Hezbollah Taunts Israel with Promises to Take Back Galilee

July 31st, 2017

Awake Goy

During the Obama years, concerns about Israel’s security situation focused on the Iranian nuclear weapons program. Today, the focus is changing: to the growing Iranian military presence in Syria, the growing military strength of Hezbollah, and the possibility of a devastating Israel-Hezbollah conflict.

That is the subject of a new article in Strategic Assessment, the magazine of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. Entitled “Political and Military Contours of the Next Conflict with Hezbollah,” it was written by Gideon Sa’ar and Ron Tira. Tira is a strategist who was a long-time Israeli Air Force officer and pilot; Saar is an influential Israeli politician who was for 11 years a Likud member of the Knesset.

It’s dangerous to try and summarize a complex and in many ways worrying text, but I will try. First, war is possible: “A conflict could break out due to a miscalculation, a failure in strategic communication, or uncontrolled escalation.”

Hezbollah’s build-up of precision weapons presents an enormous threat to Israel, as does the growing Iranian presence in Syria. Together, this may constitute “an attempt by Iran and Hezbollah to reach a strategic balance with Israel, or even to gain the capability to launch a strike that will cause significant damage to critical (military and civilian) systems in Israel.” How so?

In certain senses Israel is unusual in its vulnerability to precision weapons, as on the one hand it is a Western country with advanced critical infrastructure, and on the other hand, it is a small country with concentrated critical infrastructures and little redundancy. Regarding electricity generation in Israel, for example, out of a capacity to generate about 17,600 MW of electricity, 28 percent is installed in only two sites (with 10 cumulative production units – turbines, for example). The six largest electricity generating sites in Israel (including private ones) account for 51 percent of the national capacity for electricity generation (using only 26 production units). Thus the threat represented by even a small number of precision missiles that breach Israel’s countermeasures and strike critical systems, such as electricity generation, could be unprecedented. The picture is similar with regard to other critical systems, such as national electricity management; natural gas infrastructure; sea water desalination (only five facilities supply about half of Israel’s drinking water); and many other examples from civilian and military fields.

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In addition to the Hezbollah build-up, the presence of Iranian forces in Syria is a new development that did not exist when Hezbollah and Israel last fought, in 2006.

Therefore, Israel must examine whether to define a red line of Iranian military buildup in Syria, and if so, be prepared to advance in escalation as far as is necessary in order to prevent such buildup. Growing Iranian military presence in Syria could force Israel to look at the Syrian and Lebanese theaters as one whole. Israel will have to consider whether to continue accepting Iranian activity via its proxies and covert forces, and operate against these proxies – or to act directly against Iran.

Why is all this happening now? Sa’ar and Tira theorize that the JCPOA, the Obama administration nuclear deal with Iran, may be the culprit:

Indeed, it is possible that the temporary and partial suspension of the Iranian nuclear program is incentivizing what looks like an attempt to reach a strategic balance against Israel in other spheres (to some extent as compensation for suspension of the nuclear program), resulting in a dynamic of escalation. These processes could very well put the regional system at a crossroads, and raise the probability of war.

There is one other new development: the role of Russia in Syria, which was not present during the 2006 conflict. As the authors note, “any hostilities on Israel’s northern border could include or spill over into Syria for a range of reasons.” The Russian presence makes the entire context different:

Israel has the ability to pose a real threat to the Alawite regime, and to degrade the forces defending it significantly. An extension of the fighting to Syria, and in certain cases fighting in Lebanon that projects into Syria, could interfere with Russian attempts to stabilize its own order in Syria.

Therefore, Russia could try to limit Israel’s political, strategic, and even operational freedom to act. At the same time, Russia is a new element affecting the conduct, restraint, and deployment of all parties, the nature of any possible settlement in Syria, and the possible termination mechanisms for ending a conflict. Russia’s new role in the arena could both coerce Israel and enable it to achieve political and strategic objectives using short, limited, and gradually escalating applications of force, combined with political dialogue with Russia and the United States – and it is possible that in certain circumstances such a framework should be the defining idea of Israel’s concept for fighting in this arena.