One of the many alarming aspects of Syria in recent days – amid reports of ethno-sectarian cleansing and chemical weapons use – has been the brazen behaviour of two of the proxy warriors in the conflict: Hizbollah and Israel.

The Shia Islamist movement’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, almost boasted in a speech broadcast last week that his forces were helping to prop up Bashar al-Assad. Then, over the weekend, Israel’s air force blasted targets in Damascus that anonymous US and Israeli officials suggested were Iranian rockets destined for Hizbollah.

This accelerating spiral of proxy warfare – and these are but two of the actors driving it – is becoming a menace not just to a fast disintegrating Syria but to the region.

Yet, as the principals re-examine their options – including the US and Russia’s joint decision to call a diplomatic conference on Syria before the end of the month – Israel’s actions may have changed the calculus about the risk of limited armed intervention.

Few analyses of Syria in the past two years of conflict have neglected to highlight the Assad regime’s possession of sophisticated, Russian-supplied air defences, ritually described as formidable and forbidding by a parade of military pundits.

Definitely, after the Israeli air force in 2007 destroyed an alleged nuclear reactor in north-east Syria with the greatest ease – and buzzed Bashar al-Assad’s palace into the bargain – Damascus upgraded its anti-aircraft missile capability – though there is some dispute as to precisely what level.

All the aforesaid notwithstanding, three things should have escaped nobody’s notice: as far as Israel’s warplanes are concerned, the Syrian army might just as well be armed with peashooters; Israel did not trouble to take out Syria’s anti-aircraft batteries before launching its air strikes; and that Israel’s air force is equipped by the US – the same US that talks so much about how formidable Syria’s air defences are.

This is not intended to dismiss these defences as negligible; Turkey lost a US-supplied jet to ground fire near its border with Syria last June. Reports that Syrian gunners have been licensed to fire at will after Sunday’s air strike near Assad’s presidential palace suggest

outsiders will not be entering Syria’s air space from now on except with clear intent. Bear in mind, however, that military and diplomatic sources in the region say that on the three occasions this year Israel has attacked inside Syria’s borders – at the end of January, last

Friday and on Sunday – its jets stayed outside Syrian air space.

Understandably, Syria’s National Coalition, the mainstream rebel bloc, has mocked Assad loyalists, denouncing them as treacherous incompetents so busy brutalising their own people they are incapable of standing up to Israeli aggression.

But there is also a strong whiff of history in all this talk of Syrian formidability.

In June 1982, when Israel launched its opportunist invasion of a Lebanon wracked by civil war, the Syrians had a formidable array of Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries across the Bekaa Valley. Less advanced systems had damaged Israel’s air force in the Arab-Israeli war of Yom Kippur/October 1973.

To cut a short story shorter, Israeli jets took out the entire SAMs network in two hours without loss. Though subsequently this became known as the Bekaa Valley Turkey Shoot, at the time it was considered a turning point in air warfare, and a very important Cold War contest of rival technology that not only stunned the Syrians but left the Soviets stupefied.

I leave it to the parade of pundits to enlighten us whether something similar is likely now, while recalling that just as Pravda today sees the Russian batteries as well nigh invincible, Soviet newspapers then reported a crushing victory – for Syria.