Israel Too Soft on Hezbollah?

This opinion piece in The Jerusalem Post , by Caroline Glick, gives a peephole view into Israeli domestic politics:

LEFTIST NEWSPAPER columnists and television and radio commentators are arguing that the cause of the current war is Israel's refusal, to date, to surrender the Golan Heights to Syria, and Judea, Samaria and east Jerusalem to Fatah and Hamas. In their world the fact that global jihadists are explicit about their intention to destroy "the Zionist entity," whatever its territorial boundaries may be, is studiously denied. The fact that Palestinian society is a jihadist society and that the international Left increasingly rejects Israel's very right to exist remains either irrelevant, or a matter that can be appeased away by further territorial giveaways.

Additionally, leftist opinion-makers are now arguing that the main lesson of the war is that unilateral Israeli actions are the problem. Writing in Ma'ariv last Thursday, Nadav Eyal argued that the next step will be to use the multinational force that the UN, the Olmert government and the State Department wish to deploy to Lebanon as a model that will enable future Israeli withdrawals from Judea and Samaria (and presumably from the Golan Heights and Jerusalem). By this new logic we should continue to retreat, but next time, the French and the Turks will protect us.

The IDF is blowing south Lebanon to kingdom come, and yet this columnist takes the absence of a wider ground offensive as evidence of PM Olmert's indecision and half-measures. So long as Hezbollah is still shooting Iranian rockets into Israel, she's got a point, I guess. Israel is too small to take a lot of casualties, but there may be no way to oust Hezbollah other than to grind them out.

Have a quote:

You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life, but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.

-- T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History, 1963