Unsavoury Whodunit

"If you're contemplating any kind of military attack on Syria look what we can do to your friends the Israelis and look at how we can destabilize Lebanon.
"Syria's disintegration has affected Lebanon and the deterrence balance that existed between us and Hezbollah is no longer tenable. There are also other elements within the Lebanese theatre which want to prove they are capable of causing problems."
Shmuel Bar, Institute of Policy & Strategy, Herzliya

"We had nothing to do with the bombings in Tripoli. There's a high probability that it was Hezbollah but no certainty.
"This is not the beginning of something new. We've had other similar one-off rocket shooting by rogue global jihad organizations."
Israeli official

For their part the Lebanese Army claims an 'unknown group" was responsible for last week-end's double bombing in the majority Sunni city of Tripoli where 47 people were killed. In the interests of bypassing provoking a situation where, if Hezbollah were held under scrutiny and an investigation revealed its hand in doing what comes naturally to them, there is always the danger of the Hezbollah militia whose arms are far superior to that of the Lebanese Army, deciding to teach the Lebanese military a lesson in unity under duress.

Unsurprisingly, the first reaction to news of the bombing was to state the assumption that it represented Israel's dastardly work. Suspicion of Israel, first and foremost, even when it is abundantly clear that such an assumption has no practical basis. Knowing full well what has occurred, but unwilling to name a military stationed within Lebanon by a terrorist group that has its fingers within the government, but which refuses to meld its military with that of the nation's, nor to surrender its arms stockpiles.

The Lebanese National News Agency incautiously claimed that the suspect arrested by the country's security forces, identified as Sheik Ahmad al-Ghareeb has links to a Sunni group with warm ties to the Shiite Hezbollah. The uncongenial and worrying fact that well-trained Hezbollah troops are in Syria, aiding the Syrian military in its conflict with the Syrian Free Army  and attempting, sometimes successfully, to retake areas of the country, including Damascus suburbs from the Sunni rebels, has not endeared them to factions in Lebanon.

Deadly rebel attacks across the border from Syria into Lebanese border towns faithful to Hezbollah, causing the deaths of Shia Lebanese of Palestinian origin have infuriated Hezbollah. The bombings that have taken place in Sunni areas in obvious retribution are becoming matters of huge concern to the Lebanese authorities. Pleas to Hezbollah to withdraw from Syria have been studiedly ignored. Anger from Sunni Lebanese and Syrians alike predictably result in counter-violence.

And the concern both in Lebanon and in Israel is that Syria's brutal civil war is edging over the border into Lebanon, a country that knows all about the horrors of civil war, about invasion and occupation and the viciousness of sectarian hatred and their resulting bloody massacres. Since Israel shares a border with both Syria and Lebanon it is understandably ill at ease over the situation. Two Katyusha rockets were last week fired at northern Israel, hitting a kibbutz.

The deterrence that underlies the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan and agreements with the Palestinian Authority calling on all concerned to prevent the spread of terror, and to deter the Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria axis whose malevolence is aimed at Israel, when they are not busy slaughtering one another, appears in danger of wobbling threateningly in the frenzy of the conflict.