With the region on the brink of war, Israel must realise there is no going ‘back to normal’ | Dahlia Scheindlin

The most obvious non-normality is that Israel and Hezbollah are no further from the precipice of war than they were before 4.40am on Sunday morning. Before that, Israel claimed it had assassinated one of Hezbollah’s top military commanders in the heart of Beirut, generating weeks of fear in Israel over Hezbollah’s response (a near-simultaneous assassination of the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, presumed to be Israel’s work, prompted fear of an Iranian response as well). Before that, Hezbollah fired rockets at the Golan Heights that slaughtered a dozen children and teens, all Druze. Before that, and before that … all the way back to the pre-dawn hours of 8 October, when Hezbollah struck Israel in a burst of enthusiasm for Hamas’s 7 October terror attack. The long-term hostilities of course go much further back, and they extend to the longstanding enmity between Iran and Israel.