> "The history of liberty is a history of resistance."
> Woodrow T. Wilson
>
> "We rely on Hezbollah and these other countries which are helping us now
> because it's all we have," Abu Khalil, an unemployed construction worker
> injured by bomb shrapnel during last summer's war in Lebanon told me. As we
> stood talking in the warm spring sun outside his largely destroyed village
> of Aita Ech Chaab, a few hundred yards from Lebanon's southern border, he
> added, "And we rely on Hezbollah to protect us again from the next Israeli
> aggression, because our own government cannot and will not do that job."
>
> In its savage 34-day assault on Lebanon, the Israeli government had hoped to
> knock down precisely that sentiment. One of the stated aims of the war, in
> which more than a thousand Lebanese and more than 40 Israelis were killed,
> was to turn the Lebanese against Hezbollah for having triggered the
> conflict. An ironic assumption considering that the creation of Hezbollah
> was a direct response to an earlier Israeli attack.
>
> Formed in 1982 to resist the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, ...