Israel also drove out more than a half million civilians from southern Lebanon as part of an effort to commandeer that territory. Israel's bombing has been so indiscriminate that even President Donald Trump objected. On Truth Social, Trump announced: "Israel will not be bombing Lebanon any longer. They are PROHIBITED from doing so by the U.S.A. Enough is enough!!!"

It remains to be seen whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heeds Trump's command. Israeli has continued bombing Lebanon but not as vociferously as it previously did.

The attacks are reminiscent of Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon, which also killed roughly a thousand civilians, as well as a few hundred Hezbollah fighters. With the W. Bush White House cheerleading all the way, Israel assailed Lebanon in response to Hezbollah's seizure of two Israeli soldiers. Israel and Hezbollah had been exchanging bombs and missiles for years prior to Israel's launching a bombing campaign that soon expanded to include much of Lebanon. The carnage was wildly popular on Capitol Hill, where the U.S. House of Representatives voted 410-8 in favor of a resolution endorsing Israeli military action. Hezbollah thwarted the invasion in one of the biggest defeats for the Israeli military since the start of the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

On August 12, 2006, thousands of people gathered near the White House to protest American support for the Israeli attacks on Lebanon. While some zealots portrayed Arabs as innately hostile to the United States and its allies, this photo I snapped of a mother and daughter marching along captured the all-American reality of many supporters of Lebanon. The mother is wearing traditional Lebanese garb and carrying both a U.S. flag and a Lebanese flag. The daughter is soaking up the scene while chomping on a popsicle. This is a pair that would have fit in with practically any American Fourth of July celebration.

Another shot captured a protestor lady with a smile so robust it almost cracked the lens of my Nikon point-and-shoot camera that day.

There were plenty of Arab Americans on the scene who were confounded to see the U.S. government supporting the attacks on their kinfolks. This sign reflects perhaps naïve optimism that President George W. Bush would do anything to stop the bombing.

The U.S. government has been perennially dragged into Lebanese quagmires since the Reagan era. In June 1982, a terrorist organization headed by Abu Nidal (the Osama bin Laden of the 1980s) attempted to assassinate the Israeli ambassador in London. Nidal's forces had previously killed many Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) officials in numerous bomb and shooting attacks, since they considered Yasir Arafat a traitor for his stated willingness to negotiate with Israel. Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel exploited the shooting in London to send the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) into Lebanon to crush the PLO. Yet, as Thomas Friedman noted in his book From Beirut to Jerusalem, "The number of Israeli casualties the PLO guerrillas in Lebanon actually inflicted [was] minuscule (one death in the 12 months before the invasion)."

Defense Minister Ariel Sharon told the Israeli cabinet that his 1982 "Operation Peace for Galilee" would extend only 40 kilometers into Lebanon. However, Sharon sent his tanks to Beirut, determined to destroy the PLO once and for all. As David Martin and John Walcott noted in their 1988 book, Best Laid Plans: The Inside Story of America's War against Terrorism, the U.S. embassy in Beirut "sent cable after cable to Washington, warning that an Israeli invasion would provoke terrorism and undermine America's standing in the Arab world, but not a word came back."