Preface by Giancarlo De Cataldo. With a commentary by David Grossman When it broke out on July 12th 2006, it wasn’t a war – it shouldn’t have been or become one. Above all in Israel no one was allowed to define it as a war. Because, as the military and political leaders explained after, if you go to war and win, then you have to pay reparations. In what has gone down in history as the second war of Lebanon, or the summer war, there were mistakes, imprecision, political cynicism, the arrogance of the military. There was death and destruction. As in any conflict. Two soldiers kidnapped by Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas infiltrated in Israel had to be recuperated. Instead, after 35 days of battles and bombings, the two soldiers were not liberated, but more than one hundred were dead and along with them were 1,500 Lebanese, mostly civilians. Damages amounted to tens of millions of euros, and the Israeli leaders were officially investigated and accused. But how can one reconstruct a war in which neither the mechanics nor the final result are clear. How to explain what it means to live perennially armed. Luca Del Re, who has covered every war as a war correspondent for sixteen years, narrates those days behind the lines of the army with the Star of David. It is the account of what happened to a people catapulted, in the space of a night, in a conflict that was perhaps only apparently unexpected. The real story of an underestimated risk, an exaggerated reaction, and what seems a deliberate deception of tens of thousands of soldiers. This is the testimony – impassioned and desperate – of a “scribe”, a TV reporter, who experienced the war side by side with the women and men of that battered land. He describes the pain and the anguish of those days that those on both sides of lines went through. The torment for the victims and the mad ineluctability of the condition of eternal war. Wars are not all the same. And they shouldn’t be because every death leaves a different emptiness and forever changes the life of the person who loved the dead one, as David Grossman writes in a letter – entirely quoted here - to his son Uri who died on the last day of that cursed summer war. A war that led to nothing. A war within the war. A war that one mustn’t call war.