No. of Recommendations: 4
I'm wondering if this is going to escalate further. Just thinking out-loud, maybe it should. The status quo was already a "warm" war with no end in sight. Rip of the bandage...it will probably hurt less than pulling it off 1mm at a time. Get it over with.
I think that October 7th made Israel (or at least a large part of the electorate) unwilling to tolerate the status quo any longer. Every region of the world has its own unique foreign policy situation, of course, but it's not exactly typical that you have a large non-state military force like Hezbollah in Lebanon periodically firing rockets into another country, and that just....persists. We use the Mexico analogy from time to time, but it's impossible to imagine the U.S. tolerating a military group taking over northern Baja California and lobbing rockets into San Diego and just letting that continue.
October 7th disabused Israel of the idea that these periodic small attacks (rocket or otherwise) would always remain small. Israeli leadership seems to have convinced themselves that Hamas and Hezbollah were content to just have the power they had in their regions, and that the forays against Israel were never going to be material. That they were content with the status quo. That worldview vanished with the Hamas attack.
Plus...Israel's global and diplomatic standing is probably at an all-time low point right now. They probably view an attack on Hezbollah as carrying no additional negative consequences on that front. If anything, it might help by shifting focus to a less-sympathetic antagonist.
