“Israel better pray hard that #2 above doesn’t escalate.”
Nutjob Ben Gvir is screeching “War” and Nasrallah is calmly replying…”Ready.”
Hezbollah is curiously confident. Not just the obvious confidence that you get from having 150,000 rockets and missiles…but the kind of confidence that you get when you know that you have Russian missiles with Iranian modifications that can shoot down F-35 stealth aircraft. It’s almost like the ever-growing escalations indicate that they WANT Israel to bring out their F-35’s’ so they can get blown out of the sky.
Israel only has 75 of them and the F-35’s cost roughly 85 million each, so Israel can’t be squandering them because its not like they are cars and Lockheed Martin has a lot with thousands of them ready to get delivered at a moments notice. It takes contracts and time to replace them even if Daddy Warbucks-Biden lets Bibi use the US Treasury debit card like a spoiled rich kid whenever he crashes his Ferrari at a drunken party and wants a new one.
Of course, there IS an alternate explanation for that confidence…and if my suspicions are correct…its much MUCH worse for “Israel”
Consider that Russia is pissed at the US…recently called the US an “enemy” country…pissed about the US blowing up the Nordstream pipeline…pissed about the flood of money and weapons that the US has given to Zelensky to attack Russia. Consider also that Russia (Putin specifically) has recently said (I’m paraphrasing) that he can do the same as the US…i.e. since the US is arming others to hurt Russia then Russia can arm others to hurt the US back. And just to make the point loud and clear…Russia is planning Summer exercises in the US back yard (Caribbean). Yes, Putin could very easy be wanting to give Biden a Cuban Missile Crisis flashback when his ships pull into Cuba and Venezuela during those “exercises”…OR…just maybe Putin has something more precious to the US than Florida in his sights…ISRAEL…purely because the US literally worships Israel like it was the God of a billion multiverses. Putin could nuke Washington DC and it wouldn’t hurt them nearly as much as b*ch-slapping “Israel” by using the Caribbean activity as a decoy while actually arming Hezbollah with nukes and firm instructions that they can’t fire them unless they are invaded.
Nasrallah has THAT kind of confidence…the kind that knows that if he can goad Netanyahu into attacking…He’s free to blast Israel into destruction. In fact…Nasrallah is using that exact same word…”destruction”…and pretty much everyone is just assuming that he is simply sabre-rattling. Maybe this time its not…Maybe this time he knows he has the wherewithal to slap Israel so hard that they can never recover…but he can’t use that power unless he can get Netanyahu to take the bait and attack first.
Will “Israel” fall for the same trick as they pulled on Hamas when they green-flag operation-ed the October 7th stand down? Time will tell.
I can say that I’ve noticed Israel being much more cautious with their F-35’s…deciding to use them AT the Lebanon border as civilian harassment by terrorizing the population via breaking the sound barrier and creating sonic booms…but not actually crossing that border as much as they had been doing before.