It might be foolhardy to poke the Russian bear, but poking the Lebanese one seems to be a different matter.
Hezbollah is almost unquestionably the world’s most formidable non-state fighting force. Its military capability exceeds that of the armies of many Middle Eastern states, Lebanon among them. Its vast arsenal includes guided missiles that could hit any Israeli city.
Yet the group’s response to days of provocation has been pretty tepid so far.
Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, had repeatedly warned Israel that any airstrikes on its strongholds in southern Beirut would be met with a salvo of rocket strikes on Tel Aviv.
In the past two months, Israel has twice bombed the Lebanese capital, killing some of Nasrallah’s most experienced battlefield commanders. Last week, thousands of Hezbollah’s rank-and-file were incapacitated in synchronised attacks on the group’s pagers and walkie-talkie radios.
Hezbollah’s response has not quite been to bend over and ask for more.
This weekend, it unleashed its most ferocious cross-border rocket salvo since it began firing into northern Israel in solidarity with Hamas last October.
The barrage followed with a declaration that Hezbollah is now in an “open-ended battle of reckoning” with Israel.
But the group has deliberately not targeted Israeli population centres, nor has it deployed its most sophisticated weaponry. It has spoken menacingly but vaguely about retaliation at an unspecified time in the future.
This is well short of a full-scale declaration of war, that some of its fighters are itching for – so why the coyness?
The most obvious answer is that Iran is restraining the group. Hezbollah is Tehran’s most powerful proxy force in the Middle East. Its precision-guided missiles, like the Fateh 110 with a range of 300km, and its attack drones come from Iran.
The Iranian regime, however, regards Hezbollah as its insurance policy if Israel attacks its nuclear programme. The more missiles Hezbollah fires, the more Iran’s deterrent is eroded. The group has to sing to its paymaster’s tune.
But Hezbollah’s leadership is also reluctant to escalate the conflict too far for reasons of its own.
Some of those are to do with domestic opinion, said Kassem Kassir, a Lebanese commentator with close links to Hezbollah and inside knowledge into its thinking. The other reasons concern the group’s fears that embracing war would be to walk into a trap laid by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister.
“There are two things to take into consideration,” Mr Kassir told The Telegraph. “The first is internal. Hezbollah knows that Lebanon is divided and so does not want to take the country into a war that some do not want.
“The other is that Hezbollah knows Netanyahu is trying to draw it into an all-out war in the hope of drawing the United States into the conflict.”
“Hezbollah knows that if it fell for this, any war would not just be with Israel but also with Israel’s western backers,” he added.
Hezbollah is much better equipped than it was in 2006 when its forces fought Israel’s to a standstill in a bloody 34-day confrontation in southern Lebanon.
During that conflict, the group had just 15,000 mostly unguided rockets, firing off just 4,000 of them.
But even though it now has an arsenal 10 times greater in number and far more potent, Mr Kassir said Hezbollah would far rather engage Israel in a longer low-level conflict that weakens its resolve rather than blow its full firepower in a single confrontation it probably cannot win.
“Weakening Israel through an attritional, drawn out confrontation is, in my opinion, the strategy Hezbollah prefers,” he said.
Source Agencies
