BEIRUT – Hezbollah’s long-awaited response to last month’s assassination by Israel of a top military commander arrived Sunday to broad relief across Lebanon and the region, which had feared an escalation in the low-intensity but nasty conflict that’s raged in parallel to the war on Gaza for more than 10 months.
The relief is likely to be short-lived, as few think a widespread, incredibly painful (for both sides) war can be avoided indefinitely, but after almost a year of strikes and counter-strikes forcing over 100,000 civilians in the two countries to flee the border area, civilians on both sides seemed content to go to bed Sunday night without fear of a regional war arriving in the morning. Regardless, there’s little reason to believe Sunday’s carefully calibrated escalation has solved anything.
The confidence of Israeli officials and the public in the wake of Sunday’s extremely limited response is alarming. Thinking the most ruthless and competent enemy the Israeli military has ever faced is afraid or lacks the ability to cause widespread damage reflects an arrogance developed over decades of occupying the captive Palestinian populations in Gaza and the West Bank. It’s this arrogance that leads Israeli officials to conclude that they know how to fight ‘Arabs,’ while failing to note nothing that works in the West Bank has ever succeeded in Lebanon…..more