategic equation, a paradigm shift,” says a gloomy senior Western diplomat. Non-state actors ideologically aligned to Hizbullah, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, may well get stronger. It is precisely because the stakes are so high that a ceasefire has proved so elusive.