I set the phone down and ordered a cup of tea. It was brought not by my usual waitress, but by the café’s owner, who wore a grim expression, introduced himself hurriedly as Raed, and—to my great surprise—pulled a chair up next to mine and sat down.

“Excuse me for bothering you, but I can tell you’re not from Beirut, and you may not know what has just happened.”

I certainly didn’t know, but felt—as one always feels in Beirut—that the news couldn’t possibly be good.

“Pierre Gemayel has been shot, in the middle of the day. Can you imagine? I recommend that you go home and stay there. It will be hours before your phone works again—the government turns off the mobile-phone service on these occasions. The important thing is to get straight home. This will mean war, you know.”

I can be a bit slow on the uptake where political topics are concerned, but discussing politics with a Beiruti always makes me feel especially dull-witted. Politics in Lebanon is often a life-or-death matter, and so naturally everyone takes a keen interest. Childhood nights crouched in bomb shelters, gauging whether the rockets were incoming or outgoing and decades spent following alliances and assassinations in Lebanon’s prominent families have a way of honing native political intelligence to a very fine edge.

I made a clumsy attempt to piece together the implications of this news, as the Lebanese do so instinctively and immediately. Pierre Gemayel was a government minister, I knew, but already that seemed beside the point. Gemayel was from one of the country’s important Maronite families, the grandson of the founder of the right-wing Christian militia, the Phalange. This meant that he was a symbol of Christian power in Lebanon, which meant that his enemies were many, which meant that those wanting him dead could be … well, almost anyone, really.

I turned to Raed. “Who do you think would have the most to gain from Gemayel’s death?”

Raed shrugged. “Almost anyone, really. The point is that our government is being destroyed. This is nearly on the level of the Hariri assassination. This will almost certainly mean civil war. He was shot, can you imagine?”

Pierre Gemayel was shot. It took me another hour and several more conversations with Lebanese friends to grasp the import of this fact. Here in Beirut, arranging a car bombing is seen as a relatively easy way to murder an enemy. But shooting a man on a crowded street in the middle of a sunny afternoon?

That takes daring. That telegraphs insouciance, power wielded in complete confidence. The message to Lebanon’s frail, Western-backed ruling coalition couldn’t have been clearer: You are no longer in control.

Beirut is a diverse and profoundly class-ridden city; the newcomer feels it immediately. But in peacetime, these things seem not to matter. The people seem cheerful, almost supernaturally exuberant. They enjoy watching each other and parsing the differences among them, the small matters that divide neighborhoods and religious groups. The things they mention usually sound to my ear like harmless snobberies, but I wonder how the city would feel if battle lines were drawn as they once were, during the long civil war, when individual neighborhoods became strongholds.

Beirut in the fall smells precisely like Paris in a damp June—there’s an ineffable, very French smell of motor oil and detergents, butchers’ shops and cigarettes. It smells European and yet looks unmistakably Middle Eastern. For all its diversity, it is a very compact city, and I walk almost everywhere. It takes me about 20 minutes to get from my apartment in western Beirut to Martyr’s Square downtown, where the big demonstrations are always held. It takes no more than a half hour to walk over to friends’ apartments in Achrafieh, the predominantly Christian eastern Beirut neighborhood.

It’s fun examining the differences between the neighborhoods, which up till now have seemed matters of mere sociological interest, often sweetly comical and occasionally sad.

Bourj Hammoud is an image of the striving, jovial Armenian jewelers who fixed my watch. Hamra is the saj bread seller who always corrects my accent in Arabic so that I “don’t have to sound like a Syrian.”

Haret Hreik—or “Hezbollah Central,” as my friend Andrew calls it—brings to mind a certain very enthusiastic taxi driver who took me on a tour of the piles of rubble that were the result of multiple Israeli bombing raids; in the garbage that had collected on the site of one destroyed building, I noticed a Pekingese looking aristocratic and improbably clean as it trotted around among the boulders of smashed concrete.

And then there’s Achrafieh, which in its self-regard and Francophilic pretensions is Beirut’s greatest gift to the amateur sociologist in search of amusement. The image of Achrafieh that sticks most in my mind is of a young housewife I once saw, impeccably coiffed and chatting gaily on her cell phone as she walked out of the Monoprix grocery store. A tiny, elderly Filipina maid trudged a few paces behind her with the goods; the maid’s dress—blue gingham with a lace-trimmed white apron—looked weirdly girlish framed by those stringy brown arms and wizened face. I had briefly mistaken the maid for the woman’s child, the gingham for a summer-school uniform.

Whether the Gemayel assassination will turn out to have been the opening salvo in a renewed civil war remains to be seen, of course. But more than half of the Lebanese people I speak to in an average day seem to think so, and since Lebanon is widely seen as the canary in the mine of the greater Middle East—regional countries from Iran to Syria to Saudi Arabia all have political interests in Lebanon, and the collapse of the government in Lebanon will have implications far beyond its borders—this is very bad news for the region as a whole.

Marwan, who runs the shop where I usually buy my lunchtime sandwiches, asks me to correct his English.

“I don’t give a shit about this government we have now—there is a nicer way to say that, isn’t there?”

“You could say ‘I don’t care about this government.’”

“Oh, yes—all my English is from the movies. I mean, I don’t care about this government—but the problem is that if Lebanon falls now, we maybe take all the rest of the Middle East down with us.”

Katherine Zoepf is working on a book about young women in the Middle East for the Penguin Press.

But even if Mr. Annan succeeds and the Israeli blockade is lifted, it will still come too late for Jack Yacoubian, a Lebanese Armenian goldsmith that I met in Amman yesterday. Mr. Yacoubian, who is in his early 30’s, has spent his entire life in Bourj Hammoud, Beirut’s Armenian enclave. He recently lost his job with a large Lebanese jewelry company because the Israeli blockade has made it impossible for his employers to ship their products to overseas customers, mainly in the Persian Gulf countries; about 170 employees were laid off, he said.

“I have lost my work; I have lost everything,” Mr. Yacoubian said. “Many of us Armenians are jewelers, and our business has been ruined. Our boss tried to help us; he paid all of us out of his own pocket for a whole month, even though he couldn’t sell anything. But after that it was all over. He finally had to let us go.”

When I met him in Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport early yesterday morning, Mr. Yacoubian was on his way to seek his fortune in Bogotá, Colombia, where he has friends that he believes may be able to help him to find a new job. He doubts that he will be coming back to Beirut any time very soon.

“I will give it two months, three months, in Colombia, and then I will see what is the situation in Beirut again,” Mr. Yacoubian said. “But I do not feel very hopeful now. I think that Lebanon has many difficulties still ahead.”

Whatever promises to aid Lebanon or to support its troops near the Israeli border that Mr. Annan succeeds in extracting from Arab leaders this week, rebuilding Lebanon’s economy will take a very long time. Many highly educated or specially skilled Lebanese like Mr. Yacoubian, even including some of those who stayed throughout the war, are now making very painful and personal choices: about whether to stay in their country, or to seek greater stability and better opportunities overseas.

Many Lebanese who fled during their country’s long civil war had returned in recent years, and thanks in large part to their skills, energies and investments, Beirut had once again become a thriving Mediterranean capital. But many middle and upper-class Lebanese have dual passports, and extended families abroad. They have ambitions for themselves and their families that are not necessarily rooted in Lebanon, and they have options.

“How many times in your life can you rebuild everything?” a middle-aged Lebanese woman asked me the other week in Damascus. “Two times, three times maybe? You rebuild your home, your business two or three times. And after that maybe you say, that’s enough, and you find a home someplace else.”

A extraordinarily cosmopolitan people, many Lebanese, particularly the educated elite, are asking similarly agonized questions these days, trying to figure out whether the ceasefire will last, trying to decide whether they can bear to start all over again in the midst of such a tenuous peace. Loving your country is all very well, they say, but what good is patriotism in the face of domestic factionalism and the constant threat of Israeli attack? What sort of crazy devotion would make an educated, ambitious young person forsake other opportunities in order to stay in such a place?

In Beirut last week, and among the groups of Lebanese who remain in Damascus and Amman in recent days, I’ve heard these questions asked constantly. How the majority will eventually decide to answer them will have a huge effect on Lebanon’s prospects for a speedy recovery.

Among those Lebanese who have already resolved to stay, there is naturally some resentment of those who are on the fence. A young university professor that I met in Beirut last week spoke witheringly of his privileged students, most of whom had fled to Europe or the United States with the onset of Israeli air strikes, and some of whom have said that they don’t plan to return.

“These kids are rich,” the professor told me bitterly. “That means they have the chance to decide whether or not they are Lebanese.”

For parents, the questions are even more difficult. It is impossible to spend much time in Lebanon these days without hearing a great deal about the effects that the war has had on Lebanese children, about the unusual tearfulness and aggression shown by even normally even-tempered young children. A Lebanese friend, Patrick, spoke of his decision to send his 10-year-old daughter to stay with relatives in Europe during the worst of the fighting, and then his eventual decision to bring her home again, despite some relatives’ urgings that he educate her abroad.

“These children, this generation, knew nothing of war,” Patrick said. “When I was a teenager, we used to go out dancing, and we’d hear explosions. We’d leave the club for a few minutes, pull people out of the rubble and take them to the hospital, and then go right back to drink and dance. We didn’t think anything of it. This was normal life for us.

“I had really thought that for my daughter it would be different,” Patrick continued. “I felt angry when the fighting began, and I decided to send her abroad, so that she wouldn’t see this. But I’ve decided to bring her home. She will start the school year here, whatever happens. She is Lebanese, and this fighting, these bombings, are her heritage. She is 10 years old; she is old enough to understand.”

But even before the investigators begin their work, a chorus of politicians and experts have started to debate whether Israel’s fight against Palestinian suicide bombers over the last six years has distracted the military from preparing for more powerful foes like Hezbollah and its Iranian patron.

“This is going to be the first and most sensitive issue that’s going to be investigated,’’ said Ran Cohen, a member of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee from the left-wing Meretz party. “There is no shadow of a doubt that the most influential factor in the Israel Defense Forces’ unsuccessful performance against Hezbollah is that, over the last 10 years, the army is more like a police force rather than a combat army.’’

The discussion could show the costs of Israel’s four-decade occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—where the recent withdrawal of Israeli troops has led to a situation bordering on chaos—to be even direr than the public has previously realized.

Over the last six years, Israelis have come to accept the inevitability of a Palestinian state, but the justification for it has been framed mainly in terms of a demographic danger—that is, the peril of retaining control over a rapidly expanding population of four million Arabs by a state with a majority of five million Jews.

And even though former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon cited security as a second justification for withdrawing from the Gaza Strip unilaterally, the price of Israel’s occupation has never been framed so bluntly in terms of a zero-sum trade-off against threats from outside the country.

“Israel’s national security at this point has three theaters that are a constant source of concern and in need of resources: the Iranian nuclear threat, the northern border with Lebanon and Syria, and the Palestinian one,” said Gidi Grinstein, the president of the Reut Institute, a Tel Aviv think tank. “The blanket is short, and it’s a matter of priorities. Israel’s effort to end its control over the Palestinian population has lagged, at a huge cost to national security. From the perspective of the military, the presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is a given because of the demand of the political leadership.’’

During the course of the month-long war in Lebanon, there were countless stories from Israeli soldiers about how Hezbollah’s guerrillas—with sophisticated arms and training from Iran—posed a far more difficult challenge than they were used to in the West Bank. The common theme was that younger soldiers whose only combat experience came in the West Bank or Gaza didn’t perform as well as reservists who had previously served in Lebanon.

Now, military experts are actually starting to worry for the first time about whether the I.D.F. is ready to face Iran or Syria in battle.

Writing in the Haaretz newspaper, veteran Israeli military journalist Ze’ev Schiff suggested that Israel must redefine Iran—a nuclear power in the making—as its top security concern rather than the Palestinians. By focusing on road checkpoints and protecting Jewish settlers in the West Bank, the military’s capabilities have eroded relative to its state of preparedness in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 1982 Lebanon War.

“We are in need of a strategic revolution. We have to determine that the first and primary front is the battle to prevent the existential threat. This means the Palestinian front and everything related to it must be the second front. The most recent military confrontation in Lebanon demonstrated that being overly preoccupied with the Palestinian front caused us to neglect the threat posed by Hezbollah.’’

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently shelved his controversial plan for a unilateral withdrawal from major portions of the West Bank as his government struggles for political survival in the wake of the Lebanon war. At the same time, three ministers recently called for Israel to renew peace talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

The zero-sum argument is not without its critics. It has been criticized by military experts like Yaakov Amidror, who said that Israel’s army needs to be ready to face security threats on all three fronts at any given moment. Fighting Hamas and Islamic Jihad is just as important as being ready for Hezbollah, said Mr. Amidror, a former general who headed the army’s planning branch.

“It’s like saying after broadcasting World Cup, your television channel is not ready to cope with political news,” said Mr. Amidror, a fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. “It’s like saying we have a one-mission army. It’s nonsense. A war is a war is war.’’

But the much-discussed potential conflict against Iran would be significantly different than any of Israel’s military confrontations, present or past, analysts say. Facing an aspiring nuclear power lying 500 miles beyond its borders, Israel will rely relatively more on air power and high-tech military equipment like the Arrow missile, a $2 billion system aimed at intercepting ballistic missiles.

Analysts point out that preparing for such a war raises a wholly separate set of challenges apart from how to train infantry and ground troops.

But ultimately, there’s only a limited amount of shekels in the Israeli military budget. That may explain why Israel’s military asked the government to double its budget for next year.

Beyond that, experts say, Israel may not have the option of focusing resources on Iran at the expense of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Ephraim Kam, a fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, agreed with critics who say that Israel neglected Hezbollah because of its focus on the West Bank and Gaza, but warned that the militants in the Palestinian territories could import Hezbollah-style tactics.

“The Palestinian problem will still be a main problem, especially if more radical Palestinian groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad will draw lessons from the fighting with Hezbollah,’’ said Mr. Kam. “We are going to find a Lebanon-ization of the arena in the Gaza Strip.’’

As if summing up the quandary, Mr. Grinstein agreed that Israel couldn’t afford to ignore the security challenges posed by Palestinian militants—even as he said that he thought its priorities should be “Iran No. 1, Iran No. 2 and Iran No. 3.’’

It’s a “no-brainer,’’ he argued, that an exit strategy from the West Bank would help Israel better prepare for Iran and Hezbollah. But after the collapse of the Camp David peace negotiations in 2000 and a Gaza withdrawal that gave way to rocket attacks and a soldier’s kidnapping, it is unclear what that strategy should be.

“You have to point to other viable ways in which we could end control over the Palestinian population,’’ said Mr. Grinstein. “In the absence of a viable alternative, criticism is not a serious option.’’

Of course, I can’t speak firsthand about the sound of the bombing raids. I came to Beirut last Monday afternoon, the first day of this U.N.-brokered cease-fire, traveling by taxi from Damascus with my friend Andrew. The trip from Damascus to Beirut is usually a two- or three-hour trip, crossing at Masnaa, on Lebanon’s eastern border. But the roads and bridges that make this crossing possible had been destroyed beyond easy repair, so like everyone else we took the long way round, circling up past the Syrian city of Homs and down into Lebanon from the north.

Driving into Lebanon these days, the visitor quickly becomes a connoisseur of Israeli bridge-destruction techniques. We passed bridges that had been punctured by a single circular hole, no bigger than the footprint of a Volvo sedan (local boys told us excitedly about the unlucky “resistance leader” who had been crossing one bridge at that exact spot when an Israeli drone found him); others were so thoroughly blown apart that they were scarcely recognizable as bridges—just twin snarls of reinforcing rod, twisted by fire, hanging on either side of a scorched ravine.

Crossing either style of bombed bridge is impossible, so we lined up alongside hundreds of other cars waiting to cross each river at its driest point. When our turn came, we would bump slowly down into a trickling riverbed and back up again into someone’s backyard, silently apologizing to these farmers whose orchards had suddenly become thoroughfares now that their property was the new path of least resistance across the Lebanese landscape. Near one river, a group of old men sat under a trio of locust trees on plastic lawn chairs, smoking and seeming to enjoy the spectacle.

Our taxi driver kept the radio tuned to a national call-in show throughout the trip. I struggled with the Arabic but, hour after hour, the topic remained the same: the effects of war and displacement, the horrors encountered by refugees returning to their homes after the cease-fire, angry or anguished voices crackling onto the air from different corners of Lebanon, taking comfort in the sharing of their stories.

It’s a meager comfort, perhaps, because now that the shelling has stopped, most of the Lebanese that I’ve spoken to are nearly as angry with Hezbollah as they are with the Israelis, and they feel hopeless about their government’s ability to disarm the militia and thus sustain the cease-fire.

“Why did these idiots have to go and start a war with Israel?” a new Lebanese acquaintance, Patrick, asked me as we walked along a street in Hamra, near the American University of Beirut’s lush campus. “I really didn’t have much hope for all that talk of Lebanese national unity last year, but I never thought it would come to this—another war.

“I feel like I’m in a hijacked plane, a plane hijacked by my own brothers,” Patrick continued. “And the police are all grouped outside the plane and they’re on megaphones, shouting that they’re holding me responsible for my brothers’ actions.”

“I mean, Hezbollah is only supported by maybe 30 percent of the population, but how on earth is the Lebanese Army supposed to disarm it?” Patrick asked. “Have you seen the Lebanese Army lately? They’ve got World War II–era guns and Vietnam-era flak jackets. They look like they’ve gone missing from the Battle of Stalingrad.”

The cease-fire, most people here seem to agree, feels alarmingly brittle. And yet the Lebanese have set to work putting their lives, and their country, back together again. Hezbollah’s “Jihad for Reconstruction” teams are out in bombed areas with bulldozers and teams of civil engineers, distributing cash to the homeless. The communal refugee shelters in Damascus that I visited 10 days ago—large extended families, in some cases whole Bekaa Valley villages transplanted, en masse, to unfamiliar institutional settings—are practically empty now, and throughout the whole of this past week Lebanon’s broken roads have been jammed with people returning home.

Of course, tens of thousands of Lebanese have found that they don’t have homes to return to. The day before yesterday, Andrew and I drove around Haret Hreik, the predominantly Shiite southern Beirut suburb that Andrew jokingly refers to as “Hezbollah central,” and which has seen, unsurprisingly, some of the worst of the Israeli air attacks.

A French aid worker that I spoke to in Damascus last week told me that Beirut’s southern suburbs now looked like Dresden after its infamous burning during the Second World War. The devastation that we saw in Haret Hreik and its environs was terrible, to be sure, but I don’t think that the incendiary-bomb analogy is quite fair either.

I’ve been very skeptical about Israel’s defense of its “precision-bombing” techniques, but several times Andrew and I passed a single building utterly destroyed, collapsed in on itself like a house of cards, only to notice that the buildings abutting it were unscathed—windows unbroken, flowers still blooming gaily on the balconies.

Did the Israelis have enough intelligence information to determine beyond a doubt that these particular buildings, among hundreds of nearly identical, cheaply constructed concrete apartment buildings, were the ones containing Hezbollah hideouts or caches of weapons? Only time will tell, I suppose. What is certain, for now, is that in their efforts to root out Hezbollah, the Israelis have killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians, in proportions a whole order of magnitude higher than the casualties sustained on the Israeli side.

There are banners and posters all over Beirut proclaiming this fact. On one banner, four or five stories high and plastered down the side of an apartment building, there’s a photograph of a baby, perhaps a bit less than a year old, with his hand blown off, the stump swathed in bandages. There’s a blue pacifier in the child’s mouth, and his damp curls and eyelashes glisten as if he had just cried himself into exhausted sleep. The legend on the banner reads, in an ironic jab at the Israelis’ claims of precision, “Extremely Accurate Targets,” and then, in screaming capitals, “DIVINE VICTORY.”

This is a pun in Arabic: The last name of Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, is a contraction of the words nasr (victory) and Allah (God). And whatever their private feelings about Hezbollah as a political party—which less than a third of the Lebanese support, according to most estimates (indeed, a Dutch journalist who has lived in Tehran for several years told me yesterday that most Iranians can’t stand Hezbollah, and hate that so much of their money is going to Lebanon when they’re a poor country, too)—the sight of so many killed and injured civilians has united the vast majority of Lebanese against the Israelis and their American backers.

Several months ago, my friend Wendy and I went to see a new Lebanese film called Bosta, about a Lebanese dabke dance troupe—a delightfully silly musical with some deeper themes about Lebanon’s history of communal violence, the sense of deep shame that came from that history of mutual violence and betrayal, and the potential for redemption, particularly among the younger generation of Lebanese, engendered by the so-called Cedar Revolution and its aspirations for democracy and reconciliation. I looked for a DVD of that film this past weekend, but now I’m not so sure I’d like to see it again. Already that film, less than a year old, seems like an artifact of a hopeful, innocent and very long-ago era.

Though I don’t agree with him about much of anything, I fear that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, was right when he said in his speech last week that America’s aspirations for democracy in the Middle East have collapsed. Unfortunately, the United States’ reputation in this region has been so profoundly damaged that many of our erstwhile allies, the region’s pro-democracy reformers, say that they now feel undermined and betrayed.

Rather than supporting Arab countries as they built up the kinds of solid institutions and civil societies that could sustain democracy—and without which concepts like freedom and democracy are meaningless—the U.S. has focused on cracking regimes and delivering short, sharp shocks to fragile states.

These efforts at short-order democracy haven’t worked, but as an American living in the region, I have to believe that we and our allies can learn from our mistakes, and that some of these hopes for stability, prosperity and democracy in the region may still be salvageable.

They were there to demand resignations from Mr. Olmert, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and Army Chief of Staff Dan Halutz--and the quicker, the better. In their minds, after all, it was only a matter of time before they and their comrades would have to go right back into battle.

“Our mission is to rehabilitate the army for the next war,” said Asaf David, a 28-year old who makes his day-to-day living as a lawyer. “War is coming again.”

The remark of the infantry reservist reflects the widespread sentiment among Israelis that the war of the last month is merely a prelude to more fighting. As the Israelis start repairing the damage from a month of rocket attacks and begin an anguished self-examination regarding the war effort, they are already talking openly about the “next war”--a second installment of the month-long slugfest against the Hezbollah militiamen and their Katyusha rockets. Some even fear that the coming conflict could involve Hezbollah’s patron, Iran.

Although Hezbollah guerillas have silenced their guns since the cease-fire went into effect a week ago, Israelis expect that the Iranian-backed militia will do its best to re-arm in preparation for engaging the Jewish state once again.

“If we let them recover and rehabilitate all of the things they had built, it might not happen in a month or two months, but it will eventually happen,” said Shimon Shapira, a reserve brigadier general and a senior research associate at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center. “When they feel they are ready to carry out this conflict, they’ll do it. They haven’t given up on the jihad with Israel.”

The diplomatic rubric for boosting stability along the Israel-Lebanon border--better known as U.N. Security Council 1701--already seems in danger of withering into irrelevance.

Last week, the Lebanese government struck a deal with Hezbollah to allow them to hold onto their weapons near the Israeli border instead of demilitarizing southern Lebanon, as called for by the resolution. And with France and Italy backpedaling on commitments to staff a 15,000-strong multinational force, Israelis are skeptical about the ability of the international community to enforce the arms embargo against Hezbollah called for in the resolution.

“I don’t think that Israelis have any hopes that an international force will disarm Hezbollah, or even have a mandate to do so,” said Ephraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center at Bar Ilan University. “We’ll see a return of Hezbollah to the south--they are already there--and they will be resupplied by Syria. And we’ll return to square one.”

If Israeli observers from all political persuasions agree on one thing, it’s that, if and when the fighting resumes with Hezbollah, Israel’s ground forces need to be better prepared. Over the last few weeks in Lebanon, Israeli infantry and armored divisions were caught by surprise by the sophistication and ferocity of the guerrilla fighters. Israeli soldiers often fell back on tactics developed over recent years against Palestinian fighters with relatively poor training and shoddy arms.

Wearing olive combat pants and a military shirt tied around his waist at the demonstration, reservist Ariyeh Vieder explained that only one week out of his annual month-long stints in the army are devoted to training. “As a soldier, I didn’t do enough to defend my border,” he said. “It was very frustrating when we were in Lebanon to hear how they were firing Katyusha rockets, because they were firing them from our area.”

Yuval Steinitz, a Knesset member from Likud who used to chair the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said he believes that it will take years before Hezbollah can rebuild its military infrastructure to effectively wage war on Israel. Until then, he said, “there are many things to reconsider.”

Israel needs to revise its war doctrines to rely less heavily on air power, he said. Meanwhile, a system needs to be developed to protect the military from rocket fire. Moreover, Israel and the U.S. should complete the Nautilus laser-guided anti-rocket system, which would help to defend against the primitive, short-range Katyushas.

In anticipation of a new fight with Hezbollah, Israel will also need to develop a strategy to snuff out the Katyusha rocket fire rapidly and keep Israelis out of the bomb shelters. Meanwhile, Israel’s ground forces will have to return to the military excellence of 20 or 30 years ago, wrote Ze’ev Shiff, the diplomatic correspondent for the Ha’aretz newspaper.

“The fight against the Palestinians messed up the I.D.F. as a sophisticated regular army,” he said. “It would be preferable for that war to be fought by the border police and to train the large regular army and most of the reservists for a different war.”

That “different” sort of war could involve strikes in neighboring Syria. Although Israel avoided any fighting with Lebanon’s more powerful neighbor, hitting Syria would mean targeting a country that provides logistical support for Hezbollah by serving as a conduit for weapons shipments from Iran.

To be sure, some observers caution that speculation about the next regional war could turn out to be as misleading or mistaken as the preconceived notions that governed the most recent conflict.

“The outcome of a war in the Middle East cannot be foretold at the end of the war,” said Sam Lehman Wilzig, a professor of political science at Bar Ilan University.

Some contend that Israel’s punishing attack on Lebanon’s infrastructure has restored a degree of deterrence with Hezbollah, and that the radical Shiite militia will think twice before embarking on cross-border attacks that risk a second punishing onslaught.

Others see the recent talk of Israeli ministers reopening peace talks with Syria as a move that could help avoid a new war with Hezbollah. Cutting a peace deal with Damascus (though it would come at the painful price of giving up the strategic Golan Heights) would remove Syria as the middleman in the Iran-Hezbollah alliance.

“Everybody understands that the way to stop the Lebanese problem is through Syria,” said Mr. Lehman Wilzig. “You can kill two birds with one stone if you sue for peace with Syria--which isn’t to say it’s going to happen, but it’s a very positive scenario.”

But even if Israel were to reach a peace treaty with Syria, it wouldn’t remove the threat posed by the country that serves as Hezbollah’s primary spiritual, financial and military sponsor.

Iran’s medium-range Shihab 3 ballistic missiles can reach most major population centers in Israel, and the Israelis fear they could face a barrage of attacks if Iran becomes threatened by a U.S.-led coalition to deprive it of nuclear weapons. On Tuesday, Israeli Minister Rafi Eitan said that Israel must prepare shelters throughout the country to cope with a threat that seems more and more likely.

“Iranians stated very clearly that if someone hits them, their first target will be Israel,” he said in comments broadcast on Israel Radio. “We need to prepare the entire country for missile attacks, including all of the civilian organizations--something we have never done in the past.”

And even as residents of northern Israel begin rebuilding their homes and businesses, many say that 30 years of rocket attacks along the border have taught them not to invest much hope in the cease-fire-enforced calm. Whether it’s Hezbollah or Iran, before long there will be another pretext to fight.

“For six years, there was an incredible quiet,” said Uri Alon, a café owner whose storefront window in Kiryat looked like a spider web after the impact of a Katyusha rocket cracked the glass. “But that’s not an indication. So I can’t say I’m more optimistic.”

This week, as fighting raged along the northern border, Antoine Lahad could be found taking in a cloudy Mediterranean sunset from the seaside bar that he owns in this most modern of Israeli cities, offering delicate criticism of the way his adopted land has punished his native country.

“I’ve seen a lot of revolutions in my time, but what is going on now is painful. I expected this would happen,” said Mr. Lahad, the former South Lebanon Army chief, who blames the Lebanese government for not reining in Hezbollah attacks on Israel over the last six years.

“But Israel retaliated against Lebanese infrastructure in a very hard way,” he continued. “Maybe there was another way so many civilians wouldn’t be killed.”

Pushing 80 years of age, Mr. Lahad seems more genteel grandfather than Lebanese warlord. A Maronite Christian, he speaks Arabic and French in a tobacco-choked alto rasp. (His assistant translated this interview from Arabic into Hebrew.)

Mr. Lahad’s combed waves of white hair were held perfectly in place; the pants of a debonair gray suit approached his lower midriff. A slight tremble of the hand suggests his fragility, but his memory and opinions are robust and lucid.

From a tactical perspective, Mr. Lahad has strictly mixed feelings about Israel’s latest Lebanon offensive. He denies that Israel’s attacks will strengthen Hezbollah, as critics all over the world suggest, but he hints that Israel’s attempts to turn the Lebanese people against Hezbollah aren’t working.

“It unites the Lebanese and allows them to feel less scared of Hezbollah,” he said. “It makes them feel together with Hezbollah, even if they don’t want to be with Hezbollah. It gives them a feeling that Hezbollah should be pitied and that ‘We should help Hezbollah.’”

Mr. Lahad speaks from deep and bitter experience with both sides in the current conflict.

When he was tapped as Israel’s partner 22 years ago, he was a retired Lebanese Army officer living in Beirut. Mr. Lahad was contacted by Meir Dagan—the current head of the Israeli Mossad, who was then a major general in command of Israeli forces occupying southern Lebanon after the 1982 invasion.

Mr. Lahad replied to Mr. Dagan’s offer to lead the S.L.A. with a demand to meet with the Israeli political leadership, so he was flown by military helicopter from Beirut to Tel Aviv to meet with Defense Minister Moshe Arens.

“I said, ‘This is a political issue. I want to know if Israel had any water or land interests in Lebanon.’ If they had planned to take even one glass of water, I would not have joined,” he explained.

When Mr. Arens convinced him that Israel had no water or settlement interests, Mr. Lahad accepted the job, seeing himself as a protector of southern Lebanon amid the chaos of civil war.

Thus began a controversial decade and a half of cooperation with Israel that earned him a notorious reputation among his countrymen. The S.L.A. is perhaps most reviled for the brutal interrogations administered at the Al Khiam prison.

Meanwhile, south Lebanon became a de facto dependent of Israel, which offered everything from employment to medical services.

Mr. Lahad said that he talked often with Lebanese government officials during the 1980’s, but the contacts were stopped by the Syrians. In the mid-1990’s, he failed in an attempt to find an interlocutor for then–Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to conclude a peace treaty with Lebanon.

When asked about former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and the decision to leave Lebanon in 2000, Mr. Lahad’s reaction was visceral: “I’ve blocked out all of that.”

But then he relented.

In May of 2000, when it was clear that Mr. Barak planned to get out of Lebanon, Mr. Lahad was in Paris to meet with French military friends from his school days to coordinate a force that would come in the place of the Israel. But when he boarded the flight back from Paris to the Middle East, he got word that Israel had pulled the plug on its 18-year Lebanese presence—two months earlier than planned.

“Barak might have thought that he was acting in the interests of the state of Israel, but I think he was acting in his own political interests,” said Mr. Lahad. “And the proof of that is that now they’re paying the price for it.”

After that hasty exit from Lebanon, the soldiers in Mr. Lahad’s army and their families were left in the lurch. Many resettled in Israel. Some moved to Europe, and others returned home to face war-crimes tribunals.

Barred from immigrating to France, Mr. Lahad decided to remain in Tel Aviv.

Despite the hard feelings, Mr. Lahad apparently remains cozy with his old allies. At one point during the interview at his bar, he paused to greet a pair of blue-suited bureaucrats with Israeli-flag lapel pins who had stopped by to bring him a party invitation.

For the past three years, Mr. Lahad has owned and operated Byblos, a bar named after the Lebanese coastal city in which a long counter of cherry wood sits amid purple neon lights, Oriental wall motifs and Arabic music that give the interior the air of an exotic pickup joint. The tangy, parsley-heavy tabouleh is unmatched in Tel Aviv, and—apparently—attracts a heavyweight military crowd.

“All of the Kirya comes here,” says Claude Ibrahim, who is the manager of Byblos and Mr. Lahad’s assistant, referring to the Tel Aviv army complex that is Israel’s version of Pentagon.

Despite a newspaper report in the Toronto-based Globe and Mail that he had traveled to northern Israel several times to meet with Israeli intelligence during the conflict, Mr. Lahad denied having any formal involvement in the current war with Hezbollah.

But in his professed capacity as an amateur analyst, he is willing to predict that Israel will be unable to attain a decisive military victory over Hezbollah, because the Shiite guerrillas have entrenched themselves all over Lebanon and can’t be dislodged without intolerable casualty rates.

To get at the root of the problem posed by Hezbollah, Mr. Lahad said, Iran and Syria must be pressured. Meanwhile, the current operation can at least achieve a weakening of Hezbollah that will allow an international force to enter Lebanon and help the Lebanese Army establish control over the south.

“I expected that one day that Hezbollah would make a problem with Israel, and it would escalate into something big,” he said. “But I didn’t think it would be on this scale.”

Mr. Lahad said he is confident that, eventually, a multinational force will succeed in stabilizing the south of Lebanon, bringing some semblance of peace to the region. But he is less optimistic that he will ever again be able to visit the land of his birth. For that to happen, Israel and Lebanon will have to sign a peace treat—something that Mr. Lahad can’t foresee in his lifetime.

“Of course I want to go back. It’s my homeland,” he said. “But I don’t think peace treaties will begin anytime soon. I’m at an advanced age, and I don’t know if I’ll ever see peace. But there’s no need for peace now. It’s enough to go back to the truce.”

Anti-Israeli feeling in the Arab world, where I live and work, has reached fever pitch since the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon began four weeks ago. Much of the Nasrallah hero worship in evidence among Syrians and Jordanians may in fact be an expression of disappointment, of frustration, with their own ineffectual rulers, a raw, adolescent delight in the sense of empowerment brought about by the sight of an Arab militia fighting the great Israeli military.

Still, it’s sometimes hard, if you’re as susceptible to emotional suasion as I often am, and if you’ve spent as much time talking to penniless Lebanese refugees and angry pro-Hezbollah demonstrators, and watching pan-Arab satellite television, as I have lately, to empathize with the Israeli perspective on this war.

So I told my Jordanian interlocutors the truth, which is that I’d been feeling that I simply had to come to Israel, to talk to Israelis about the war, after several weeks of talking exclusively to Syrians and Jordanians and Lebanese, and to get a sense of the way the war looks and feels from Jerusalem, if I could.

I crossed into Israel last Saturday morning in the company of my friend Rebecca, an Israeli-American, and two cats belonging to another friend of ours recently evacuated from Beirut (they could feel the shelling through the tiled floors with their paws, he said, and were unnerved by it). The cats—fat, orange Brooklyn-bred Sid and lithe, calico Sam—nestled in their gray carrier box and wore looks of baleful resignation throughout this final phase of their long odyssey from Beirut to Jerusalem, which has, improbably, become one of the safest-feeling cities in the Middle East right now.

My Jerusalem plan worked, more or less, in the personal sense, in that I’ve developed a great deal more sympathy for the Israeli position on the war, and a kind of awed fascination for the Israelis’ national character: their wiry tension, their ability to live a relatively calm, modern, democratic existence perpetually on the brink of war and disaster.

But my time here has also made me a great deal less optimistic about the possibility of a quick and effective ceasefire.

I can well appreciate the Israeli position that it is simply unacceptable to have a guerrilla force, with no accountability to any legitimate government, operating at will and taking prisoners along your northern border. I’ve met a young Israeli woman who has lost a close friend in the fighting, and seen Jerusalem hotels packed with elderly refugees from Haifa.

But I think that the Israeli view of Hezbollah—that it can be dismantled, that the rest of Lebanon will eventually rise up to fight the Shiite militia as an enemy in its midst—is terribly flawed. Many Lebanese are, certainly, angry with Hezbollah for dragging their country into yet another war. But the old saw about how the enemy of one’s enemy is a friend doesn’t seem to hold true in this region. As many differences as they may have with Hezbollah, with each passing week, support is consolidating behind Hezbollah across the Arab world, and it’s becoming more and more impossible—politically incorrect at best, treasonous at worst—to criticize Hezbollah’s charismatic leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, in an Arab country.

According to my friend David, an American who lives in Jordan, the Arab street is “like the Loch Ness monster: ferocious, but imaginary.” But I worry that the Arab world has been pushed just a bit too far now, that the inhabitants of that so-called Arab street are much more reactionary than their leaders. Many Jordanians told me last week that they saw this new war as a proxy war, that the United States was using the Israeli military to fight Iran, by using Israeli power to disarm Iran’s force in Lebanon.

It turns out that many Israelis agree with them and think, in fact, that it’s just fine.

“I believe that this is the first phase of a war between the U.S. and Iran, and I feel sorry for Lebanon,” a reporter on Arab affairs for Ha’aretz, the Israeli daily, told me this evening, over iced coffee, in the garden of Jerusalem’s American Colony Hotel. “Of course, I’ve never been there, but from what you see on TV, the Lebanese seem like a very open-minded, liberal people. And their country is being destroyed.

“For now, Israel is definitely trying to avoid attacking Syria,” this reporter told me. “But my military sources tell me that Syria is giving military support to Hezbollah and that most of the rockets falling on Israel are Syrian-produced. The Syrians are playing with fire; it’s like they’re sitting on a pile of explosives and playing with a cigarette.”

I’m heading back to Damascus first thing tomorrow morning, and my conversation with the Ha’aretz reporter this evening hasn’t exactly contributed to my peace of mind. I live in Damascus’ old walled city, and my bedroom window is set right into the old city wall, so that I could actually litter into the dry moat that surrounds it. The wall is a good four feet thick and feels solid, impregnable as any fortress. I just wonder how long that feeling will last.

Katherine Zoepf is a writer based in Damascus.

This week, as fighting raged along the northern border, Antoine Lahad could be found taking in a cloudy Mediterranean sunset from the seaside bar that he owns in this most modern of Israeli cities, offering delicate criticism of the way his adopted land has punished his native country.

“I’ve seen a lot of revolutions in my time, but what is going on now is painful. I expected this would happen,” said Mr. Lahad, the former South Lebanon Army chief, who blames the Lebanese government for not reining in Hezbollah attacks on Israel over the last six years.

“But Israel retaliated against Lebanese infrastructure in a very hard way,” he continued. “Maybe there was another way so many civilians wouldn’t be killed.”

Pushing 80 years of age, Mr. Lahad seems more genteel grandfather than Lebanese warlord. A Maronite Christian, he speaks Arabic and French in a tobacco-choked alto rasp. (His assistant translated this interview from Arabic into Hebrew.)

Mr. Lahad’s combed waves of white hair were held perfectly in place; the pants of a debonair gray suit approached his lower midriff. A slight tremble of the hand suggests his fragility, but his memory and opinions are robust and lucid.

From a tactical perspective, Mr. Lahad has strictly mixed feelings about Israel’s latest Lebanon offensive. He denies that Israel’s attacks will strengthen Hezbollah, as critics all over the world suggest, but he hints that Israel’s attempts to turn the Lebanese people against Hezbollah aren’t working.

“It unites the Lebanese and allows them to feel less scared of Hezbollah,” he said. “It makes them feel together with Hezbollah, even if they don’t want to be with Hezbollah. It gives them a feeling that Hezbollah should be pitied and that ‘We should help Hezbollah.’”

Mr. Lahad speaks from deep and bitter experience with both sides in the current conflict.

When he was tapped as Israel’s partner 22 years ago, he was a retired Lebanese Army officer living in Beirut. Mr. Lahad was contacted by Meir Dagan—the current head of the Israeli Mossad, who was then a major general in command of Israeli forces occupying southern Lebanon after the 1982 invasion.

Mr. Lahad replied to Mr. Dagan’s offer to lead the S.L.A. with a demand to meet with the Israeli political leadership, so he was flown by military helicopter from Beirut to Tel Aviv to meet with Defense Minister Moshe Arens.

“I said, ‘This is a political issue. I want to know if Israel had any water or land interests in Lebanon.’ If they had planned to take even one glass of water, I would not have joined,” he explained.

When Mr. Arens convinced him that Israel had no water or settlement interests, Mr. Lahad accepted the job, seeing himself as a protector of southern Lebanon amid the chaos of civil war.

Thus began a controversial decade and a half of cooperation with Israel that earned him a notorious reputation among his countrymen. The S.L.A. is perhaps most reviled for the brutal interrogations administered at the Al Khiam prison.

Meanwhile, south Lebanon became a de facto dependent of Israel, which offered everything from employment to medical services.

Mr. Lahad said that he talked often with Lebanese government officials during the 1980’s, but the contacts were stopped by the Syrians. In the mid-1990’s, he failed in an attempt to find an interlocutor for then–Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to conclude a peace treaty with Lebanon.

When asked about former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and the decision to leave Lebanon in 2000, Mr. Lahad’s reaction was visceral: “I’ve blocked out all of that.”

But then he relented.

In May of 2000, when it was clear that Mr. Barak planned to get out of Lebanon, Mr. Lahad was in Paris to meet with French military friends from his school days to coordinate a force that would come in the place of the Israel. But when he boarded the flight back from Paris to the Middle East, he got word that Israel had pulled the plug on its 18-year Lebanese presence—two months earlier than planned.

“Barak might have thought that he was acting in the interests of the state of Israel, but I think he was acting in his own political interests,” said Mr. Lahad. “And the proof of that is that now they’re paying the price for it.”

After that hasty exit from Lebanon, the soldiers in Mr. Lahad’s army and their families were left in the lurch. Many resettled in Israel. Some moved to Europe, and others returned home to face war-crimes tribunals.

Barred from immigrating to France, Mr. Lahad decided to remain in Tel Aviv.

Despite the hard feelings, Mr. Lahad apparently remains cozy with his old allies. At one point during the interview at his bar, he paused to greet a pair of blue-suited bureaucrats with Israeli-flag lapel pins who had stopped by to bring him a party invitation.

For the past three years, Mr. Lahad has owned and operated Byblos, a bar named after the Lebanese coastal city in which a long counter of cherry wood sits amid purple neon lights, Oriental wall motifs and Arabic music that give the interior the air of an exotic pickup joint. The tangy, parsley-heavy tabouleh is unmatched in Tel Aviv, and—apparently—attracts a heavyweight military crowd.

“All of the Kirya comes here,” says Claude Ibrahim, who is the manager of Byblos and Mr. Lahad’s assistant, referring to the Tel Aviv army complex that is Israel’s version of Pentagon.

Despite a newspaper report in the Toronto-based Globe and Mail that he had traveled to northern Israel several times to meet with Israeli intelligence during the conflict, Mr. Lahad denied having any formal involvement in the current war with Hezbollah.

But in his professed capacity as an amateur analyst, he is willing to predict that Israel will be unable to attain a decisive military victory over Hezbollah, because the Shiite guerrillas have entrenched themselves all over Lebanon and can’t be dislodged without intolerable casualty rates.

To get at the root of the problem posed by Hezbollah, Mr. Lahad said, Iran and Syria must be pressured. Meanwhile, the current operation can at least achieve a weakening of Hezbollah that will allow an international force to enter Lebanon and help the Lebanese Army establish control over the south.

“I expected that one day that Hezbollah would make a problem with Israel, and it would escalate into something big,” he said. “But I didn’t think it would be on this scale.”

Mr. Lahad said he is confident that, eventually, a multinational force will succeed in stabilizing the south of Lebanon, bringing some semblance of peace to the region. But he is less optimistic that he will ever again be able to visit the land of his birth. For that to happen, Israel and Lebanon will have to sign a peace treat—something that Mr. Lahad can’t foresee in his lifetime.

“Of course I want to go back. It’s my homeland,” he said. “But I don’t think peace treaties will begin anytime soon. I’m at an advanced age, and I don’t know if I’ll ever see peace. But there’s no need for peace now. It’s enough to go back to the truce.”

Just as American policymakers badly miscalculated what would be required to occupy and stabilize Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, so Israel appears to have underestimated what kind of resistance its forces would encounter in driving Hezbollah from southern Lebanon. The Americans failed to anticipate the ruinous effects of the war and occupation on our international reputation and national interest. The Israelis somehow failed to recall the terrible stain on their national image left by their last incursion.

There is no American strategy for the Middle East. There is only crisis management, performed incompetently, and slogans about “democracy” and “evil” and “terrorism.” From somewhere inside this intellectual vacuum, the voice of President George W. Bush assures us that things are getting better in Iraq.

There seems to be no Israeli strategy, either. There is only a military reaction to the provocations of Hezbollah and Hamas, with disappointing and sometimes disastrous results. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert claims that his campaign is winning, that the murders of civilians and U.N. observers will somehow prove to be worthwhile. The stature of the terrorists grows, and the war has succeeded in discrediting moderate Arabs and silencing the Hamas leaders in Gaza who were ready to start talking instead of killing.

Israel’s bloody response to the seizure of three soldiers has united its enemies and divided its friends. Atrocities committed by the Israel Defense Forces in Qana and elsewhere have appalled Western opinion and enraged Arabs and Muslims in countries that share Israel’s hostility to radical Islam. The people of Lebanon, who have never fought Israel and were trying to rebuild their country, have been turned into furious enemies of the Jewish state.

At the same time, the Sunni fanatics of Al Qaeda are finding common cause with their enemies, the Shiite fanatics of Hezbollah. For these organizations, the continuing violence is a moral victory, because every day of killing proves that there can be no negotiated peace.

But what does Israel expect to accomplish by bombing civilians in Lebanon? What kind of victory does Mr. Olmert hope to win by delaying a ceasefire? Whatever he may once have hoped to achieve, the Israeli leader is now quickly reducing expectations. He knows that after three weeks of bloody conflict, Hezbollah still has thousands of missiles ready to fire into northern Israel. He cannot predict that Hezbollah will be extirpated or even defeated, only that they have suffered and that things will be “different” than before.

And he will be held responsible, in the eyes of the world and his own countrymen, for a policy that could only lead to war crimes. The Israeli war plan turned hundreds of thousands of civilians into refugees, bombing their homes and villages whether they had left them or not, and then blaming them for being “terrorists” if they failed to escape. That kind of conduct will place the Israelis on the same moral plane as their attackers, where they should never be.

What has made this bad situation worse—and promises to inflict incalculable damage long into the future—is the feckless encouragement of Israel’s disproportionate response by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her obtuse boss. Having neglected Israel and Palestine for years, their parody of diplomacy has achieved nothing so far, except to discredit the United States.

It will be many years before our government can play any useful role as an interlocutor between the Israelis and the Arabs, with whom they must eventually make peace. Indeed, the American refusal to insist on an immediate ceasefire has made us look weak and immoral, as if we are controlled by a small and isolated ally. We could scarcely afford still another self-inflicted blow to our reputation.

It may be too obvious to mention, but the lost lives of women, children and soldiers on both sides—not to mention the physical destruction in Israel and Lebanon—has long since outweighed the incidents that instigated this war. If the three Israeli soldiers are still alive when a ceasefire finally comes, then the negotiations over their fate that should have commenced weeks ago will begin.

The problems that existed before hundreds of civilians were killed will still have to be addressed. The world will still have to find ways to police the border between Israel and Lebanon, to encourage the Palestinians toward peace instead of jihad, and to pull Syria away from Iran. These mad and murderous weeks have only made it all harder.

This is, to be sure, not the same as the experience in Southern Lebanon. Who is eating a rib steak with a Stella a few miles from the border there, sending it back because it's too rare, needs another minute on the grill? I stayed at a place in Jerusalem staffed by Palestinian Christians and it really is true they watch al-Jazeera day and night. And al-Jazeera provides tape, over and over, that we wouldn't see back in the States—children's bodies being pulled from houses, handled like oversized dolls. In East Jerusalem the Arab street is unhinged. Every conversation you have soon rises in decibels with repetitions of the word "justice!" I nod and smile and agree. The hatred in Jersualem is mutual and scary.

The bus I took north was full of soldiers, their rifles dangling off their backs. They throw these things around a little too casually for me. But you get hardboiled in a hurry. This is my first time in a war zone so forgive a little Hemingwayesque allusion. You see normal village life going on but with only a few hard cases doing so. A kid on a tractor, a boy riding a bicycle, some old people having dinner on their porch, a man tilling his fields. Mostly this pretty (and affluent) town not far from Kiryat Shemona is shut down amid the banging. Soldiers and reporters move past one another on their cellphones in the restaurant with the same abstracted air. Not a lot of laughter.

Nearby's the Golan Heights. I can see legendary places, Mt. Hermon, Shebaa Farms, the Golan. How many times has Israel been fighting its neighbors here? In my hotel lobby there are photographs of Jewish lands lost to Lebanon at the drawing of the '49 armistice line. And a photo of the IDF arriving at the Wailing Wall in '67. Able to pray at last, after years.

Now Muslim men are prevented from praying at the Al-Aqsa mosque on Fridays, because soldiers restrict access at the Damascus Gate to the Old City, so they pray in the street outside the walls of the city. Cycle of violence. Not that I'm pulling for Hizbullah. I want to sleep tonight...