Early last month, shortly after the fall of the Assad regime in Damascus, Israel took a step that dramatically altered the strategic landscape of the entire region.

Quietly and without any prior indications, the IDF entered the buffer zone on the Golan Heights separating Israel and Syria and liberated the highest peak of Mount Hermon, raising the blue-and-white banner over the tallest mountain in either country.

And while Israeli officials were quick to insist that the move was temporary, it would be a grave mistake to forgo this territory.

For both strategic and historical reasons, the Jewish state should annex all of the newly acquired parts of Mount Hermon and formally incorporate them into Israel.

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Last week, Israel made one of its gravest strategic mistakes since the war began on Oct. 7 last year.

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, the Jewish state agreed to a ceasefire in Lebanon, prompting shouts of joy and sighs of relief in underground Hezbollah bunkers throughout Beirut.

Sure, Israel gave the terrorist organization an unprecedented pummeling in recent months, degrading its military arsenal, weakening its command structure, and delivering a blow to its fighting image.

But it is precisely now, when Hezbollah is down but not out, that Israel can and should finish the job rather than retreating to its corner like a boxer in the ring in between rounds.

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As the IDF battles to clear southern Lebanon of Hezbollah terrorists, it is worth highlighting an intriguing historical fact, one that many seem to have forgotten.

Having grown up with an international boundary between the Jewish state and our neighbors to the north, we take it for granted that this is how it has always been and should be.

But the truth is that the current border between Israel and Lebanon is little more than a century old and is entirely artificial, a relic of a time when European colonialists whimsically drew lines on maps over a bottle of brandy in smoke-filled rooms.

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Precisely four decades ago this past week, at the tender age of 16, I made a momentous decision, one that forever changed my life.

After months of careful consideration accompanied by a healthy dose of teenage intensity, I decided to take the plunge and observe Shabbat for the first time.

It marked a dramatic break from the relatively relaxed Conservative Judaism with which I had been raised, in which Shabbat was celebrated but not strictly observed in the Halachic sense.

And it ended up propelling me on a long and winding journey of discovery, expanding the boundaries of my religious and spiritual life to realms that I never imagined.

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This past weekend, the Jewish state conducted a master class in how to call a hostile foe's bluff and severely incapacitate it with strategic precision.

Over the course of just several hours, the Israel Air Force (IAF) reportedly succeeded in destroying much of the air defense system that Iran had spent the past two decades building, while also obliterating the ayatollahs' missile production capabilities.

The attack, which came in response to the barrage of ballistic missiles that Iran fired against Israel on October 1, is nothing less than a momentous development, one that potentially changes the entire calculus of the conflict between Iran and Israel.

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