THE New York Times recently ran a front-page photo showing United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice cradling her head in her arms after another day of tough negotiations aimed at bringing about an end to the latest flare-up of blood shed in the Middle East.Her weariness told the whole sad story: the frustration, the anger, the pity and, of course, the strain were all etched on the Secretary's face. And that is the job of a photo journalist — to be on the spot to take that one picture that may put an otherwise complex, otherwise multi-faceted news event into perspective. This was the sort of picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words image that might end up earning the photographer a Pulitzer Prize.

Not long after that photo ran the Israelis ratcheted up their unlimited aerial bombing campaign of Lebanon. This campaign is supposedly aimed at "degrading" its Lebanese Hizbollah enemy but so far has ended up killing far more Lebanese non-combatants.

It has also shattered the infrastructure of Lebanon, only recently rebuilt following a brutal civil war that lasted from 1975 until 1990 and Israeli occupation of the southernmost region of the country that only ended in 2000.

One horrendous attack from the air on the part of the Israeli Air Force killed a lot of children and women who were attempting to shelter in an apartment block in the village of Qana.

The Israeli government was forced to issue a statement regretting the civilian casualties but that tragedy had the effect of forcing an early end to Secretary Rice's (she's pictured at right)<\p>first round of so-called peace making trips in the the region as the Lebanese Prime Minister refused to have any further meetings with her.

Should the American public be surprised by the Lebanese reaction? I don't think so, for they have aligned themselves with a country that is carrying out a policy of what amounts to state terrorism against a civilian population.

Can this be denied? I don't think so. For anyone hearing the news reports at the beginning of this conflict heard the uncompromising statement issued by the Israeli government. It stated that it was going to bomb Lebanon back 20 years and it soon became clear what this meant.

The Israeli military began to massively target and bomb the Lebanese civilian infrastructure including roads, power plants, housing and anything that moved — and that includes innocent fruit pickets whose only crime was to be caught in the open loading their products in trucks.

Now anything goes when it comes to war, after all. I'm not so naive to deny this. In World War Two the Allies bombed and killed many civilians caught in the industrial areas of Germany and Japan. But at the end of the war the British and the Americans put on trial German and Japanese military and political leaders for war crimes. THE Germans, for example, when they overran Western Europe in the early part of the war, sent the Luftwaffe to deliberately bomb and machine gun long lines of civilian refugees attempting to flee the combat areas. They used their infamous Stuka dive bombers to do this and inflicted massive casualties while simultaneously demonstrating to the people of the Nazi-occupied countries that their new overlords were ruthless, determined and would stop at nothing in the face of any opposition to their rule.When the Nazis invaded Russia they destroyed many villages and conducted collective punishment wherever they went, depopulating vast areas of the Soviet Union and sending hundreds of thousands of people back to Germany to work as slave labourers in their munitions and industrial plants (and, of course, exterminating Russian Jews on a wholesale basis).

The Japanese did the same thing. They bombed many Chinese cities and killed millions of people in their war in Manchuria which began early in the 1930s. One particular brutal campaign was conducted against the Chinese city of Nanking where more than 300,000 Chinese civilians were killed in an attempt to terrorise the Chinese population into total submission to the Chrysanthemum throne.

Now, Jewish people would naturally upset if the current actions of the state of Israel were only compared to the actions of the Nazis during World War Two and in particular what they did to the Jewish communities in Europe, and rightly so — that is a gross insult.

Extermination of the Palestinian population is not and never will be the underlying policy of Israeli military action in the Middle East. But, as I have often said, there was not one Palestinian guard in the death camps in Europe. There was no Palestinian political leadership that closed the door to Jewish immigration in Western countries when those Jews who saw what was about to overtake them, attempted to get out.

Even non-observant Israeli Jews tend to say they are God's chosen people who were given the Promised Land by the Lord. While acknowledging their ancestors did not originate there, they point to the promise made to Abraham (originally from the Neobabylonian city of Ur).

Although the modern Zionist movement was largely non-religious, the idea of the "promised land" has had a powerful influence in creating and maintaining the modern state of Israel. Ironically, though, the same Biblical story of Abraham also tells of the origin of another people, the offspring of Abraham and Hager's son Ishmael, whom Muslims identify as the Arabs (the Islamic prophet Muhammad is considered to be one of the many direct descendant of Ishmael).

Both religions, therefore, trace their origins back to Abraham, and both hold the land of Israel sacred — though neither accepts the other's claims.WHAT we are seeing today is another War of the Cousins, Semitic peoples who are unwilling to compromise with one another so who slay one another instead. And it is also said in the Bible that those outside nations which meddle in the affairs of that area will find it a bitter cup to drink from — something the world powers will yet have cause to regret.The people of the state of Israel desperately want to live in peace in the Middle East but because of the way their country was created in 1948 — resulting in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of indigenous Arab peoples — there has been no lasting peace between the Jewish state and its neighbours.

Each generation has been forced to fight a war. In the mindset of the Israeli military, anyone who goes to war against them will face retribution that will be ten times worse than any punishment inflicted on them.

And up until now this has been true. The Syrians, the Egyptians, the Jordanians and various Palestinian guerrilla groups have all, at various times, been on the receiving end of the Israelis' wrath.

But Hizbollah is no brittle Arab army. It has been the only Arab military force that has compelled the Israelis to withdraw from conquered territory (southern Lebanon in 2000) and it is now fighting in that same old battle ground it knows so well and has surprised the Israelis with its fighting will.

In many ways, the state of Israel has come to the same watershed that the old white minority regime did in apartheid South Africa, when it thought it could impose its will in the wake of the collapse of Portuguese colonialism in Angola.

It invaded the southern part of Angola, only to meet defeat at the hands of the Angolan liberation fighters with the help of their Cuban allies.

The state of Israel cannot enforce a peace on its terms only. Peace will only come about when there is justice for the Palestinians and the return of lands taken by acts of war — the so-called two-state solution the Bush White House pays lip service but does next to nothing to help bring about.

Failure to enter upon this path will see continued generations having to fight their own wars.