In a quiet corner of London a small group of extraordinary runners complete laps of an athletics track for a day and a night. Why do they do it? And how far do they go?

Henry James is Alan Hollinghurst’s favorite writer, and in his native England, Hollinghurst, now 70, has over the years acquired a bit of Jamesian eminence himself. He even gets compared to the Master sometimes. That’s because of the sweep and density of his novels, which span more than a century of political and social change, and his exquisite understanding of the British class system. Readers also point to his beautiful, sonorous sentences. He’s often called the best living writer of English prose.

But Hollinghurst began as a sort of enfant terrible. In 1988, his first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, was an overnight sensation, famous for two things: its stunning prose and the frequency and frankness of its gay sex scenes. The book’s narrator, a rich and idle young aristo named Will Beckwith, is mainly interested in old buildings and in cruising—especially for well-muscled, dark-skinned men. He describes his sex life with an avidity and an exactness that are almost poetic. Here, for example, is one of his many descriptions of male genitalia:

O the difference of man and man. Sometimes in the showers, which only epitomized and confirmed a general feeling held elsewhere, I was amazed and enlightened by the variety of the male organ. In the rank and file of men showering the cocks and balls took on the air almost of an independent species, exhibited in instructive contrasts. Here was the long, listless penis, there the curt, athletic knob or innocent rosebud of someone scarcely out of school.

Before Hollinghurst, few had written about gay sexuality so graphically, not even pornographers. There was more of the same in Hollinghurst’s next book, The Folding Star (1994), whose protagonist, a failed writer named Edward Manners working as a tutor in a Bruges-like Flemish city in the late 1980s, is also an enthusiastic cruiser and appraiser of penises. Lots more followed in the novel after that, The Spell (1998), a stylish but ultimately failed attempt at a comedy of manners about four men who mostly just drink too much, do some drugs, and tumble into bed with one another.

Hollinghurst’s fourth novel, The Line of Beauty (2004), is both a satire of British politics in the Thatcher era and a lament for lost innocence, national and personal. Considered by many people to be his masterpiece, it opens in 1983, when the Tories sweep the general election, and amid the excess and excitement of that period, it also touches on something only hinted at in the earlier books: the AIDS crisis. The protagonist is a young gay man, the aptly named Nick Guest, an outsider, middle-class and provincial, who’s fascinated by wealth and privilege. He becomes a lodger at the London townhouse of an influential but corrupt Tory member of Parliament, and from that vantage educates himself simultaneously about sex, class, and politics. An amusing early scene captures the spirit: Upon losing his virginity to a young Black man he meets up with in a private garden across the street from the MP’s house, he feels “as if the trees and bushes had rolled away and all the lights of London shone in on him: little Nick Guest from Barwick, Don and Dot Guest’s boy, fucking a stranger in a Notting Hill garden at night … It was so bad, and it was so much the best thing he had ever done.” The book was bold and ambitious, and also sufficiently racy that after being awarded the Booker Prize in 2004, it briefly became tabloid fodder. “Booker Won by Gay Sex” was the weird headline in the Daily Express, while The Daily Telegraph complained that the judges had been “seduced.”

For almost two decades at that point, Hollinghurst had seemed keen to make a point with his sexual explicitness: that although homosexual behavior had been criminalized for so long in Britain, gayness was a reality there, as everywhere, and that fiction should examine all of life, including sex, from a gay perspective as closely and honestly as it has portrayed life from a heterosexual one.

[Read: Tracing the internal queer revolution]

But none of his novels (with the exception of The Spell ) is only about being gay, any more than, say, John Updike’s Rabbit books are only about being heterosexual. And after The Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst may have felt that calling attention to sexual encounters, at least, had become less necessary. Since then, his novels have taken homosexuality pretty much for granted, and the sex has become comparatively scarce, and mostly not very graphic. The Sparsholt Affair (2017) even contains a funny, probably self-referential scene in which a character now in his 60s suddenly realizes that, except for his own and his husband’s, he hasn’t seen a penis in ages.

Hollinghurst’s cultural range—as his new novel, Our Evenings, again confirms—is enormous. Before he left to write full-time, he was the deputy editor of The Times Literary Supplement, and for a while he was also in charge of something called Nemo’s Almanac, a fiendishly difficult literary competition requiring contestants to identify obscure quotations from writers most people have never heard of. His novels are filled with allusions to books, poetry, music, art. Elaborate subplots in his first two also uncover a history of betrayals, political and cultural as well as personal, that are far more consequential than mere bedroom infidelities.

His formal range is unusual too. Both The Sparsholt Affair and The Stranger’s Child (2011) are narrative departures. Hollinghurst’s previous method had been something like full immersion—telling us everything, and then some. These two work by means of elision and ellipsis, unfolding in sections separated by roughly 20 years. Important events (dating back to World War I in one case, and World War II in the other) happen offstage; characters disappear and then reappear, much the way they do in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, sometimes leaving the reader uncertain at first who these people are or what, exactly, is going on. Several chapters in Sparsholt are told from the point of view of a 7-year-old girl, and they add an element of What Maisie Knew to the story. Why all the fuss over this one little drawing? she wonders—a linchpin of the plot, if only she understood. She’s not alone in her puzzlement: Both novels revolve around a cipher of sorts, each of them a war hero who casts a shadow and serves as proof of how ungraspable the past can be and how it nevertheless infiltrates the present.

The core of both books—and Hollinghurst’s abiding preoccupation—is time, and what it does to everything. Buildings fall down; reputations sink. People age, in ways that novels seldom portray anymore. It’s shocking in Stranger’s Child, for example, to see one main character, so charming as a teenager, turn into a tipsy bag lady. Most of all, time obscures the truth. Hollinghurst’s fiction is underpinned by a fierce and exacting morality that does not spare characters trying to cover up or forget the sins of the past. Which they do: People in his pages misremember their own remembering; stories change, and sometimes the important ones aren’t told at all.

Our Evenings can’t be called a sequel to The Line of Beauty—it begins much earlier, back in the ’60s, and ends much later—but it revisits many of that book’s themes and preoccupations, political ones especially. The perspective, though, is longer and more chastened. The heady Thatcher era is ancient history, and in contemporary England, where the new novel winds up, all the fizz is gone.

The outsider this time is an actor named David Win, who, just like Nick Guest, has his nose pressed against the glass of the English class system. But, a decade or so older than Guest, he encounters a more closed world. He’s half Burmese, raised by a single mother in a provincial town—“a brown-faced bastard,” in a classmate’s phrase. In The Line of Beauty (and in almost all of Hollinghurst’s books, for that matter) dark skin makes a man especially desirable, but for Win, it’s mostly just a burden, another mark of outsiderness.

As a young teenager in the mid-’60s, Win is taken up by Mark Hadlow, a wealthy, left-leaning philanthropist whom the novel presses, a little unconvincingly, into representing all that’s good about the old moneyed classes. Win even becomes a kind of surrogate son, replacing Hadlow’s real offspring, a bully and a cheat who drifts ever rightward politically, eventually helping bring about Brexit. The publicity material for the novel promises an escalating rivalry between Win and Giles Hadlow, culminating in a “shock of violence,” but that’s not really what happens. Giles pops up periodically in Win’s life, usually as an annoyance, sometimes a comic one. The real damage Giles does is to the nation, not to his father’s protégé.

Told almost entirely in the first person by Win, Our Evenings for much of its nearly 500 pages is an old-fashioned coming-of-age story, lingering, in Hollinghurst’s impeccable prose, at all the traditional stops: seaside holidays, public school, Oxford exams, punting on the Cherwell, the first stirrings of gay sexual desire, an unrequited crush on a straight classmate. Win takes forever to emerge from the closet: flirtations, mixed signals, invitations never followed up on. The book is more than half over before Win finally goes to bed with someone—and he’s nothing like Nick Guest’s hunk, just a mousy civil servant.

Win and his mother, Avril—the best character in the book—broach sex and relationships the way English parents and children used to: practically never. When Avril moves in with a woman, resorting for a while to the pretense of separate bedrooms, this upheaval in their lives is barely mentioned. As for her life with Win’s father, she’s evasive, and Win seems determined to stay ignorant. At times, in fact, Our Evenings reads like a throwback, a novel from the pre-Hollinghurst era—as if the author, now older and wiser, were reminding both himself and his readers that sexual honesty is rarely won easily, and that true emotional intimacy is often elusive.

The book also has a complicated, somewhat rueful take on race. From the beginning, Win’s acting career is compromised by his brownness. An early adviser suggests that the teenage Win should just stick to radio. His subsequent apprenticeship is described in some detail, especially a funny stint in an experimental-theater troupe that specializes in mostly nude performances of the classics. By then—in the 1970s—there’s a suggestion that, in progressive circles at least, Win’s real handicap might be that he’s not dark enough: A Black member of the troupe quickly becomes a star in London and then in Hollywood. Mostly Win’s acting serves to supply the novel with a ready-made set of themes and imagery. As soon becomes obvious, lots of things in these pages take place just for show; hypocrisy reigns, and in one way or another, almost everyone is playing a part. Except for Win: Despite his profession, he, unlike Giles Hadlow, say—or his forerunner, Nick Guest—doesn’t fake a thing.

The title, Our Evenings, refers partly to a haunting piano piece by Leoš Janáček that Win hears during his schoolboy days, and partly to the companionable and unexpected late-life relationship he discovers with the Dickensian-named Richard Roughsedge. But the pronoun could also apply to England as a whole, whose twilit hours, the book suggests, are not as sexy as the old days and still not very advanced when it comes to prejudice against the “wogs.” As is so often true of Hollinghurst’s work, an autumnal element runs through the book, a Housman-like sense of belatedness, of better times gone by. The composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, that warhorse of English traditionalism, is mentioned six times, and his plangent music—invoking a lost, idyllic England; a greener, more pleasant land—could easily be the novel’s soundtrack.

Our Evenings is not Hollinghurst’s strongest book, but it may be his saddest, with its sense of what James called “muddlement” and of lives never quite fulfilled. Win’s mother is lonely and misunderstood throughout. Win himself has trouble making lasting connections, and his career, though it eventually earns him some small renown, is not all it could or should have been. Almost as if wearying of itself, the novel doesn’t so much end as just come to a stop, seemingly overwhelmed by the mess that contemporary Britain has become. Brexit, COVID, bloodshed in the streets—even Thatcher’s England was happier than this. By the final pages, you may find yourself wondering whether Hollinghurst’s sense of loss might extend to his own exhilarating early days, when in writing about gay life there were still boundaries to be broken.

This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “Alan Hollinghurst’s Lost England.” ​​​​

Is bad behavior in marriage back? In fictional marriage, I mean. For years, heterosexual matrimony in American novels has seemed rather like it’s become a trap for the female protagonist: Unhappy or misunderstood by her spouse, she may act out or seek retribution; whatever her behavior, though, readers are meant to see that it’s attributable to her environment—in other words, that she’s not really in the wrong. For this plotline to work, the wife must be attuned, sometimes newly so, to herself, her unhappiness, her desires—a fictional extension of the powerful, if reductive, idea that women can protect themselves from harm by understanding their own wants and limits.

In daily life, of course, human desires and boundaries are changeable. The feminist philosopher Katherine Angel writes, “Self-knowledge is not a reliable feature of female sexuality, nor of sexuality in general; in fact, it is not a reliable feature of being a person. Insisting otherwise is fatal.” Self-awareness has certainly killed sex (and sexiness) in a lot of novels; it’s killed a lot of novels, in fact. A story without badness isn’t much of a story, and a story whose hero has perfect self-knowledge is a story utterly devoid of suspense.

Stories about marriage are no exception to this rule. There’s an unbearable flatness to any book whose protagonist is always justified in her actions—or, for that matter, always able to justify them to herself. After years of reading such dead tales, I found both delight and hope in the critic and memoirist Lauren Elkin’s debut novel, Scaffolding, a tale of two slippery adulterers who consider understanding oneself an impossible—or, at best, incompletely possible—task. Its protagonists, Anna and Florence, are psychoanalysts who live in the same Parisian apartment nearly five decades apart, in the 2010s and 1970s, respectively. Both women have crises of faith in language, in intellectualism, in their role as a therapist and as a wife. Neither wants to leave their marriage, but both launch intense, clandestine affairs.

Anna and Florence don’t totally understand their motivations for cheating. They act on impulse—in Anna’s case, for what seems like the first time in her life—and yet each seems to recognize that her affair is a voyage of discovery. Elkin writes these events as complicated adventures in wrong decisions—which, crucially, she neither justifies nor condemns. She lets her characters be bad yet ordinary, bad yet sympathy-inducing, bad yet worthy of a good life. In a sense, their badness improves their situation. Their lack of self-awareness, their tendency or ability to submit to their id, gets them closer to what they consciously want: some privacy within their marriage. Just as Scaffolding argues that we can’t know ourselves fully, it makes plain that we can never completely know one another—and that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with that, even when it leads to bad behavior; even when it breaks our hearts.

Scaffolding is about feminism as much as it is about marriage. Florence, its ’70s protagonist, is a psychoanalysis student who spends her free time with consciousness-raising groups. She commits herself to flouting convention, even though her marriage is fairly traditional: She cooks and cleans, and is busy redecorating the apartment that she and her husband, Henry, inherited from her grandmother, who survived the Holocaust. Elkin swiftly makes apparent to readers that Florence’s feminist rebellion is also a rejection of the (largely Christian) “Franco-Français” society that deported her family—something Florence herself seems not to notice. She’s too busy thinking about the affair she’s having with one of her professors. Anna, in the 21st century, is less rebellious and much less happy. She’s suffering from depression after a miscarriage, spending hours immobile in bed, “as if a large sheet of cling film were pinning me in place.” Sexually, she’s shut down; her husband, David, is working in London, and she declines to go with him and struggles to engage in any intimacy when he visits her in Paris. Her only live connection—very live, it turns out—is with Clémentine, a feminist artist in her 20s who grows determined, and successfully so, to draw Anna out of herself and into the world.

[Read: How should feminists have sex now?]

But even as Anna begins recovering from her depression, its effect on her career is devastating. Formerly devoted to her analysis practice, she’s now stopped valuing her profession. “Why look in other people’s narratives for the metaphors, the gaps, the gaffes, the subtexts, that point you to what they themselves may or may not realise?” she asks herself. “Maybe the words merely point to themselves.” Readers see her apply this feeling to her own life, expending less and less effort on making sense of her behavior. Florence follows a similar trajectory, though as a result not of trauma but of going to Jacques Lacan’s lectures and having an affair with a Lacanian psychology professor. (Don’t worry: Although Lacan famously deconstructed language, which led, in his case, to highly abstruse writing, Scaffolding does not. Elkin’s prose is elegant and straightforward, with just enough experimentation to suit its ideas.) “We have to absorb what we’re learning without passing it through language,” she tells a friend—no easy job for a shrink. But both Florence and Anna learn to see conscious thought as a scaffold, with impulse and desire as the real, substantial building it encases and supports.

Florence tries and fails to explain the intensity of her feelings for the professor she’s having an affair with; she tells herself he’s a stand-in for something but has no idea what. At the same time, she’s mystified by the fact that the affair is a “big, big deal” to her when she’s out and about in the daytime, but the moment she returns to her “evening life” with Henry (a cheater himself, not incidentally), thoughts of her lover either vanish or fuel the sex life that is the core of her marriage. Secrecy and deception as aphrodisiac—this may not be moral, and yet, Florence decides, it’s “exactly how [marriage] should work, and exactly not how it is supposed to work.”

Anna, for her part, keeps more secrets from herself than from David. She nurtures an attraction to her neighbor Clémentine without permitting herself to notice, though the reader can’t miss it: Anna, otherwise cut off from her body, is so physically attuned to her friend’s presence that she describes her as “her own charged atmosphere.” It’s through Clémentine, in fact, that Anna reencounters an ex whom she desires so intensely, she sleeps with him almost instantly, even though doing so means betraying both David and Clémentine. Unlike Florence, Anna doesn’t attempt to explain her feelings or actions to herself. She knows her behavior is wrong, yet she also knows how alone she’s been, how solitary and isolated from her husband her depression has made her. Having an affair punctures her cling film. It might be bad, but it also returns her to her marriage and her life.

Scaffolding isn’t really suggesting that adultery and secrecy are good for a marriage. Rather, the novel treats these things as bad but normal and manageable—and preferable to a total loss of connection. When Clémentine cheats on her boyfriend, she tells Anna the cheating is a disruption that can be “absorbed back into the relationship.” Novels that leave wrongdoing out of their worlds imply that no transgression, marital or otherwise, could be that small, and that for a character to do something genuinely harmful would bring their whole life crashing down. Our broader cultural impulse toward hyperconsciousness is rooted in the same idea. It reflects an inability or unwillingness to tell the difference between big bad things and the small bad ones—and, by extension, to forgive the latter.

[Read: A grim view of marriage—and an exhortation to leave it]

Elkin puts some big badness in Scaffolding to draw out this distinction. Clémentine is part of a brigade of women who graffiti anti–domestic abuse messages on Paris’s walls. Their work presents a vision of feminism very different from the one in Florence’s consciousness-raising groups, which are all about knowing oneself: For Clémentine, protest is the only way women can resist misogyny. Anna’s first positive emotion in the novel is a response to the graffiti: “Aren’t they incredible?” she says, pointing one out to David on one of his visits from London. Florence, meanwhile, isn’t just involved in raising her own consciousness. She also keenly follows the Bobigny trial, France’s equivalent of Roe v. Wade. Both characters are highly aware of how dangerous life can be for women. Compared with unsafe clandestine abortions or spousal violence, some cheating means nothing; but compared with the flatness of Anna’s day-to-day life and the conventionality of Florence’s marriage, their affairs have immensely high stakes.

Scaffolding strikes this balance well. Elkin is deft but clear in reminding readers that there’s a distinction between badness and evil, or badness and hate. She writes Florence’s and Anna’s marriages as immensely loving ones, despite their holes and wobbles; in such relationships, the novel seems to argue, it is conceivable—though not guaranteed—that almost anything can be forgiven or absorbed.

Neither Florence nor Anna knows why they cheat on their husband. Perhaps more important, neither of them knows why they love their husband. In a novel less invested in psychological mystery, this would signal crisis for the fictional marriage. In life, it’s the most normal thing there is. Complete self-awareness is both an unattainable standard and a false promise, as is complete transparency with someone else, no matter what your wedding vows say or suggest. Accepting this fact is terrifying. It turns commitment into suspense. In reality, many of us prefer not to acknowledge that, which is more than reasonable: Who goes into their marriage wanting deception and drama?

Novels, though, are built to let us test-drive uncertainty—to feel it without living it. Where marriage is concerned, this is an important option for many of us to have. Marriage stories whose protagonists never slip up don’t give readers this option; if anything, they flatten our views of intimacy rather than letting us expand them through imagination.

“They’re cheering us now,” I said to the soldier next to me in the jeep, as we drove through Beirut to applause and showers of rice. “But soon they’ll be shooting.” It was June 9, 1982, four days after Israel had invaded Lebanon. The war followed years of Palestinian rocket fire on northern Israel, but the proximate trigger was a Palestinian gunman’s attempt to assassinate the Israeli ambassador in London. The goal of Operation Peace for Galilee, as then–Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin called it, was to push the terrorists out of rocket range, but Defense Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the army to advance farther north and besiege Beirut. After evicting the terrorists and the Syrian troops occupying the country, Israel hoped to install a Christian, pro-Western government that was committed to peace.

I was serving in a reserve reconnaissance unit of the Israel Defense Forces at the time, but in civilian life, I was studying Middle East history. I’d learned that the Lebanese had often cheered invading armies but later turned on them. Previous efforts to pacify the country had uniformly failed. Sharon’s plan, I thought, was reckless. “We’ll never get out of here,” I said to the soldier as we drove, rice-pelted, through Beirut’s suburbs. “We’re stuck.”

Stuck we were, both militarily and diplomatically. President Ronald Reagan at first backed the operation, but then, appalled by the number of civilian casualties, forced Israel’s troops to fall back to southern Lebanon. The U.S. Marines who replaced us also abandoned Beirut after 243 of them were killed by a suicide bomber from a previously unknown Shiite group named Hezbollah. Those same Iranian-backed terrorists relentlessly attacked IDF positions in the south, until finally, a full 18 years after they’d invaded Lebanon, the last Israeli soldiers withdrew.

[Gal Beckerman: A naked desperation to be seen]

Though Israel succeeded in freeing Lebanon of Syrian troops and evicting many Palestinian terrorists, and a peaceful Christian government emerged, that progress proved fragile. The new president was soon assassinated, and the country gradually came to be dominated by Hezbollah. On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah terrorists ambushed an IDF patrol, killing eight soldiers and capturing two. Israel responded with the Second Lebanon War.

The conflict raged for 34 days, during which Hezbollah rockets pummeled Israeli cities and towns and IDF jets bombed strategic targets in Lebanon. President George W. Bush initially supported Israel’s right to self-defense, before recoiling from the high civilian casualty rate and demanding a cease-fire. A last-minute thrust by Israeli ground forces succeeded only in further antagonizing the Americans. Their response was United Nations Resolution 1701, which ended the fighting and instructed Hezbollah to withdraw to north of the Litani River, creating a buffer zone in the south of Lebanon.

In this second war, I served as an IDF spokesperson, rather than a combat soldier. But on its last night, I volunteered for battlefield duty. My assignment was to help transport the remains of fallen soldiers out of the combat zone and back over the border to Israel. Their comrades watched us as we worked, their faces grim with disappointment and fatigue. More than 100 soldiers had died, yet none of us could say exactly for what.

Although Israel managed to inflict a toll on Hezbollah—its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, publicly regretted ambushing that patrol—it gained little in the long term. In defiance of Resolution 1701, Hezbollah deployed along Israel’s northern border and burrowed multiple attack tunnels beneath it. Directly opposite the frontier fort where I served after 2006, Hezbollah erected a huge billboard on which a laughing terrorist hoisted an Israeli soldier’s severed head.

Israelis deluded ourselves by thinking that the war had deterred Hezbollah when, in fact, the war had deterred us. We remained largely passive while, over the next 17 years, Hezbollah expanded its rocket arsenal tenfold and grew to become one of the region’s most formidable military forces.

Israel’s indifference ended after October 7, 2023. We now know that 3,000 terrorists of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan unit had been planning to smash through the border and ravage Israel’s north much as Hamas had in the south. Timely bombing by the Israeli air force preempted that attack, but Hezbollah compensated by shelling the Galilee. Nearly 100,000 Israelis became refugees in their own country, their fields and houses scorched.

Historically, Israel has never done well with wars of attrition, yet Hezbollah was waging one that steadily crept south, toward the Sea of Galilee in the east and toward Haifa in the west. Israel’s return fire failed to deter Hezbollah and, by its very ineffectiveness, may have egged it on. Throughout, Hezbollah declared its readiness to agree to a cease-fire if Hamas did, but Hamas wanted a war in the north that would relieve the pressure it faced in Gaza. It was only a matter of time before Israel, assured that Hamas was sufficiently degraded, would turn its attention to Hezbollah. On September 19 of this year, after the pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah operatives simultaneously exploded, seriously wounding thousands of people and killing at least 37, the Third Lebanon War began.

Though also launched in response to terrorist attacks from Lebanon, the Third Lebanon War differs from its predecessors in several crucial ways. For Israel, Lebanon is now just one front in a year-long, multifaceted struggle with Iranian proxies throughout the region, as well as with Iran itself. Unlike the previous two wars, both of which were perceived by many Israelis as wars of choice, the current conflict is seen by almost all Israelis as fully justified. We know that Israel cannot lose the north and survive.

For that reason alone, Israelis need to consider how the Third Lebanon War can succeed where the first two failed.

Success will depend principally on setting clear and realistic objectives. Israel cannot, as it did in 1982, seek to remake Lebanon into a Middle Eastern Belgium or, as in 2006, merely retaliate for Hezbollah’s aggression. Rather, Israel’s limited goals must be to drive Hezbollah beyond the Litani and to end the rocket fire on the north. Israel must deny any intention of permanently occupying southern Lebanon and declare its openness to any diplomatic means of implementing and reliably enforcing Resolution 1701.

[Dara Horn: October 7 created a permission structure for anti-Semitism]

The United States must also avoid its former mistakes, committing instead to supporting Israel and allowing it to complete its military mission. Israel began this war with a series of brilliant strikes against Hezbollah’s leaders and military infrastructure, but the fighting ahead is likely to remain brutal. The U.S. must desist from imposing premature cease-fires or sponsoring UN resolutions that the terrorists can handily violate. But the United States should also insist that Israel honor its pledge not to occupy Lebanon, and that it engage earnestly with diplomatic envoys.

Although I recently volunteered for reserve duty guarding a Galilean kibbutz, I will not take part in this Lebanon war. For the young Israeli soldiers engaged in close combat, I can only offer one older veteran’s advice: You are fighting to restore security to your people, not to refashion Lebanon or to remain indefinitely on its soil. Your job is not to punish Hezbollah for any specific act of aggression, but to deter it and its Iranian sponsors from further attempts to destroy us. Your job is to fight with all the skills you’ve been taught, the superior gear you’ve been issued, and the values you learned at home, in order to complete your mission—and then to return to help lead Israel into the future.

The third time—so the colloquialism goes—is always a charm. The Third Lebanon War can yield positive and perhaps transformative results. Hezbollah and its Iranian patrons can be defeated, Israel can reinforce its security and revive its deterrence, and the United States can reaffirm its superpower status. But all of that will require a consistent effort to study the mistakes of Israel’s first two wars in Lebanon, and to avoid repeating them.

The Transport Secretary says it would make "no sense" to have the line terminate in west London.