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Old rules, new rules? No rules: bullied by Israel and the US, the international community has failed the Palestinians, and the citizens of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.

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The Israeli onslaught on Lebanon has created a mood beyond fury and despair across the Middle East. It is not just that there is no longer a 'peace process'. It is much worse than that. There is no longer any belief in the possibility of a negotiated peace with Israel, and where there is no belief there can be no hope. Unfortunately, the firm and decisive action needed to restore hope is unlikely to be taken. The 'international community' has had nearly sixty years to do something about the central issue in the Middle East--Palestine--and has totally failed to live up to its responsibilities and obligations.

To say that the source of Lebanon's problems is the 'Palestine problem' is to put the responsibility where it should not lie. The problem is not Palestine but Zionist ideology and the state to which it has given birth. The Zionists did not come to Palestine to live alongside the people already there but to displace them. That was the original sin. In 1948, they 'cleaned' Palestine of as many people as they could before destroying hundreds of their villages and building 'socialist' settlements on the ruins. Lebanon, Jordan and Syria had no option but to take in hundreds of thousands of people driven from their homes at the point of a bayonet or gun. In 1967, during Israel's assault on Egypt and Syria, 200,000 Palestinians were moved from the West Bank into Jordan at the same time as 90,000 Syrians were being driven from their homes in the Syrian Golan Heights. The Golan was formally annexed by Israel in December 1981.

It was from Lebanon that Palestinian guerillas began striking back in the 1960s and it was Lebanon that had to take the brunt of Israel's savage invasions, incursions, reprisals, assassinations and attacks on refugee camps as it sought to stifle the Palestinian resistance. In 1978 2000 civilians were killed and a large slice of southern Lebanon occupied when the Israeli government of Menahim Begin launched a full-scale invasion in retaliation for a terrorist outrage. In...

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