Israeli soldiers use a Palestinian civilian as a human shield to plant an automatic shooting machine in a besieged house, in contravention with the 4th Geneva Accord, during a military operation in Bethlehem. (Maan Images, Magnus Johansson)

Lebanon has sat near the top of the international community's diplomatic agenda since this past summer's war with Israel broke out on July 12, a fact that has helped maintain the UN-brokered August 14 cessation of hostilities and served to buttress Beirut's efforts to obtain reconstruction assistance. Unfortunately, the unusual focus on Lebanese issues has also provided convenient cover for another exercise in Israeli brutality, namely the merciless pummeling of the Gaza Strip. The people of that unfortunate patch of land have been subjected to more than three years of steadily increasing violence, and there appears to be no end in sight.

Today's ugliness in Gaza will be no more successful than past attempts at using a preponderance of military power to extinguish Palestinian aspirations, and unless Israel finally incurs some form of cost for its shameless bullying of a desperate people, no one should expect that the crisis will end any time soon.

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As some early Zionist leaders warned their more hawkish colleagues, reliance on the profligate use of armed force as Israel's primary interface with the Arab world can never bring about its acceptance by the region. Those more sensible voices went unheeded, and so Israel's history since 1948 has been one of repeated failure to learn from past mistakes in this vein, a trend made possible by the blanket impunity bestowed on the Jewish state by it principal benefactor, the United States.

The terrible events of September 11, 2001, should have demonstrated to America once and for all that blind support for its irksome ally was causing more problems than it ever solved. Instead, the Bush administration has only increased its acquiescence in Israel's counterproductive strategy of opting instinctively for the disproportionate use of force in defense of policies and practices that violate international law at every turn.

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