EAny conflict that attracts public attention triggers speculation about what might happen next. Some paint doomsday scenarios, others use fearmongering as a diplomatic tactic in the hope that presenting worst-case scenarios will spur the international community’s leaders into action.

After the recent escalation between Hezbollah and Israel, there is a tendency to assume that such a war is imminent. Resist this argument: escalation does not automatically mean that all-out war is inevitable.

One of the tragedies of the Israel-Hezbollah game is that it distracts attention from Palestine. Hezbollah’s fight against Israel is not about helping the Palestinians or even Hamas, but about Hezbollah’s self-preservation. The group could have intervened on a large scale in October, before Israel significantly weakened Hamas’s military power, but it did not. Hezbollah would only wage a full-scale war with Israel if it felt it faced an existential threat itself (which is not the case at present). It will not sacrifice itself for Palestine.

There is an urgent need to address the Israel-Palestine conflict in a clear and nuanced way. The fixation on whether escalation will lead to all-out war obscures the realities on the ground. Like many conflict regions, the Middle East is often unpredictable. The international media tends to create maximum scenarios – such as a slide into regional war – to forestall this unpredictability. But this can also lead us to miss the match that lights the fire for other big stories, such as the uprisings that culminated in the Arab Spring. Rather than addressing the nuances of conflict and discord, people end up unwittingly becoming warmongers.

The fact that Israel and Hezbollah exaggerate their actions and intentions in propaganda does not help matters. Statements from both sides often contain escalated threats that suggest that a full-scale war is at stake. Many people also remember the 2006 Lebanon War between Hezbollah and the Israeli Defense Forces, and some outsiders seem to base their understanding of the current escalation on that earlier scenario, which began with a Hezbollah military operation and escalated into a full-scale conflict.

Israel and Hezbollah have redefined the rules of engagement they implicitly adopted after 2006. Both are moving deeper into each other’s territory. But that does not mean they are heading for a regional conflagration. The perception that open war could break out in the Middle East at any time reflects a deeper, underlying fear of the region’s links to conflicts that are drawing in the rest of the world (think of the rise of al-Qaeda or the Islamic State). In the West in particular, fear of the Middle East can be an expression of fear of Western intervention.

While mistakes can happen even in tightly choreographed military actions, the circumstances on the ground point to the likelihood of a full-scale conflict between Hezbollah and Israel – particularly one involving other parties – as quite low. In 2006, Hezbollah bet that a war with Israel would benefit its political standing in Lebanon after its political opponents accused the group of being behind the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005. At the time, Lebanon also enjoyed economic support from countless Arab countries in the Gulf, which financed reconstruction after the 2006 war.

Today, Hezbollah is the most powerful political party in Lebanon. It does not need war to strengthen its status. Lebanon is suffering from a severe financial crisis and its Gulf neighbors are no longer offering unconditional aid. An open war with Israel would therefore be extremely damaging for Hezbollah. The group is trying to avoid this direction, but at the same time feels pressure to maintain its credibility as an anti-Israel actor.

The solution to this dilemma is psychological warfare. Before the age of social media, psychological warfare involved, for example, putting up billboards with threatening messages in Hebrew on the border with Lebanon. Today, psychological warfare is taking place on a larger global stage than ever before. Both Hezbollah and Israel have been passing on threats to each other in videos and statements that have been shared worldwide on the Internet.

However, in the current context, Hezbollah considers psychological warfare to be a better alternative than military action. A full-scale war would also be very damaging to Israel and would cause massive destruction within Israel. Therefore, Israel is refraining from such a scenario. Instead, it is carrying out attacks on Hezbollah targets to demonstrate its superior intelligence and military capabilities. This in turn serves to deter Hezbollah, which knows that such revelation would not bode well in the event of war.

The remote likelihood of a full-scale war does not mean that we should ignore or downplay what is happening in the Middle East. The fact that we continue to focus on the prospect of a major war underscores that all is not well. The Middle East is unpredictable because it continues to suffer from serious problems, and Palestine is at the heart of them. Until this conflict is resolved, there simply cannot be stability in the region.