Now that UNIFIL has substantially endorsed Israel’s account of yesterday’s fatal shooting on its border, a couple of thoughts…

1.

The fact that the slaying of Dov Harari was not accompanied by salvos of Hezbollah rockets landing in Israel nor quickly followed by F16s bombing Lebanon in response may be  attributable, among other things, to the Dahiya doctrine; Israel’s stated intention to use disproportionate force (perhaps I should say “really very disproportionate force indeed”, as many commentators regard any  level of force used by Israel to be disproportionate) against civilian  infrastructure being used to attack it should Hezbollah decide to go to war against Israel again. The next time around there’ll be no half-cocked escalation with ill-prepared infantry blundering around in the villages of south Lebanon like there was in 2006 and this knowledge appears to have had a  certain sobering effecting on Nasrallah.

Sure, blowing the brains out of a engineering corps reservist was excellent sport for those with no doubts about the sub-human nature of self-governing Jews, and having it done by someone wearing a Lebanese army uniform helps to further blur the distinction between the Lebanese state and Iran’s client militia, but it’s a long way from the foolhardy élan with which Nasrallah went to war in 2006.

And before anybody feels the need to say it; yes I know that the fact that Hezbollah has been deterred since 2006 doesn’t mean that it’s always going to stay deterred and I also know that having the two sides glaring at each other  over the border fence, with a club in one hand and a dagger in the other, is not the same as, as nice as or as desirable as a just solution to the underlying problem that causes all instances of  instability in the region^TM, nor to  a solution for the outstanding issues between the two states.

2.

Should deterrence fail and war break out  between Israel and Hezbollah/Lebanon again, yesterday’s incident will have brought a signal benefit for Israel. By further identifying the Lebanese state and its armed servants with Hezbollah, its cause of eternal resistance to Israel’s existence and, by extension,  with Iran and its ambitions, the attack has simplified  a whole series of planning and targeting decisions that  the IDF will have to take prior to and during any future conflict with Lebanon. To put it another way; in the event of a new war, what reason would the IDF now have for not flattening every Lebanese army barracks and killing as many members of the Lebanese army as it can?