R. D. Marcus, Israel’s Long War with Hezbollah, Washington DC, Georgetown University Press, 2018.

As former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak said in 2006, when Israel first invaded Lebanon twenty-four years earlier, Hezbollah did not yet exist  (though some of its parent organizations, which later merged, did). On the ground, what resistance the Israelis encountered was mounted primarily by Yasser Arafat’s PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) guerrillas. Many of them fought bravely enough. It was hardly their fault that they were unable to stem the advance of six Israeli divisions with as many as eight hundred tanks between them. To say nothing about the Israeli Air Force which, having dealt a crushing blow to its Syrian opponents, enjoyed  as complete a dominance of the air as any belligerent at any time and place could ask for. Come August of that year and some 11,000 of Arafat’s men were evacuated to other countries. A bit like the Romans, following their defeat at the hand of the Samnites in 321 BCE, being forced to pass under the yoke. What a triumph for Israel—or so almost all Israelis and not a few foreigners thought.

Contrary to Israel’s expectations, though, this occasion did not mark the beginning of the end. It did not even mark the end of the beginning. Instead, guerrilla operations continued both in- and around Beirut and along the narrow, winding roads that led from Israel’s northern border towards the city. From time to time there were also rocket attacks on Israel itself, claiming some casualties, disrupting day-to-day life, and leaving the Israelis furious but basically impotent.  Increasingly as time went on, the guerrillas who carried out the attacks tended to belong to a Shiite organization known as Hezbollah, meaning God’s [Allah’s] Party. So puny was it that, at first, the Israelis hardly registered its existence. They called its men, Hezbulloth; a term that meant, roughly, the same thing the Kaiser had in mind when, very early in World War I, he spoke of the “contemptible little [British] Army and called on his commanders to crush it underfoot.

What happened next is well known. The contemptible little army took time and hundreds of thousands of casualties ere it was finally able to find its feet against the formidable Kaiserheer. By the time it did, though, its forces on the Western Front alone had expanded from six divisions to about sixty. On the way it spawned the world’s first independent air force, which was separated from the army in the spring of 1918. It had also perfected its methods of combined arms warfare to the point where they were second to one. Always extremely well-armed and supplied, it was commanded by generals who, though perhaps not always brilliant and enterprising, were tough and absolutely determined to carry out their mission to the end. It was the only force belonging to a major belligerent that went through the entire war without either being routed or rising in mutiny, as happened to all others at one point or another.

Back to Hezbollah.  It has Earlier, because of a scarcity of availability of efficient impotence remedy, most men had no possibility however to stay with this condition get free viagra greyandgrey.com for years. Optimistic roles of greyandgrey.com levitra sale Soft Tabs 60mg Men being hit by the disease such as impotence, then you have to take a keen interest to reveal every opportunity that can ensure the best protection and prevention of the costly levitra. Chiropractic maintain throat Discomfort Chiropractor throat agony therapy is focuses on minimizing the actual throat pain or even prevent the swelling from applying pressure generic sildenafil 100mg on the nerve. Men, who buy penis pumps in UK, would testify for the fact that pumps are not only enhancement devices, but also help them improve their ability to control their ejaculation. viagra levitra not, of course, won World War I or anything like it. Starting from very modest beginnings, though, it has succeeded in pulling itself up to the point where it currently maintains a balance of terror with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), widely acknowledged as one of the most modern and most powerful on earth. The present book is essentially a history of Israel’s attempts to prevent this from happening. Starting in the mid-eighties when it was a question of fighting lightly armed guerrillas with little organization, training, and experience. Passing through the nineties when the IDF in Lebanon built a string of heavily fortified strongholds to guard against further attacks and used heavily armored vehicles to patrol among them. Passing through the years 2000-2006 when, having retreated across the border, it largely limited itself to retaliation for Hezbollah’s occasional cross-border attack. Passing through the 2006 Second Lebanon War when, as well as invading southern Lebanon, it mounted a full scale air attack on its enemy, demolishing the latter’s long-range missiles but utterly failing to do the same to the short-range Katyusha rockets. All this, while trying now in one way, now in another, to adopt the so-called RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs) of those years and adapt it for its own purposes.

From 2006 on a tense stalemate has prevailed, leaving the two sides free to glare at each other across the border. Whoever is interested in the way the IDF, with all its fighter-bombers, drones, missile defenses, tanks, artillery, computers, etc. etc. got to this point can find many of the details in Marcus’ book. Ditto for anyone who cares about the career of the man at the center of it all, Brigadier General (ret.) Shimon Naveh. Reflecting the IDF’s inability to come to grips with the problem, for about ten years Naveh was in charge of the efforts to provide it with a coherent doctrine for doing so. Only to come out with one so convoluted and so arcane that no one could understand it. In the end, his efforts were terminated by the State Comptroller.

Judging by the book Marcus, whom I have never met, is a fine scholar. There doesn’t seem to be an Israeli senior officer whose wisdom he has not sought. His work will no doubt appeal to military analysts interested in understanding the conflict in question and, perhaps, fitting it into the way other armed forces around the world are going. What the reader will not find is more than a handful of pages on how Hezbollah’s “innovation and adaptation” to the IDF’s infinitely greater firepower enabled it to survive and expand from practically nothing into an organization fully capable of holding Israel at bay. A pity, that, for to my mind at any rate it is the most important and most interesting question by far.