The Levant has once again descended into its familiar theatre of blood and thunder. Eighteen souls extinguished in Lebanon, four Israeli soldiers slain in what the world insists on calling a ‘revenge attack’ by Hezbollah. A tragedy. A crime. A cycle so weary that even the ancient chroniclers of Rome’s decline would find it banal. Yet, here we are, witnessing the same tired script played out with the same predictable fury.
Let us not be seduced by the simplicity of ‘retaliation’. Hezbollah’s rockets were not a bolt from the blue; they were the logical, if grotesque, culmination of a long-standing policy of assassination and targeted killings that Israel has perfected over decades. The strike in Lebanon was the spark; the four dead soldiers were the inevitable fire. This is not a ‘new’ conflict. It is the same old war wearing a different mask.
What strikes me as truly decadent is the intellectual laziness with which we frame these events. ‘Revenge attack’ suggests a kind of tit-for-tat barbarism, a primal vendetta unworthy of modern states. But Hezbollah is not an animal lashing out. It is a highly rational actor, operating within a logic that both sides understand perfectly: you kill our people, we kill yours. This is the crude calculus of deterrence that has governed the Middle East for decades. It is not moral. It is not just. But it is a system, and systems have their own brutal coherence.
And here lies the tragedy of the modern West: we have forgotten that history is not linear progress but a spiral. We comfort ourselves with the illusion that such violence is a relic of a darker age, a ‘breaking’ of the norms we have so carefully constructed since 1945. But the norms were never universal. They were a luxury for those who could afford to forget the foundations of their own power. While we moralise, the real players are playing chess with human lives, calculating the cost of each square.
The fallen soldiers will be mourned. The children in Lebanon will be buried. And the world will move on, clutching its humanitarian platitudes like a child’s blanket in a thunderstorm. But the thunder will not cease. It will return, as it always does, because we have built a house on fault lines and called it peace.
Mark my words: this is not a crisis. It is a chronic condition. The only question is whether we have the courage to diagnose it properly or will continue to treat the symptoms with the same anodyne poultices that have failed for centuries.
