Oh well, here's what I think:

Thank you.

"Why, for example, did the Israelis attack and destroy the headquarters of the Liban-Lait company in the Bekaa Valley, the largest milk factory in Lebanon?"

Because they are targeting Lebanon in the most inexcusably indescriminate way. Why? Because that's exactly what Hizbollah are doing, and Israel is punishing the people of Lebanon for that crime.

That does not actually answer your own question, because it does not say what the purpose of the punishment is. To relieve the Israelis' feelings through revenge? (Inflicted on a third party?) To coerce the Lebanese government, through sympathy with its people's suffering, to cease to harbour Hezbollah? To coerce Hezbollah, through its sympathy with other Lebanese, to cease trying to kill Israelis? All of these things? Or what? But anyway, we shall respond to your answer as far as it went.

You copied your list of questions verbatim from yesterday's article by Robert Fisk in The Independent. Incidentally, it may be helpful to you to know that Robert Fisk, by his disregard for facts, his tendentious reinterpretations of history, his relentless agenda of demonising the actions of the US, Israel, and the West generally, and his anti-Western racism, has become a byword for systematic factual unreliability caused by pathological ideological bias. So he is not someone whose utterances are worth laboriously typing into a computer, and certainly not citing as a factual reference when trying to persuade someone who does not share his agenda. However, it so happens that that is not directly relevant to our discussion here, because it is undoubtedly true that factories have been hit by Israeli air strikes during the current war. So let us assume, for the sake of argument, that one of them was the Liban-Lait company in the Bekaa Valley, and that it was targeted rather than hit accidentally.

The obvious way in which this could come about would be if Hezbollah fighters, or leaders, were using the factory as a base, or for storing or launching their missiles. That is not an implausible thing for them to be doing, since it is their systematic policy. Only yesterday, Israeli forces discovered a Hezbollah arsenal in a mosque, so it is inconceivable that Hezbollah would hesitate to use a milk factory in the same way.

One therefore has to ask oneself this: if the motives for the current Israeli air raids were exactly as the Israeli government is publicly claiming, would one expect any factories to be hit? The answer is clearly yes. And so one should consider further: would one then expect Fisk to interpret those raids as evidence of immoral intentions on the part of the Israelis? Again, clearly, yes. Would they in fact be evidence of that? Clearly not in themselves, because they are, on the face of it, also consistent with other intentions, including those that the Israelis claim to have.

However, to make a fair judgement, one must consider whether your alternative explanation is plausible too, namely that this was part of an inexcusably indiscriminate, collective punishment of the Lebanese people, "exactly what Hizbollah are doing" [to the Israeli people].

One problem with that explanation is that, as Elliot said, the Israelis would be going about this punishment in a very illogical and self-defeating way. They keep insisting that that is not what it is. And they are taking extraordinary measures to, for example, allow the flow of humanitarian aid, and to reveal in advance where they are going to strike so that civilians can leave the area. Moreover, they are limiting themselves to using only a tiny proportion of their military power. Whatever you may think of the morality of their choice of targets, they are manifestly not, as Hezbollah is, choosing them according to population density. Now, you may think that all such apparently perverse measures are camouflage, intended to disguise what you know to be the true intentions of the Israelis. If so, then you are at least claiming that those intentions are being systematically disguised. In other words, the alleged Israeli intentions we are discussing, and the military planning and actions which you say they are causing, are part of a conspiracy.

There is also the fact that this alleged punishment mission is costing the lives of Israeli soldiers. The Israelis claim to care deeply about the loss of individual lives, and to be deeply averse to risking them other than in self-defence. They must be lying about that too, if the real intention of these actions is revenge. Perhaps you are not saying that it is; there are forms of punishment that are not vengeful - though rarely against third parties. That is why we hoped you would be explicit as to what motive you are actually alleging.

But in any case, there would have to be a conspiracy, and all this leads us to consider its nature, and how plausible it could be that it exists. We refer you to our series on the subject. but in brief, if the real intention of the current Israeli actions (such as the bombing of any particular building) differs as you say from the reasons that they publicly defend, then they are faced with what seems to us an impossible problem of dupe-management. In this regard, bear in mind that the Israeli Air Force in particular contains officers with a vast range of political opinions. Regularly, some of them resign, or refuse to participate in certain actions, because they disagree with them politically. It is therefore beyond the bounds of credibility that, in the briefing for a mission to bomb a milk factory, the pilots would be given a justification such as "this will pay back those Lebanese for Hezbollah's murders of our children", and for the conspirators in the government to expect those pilots to go out and attack, including risking their own lives, in pursuit of such an intention.

The pilots are not raw conscripts. They are world-class professionals, highly skilled and knowledgeable about the enemy and the military situation. Is it plausible that they could be fobbed off again and again with a rationale for their missions that was such a gigantic lie? Would they not be constantly encountering situations where the purported national aims would be best served by one mission, yet they were being ordered to fly a completely different mission inconsistent with those aims?

And therefore finally, we are led to consider whether, if what was really happening was that all of the missions really are in conformity with Israel's purported aims, Robert Fisk would be saying so. And whether you would be.