To the south, a million Israelis cower in bunkers. In Haifa, a few ventured back on to the streets yesterday after a lull in Hezbollah’s rocket attacks on the country that it seeks to annihilate. But the attacks began again, blowing away the front of the city’s main post office and tearing off a woman’s foot. “It is fire,” Yona Yahav, the Mayor, said. “It is shooting. It is war.”

No doubt of that. Between Tyre and Haifa, the most fearsome army in the Middle East was in a race to destroy Hezbollah before the US and Britain joined the rest of the UN in calling for a ceasefire.

What began as a reprisal for the abduction of Israeli soldiers was yesterday explicitly defined as a mission to recast the region. The Israeli offensive “was not, as in the past, a response to a particular incident”, Israel told Vijay Nambiar, leader of the UN mediation team in the Middle East, “but a definitive response to an unacceptable strategic threat by Hezbollah, and a message to Iran and Syria that threats by proxies would no longer be tolerated.”

Yet Israel knows that Hezbollah has spent six years digging into southern Lebanon. The rugged hills south of the Litani River are the heartland of Hezbollah’s state-within-a-state, a network of camps, bunkers and forest tracks hiding perhaps 13,000 Katyusha rockets, 600 trained fighters and up to 10,000 more volunteers. Many have sworn to die before allowing Israel back on to the land it left six years ago; at least 330 civilians have died already.

This war is being fought over an area half the size of Greater London — and over diametrically opposed visions of the wider world. The longer it drags on, the more that world will be sucked into it.

Gaza, ten months after the Israeli withdrawal, is already a battle zone again. Any chance of a similar pullout from parts of the West Bank has vanished in the past ten days. In its place, Israeli officials say, a new intifada looms in the shape of up to 80 West Bank jihadist cells backed by Hezbollah.

Nervous governments in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have resisted pleas from the Palestinians and Hezbollah to take sides, but they know they must reckon sooner or later with their own Islamist oppositions.

Just as Atlanticism was returning to diplomatic fashion, most of Western Europe and the UN are once again at odds with Washington. President Chirac of France and Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, have called for a ceasefire at all costs. Tony Blair, improvising in St Petersburg and since, is trying to hold the West together.

The US will now lead efforts to find a diplomatic solution. But by implicitly encouraging Israel’s onslaught on Hezbollah so far it has, not for the first time, risked global condemnation for the sake of fundamental change in the Middle East and a quantum leap forward in its War on Terror. What is the point, Washington’s UN Ambassador asked bluntly, of negotiating with “a bunch of terrorists”?

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Somewhere in Lebanon — which was poised two weeks ago for economic take-off but now resembles an earthquake zone — those terrorists are holding two unnamed Israeli soldiers. They were snatched, and at least seven other soldiers were killed, on July 12 in a raid into northern Israel that Hezbollah called “Operation True Promise”.

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