ISRAEL: There is little dissent in Israel over the army's offensive, writes Peter Hirschberg in Jerusalem.
It sounds familiar: rejigging the balance of power in Lebanon to ensure a stable regime that will in turn guarantee quiet on Israel's northern border.
It's certainly not as ambitious as Israel's abortive attempt in the early 1980s to redraw Lebanon's fractious political map, but the goals set by Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert for the military campaign Israel is currently waging in Lebanon are not modest.
Military officials say that much of the massive aerial bombardment over the last four days has been aimed at knocking out Hizbullah's command structure and its arsenal of weapons, especially the stockpiles of rockets it has been firing into northern Israel.
By weakening Hizbullah, Israeli leaders hope the new Lebanese government will be able to contend with the Shia organisation and despatch its forces to take control in the Hizbullah-dominated south.
The first goal of the campaign, a senior military source confirmed yesterday, was to ensure that Hizbullah did not remain a dominant military force in Lebanon.
This, he said, would allow weaker parties that are angry with the Shia organisation for triggering a fierce Israeli response to make their voices heard.
Despite the obvious dangers in this strategy - bombarded by Israel, the Lebanese public could rally around Hizbullah and the government could resign - Mr Olmert is enjoying massive support from the Israeli public and broad backing from Israel's usually fractious parliament.
Already angry that Palestinian militants have for months been firing rockets into Israel from Gaza, despite the fact that the government pulled the army and the settlers out of the coastal strip last year, many Israelis were further incensed by the Hizbullah attack last week in which three soldiers were killed and two captured. Five others were killed shortly afterwards while giving chase.
Having ended the occupation in south Lebanon six years ago and having withdrawn to the UN-delineated border, Israelis want Hizbullah to be punished for violating that border. That sentiment has united left and right-wing Israelis, with only the Arab parties in parliament attacking the government over its offensive. Yossi Beilin, for instance, the architect of the Oslo peace accords and an inveterate peace campaigner, has slammed the attack by Hizbullah and backed a strong military response.
In the daily Haaretz yesterday, well-known opinion writer Gideon Levy criticised Mr Olmert for waging a "war of choice" in Lebanon, suggesting that Israel was "eager to get to the battlefield . . . without taking any time to think. That deepens suspicions," Mr Levy wrote, "that we need a war every few years, with terrifying repetition, even if afterward we end up back in exactly the same position."
But unlike Mr Levy, many columnists, even if they do question whether Mr Olmert can really bomb Hizbullah into submission and engineer a new order in Lebanon, have supported the government's decision to launch a fierce response to the Hizbullah attack.
Israelis are also able to view the consequences of their actions in Lebanon.
Israel's three main TV channels have been regularly broadcasting footage of the devastation in Lebanon as a result of the Israeli bombing. Footage has also been shown of Lebanese civilians, against the backdrop of the piles of rubble that were once their homes, venting their anger on Israel.
While the rocket attacks by Hizbullah in northern Israel and the casualties they have wrought top the news in Israel, the number of civilian dead in Lebanon is also covered - especially cases in which a large number of civilians have been killed in a single strike, like the 20 Lebanese civilians, many of them children, who were killed when an Israeli missile incinerated a van on Saturday in southern Lebanon.
Israeli news stations have also been monitoring foreign press coverage of the conflict. Anxious at how they are being portrayed abroad, many moan that the foreign networks afford far more time to the carnage in Lebanon than to the damage caused by Hizbullah's rockets.