Alan Dershowitz certainly thinks so. And the signs coming not just from Beirut but also Tehran suggest that Israel has successfully reset the disincentives to war that the October 7 massacres undermined.
We’ll get to Dersh’s arguments in a moment. Reporting today from the Times of Israel shows just how ineffective the retaliation attack from Hezbollah turned out to be. They didn’t hit any of their intended targets, even accounting for the destruction of the pre-emptive strike conducted by the IDF. And yet Hassan Nasrallah seemed very eager on Sunday to declare himself satisfied that they had paid back Israel for the strike that took out Fuad Shukr:
Some would define his speech as apologetic – designed to explain to his domestic audience in Lebanon that Hezbollah had not permitted the assassination by Israel of its military leader, Faud Shukr, to pass unavenged, and that it had…