Will Lebanon be dragged into a war with Israel?

In the week following the 7/10 attacks by Hamas, a journalist in Beirut put the question all of Lebanon wanted to ask to the Prime Minister, Najib Mikati: do we have to be dragged into the war with Israel?

It was more of a cri de coeur than a question, because the whole country knows the answer and knows that Lebanon has no choice. Hezbollah, the Shia Islamist party and militant group, unofficially controls many, if not most, of the levers of power in Lebanon and it does not answer to the people or the government here. Hezbollah’s leader, the reclusive cleric Hassan Nasrallah, holds no public office and he doesn’t give a stuff about Mikati’s government. He takes orders only from Tehran. On 3 November, in a televised speech to the party faithful, Nasrallah, who had till then been silent on the conflict, read Israel the riot act. His party, he said, was ready for any escalation, and would match any atrocity on Lebanese soil with a similar action across the border.

This was dismal news. The vast majority of Lebanon is sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but we do not want another conflict. We hold on to the hope that despite stern assurances it is prepared to deal ruthlessly with its old enemy, Israel does not want to fight on two fronts and that Hezbollah, for its part, is reluctant to tarnish its hard-won martial glory. In 2006 it fought Israel to a standstill in a bloody month-long summer war and it knows that, despite Nasrallah’s sabre rattling, any ‘rematch’ would not be as close. So, for the moment, both sides are abiding by the established conventions of cross-border niceties – a few Hezbollah rockets followed by token Israeli retaliation.

But Lebanon’s margin of error is shrinking by the day: casualties on both sides are mounting and Israeli artillery barrages are creeping north.