Many on the far Left agreed. While the terrorists and their backers were glorying in their fiction, left-wing pundits were penning their own, strikingly similar, obituaries for the Israeli offensive and crediting Nasrallah and his forces with an unearned victory.

On his dubiously named Informed Comment blog, University of Michigan professor Juan Cole wrote that Hezbollah’s claim of “unprecedented victory against Israel” were “closer to the truth than” than any statements made by President Bush of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Nor did Cole have any doubt that Israel’s strategic bombing was a disastrous failure. “It was brain dead for the Israeli officer corps and politicians to think they could get anything positive out of bombing Lebanon back to the stone age and making a million people homeless,” Cole wrote.

Quite apart from who was really responsible for the civilian exodus from southern Lebanon--and Hezbollah, which provoked the current fighting with a raid into Israeli territory, is clearly more culpable--Cole’s assessment of the Israeli bombing was highly debatable. In the first place, the Israeli bombardment was very far from the indiscriminate assault conjured up by Cole. Israeli warplanes specifically limited their targets to Hezbollah headquarters in Beirut's southern suburbs, long-range rocket launchers positioned just south of the Litani River, and Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon like the city of Tyre and its surrounding villages, where most of Hezbollah’s weapons caches have been stored. Israeli aerial strikes were also far more successful than Cole and many other critics would like to believe. They forced once-hidden Hezbollah guerillas out into the open, destroyed many of their redoubts, and re-imposed deterrence by making clear the consequences of Israeli military retaliation, all at an impressively low cost in Israeli lives.

And that was precisely why Hezbollah deserved to be called the victor, some left-wing analysts maintained. Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer turned ubiquitous liberal blogger, sneered on the Huffington Post that “Israel lost at least 108 soldiers and 39 civilians during the last month. More than 1140 Lebanese civilians died from Israeli bombings. Over 300 of these are dead children. Way to go Israel, that helps your image. I'm sure you've earned the affection and good will of the Arab masses for that bit of professional soldiering.” Never did Johnson explain why so many civilians were hurt when Israel was targeting only Hezbollah. The reason, of course, is that Hezbollah purposely positions itself amid residential areas with the express aim of drawing Israeli fire and exploiting any civilian casualties for the purposes of propaganda.

Johnson declined to address such inconvenient details. Rather, he explained that “[m]ost of the people killed by Hizbullah were soldiers, not civilians” and that this demonstrated that “that Hizbullah displayed far more discipline on the battlefield than Israel.” Another possibility--that Hezbollah rockets, nearly all aimed at civilians, simply failed to hit their mark--did not occur to Johnson. Where a less sympathetic observer might have discerned Hezbollah’s genocidal aims, Johnson saw only sensitivity to civilians. Even when the facts argued differently. For instance, Johnson claimed that “Hizbullah turned off the rocket attacks when the ceasefire arrived while Israel continued bombing Beirut.” In reality, Hezbollah guerrillas fired at least 10 Katyusha rockets into southern Lebanon immediately after the ceasefire took hold, and has vowed to attack Israeli forces in southern Lebanon despite the truce.

Few critics of Israel are as persistent as the journalist Robert Fisk. Unsurprisingly, then, Fisk could not pass up the opportunity to endorse the emerging far-Left consensus that Hezbollah had indeed won the war. Though he stopped just short of supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s blustering declaration that Hezbollah had won a “glorious battle,” he insisted that it was very close to the truth. “Lebanese Hizbollah guerrilla army has, in effect, won this round of their war with Israel,” Fisk wrote. In Fisk’s view, the “loss of 40 soldiers in just 36 hours and the successful Hizbollah attacks against Israeli armor in Lebanon were a disaster for the Israeli army.”

As with much of Fisk’s reporting over the years, this claim did not survive scrutiny. Far from recoiling at Hezbollah attacks, the IDF was by all accounts eager to finish off the terrorist army, and military leaders expressed disapproval only after the ceasefire breathed new life into the battered Hezbollah forces. “The IDF was disappointed,“ according to the Jerusalem Post. “Senior officers said they had been looking forward to the fight.” Indeed, the dominant view in the army appears to be that IDF casualties are less a reflection of Hezbollah’s military prowess than the diffidence of the Israeli government.

But while there is much to criticize in Israel’s military strategy--many of Israel’s supporters have been doing just that since the current conflict began--the Left’s recriminations are not aimed at getting Israel to fight a smarter and more effective war, but rather at pushing her to surrender. The defeatist line is itself a coefficient of the view that Israel is principally to blame for the forces bent on her destruction.

It is a view that has commanded popular support on the Left since the Israeli campaign began. Ex-Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Sheer has claimed that the real source of the conflict is not Hezbollah’s declared intention to destroy Israel, but Israel’s “militarism.” According to Sheer, “Israel's dependency on the drug of militarism as a false escape from the difficult accommodations needed to bring peace to the Middle East.” (What accommodations there could possibly be with a terrorist organization that, as a doctrinal matter, rejects any treaties and negotiations with Israel, Sheer does explain.) Hezbollah apologist Noam Chomsky, who has defended Hezbollah’s refusal to disarm, as required even by the United Nations, and enthusiastically supported its “resistance,” now dismisses the legitimacy of Israel’s military campaign in part because Israel “virtually an offshore US military base.”

A derivative view, also prevalent on the anti-Israel Left, holds that Israel is fundamentally a racist state that thinks nothing of killing Arabs and Muslims. Syndicated left-wing columnist Norman Solomon avers that, for Israel, “the death of an Israeli civilian as far more tragic and important than the death of an Arab civilian,” and claims that “[t]here's something really sick about such righteous support for civilian death and destruction.” It goes without saying that Solomon makes no mention the fact that, in contrast to Israel, which makes every attempt to avoid civilian casualties, Hezbollah has been waging a war specifically against civilians, not least those Lebanese among whom the terrorist group seeks refuge and who pay the price for its recklessness. Nor will one find any acknowledgement by Solomon of the rabid anti-Semitism that has animated Israel’s enemies since her founding and is to today embodied by the Hezbollah and its Holocaust-denying impresarios in Iran.

Then there are the revisionists. No matter what the circumstances, they unfailingly point to Israel’s “occupation” as the root cause of the conflict, whether it involves Hezbollah, the Palestinians or Israel’s disgruntled Arab neighbors. Accordingly, a prominent academic petition inspired by the Lebanon reposes the blame for the fighting on Israel’s “occupation of Palestine” and Israel “expansionist policies.” It hardly matters that the occupation was itself a response to a war waged by Arab states, or that Israel recent withdraw from Gaza has only prompted more violence from the Palestinian Arab side. For Israel’s critics, facts are a distraction. Hence Robert Fisk can claim that it is “the return of the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights - see UN Resolution 242 - that lies behind this whole disastrous war,” without so much as a glancing reference to the resolution’s contents, which call for end to all “states of belligerency” and a respect for “sovereignty, territorial integrity”--conditions that the Hezbollah, let alone Syria and Iran, have clearly violated.

Of course, the current triumphalism makes no concession to reality. For Hezbollah, declaring “victory” is little more than a cheap propaganda ploy to win support. For the far-Left, it is an occasion to parade its morality by siding with the supposed victim. But on the central issue of the ongoing war both are in agreement: Israel must loose.

Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.