A ritual is performed every time Israel starts another war, before the white phosphorus rains down, before the fear and panic of people fleeing their homes, before the footage of stunned survivors sifting through the rubble of collapsed apartment blocks.

It’s called the cease-fire ritual—a public display of handwashing. It’s the charade of pretending that there are honest diplomats out there trying to search every avenue, stretch every sinew, to stop this bedlam from starting.

Much of it is choreographed. Other parts are improvised. But be sure about one thing: It is pantomime. It bears no relationship to reality.

Nothing can persuade its Arab neighbors that Israel cannot live with them in peace more than the course on which Israel is currently set—a course that targets and threatens Christians, Muslims, Shia, and Sunni alike.

Hours before Israel declared that its ground attack on Lebanon had begun, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot was vainly insisting in a media conference in Beirut that his proposed 21-day cease-fire was “still on the table.”

As he was doing so, the U.S., France’s co-sponsor, was briefing journalists that cease-fire talks had stopped. This position went through several iterations as the afternoon wore on, and the contradictions accumulated.

The U.S. simultaneously wanted a diplomatic solution, while describing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s assassination as an “unalloyed good.” It claimed to have restrained Israel to a limited operation on the border, while also expressing anxiety about the humanitarian aspect of the operation. And it pledged to continue to work on de-escalating tensions while acknowledging that Israel was a sovereign country that made its own decisions.

If this charade sounds horribly familiar, that’s because it is.

Cut through the verbiage and the bottom line—as the Pentagon has confirmed—is that the U.S. supports a ground invasion of Lebanon, and cease-fire plans can go hang.

The same happened in Gaza a year ago. Israel’s “right to defend itself” is shorthand for flattening every neighborhood unfortunate enough to live next to it.

This macabre dance serves a purpose: Virtually every media outlet in the Western world on Tuesday described the unfolding operation in Lebanon as “targeted” or “limited”—precise commando raids that go in and come back out—just as they did during the initial phase of the Gaza war.

“We do not expect it will look like 2006,” a U.S. official toldThe Washington Post.

Meanwhile, Israeli diplomats and generals could not stop themselves from blurting out the truth. Mike Herzog, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., said: “The American administration… did not limit us in time. They, too, understand that following Nasrallah’s assassination, there is a new situation in Lebanon and there is a chance for reshaping.”

A “reshaping” of Lebanon does not mean a targeted operation limited to the border. Nor was limitation in the thoughts of one Israeli army commander, who noted: “We have a great privilege to write history as we did in Gaza here in the north.”

Rage and hate speech have reached psychotic levels in Israel. The desire for vengeance directed against the people of Gaza has swiftly found a new target: the people of Lebanon.

Nir Dvori of Channel 12 News gloated that “Nasrallah died in torment” amid reports that the Hezbollah leader had suffocated. The head of the Shlomi town council welcomed the ground invasion, saying: “It is necessary to cleanse the area.”

Political commentator Ben Caspit dreamed of the “day after” such a cleansing operation, suggesting that even the grandmothers of any fighter in Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force who crossed back over the Litani River should “die at that moment.”

Funny he should mention the Litani River, whose name has often been invoked as the upper limit of southern Lebanon that Israel wants to clear of Hezbollah rockets—because that, too, is turning into a myth. The military ambitions of this operation go far deeper into Lebanon.

Barely 12 hours after the U.S. State Department said it had limited Israel’s operation, the Israeli military issued evacuation orders to more than 20 towns and villages in southern Lebanon. “You must head immediately to the north of the al-Awali River,” near Sidon, army spokesperson Avichay Adraee said on X (formerly Twitter).

This indicates that Israel has claimed as its area of military operations the whole of southern Lebanon, almost one-third of the country. In a stroke, Israel doubled its area of operations.

This is in line with the promise that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made in the hours after Hamas’ attack a year ago.

“We are going to change the Middle East,” Netanyahu told officials visiting Jerusalem from the country’s south, where Hamas had struck on 7 October 2023.

Jared Kushner, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and real estate investor who has apparently spent hours studying Hezbollah and considers himself an expert on the subject, wrote similarly on X: “September 27 [the date of Nasrallah’s killing] is the most important day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords breakthrough… Anyone who has been calling for a cease-fire in the North is wrong.

“There is no going back for Israel. They cannot afford now to not finish the job and completely dismantle the arsenal that has been aimed at them. They will never get another chance.”

Netanyahu and his American backers will change the Middle East by invading Lebanon, that is for sure. But not quite in the way they imagine.

After leading the liberation of southern Lebanon after 18 years of occupation, and having led the battle against Israel in 2006, in Hezbollah’s eyes successfully, Nasrallah kept the northern border quiet for nearly two decades.

Under Nasrallah’s rule, Hezbollah was totally absorbed in another fight altogether: the civil........

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