Israel : Lebanon - Deuce

The Breaking News this morning was that an Israeli Aircraft attacked Beirut International Airport, destroying three of its runways and paralysing its trade and tourism. Yet another episode of the never ending Middle East tragedy which has been going on for - literally - thousands of years and has been news material on a daily basis for as long as I remember. Despite this I have never truly understood the complexity of the crisis or remembered who the main players were. So I decided that today would be the day when I look up Hezbollah, the Shi'a Group, Syria, the Palestines, Hamas and the rest of the well familiar sounding organisations and countries which all together make up an ugly mash of chaos in my head.

As I have been digging deeper and deeper in today's news and related articles the whole story just became even more complicated and shocking. I might be naive but I never imagined that the actual victims involved in it are not "just" a few terrorists here and a few terrorists there but it is hundreds of dead or injured/week(!) on both sides. Sentences like the following ones don't even make it to the top of an article on cnn.com, they are randomly at the lower end of the story reconfirming the Western readers' belief that this war is only about some obscure row about some distant land.

"Thursday's casualties throughout northern Israel totaled 29, including one woman killed and 15 injured in the Nahariya rocket attack, according to the IDF. Lebanon's health ministry said 45 people had been killed in Lebanon since the fighting began last Wednesday."

Without trying to pretend that I gained in-depth understanding into anything there is one thing that kept coming into my mind (and excuse me for the trivial comparison). The attacks and counter-attacks in the region sound like a tennis match. The viewer has to swing his head from left to right from right to left non-stop. Here is a bridge gone. There is an airport. Two soldiers kidnapped here. 54 soldiers imprisoned there. One blackmail is answered by another one. There is no truer illustration to the eye-for-eye , tooth-for-tooth principle than the strategy of this war.

And therefore, I came to the conclusion that it will never come to an end. There will always be some more people left in these countries with a few more teeth to smash out or a couple of eyes to poke. The players might change, today we are witnessing Israel vs Lebanon, tomorrow might be a day for doubles, US and Israel vs Syria and Lebanon and every single game is expected to last for a long long time but unfortunately neither party will ever win.