The Israeli defence establishment has been energetically characterising the South Lebanon Army's withdrawal from Jezzine as a unilateral action - decided upon independently by SLA commander Gen Antoine Lahad.
Israeli military officials insist that the SLA's departure from the Jezzine enclave, to be carried out over the next two weeks, does not indicate that a wider withdrawal by the entire Israeli apparatus in south Lebanon is now imminent.
But for all the Israeli spin, the signs are that the SLA's retreat from Jezzine, after 14 years in control, indeed presages a wholesale reordering of the balance of forces in Lebanon - a reordering, moreover, that leaves the SLA and its Israeli backers on the defensive, and Hizbullah and Syria with the upper hand.
The SLA is leaving Jezzine because the price it has been paying for staying there has become untenable. Senior SLA officer after senior officer has been killed or wounded there, as an increasingly daring and successful Hizbullah force intensifies its attacks on SLA targets, ambushing, shelling and bombing Gen Lahad's troops.
But it's not only the mounting death toll that has undermined the SLA's staying power. It is the knowledge that Israel, which trains and funds the SLA, is reevaluating its presence in the socalled south Lebanon "security zone" - the buffer area, jointly patrolled by Israel and the SLA, that prevents Hizbullah gunmen directly targeting northern Israel.
Last month, the Labour Party leader, Mr Ehud Barak, was elected Prime Minister, swept into power, in part, on a promise to bring the Israeli army home from Lebanon, where it too has been sustaining heavy casualties at the hands of Hizbullah, by this time next year.
Mr Barak's pledge, music to the ears of anxious Israeli mothers, has gone down considerably less well in the ranks of the SLA. If the Israelis are going, SLA troops - from the lowliest privates all the way up to Gen Lahad - are asking, what is to become of them? Mr Barak's plan for a Lebanese pullout is complex but, on the face of it, quite feasible. He intends to recommence peace negotiations with Syria, wooing Damascus back to the talks with the promise that Israel will relinquish much, if not all, of the Golan Heights ridge it captured in the 1967 war. Although a full peace treaty may take time to negotiate, Mr Barak hopes that the Syrians will be sufficiently encouraged by the new contacts to bring their considerable influence to bear in Lebanon.
Hizbullah, Israeli military officials assert, can operate only because the Syrians allow a flow of arms to reach its fighters from Iran. If Syria stops the flow and quietens Hizbullah, and encourages the improving Lebanon army to deploy in the "security zone" that Israel now occupies, the Israeli army will be able to pull back to the international border, confident that Hizbullah will not follow it to the fence and beyond.
It is critical for Mr Barak's plan, however, that the Israel-SLA partnership holds firm until his hoped-for deal with Syria can be finalised. If the SLA begins to crumble - and the departure from Jezzine, combined with persistent reports of Gen Lahad's plans to quit (only half-heartedly denied by him yesterday), are ominous - Israel will be left to face Hizbullah alone, with a likely further rise in the death toll. And the price Syria will be able to extract from Israel for the accord will rise in parallel.