Israel has always believed its defense lies in attack. If it can threaten and cower its neighbors, it will remain safe. Last year’s assault on the Lebanon provided a master class in this policy.

First Israeli jets, having taken out the rudimentary Lebanese air force and command-and-control systems, embarked upon the pre-planned destruction of the country’s infrastructure, much of which had only been rebuilt after the ravages of civil war. Then the Israeli high command turned its full attention to southern Lebanon in which Hezbollah had planted itself. Occupants of towns and villages were given just 48 hours to flee after which the region became a free-fire zone. Most of the thousand Lebanese civilian deaths came in this storm of aerial and long-range artillery destruction, which also left behind tens of thousand of cluster bombs from weapons provided by the US, which even now add to the toll of dead and maimed.

This week, Human Rights Watch (HRW) asserted that the majority of the Lebanese casualties came about as a result of indiscriminate attacks which rarely actually targeted known Hezbollah positions. The rights group says that the majority of Hezbollah forces was dug in well away from most civilian centers and not, as the Israelis claimed, deliberately deployed in the middle of towns and villages, so as to draw down fire and ensure the high- value propaganda of the massacre of the innocents.

HRW is no partial dupe in this affair. It has been no less critical of Hezbollah’s indiscriminate rocketing of Israeli settlements. Around 4,000 rockets killed 40 Israeli civilians as well as some of the 119 Israeli soldiers to perish during the 34-day conflict. But it is Israel that seeks to pretend because of its democratic qualifications that it is somehow a moral cut above its neighbors; that somehow its democratic institutions give it license to create the greatest carnage and destruction. A modern army with high-tech US-made weapons technology and complete command of the air ought to have been able to target Hezbollah fighters with far greater accuracy than it did.

Throughout conflicts of the last century, it has so often been civilians who have suffered more severely than combatants. When regular armies are fighting a relatively small number of guerrillas, as currently with the Americans in Iraq, the slaughter of civilians becomes even greater. Fallujah remains a largely unexamined tragedy. In addition it seems clear that yesterday’s ground and helicopter attacks in the Shiite Al-Washash district of Baghdad also inflicted civilian casualties.

As in every such tragedy, military spokesmen will express regret and maintain that the “collateral damage” is inevitable. They will also always say that everything is done to avoid civilian deaths. If that regret were ever genuine, then much more would in reality be done to stop these murders. But it is not. The massacre of the innocents continues.