In the past few weeks, forest fires have swept through Israel, forcing people to be evacuated from their homes and destroying thousands of acres of land. Nadav Shragai spoke with some who were happy to see the conflagration:

I found them after encountering a few social-media posts from Palestinians and Arab Israelis. One was the well-known Haifa historian Johnny Mansour, a lecturer at Beit Berl College. Mansour and his colleagues . . . choose to stress what, in their eyes, the fires exposed: the “geographic, historical truth” of what the “Zionist colonial project” was hiding—“sights that no one expected,” Mansour said.

He cited “agricultural terraces that Palestinians worked for decades, the result of the Palestinian peasant’s hard work, sweat, and blood to preserve his land and make a living off it, landscapes that the project of occupation and Zionist uprooting, with its colonial institutions planted with trees to destroy what the peasants created and to hide the land and the characteristics of the region.”

Mansour, who sees the Palestinian national movement and its agricultural expressions as natural, and Zionist forestation as a foreign weed, is not alone in his views. . . . Back during the wildfires of 2016, the Fatah movement adopted a similar stance. . . . Or in other words, “If I can’t have it, neither can you.”

There are plenty of signs that last week’s fires, like waves of wildfires in 2019 and 2016, were at least in part another mutation of Palestinian terrorism. The retired Fire and Rescue Services official Ran Shalaf, who used to head arson investigations for the department, said as much five years ago. Fire and rescue officials, as well as defense officials, are saying exactly the same thing today, and the Public Security Ministry also thinks that many of the fires were arson.

There is little doubt that if Hizballah had participated more intensively in Saturday’s attack, Israeli air defenses would have been pushed past their limits, and far more damage would have been done. Daniel Byman and Kenneth Pollack, trying to look at things from Tehran’s perspective, see this as an important sign of caution—but caution that shouldn’t be exaggerated:

Iran is well aware of the extent and capability of Israel’s air defenses. The scale of the strike was almost certainly designed to enable at least some of the attacking munitions to penetrate those defenses and cause some degree of damage. Their inability to do so was doubtless a disappointment to Tehran, but the Iranians can probably still console themselves that the attack was frightening for the Israeli people and alarming to their government. Iran probably hopes that it was unpleasant enough to give Israeli leaders pause the next time they consider an operation like the embassy strike.

Hizballah is Iran’s ace in the hole. With more than 150,000 rockets and missiles, the Lebanese militant group could overwhelm Israeli air defenses. . . . All of this reinforces the strategic assessment that Iran is not looking to escalate with Israel and is, in fact, working very hard to avoid escalation. . . . Still, Iran has crossed a Rubicon, although it may not recognize it. Iran had never struck Israel directly from its own territory before Saturday.

Byman and Pollack see here an important lesson for America:

What Saturday’s fireworks hopefully also illustrated is the danger of U.S. disengagement from the Middle East. . . . The latest round of violence shows why it is important for the United States to take the lead on pushing back on Iran and its proxies and bolstering U.S. allies.