Israel Matzav: “You stand there with your law, and I’ll stand here with my bayonets, and we’ll see which one prevails.”

“You stand there with your law, and I’ll stand here with my bayonets, and we’ll see which one prevails.”

The recent transfer of long-range scud missiles to Hezbullah by Syria was only the latest in a series of transfers of advanced weaponry to Hezbullah over the Syrian - Lebanese border since the Second Lebanon War ended in 2006. Those transfers are watched and noted by Israel, but ignored by everyone else, including the supposed guardians of UN Security Council Resolution 1701.

The weaponry supplied to Hizbullah include M-600 surface-to-surface missiles, the man-portable Igla-S surface-to-air missile system, which would threaten Israeli fighter aircraft monitoring the skies of Lebanon, and now the Scud-D ballistic missile system.

If the reports regarding such weaponry are correct, they would make Hizbullah by far the best-armed non-state paramilitary group in the world.

These reports do not mean that war is necessarily imminent.

Israel appears in no hurry to punish Hizbullah and Syria for the flouting of red lines. Unlike its enemies, the Israeli government is publicly accountable, and would find it difficult to justify a preemptive strike – which might well result in renewed war – to the Israeli public.

Hizbullah and Syria also seem in no rush to initiate hostilities. They have merely internalized the fact that nothing serious appears to stand in the way of their activities across the eastern border of Lebanon, and are hence proceeding apace.

The clearest lesson of the latest events is the fictional status of international guarantees and resolutions if these are not backed by a real willingness to enforce them.

The Western failure to underwrite the elected government of Lebanon has led to the effective Hizbullah takeover of that country. The failure to insist on the implementation of Resolution 1701 has allowed the apparent strategic transformation of Hizbullah over the last three and a half years.

While the “resistance bloc” does not necessarily seek imminent conflict, there is also no sign whatsoever that its appetite has been satiated by its recent gains. Laws, elections and agreements do not stand in its way. It operates, rather, according to the dictum of a certain 20th-century German leader, who said, “You stand there with your law, and I’ll stand here with my bayonets, and we’ll see which one prevails.”

There's going to be another war up north. The only question is when. This time, Israel really has to finish off Hezbullah.

By the way, I take issue with blaming this entirely on a failure to insist on the implementation of Resolution 1701. That resolution was flawed from the outset by requiring that the Lebanese army request UNIFIL's intervention rather than giving UNIFIL free reign. The result is that areas like the Syrian border, the Mediterranean coast line and parts of southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley are essentially off limits to UNIFIL troops.

This was all foreseeable to anyone who read and understood Resolution 1701.

One other little point from that same post that I cannot resist putting out for those of you who think of revising history to say that the Bush administration was not behind Israel in that summer of 2006:

A senior administration official in Crawford, Tex., where Mr. Bush is on vacation, said that it increasingly seemed that Israel would not be able to achieve a military victory, a realization that led the Americans to get behind a cease-fire.

We could have achieved one with a different Prime Minister, Defense Minister and IDF Chief of Staff in charge. The three stooges (Olmert, Peretz and Halutz) wasted a golden opportunity.

Israel Matzav: “You stand there with your law, and I’ll stand here with my bayonets, and we’ll see which one prevails.”