Iran’s Missile Strategy

The Islamic Republic is in possession of the Middle East’s largest arsenal of missiles, most of which are of the short- and medium-range ballistic variety, and many of which could be equipped with a nuclear warhead. In addition, the Iranian proxy Hizballah has its own massive stockpile of rockets. As Michael Eisenstadt explains, missiles play a crucial role in Tehran’s strategic thinking, and pose a number of dangers:

[T]he recent nuclear accord with Iran . . . did not impose new constraints on Iran’s missile program. On the contrary, it loosened [existing ones]—and included provisions for their lifting in eight years, if not sooner. Iran’s missile force could double or triple in size by the time the major limits imposed [on its nuclear program] by the deal are lifted fifteen years from now. By then, Iran’s growing missile and cyberwarfare capabilities will pose major challenges to regional missile defenses, military and critical-infrastructure targets, and civilian population centers. This would make preventive action by Israel or the United States, in the event of an attempted Iranian nuclear breakout, much more costly.

[Furthermore], an Iranian nuclear missile force would be highly destabilizing. Short missile-flight times between Iran and Israel, the lack of reliable crisis-communication channels, and the impossibility of knowing whether incoming Iranian missiles are conventional or nuclear could someday spur Israel—and any other regional nuclear states that emerge in the interim—to adopt a launch-on-warning posture, undermining the prospects for a stable nuclear deterrent balance in the region.

[Already, Iran has established a “deterrence triad” that ] rests on its ability to: (1) threaten navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, (2) undertake unilateral and proxy terrorist attacks on multiple continents, and (3) conduct long-range strikes using its own missiles or by way of long-range rockets and short-range missiles in the hands of proxies such as Hizballah. Iran’s growing cyberwarfare capabilities may eventually become a fourth leg of this deterrent/warfighting triad, enabling it to strike at adversaries and to project power globally, instantaneously, and on a sustained basis, in ways it cannot in the physical domain.

Read more at Washington Institute for Near East Policy

More about: Hizballah, Iran, Iran nuclear program, Politics & Current Affairs, Strategy

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society