Shalom all, 

International myopia and shortsightedness seem to dominate whenever the subject is Israel. As noted in yesterday’s post, the global community has long viewed Israel’s security challenges through a lens limited to surface impressions – momentary emotions, fleeting images, and diplomatic convenience. Such dulled vision inevitably leads to distorted responses. Yet even amid this haze, there are occasional rays of clarity – voices able to see the reality more sharply and to offer insight that Israel is the answer, not the problem. If only others would listen.

Hezbollah’s escalation: two-week surge, re-arming, and northern threat

While much diplomatic attention has focused on Gaza, Hezbollah has made tactical leaps and built deeper arsenals in the past two weeks. Israeli sources say weapons are being smuggled from Syria into Lebanon, new anti-tank missile caches have been formed south of the Litani, and Hezbollah drone incursions tested Israeli responses.

Key implications:

• Multi-front war risk: If Hezbollah opens a second theatre, Israel must split resources while still battling Hamas underground.

• Proxy escalation: Hezbollah’s probing of Israeli air defences and borders is not random – it’s testing the limits of will and rules. And the Lebanese government is not acting more forcefully to curb the activities of that terrorist organization.

• Supply route resilience: Arms flows through Syria and Lebanon are harder to interdict than Gaza rockets; stopping them requires sustained intelligence and readiness.

Israel must treat the northern threat not as “latent” but as active, building into a broader Iranian-led war strategy.

The operational picture: integration of threats, geography and diplomacy

These threads – Gaza tunnels, hostage intelligence, corridor-talk, Hezbollah escalation – converge into one operational reality:

• Hamas remains operationally capable despite the cease-fire.

• Hamas uses symbolic gestures, such as the Goldin transfer, as tools of negotiation.

• Hezbollah is re-arming south of the Litani, using civilian infrastructure as cover.

• Diplomatic drafts risk changing geography before threats are neutralized.

For Israel that means a single strategic fact: security sequencing must come before political settlement – not after. Anything else is upside-down strategy.

Time is becoming a critical factor, as other “players” will enter into the field, leaving Israel on the sidelines. Israel needs to make its voice heard loudly and clearly, so that Washington, Brussels, Moscow and the U.N. should never be left guessing what Israel will or will not accept. 

Israel needs to make demilitarisation the baseline condition for any future action relating to Gaza. Any proposal must first deliver verified dismantling of tunnels, weapons, and fighters. 

It needs to link all movement or safe-passage to independent hostage verification. Not a deal, a sequence: hostages returned → disarmament verified → then movement considered. 

It needs to maintain military pressure on Hamas – every cease-fire violation must be met with severe consequences.

It needs to firmly reject any corridor that carves Israel’s geography without security control. Sovereignty over airspace, borders and defence must remain unbroken. 

It needs to sustain northern interdictions, prevent Hezbollah’s rearmament and sever Iranian supply chains via Syria and Lebanon, while preparing for a larger conflict. Israel must anticipate, not react and pay particular attention to its borders with Egypt and Jordan, and the possibility that “friendly neighbors” may quickly turn, join ideologically and militarily with our enemies, and return to the goal of eliminating Israel’s existence.

It needs to demand clear ROEs (Rules of Engagement) for any multinational force deployed. International troops cannot be symbolic – they must have enforcement capability, which means they would need to act against Hamas terrorists if necessary (a fact that causes some countries to hesitate to commit troops to the multi-national force). 

It needs to brief allies with operational maps and intelligence. The contiguous corridor geometry and tunnel network should be visualised for decision-makers, not left abstract. This is seriously problematic, as even providing such visuals could be interpreted as Jerusalem’s consent to the establishment of a “Palestinian” state.
It needs to build a national consensus on the long haul. In light of the present political chasms, this will probably be one of the most difficult tasks – to get the nation behind a multi-year strategy of deterrence, reconstruction, intelligence and diplomacy. 

Conclusion: Clarity must take precedence over selective empathy. 

The return of Lt. Hadar Goldin should be a clarion call – not just a moment of mourning. It should highlight the transactional nature of the enemy, the depths of the threat, the geometric consequences of diplomacy divorced from defence. Hamas played its part. Hezbollah watches. Meanwhile the world clicks “like” on every humanitarian photo and thinks it’s done its job.

Israel cannot and must not accept that narrative. If global optics dominate strategy, Israel loses before the first bomb falls. Israel must insist on sequencing, verification, and geographic clarity (in this regard, a picture can truly be worth a thousand words). The war may pause – but the fight for lasting security is only just beginning … again.

Foreign governments view the Arab-Israeli conflict through news cycles, press briefings, electoral calculations and a shrinking attention span. They do not see the tunnels reaching under their homes. They do not hear sirens at night. They do not bury soldiers a decade after their deaths, because terrorists treat their bodies as trophies.

Last week was not merely a list of events – it was a reminder.

A reminder of the enemies Israel faces.

A reminder of how badly the world misunderstands those enemies.

And a remainder that survival requires clarity, not wishful thinking.

And then there is Iran, still around, still active and still planning its moves against Israel, while focusing on developing a massive missile supply, so that it can bombard Israel with some 2,000 missiles per day. But, that is a story for a different day.

In the age of selective empathy, Israel must act with full attention. Because the world’s vision is blurred, Israel’s must be sharp. Israel’s task is not only to defend itself militarily – it is to tell the story the world refuses to hear, to draw the map the world refuses to look at and to ensure that mistakes made in distant capitals do not become dangers carved into Israeli soil.

Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! (Isaiah 5:20)

On your walls, O Jerusalem, I have appointed watchmen; all day and all night they will never keep silent. You who remind the LORD , take no rest for yourselves; and give Him no rest until He establishes And makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth. (Isaiah 62:6-7)

Keep looking up!

Bless, be blessed and be a blessing.

Marvin