An exceptional shooting incident was reported Oct. 5 on the Israeli-Lebanese border, resulting in an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) patrol wounding a Lebanese soldier. The incident does not, however, conform to earlier analysis by the senior officer in Israel's Northern Command who briefed military affairs correspondents Sept. 14. He warned against a possible clash in which Hezbollah would temporarily take control of significant portions of the Galilee and talked about a war that seems further away than ever.

Current conditions in the region could enable Israel to take steps that would postpone such a flare-up to a distant date, if ever. The officer reiterated the main motif running through Israel’s deterrence strategy of the past eight years in regard to Hezbollah: In any future war, the IDF will cause tremendous damage to the organization and to Lebanon. IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz put it this way Oct. 3: ''We will take Lebanon and knock it back 70 or 80 years.''

Such threats are only part of the story of Israel’s relationship with Hezbollah in recent years. Both sides failed the test of their mutual deterrence on July 12, 2006, when they found themselves locked in a lengthy war on a scale that neither had foreseen. Israel failed in that it did not persuasively indicate to Hezbollah that kidnapping soldiers on Israeli soil would lead Israel to change the rules of the game and react by initiating war. Israeli leaders failed to do so in part because they did not think Hezbollah would act the way it did. On the contrary, in the months leading up to the war, Israel adhered to a pattern of restraint that had characterized its behavior previously, causing Hezbollah to underestimate the Israelis' reaction to the planned kidnapping and therefore to proceed with it.

Hezbollah, meanwhile, was unsuccessful in establishing deterrence vis-à-vis Israel on the eve of the war and did not make clear the potential repercussions of an all-out confrontation with it. Having amassed thousands of rockets, advanced missiles and other surprises turned out to be insufficient. Had it added a campaign of deterrence to its military stockpiling, Israel might well have refrained from a series of far-reaching reactions after the kidnapping of Eldad Regev and Udi Goldwasser, which set the ball rolling to war.