Hovsepian, Nubar, Editor. The War on Lebanon: A Reader.

• Position: Book review

Hovsepian, Nubar, Editor. The War on Lebanon: A Reader. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2008. 422 pages. Paper $ 20.00.

Nubar Hovsepian counters US-Israeli allegations about the nature of the 2006 war, as the title of his book makes clear. It is "The War on Lebanon" rather than the war in Lebanon. The 2006 Israeli-American war on Lebanon was to establish a new Middle East. In the introduction he explains how the war on Lebanon is intricately connected to the wider issues in the Middle East, especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The war cannot be understood in isolation from the local, regional, and international dynamics. A dialectical relationship exists between internal and external factors that helps explain Lebanon's historical development. The history of Lebanon is replete with unresolved questions, therefore, "Any political settlement in Lebanon depends on a national agreement that includes Hizballah, or Lebanon risks sliding into further conflict that could serve as a tripwire for an unplanned escalation to civil war" (9).

In the forward, Rashid Khalidi stresses how the events of July 2006 marked a new stage that did not only involve the superpowers directly, but was related to the Palestinian question. Khalidi explains how events demonstrated a tight linkage between conflicts among Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria on the one hand, and, on the other, conflicts in the Gulf region. The Israeli war on Lebanon developed directly out of the Israel siege of Gaza. "It remains to be seen whether the five-week Israeli war on Lebanon, one of the most limited of the Arab-Israeli confrontations since 1948, but in some ways the one with the most ramifications, will break the dismal pattern...