This time on the editorial pages of the UK Telegraph:

…If the Palestinian Authority and the Lebanese government were unwilling or unable to stop freelance incursions into Israeli territory, Israel would do it for them. The attacks of the past week are not a random lashing-out; they are intended to degrade the infrastructure on which the gunmen rely.

[…]

Israel’s frontier with Syria is relatively stable and secure, despite Syria’s undisguised loathing for its neighbour. Why? Because Syria, as a sovereign state, will not tolerate uncontrolled militias within its borders. This places it in a different category from the Palestinian and Lebanese administrations, whose writ does not run throughout their own territories.

Many Israelis believe that their neighbours do not really want to crack down on freelance bombers. But it is as much in Hamas’s interest as Israel’s to prevent random acts of violence within Palestine.

A parallel can be drawn with the first government of the Irish Free State, which acted more brutally against the IRA than Britain has ever done. It did so not out of love for Britain, or enthusiasm for the existence of Northern Ireland, but because it was determined that there should be only one legitimate army in the state.

Exactly! And it’s not just the Palestinians. of course. It is quite incredible that the Lebanese government has failed to grasp the importance of this.

I have been thinking of the Altalena incident myself, way back in th summer of ‘48, as a viable example of a weak, fledgling, endangered regime, riddled with internal discord, setting out the rules quite clearly, and very bravely, from the outset. As the Israeli Foreign Ministry puts it: “Despite the remaining bitterness, the incident made it clear that no “dissident” armed force would be tolerated.”

As I see it, Altalena and the extremely unpopular dismantling of the Palmach, round about the same period - however one may feel about these two events, and whatever narrative of the events one may choose to adopt - were paramount to the survival of the State of Israel.

If the provisional Israeli government of the time could do it - and remember, we were in the middle of an awful, bloody war against the armies of five sovereign states who were out to destroy us, and we were armed with, more or less, sticks and stones - then the Lebanese government can too. No excuses.