DANGER LEVELS.(The Talk of the Town)

Just four months ago, following the incapacitation of Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert was elected Prime Minister of Israel. The hopeful narrative of his campaign was that of a career hard-liner who, like the great majority of Israelis, had finally come to believe that his country's occupation of the more than three and a half million Palestinian Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank was morally untenable, spiritually corrosive, and politically senseless. Olmert comes from an activist family that believed in the Greater Israel ideology of Vladimir Jabotinsky. He was a "Likud prince," a champion of the mass-settlement project. But, in the footsteps of Sharon, who had closed the settlements of Gaza, Olmert declared his intention to extend the process known as "disengagement" to most (if not enough) of the West Bank. In the early weeks of his premiership, his greatest concern seemed to be how best to time the withdrawals and avoid any clashes between his own police and the most zealous of the settlers. Because the process lacked a Palestinian partner, the disengagement plan was too peremptory to promise a final settlement, but at least it suggested progress toward the sole mutually acceptable resolution of the historic conflict--two viable states, side by side, in a lasting, if uneasy, peace.

That strand of Middle Eastern optimism is now a memory. Olmert is fighting a war on two fronts--in Gaza against Hamas and in Lebanon against a large and sophisticated Hezbollah militia--and it is entirely possible, if sense and diplomacy do not quickly intercede, that the region, already inflamed by the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq and the murderous insurgency that has followed, will face a danger level not seen in decades. By the end of last week, a ground war seemed imminent. Some observers speak forebodingly of 1914, but the most immediate result of this war will likely be to undermine the Israeli consensus for territorial compromise with the Palestinians, shatter the fragile Lebanese polity, and radicalize more Muslims in the region and beyond.

Much of the Israeli public has concluded that a policy of territorial retreat only emboldened the militias on their borders. After the Israel Defense Forces withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, many had hoped that Hezbollah, which was born in reaction to the Israeli invasion in 1982, would transform itself into a conventional political party, a peaceful champion of the Shiite underclass. Instead, it built up its arsenal and accelerated its attacks across Israel's northern border. Similarly, after Israel withdrew from Gaza last year, Palestinian fighters, with the encouragement of the new Hamas government, lobbed more than seven hundred rockets into Sderot and other towns in southwest Israel.

Olmert had to respond. But he has done so in a way that pleases his enemies while bringing despair to countless innocents. Israel's intention is to disarm the militias, to protect the citizens of Haifa, Afula, and Safed, but its attacks have killed hundreds of Lebanese, many of them civilians. Hundreds of thousands have fled their homes in fear. Israeli bombs have also demolished significant parts of the Lebanese infrastructure: the landing strips of Beirut, grain silos, roads, fuel storage, apartment buildings. Food and medical supplies are running short. Such is the vanity--and the inevitable result--of "surgical" strikes. Israel can neither morally nor politically finish this mission on its own. The Party of God, for its part, uses civilians as both shields and targets, and boasts of its own escape.

The Lebanese Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, has denounced the scale of the Israeli counterattack, saying that he will ask for compensation for his country's losses, and has rightly appealed to the United Nations, Europe, and the United ...