Tag: Israel war

Israel Chose, and the World Changed

John Podhoretz  for Commentary.org 

The great delusion of post-Marx history is that change results from vast impersonal forces rather than the workings of individual human actions and unforeseen circumstances. What history records is the way free will and sheer contingency gum up the works of the Great Machine of Progress.

Would there have been an Arab Spring without a fruit vendor in Tunisia setting himself on fire in 2010? What if Derek Chauvin had taken the day off on June 20, 2020? What if there had been a blizzard on January 6, 2021?

And…what if Yahya Sinwar had hit his head on a pipe in a tunnel on October 6, been concussed, and hadn’t given the order to move on the kibbutzim and the Nova festival on October 7? Had he hit his head, would we be living in a world today in which Hamas has been all but destroyed, in which Hezbollah has been literally and perhaps fatally crippled, in which Iranian strikes against Israel have led to the mullahs losing their air defenses while steeling themselves for the loss of their nuclear program—and with the Assads gone from power in Syria after 53 years of ghoulish evil the likes of which the world has rarely ever witnessed?

All for the want of a horseshoe nail.

You could argue that a war conducted by Israel to destroy Hamas was always in the cards, just as the Israelis demonstrated they had thought the same with Hezbollah, since, beginning in 2015, they planned to destroy the Iranian catamite army by creating a shell import-export company that specialized in communications devices—and then laid in wait to activate the plan.

The war happened, though, because Sinwar made it happen. It was different north of Israel. The Jewish state chose the time, manner, and place of the pager detonation. They chose. It didn’t just happen. Impersonal forces didn’t move the levers in Gaza or in Lebanon. Leaders did.

Now, why Israel waited as the country’s north was depopulated and the financial, logistical, and psychological costs of that depopulation mounted will be matters of controversy there for the coming generation. Clearly its leaders believed they had to deal with Sinwar’s unprecedented blow first. And clearly they were managing world opinion, which is to say American opinion.

Israel knew it needed to win the war with Hamas, and that there was no way to conclude the war with Hamas without turning north and taking out Hezbollah. And I think Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet (as much as they all hated and hate each other) knew that the United States under Joe Biden simply did not want Israel to win. Biden and Co. may have wanted Israel to prevail in some fashion—but not if it was going to be too much of a pain in the Democratic Party’s ass.

At some point, Israel could not manage this ludicrous balancing act—prevailing without winning—and it moved. That was a choice. Human choice. And that choice led to other choices. Choices to make it clear that the Iran-backed terrorists had no quarter. Think you’re safe in Tehran? Think again, Haniyeh. Think you’re in the clear in Beirut? Bye-bye, Nasrallah. Think you can strike Israel without consequence from Tehran? No more defenses, mullahs. Think you just stay in Syria and keep sending weaponry through the Levant to your boys south of the Litani River? Say goodbye to Syria, Khamenei.

None of these events was inevitable. Rafah could have gone uninvaded. The pagers could have remained in Hezbollah pockets. Israel could have “taken the win,” as Joe Biden urged, wrongly, as was true of everything he has ever urged. It’s often said that the side that starts and loses a war does so out of a misperception of risk. The misperception that has led to this epochal change in the Middle East has to do with the way foolish Muslim fanatics and equally foolish American liberals view the Jews.

Here’s how they should view us:

We’re the eternal people.

You’re just the nomads.

Photo: Abir Sultan/Pool Photo via AP, File

Israel’s Spectacular Missions Are Necessary for Its Survival

Seth Mandel for Commentary.org

What did it take to assassinate Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas politburo leader, in Tehran? Israel had to infiltrate an intensely guarded apartment building used by the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps. It had to know which room Haniyeh would stay in, and when. It had to smuggle in a bomb that sat for two months without being detected in what was supposed to be a secure IRGC meeting house. It had to be able to detonate the bomb remotely at the perfect time, which required airtight intelligence up through the moment of impact.

Perhaps the most amazing detail of the entire scheme was this: The head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad was staying in the room next door to Haniyeh’s—another fact known by the Israelis—and he was untouched by the explosion.

This does not only require months of planning—that’s just the end stage, like the “last mile” drivers who deliver your Amazon packages in their own cars. It requires decades of innovation within a defense establishment that, in hardware and human intelligence, must remain ever able to do things nobody else thinks are even on the menu.

All so that a country the size of New Jersey can maintain a qualitative military edge just in case. Through it all, there are always skeptics who question the necessity of the investment. And every so often there is an event, like the Haniyeh assassination, that answers it definitively. It’s necessary for Israel to be a step ahead of the rest.

One reason for this is that Israel has never had the luxury of believing it could rely on anyone else. But the main reason is that Israel has always had to defend what to other countries would be indefensible borders.

By the time the Second World War broke out, Zionist organizations were already being squeezed by the British. The American diplomatic observer at the 21st Zionist Congress that year noted that the delegates were deeply pessimistic at the amount of land on offer after the British White Paper choked off Jewish immigration to Palestine. Accepting the status quo at that time as a final status “would result in the formation of small states unsound economically and would place irrevocable limits upon Jewish expansion in Palestine.” Chaim Weizmann was forever willing to compromise, but he understood that, from the White Paper forward, the process on display was one of suffocating the Jews of Palestine unless or until they agreed to effectively commit national suicide.

The boundaries with which Israel was born invited immediate invasion. The armistice lines demarcating positions after the Israeli victory were not much better and invited low-level war and then major war again in 1967. Amazingly, Israel was lectured for decades after that about how it didn’t need to hold on to land it won in that defensive war because it also won the war in 1948 and therefore its original boundaries were “defensible.”

This argument continued until the Oslo years of the 1990s and the outbreak of suicide terrorism as a main strategy of Palestinian Arabs against Israel. At that point, the new lecture was that there really was no such thing as defensible borders in the Israeli-Palestinian element of the conflict, because the violence was coming from inside land controlled by Israel, not outside.

That indefensibility argument only increased with the second intifada, launched by Yasser Arafat after he rejected an offer of Palestinian statehood in 2000. Israel was burning up from within, its critics said, and therefore the only solution was a diplomatic one that forfeited Israeli sovereignty and security. But it turned out there was a military solution to the violence: Israel undertook a campaign of targeted assassination that made a continuing campaign of organized terrorism impossible for the time being.

There was also a way for Israel to protect, rather than surrender, its borders and its sovereignty. In 2002, Israel began building its security fence to prevent infiltration from the West Bank. By 2004, areas protected by the fence had seen fatalities from West Bank-originating terror attacks drop to zero. Construction of the fence continued, and so did its security benefits.

Case closed on defensible borders? Hardly. The advent of the rocket wars brought a return of the lectures that Israel could not have defensible borders. The idea was that the nature of war had changed, the contours of the conflict were different now, and Israel needed to think about appeasement as a path to survival.

That brought about the efforts to build the Iron Dome missile shield, which has kept Israel generally safe and sovereign during this most recent phase of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

We may be coming to a new era. Iron Beam, the next generation of missile interception using lasers, is in development but likely won’t be ready for deployment until next year. Iron Dome’s interceptor missiles are expensive, and anyway the system wasn’t designed to stop thousands of missiles and rockets and drones per day, which is what could happen if war breaks out with Hezbollah in the north. Israel’s recent demonstrations of its capabilities inside Iran may not prevent that war. But they are a signal to Iran—and to the world—that the Jewish state has more up its sleeve. Only if Israel’s capabilities cease to match its worst-case scenarios will its borders cease to be defensible.