Theorists of today's conflicts may be mistaken to think in terms of a ‘clash of civilisations'. Closer to the mark are the ideas of two writers who focus on the communal nature of modern warfare

In the dark ages of black and white television, A.J.P. Taylor, first of the on-screen historians, gave sparklingly lucid lectures on how wars began. Would that he were still alive to suggest to us how wars might finish.

Pundits, particularly of the hawkish neo-con variety, are fond of telling us that what we are seeing in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and almost any hot spot you care to name is the "long war", also known as "the great war for civilisation". The major texts of those who take this position are Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilisations, and the collected works of Leo Strauss. With their preference for a highly structured view of the past and their penchant for prophecy and notions of inevitability, many of the neo-cons betray the Marxist element in their intellectual genes.

What we are seeing in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan is a new kind of open-ended communal conflict, where at least one of the protagonists is not based in the authority or military powers of the states. This makes it difficult to bring the combat to a conclusion, or culminating point as it is described in military jargon. This is now the acute problem for Israel and people and polity of Lebanon, though not for the movement and fighters of Hezbollah.

It is also the issue at the heart of the process of social disintegration in Iraq and Afghanistan: there is no point in sight at which the combatants would be willing to conclude their hostilities. There is no point, either, in seeking a quick, bold resolution by finding the Big Enemy (what Italians call il grande vecchio) and bashing him for all you're worth.

Bombing Damascus and Tehran, as counselled by the Washington-based journalists William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, will not end Israel's troubles with Hezbollah and Hamas. Though both receive money, arms, ideas and training from Syria and Iran, their command structure is not hard-wired to the governments of those two countries, and the body of their recruits and support comes from the people of south Lebanon and Beirut and Palestine.

A more accurate view of the new ragged, communal conflicts has been provided by an Israeli military historian, Martin van Creveld, now regarded almost as a heretic by fellow academics, and a maverick though highly decorated British general, Rupert Smith. In 1986 Martin van Creveld produced On Future War, in which he predicted that wars would be communal clashes, involving gangsters, guerrillas and terrorist groups living in and on the community, as much as with the disciplined formed armies of states. "The new wars will not obey the dictates of linear, Newtonian time, they will be cyclical and repetitive," he told me in his Jerusalem home nearly 10 years ago. As someone engaged on a history of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), he predicted accurately the dilemma in which it now finds itself.

According to van Creveld, Israel's citizen forces would find it increasingly difficult to sustain peacekeeping and security operations against an emboldened and violent populace in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. Well before it happened, he predicted Israeli forces would have to pull out of southern Lebanon where they were being wounded and demoralised by the guerrilla tactics of Hezbollah.

Rupert Smith's The Utility of Force takes the story further. Based on his experiences of nearly 40 years in the army, in which he saw, close up, highly irregular warfare in Northern Ireland, Zimbabwe, Bosnia and Kosovo, and since in Ache in Indonesia, he outlines the limitations of military force, at all levels, in today's conflicts. Borrowing Maoist terminology, he calls these "wars among the people", where the combat arm, the guerrillas or fighters, live and move among the community. The industrial force of state armies with tanks, laser bombs, remote controlled drones, can only be of limited value against them. Though capable of a tactical win, by smashing bunkers, bombing villages and "knocking out" rocket and missile sites, strategic victory is elusive because it requires the changing of hearts and minds. This calls into question the premise of the Israeli Government and command, to say nothing of the Bush administration and Tony Blair, that the Government of Lebanon must be cajoled or coerced into getting an armlock on Hezbollah and force it to disarm according to UN Security Council Resolution 1559.

Smith attributed six characteristics to the new wars among people and they seem prescient of what is now under way in Lebanon (also in Iraq and Afghanistan). Industrial armies have finite resources in equipment and people. Their utility and employment are governed by time. The guerrilla group is not because it can up the tempo of violence and then lower it as they go back into the everyday life of the community: "escalators can go down as well as up," he explains. They tend to use weapons below the latest level of sophistication - the pace of innovation of guerrilla weaponry and tactics, used by Hezbollah and the Iraqi and Afghan fighters, bears this out.

Much of the contest, concludes Smith, will be outside the state; in the case of Helmand in Afghanistan and all the hot spots in Iraq, this is especially true. The conflict is among and for the people. Meanwhile, much of the battle for sympathy and support will be in the "information space" of public media of all kinds.

Smith himself, when serving, was almost the exception among contemporaries in eschewing grand-standing before the media, but he never underestimated its importance. "The media is like the weather, it's around us, and you can't do much to change it," he once observed. Both Hezbollah and Israel set great store by the media, but in the past three weeks Hezbollah has shown itself much more adept at manipulating it. The Government of Ehud Olmert has sounded confused and out of touch - to say nothing of the pronouncements of George Bush, Tony Blair and their foreign ministers, Dr Rice and Mrs Beckett. First Israel seemed unsure about the strategic goal, which was, on different days, to disarm Hezbollah (not a strategic aim in itself), destroy Hezbollah, get Lebanon's coalition Government to disarm Hezbollah, or clean out southern Lebanon of rocket sites and declare a cordon sanitaire along the border.

Hezbollah's message has been accurate and deadly. Hezbollah sees itself as the defender of the oppressed, meaning the Shias of Lebanon and by extension the Palestinians, against the might of Israel. Of course it managed to gloss over why it got into this fight now; which probably had a lot to do with seizing the initiative back from Hamas in being Israel's number one opponent. There is something ill-thought-through about its tactics, too - it is hard to understand its notion of a military "end state" in this campaign. But its members have scored in giving the impression they are the victims, and that they are still fighting, and possibly winning.

The carnage at Qana and in the convoys of people fleeing Tyre, they say, shows Israeli notions of precision targeting for what they are. "Israel does not target civilians", said the Israeli military spokesman with remarkable ineptitude, for television screens across the world show that Israeli tanks and aircraft certainly kill many more civilians than Hezbollah's rockets do.

So following the Martin van Creveld-Rupert Smith theses, what must we expect now? As a prophet, I cannot claim more credibility than the neo-cons. Prophecy is not part of the reporter or historian's brief, though the burbling of some of the UK's finest commentatori now filling the nation's screens from the Levant might lead one to think otherwise. The Israeli security cabinet has now stated that it intends to move into Lebanon, evidently to the Litani river, with five brigades to carry out "search and destroy" missions against Hezbollah arms dumps and command posts - for the fighters themselves will have long gone.

It will not be easy, and Hezbollah and its allies are bound to try some new deadly form of ambush on Israel and its sponsors. In a few days the Olmert Government will declare a sort of tactical victory, saying that the danger of rocket attacks from Lebanon has been removed. This will allow negotiations to start in earnest. The key will be the role of France, Germany and Italy, because it will fall to them to put together a peace monitoring force. They will do so only if there is a real peace, however temporary, to keep.

Hence we have the insistence of France and its European partners to include Damascus, and possibly even Tehran, in the pact, and with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt as sponsors of Lebanon. Against this are contrasted the voices of George Bush and Tony Blair, calling for the exclusion of Damascus at all costs and issuing veiled threats against Tehran.

The issue facing the global community today is not merely a debate about force and its utility. The moral question raised by the bombing of Tyre and Qana, the rocketing of Haifa, Tiberias and Kiryat Shmona is real and central. And it is not one of equivalence. Bombing people in the wars among the people is both unethical and in the end impractical. It loses sympathy and support; Israel's tactics have left it more isolated internationally than at almost any time since its birth in 1948.

Calling for the destruction of Israel, the battle cry of Hezbollah and now the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, is almost as inept as it is immoral - and profoundly against historic traditions of Islamic tolerance. Suppose the nightmare does come true. What does Hezbollah propose to do after it destroys Israel? It is a movement that disposes rather than proposes. What would it do if it had nothing on which to vent its hatred, the quality on which so much of its identity now seems to rest?

Israel has lived the open-ended, cyclical war almost since its inception 58 years ago. To be in a perpetual state of mobilisation and conscription imposes a colossal strain on the community. "Things look pretty bad," said an Israeli friend whose family had fought in the gruelling campaigns in Lebanon 10 years ago, "but that should be our opportunity. It offers a big opportunity. The Government should say this has to stop and we must now go for some final settlement. And just put it all on the table."

Robert Fox is a war correspondent.

‘We see, hear and live every moment of this war'

Samuel Fahim, a friar at the monastery in Harissa in Lebanon, describes life for the members of his order and those who have sought shelter with them from the Israeli bombing of the area

The war in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah broke out almost unexpectedly. Now we are in the third week of the sixth war on Lebanese territory in the past 60 years, and how bitter it is to live amid guns, airplanes, missiles and bombs. How sad to not be able to find much-needed food and medicine or a bed to sleep in; how hard it is to wait for death from one moment to the next.

We are a Franciscan community made up of five Religious and live in the town of Harissa, which is on a famous mountain with a huge statue of Our Lady of Lebanon. We are in the centre of Lebanon, on the only road between the north and south of the country. One could say that this has been the calmest area up to now, thanks to the great Shrine of Our Lady, the Apostolic Nunciature, and the headquarters of the Maronite Patriarchate.

But this in no way shields us. We see, hear and live every moment of this war, and so we have opened our friary to many people seeking refuge and protection for their children. We share everything with them - both material and spiritual.

Most of our time is spent in front of the friary's only television or with radios in our hands, following the news and hoping for a ceasefire. We all eat our lunch and supper together and then almost everyone joins us for the 7 p.m. daily Mass.

There have been three unforgettable moments. First, the bombing of Port Junieh, just 7 km from here. Families were terrified. Parishioners, with women and children screaming, fled for safety in the friary. Then, the destruction of television, radio and mobile phone centres just 5 km from us in the village of Fatka. It was noon and many children were playing with the friars in our parish hall just to pass the time. When the planes started the bombardments the children began crying and screaming. And this is to say nothing of the fear felt by their parents. Finally, on Tuesday 25 July, we had a spiritual day dedicated to St Anthony of Padua, patron of our friary and shrine. All the townspeople took part, asking the Lord to take this war away by fasting, prayer, a Holy Hour and Mass. The only means left to us is to turn to God.

The people we have been hosting in our friary these days every so often receive terrible news of their homes. Some have been destroyed, others looted and some set ablaze. There is only one advantage that this war has brought. It is a better understanding of the great value of peace - which we all yearn for so much.

Fr Samuel Fahim is a friar at the Convent of St Anthony of Padua, Harissa, Junieh, Lebanon. Translated by Robert Mickens.

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