The Lebanese front

r begins, but you don’t get to decide when it will end. And you will be paying a higher price at that unknowable end than you were at the beginning.”

Hamas has probably won de facto control of the Palestinian national movement this week. It has shown it can spark unrest in the West Bank and within Israeli society. But it has done so at the cost of transforming beleaguered, struggling Gaza into a proxy proving ground for the next Israel-Hezbollah war. Israel believes that the Olmert government’s forceful response in 2006 was the reason Hezbollah has declined to test the IDF in a significant exchange of fire ever since.