BEIRUT: Within the space of a few hours, two Israeli soldiers were dead, and Wednesday had turned from just another weekday to the day that Lebanese started asking themselves: Are we about to see a repeat of 2006?
That year saw a full-on war with Israel develop following a deadly cross-border attack by Hezbollah on an Israeli patrol. The 2006 war, which ended up costing more than 1,000 lives and severely damaging infrastructure across the country, came after years of “tit-for-tat” incidents between the two sides as part of a carefully calibrated game for which both sides thought they knew the rules.
The name of the unit that attacked an Israeli convoy in the occupied Shebaa Farms Wednesday, killing two and wounding seven others, was the Qunaitra Martyrs – a clear reference to the airstrike last week on a Hezbollah vehicle in Qunaitra, Syria.
That attack killed six party fighters, including the highly symbolic Jihad Mughniyeh – son of assassinated commander Imad – and a senior Iranian military figure. Everyone knew that Hezbollah would have to retaliate.
As a result, most have interpreted the Shebaa Farms incident as part of the contained mini-war between the two sides. But could Hezbollah have been looking for something more following such a bold and humiliating attack on its troops in Syria? Or could their response accidently have paved the way for something bigger, as it did back in 2006, due to unpredictable internal Israeli factors?
“Never rule out war between these two antagonists,” said Bilal Saab, a senior fellow for Middle East security at the Atlantic Council. “But Hezbollah has already done what it wanted to do: a limited, deadly and precise attack.”
He pointed to the significance of Hezbollah’s decision to respond to the Qunaitra attack from the Shebaa Farms, a heavily disputed territory in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights that Lebanon claims as its own.
“The very choice of geography shows the organization does not want to escalate,” Saab said. “It’s cautious, the choice of Shebaa, it means we are back to the previous rules of engagement, which were stable until 2006, when everything broke down.”
“It didn’t attack inside Israel, or inside Syria in the Golan Heights. Hezbollah is not after major escalation, if it was, it could have done much, much more, and Israel understands this,” he added.
But as with all analysts that The Daily Star spoke with, Saab highlighted that the ball was very much in Israel’s court now, and that this included huge unknowns.
“The political calculation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is very important, and oftentimes it has little to do with the military dynamics between the two sides.”
Following the disintegration of his coalition government late last year, Netanyahu called for snap national elections to be held in March. With his position in peril, he is expected to appeal to the right-wing politicians and parts of Israeli society to keep him in power, a bid that many believe would be hugely boosted by a confrontation of some sort with archenemy Hezbollah.
Seeking to depict himself as a crusader against Arab forces bent on Israel’s destruction, his desire to utilize the attack on a military convoy as something more dangerous was evident in his initial response to the incident. “We will not allow terror elements to disrupt the lives of our citizens and threaten their security,” he said. “We will know how to respond with force to whoever challenges us.”
“He’s a wild card,” Saab continued. “In some ways he is just like [former Israeli Prime Minister] Ehud Olmert, who had an inferior political position and went ballistic on Lebanon [in 2006], which obviously backfired.
“The political calculations were huge back then and my understanding, my suspicion, is that they will also play a factor here. We are just not sure of the size.”
The problem is that Netanyahu has been waiting for such an opportunity to urge government parties and the general public to support his election campaign, Mario Abou Zeid researcher at the Carnegie Middle East Center agreed. “I don’t think he will lose this opportunity, he will use it.”
And there were clear signs Wednesday that fellow Israeli politicians – both friend and foe – would rally around the idea of more fighting. Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman called Wednesday for a “harsh and disproportionate” response, while one of Netanyahu’s key opponents, MK Tzipi Livni, said “an attack on soldiers or civilians will be answered harshly and without compromise.”
“There is definitely a possibility of escalation,” Abou Zeid said. “But it’s not 100 percent yet. I don’t think it would be a popular option inside the Israeli community, on the news they were all against escalation and engaging in open war with Hezbollah, but it is more popular among the higher ranks and commanders.”
Phillip Smyth, a researcher at the University of Maryland and author of the blog “Hizballah Cavalcade,” said it was possible that this attack was too much for Israel to ignore.
“In earlier retaliatory responses, when Hezbollah ‘answered’ Israel after their positions or equipment were hit in Syria, a lot of the time they are smaller scale IED attacks ... mostly resulting in injuries, not huge, so it was possible to sweep it under the rug,” he explained.
This time, however, two Israeli soldiers have been killed, he said. “Are the Israelis going to take this and say we allow this response and won’t escalate? There is the other possibility that they respond in a much harder fashion.”
However, he agreed that Hezbollah was not looking for all-out war: “For the most part they really do have their hands tied. They’ve sent thousands of people to Syria ... I don’t think they want to escalate to point in which everything south of Litani [river] is blasted to smithereens.”
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