On: Netanyahu orders army to 'vigorously attack' Hezbollah in Lebanon

The spectacle of Benjamin Netanyahu ordering yet another “vigorous attack” is as predictable as it is pathetic - the last gasp of a political cadaver attempting to prove it still has a pulse. Here we have the standard operating procedure of the professional militarist: when domestic support crumbles, when corruption charges loom, when one’s own cabinet begins to smell the rot, nothing distracts like the reliable theater of war.

Hezbollah, of course, is no choir of pacifists - merely another gang of fanatics who’ve mistaken zealotry for strategy. But Netanyahu’s sudden enthusiasm for “vigorously” bombing Lebanon, just as the ceasefire’s ink dries, reeks of the oldest trick in the book: the statesman who can no longer govern at home, and so turns to governing abroad at gunpoint.

The truly grotesque irony is that this performance is staged not for Israelis or Lebanese, but for the gallery of fools in Washington, Brussels, and the UN - those earnest bureaucrats who still believe a “measured response” is anything but a euphemism for mutual self-destruction. The whole affair is a perfect farce, played out with live ammunition.

And so the cycle grinds on: the strongman postures, the militants retaliate, the civilians perish, and the diplomats wring their hands over “escalation,” as if any of this were ever anything but escalation by design. The only novelty is how little novelty remains.