Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu has apparently built himself another master plan.

A clever plan. A hard plan. A very serious security plan, obviously. The sort of plan that gets sold to the Israeli public as, deterrence, freedom of action, deepening the grip, securing the north, all the usual blood-soaked management-consultant language they wheel out whenever they have decided that somebody else’s country needs to be rearranged by airstrike.

And Lebanon was supposed to be the trap.

At least that was the idea. Hezbollah would make the mistake. Hezbollah would get squeezed. Hezbollah would be forced back. Israel would deepen its grip in the south, take the strategic ground, parade around the castle they captured the other day, redraw the buffer zone, and Netanyahu would stand there looking like the great wartime genius who had finall ...