(JNS) From my home in Kibbutz Dafna, less than two kilometers from the Lebanese border, we have repeatedly heard powerful Israeli strikes over the past two weeks. At times, the windows shake. Sometimes, the sound of the explosion reaches us seconds after we see the smoke.
What is striking, however, is what we barely hear in return.
Two years have passed since Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli strike in Beirut on Sept. 27, 2024. The obvious way to measure what has changed since then is to count commanders killed, tunnels exposed, weapons destroyed and infrastructure damaged. But the more important change may be harder to quantify: Who now sets the rules between Israel and Hezbollah?
For years, Nasrallah built his power around a carefully managed system of deterrence. Hezbollah did not need to be stronger than the Israel Defense Forces. It needed Israeli decision-makers to believe that any action in Lebanon could trigger a response whose cost was difficult to predict.
Several incidents illustrated how deeply that logic affected Israeli decisions. In September 2019, after Hezbollah fired anti-tank missiles toward...
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