Haifa and

Nasrallah
It is deeply ironic that the city that has suffered the most from the Hezbollah rocket bombardment and suffered the most casualties should be Haifa. Haifa, historically known as "Red Haifa", has been the stronghold of left Labour and Meretz and the Communist Parties (Israel has two). Their position for decades has blamed Israel for Arab aggression on the undying "If we're nice to them they'll like us" theory. There is a saying that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. One can hope that even Haifa leftists are capable of a similar learning process, but I doubt it.

In what sounded like a bizarre echo of 1948, Sheik Nasrallah whose speech was on C-Span, called on the Arabs of Haifa to leave the city because Hezbollah was going to destroy it.

As much as it is commonplace to say that there is no military solution to this problem, there clearly is. When the US arms industry creates an effective defense against small short range missiles this will stop happening. The US Navy already has a system in place that protects our ships from missiles. The publicly acknowledged system is called Phalanx, which creates a curtain of shrapnel which destroys incoming missiles in flight. It is beyond question that there are additional systems the existence and nature of which are secret.

Without such systems large warships would be obsolete. The destruction of HMS Sheffield by a single French-made missile during the Falklands War illustrated this clearly. The existence of the US and British navies is proof that missiles can be defended against. The development and deployment of such systems will go a long way toward stabilizing the Israel-Arabs situation by imposing involuntary disarmament on Hezbollah.