In the mainstream U.S. press, there was almost no challenge to the Israeli government's claim that Israel had gone to war with Hezbollah on July 12, 2006.

Even among critics who believed that Israeli troops were committing war crimes, there was widespread acceptance that the war had started on July 12, after Hamas militants had kidnapped two Israeli soldiers.


A Lebanese man carries a child killed in Israeli air strikes
(© Getty Images, Inc.)

There was similar agreement over the war in Gaza: Israel had started a war against Hamas on December 27, 2008, after Hamas had refused to renew a cease-fire and permitted the intensification of Palestinian rocket fire into Israel. Although plenty of journalists accused Israel of overreacting to the primitive rockets, hardly any questioned the war's start date.

Such questioning tended to be limited to a few Western commentators—and to millions of Palestinians. Palestinians by and large dismissed the notion that the Gaza war had started, after Hamas had rejected a new cease-fire, on December 27. In their view, Israel had voided the cease-fire the previous month by killing six Hamas militants, and the blockade Israel continued to enforce around Gaza was itself an act of war.

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Read "Lebanon" in the Recent Events section of the Palestinian territories text in World Conflicts Today.

How might consideration of the Lebanese perspective undermine the Israeli contention that its war with Hezbollah started on July 12, 2006?

And why would that matter?