Also, consider Tuesday's strange concatenation of circumstances. The journalist who was killed in the skirmish was Assaf Abu Rahhal, a correspondent for Al-Akhbar, a pro-Hezbollah newspaper whose editor-in-chief, Ibrahim al-Amine, is seen as a mouthpiece for the party's leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.  Rahhal has been denounced by Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt -- certainly no fan of the Jewish state -- as being a hireling of Hezbollah's two patron-states, Iran and Syria. This invites the obvious question: What was a Hezbollah propagandist doing at this particular juncture at the Lebanese border at ten in the morning, two hours after the maintenance work was scheduled to have taken place?  If Lebanon intended no ‘ambush', mightn't it have been more cautious as to whom it invited to witness an ostensibly mundane bit of Israeli gardening? (In Washington Post column published just this morning, Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, claimed that Hezbollah also dispatched a film crew to record the confrontation.)

The atmospherics preceding Tuesday's violence were no less pessimistic.
On Monday, six Grad rockets were fired from Sinai into Israel: five hit the southern Israeli port-city of Eilat, causing no casualties, but one bypassed Israel altogether and landed just outside the InterContinental Hotel in the Jordanian town of Aqaba, killing a taxi driver and injuring four other bystanders. All six rockets, it's now been established, were manufactured in Iran or North Korea, indicating that a proxy of Tehran -- probably Hamas -- was responsible.

Meanwhile, Monday also saw Hezbollah and Iranian media conduct a joint propaganda blitz over the possibility of Israel's plans for starting a regional war that would engulf Syria, Gaza and Lebanon. The suggested purpose of this Zionist gambit would be to destabilize an already parlous domestic political situation in Lebanon relating to the UN Special Tribunal tasked with investigating the 2005 murders of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and his retinue. (It's the Alice-in-Wonderland nature of Levantine politics that Hariri's assassination is widely attributed to Syria and Hezbollah, while the latter now occupies key portfolios in the tenuous "unity" government led by Hariri's son, Saad.)  Nasrallah and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad have tried for years to stifle this dogged international inquiry, which is due to hand down indictments in the next few months that will almost certainly include top Hezbollah and Syrian officials. What better way to distract one UN body than by involving another in a major conflagration with the Jews? 

For his part, Assad, who feeds off sectarianism better than most in the Middle East, has emerged from Tuesday's battle sounding oddly unified, like a 21st-century Nasser.  Syria, said Assad, "is standing by its sister...in the face of the criminal Israeli aggression and calls on the UN to condemn and stop this aggression", nicely eliding Syria's two-decade occupation of this sororal relation. 

Of course, Hezbollah's official response to the combat was to deny any involvement: "We told  our brothers, control yourselves and don't do anything," Nasrallah said in a televised speech hours after the border incident, denying that any of his agents had played a part. Yet he, too, was quick to gloss over enmities and divisions by which his gang had previously profited, enlisting all of Lebanon and its multi-ethnic and multi-confessional military in his grand Islamist "resistance."

Lee Smith, a Lebanon expert and author of the recent book, The Strong Horse: The Clash of Arab Civilizations, told me that despite this climate of imminent catastrophe, Hezbollah likely doesn't want war--at least not right now. "I'd keep an eye on Iran's more interesting developments," Smith said over email, citing the mullahs' false but highly touted claim this week to have purchased four batteries of the Russian S-300 air-defence missile system (which they want to deter an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities) as well as the recent seeming attempt yesterday on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's life. "For reasons unclear to me, Nasrallah really does seem scared about the Special Tribunal, but in the end there is not much Hezbollah can do about it. This is not a Lebanese issue anymore, it's an international one. Still, there's always the danger of Hezbollah doing something dumb on the border."