Hizballah’s Recent Attack on Israel Could Be a Sign of Much Worse to Come

On Wednesday, Palestinian militants in southern Lebanon launched rockets into Israel—one of several such incidents in recent weeks. The IDF responded with artillery fire and airstrikes. Then, on Friday, Hizballah—which controls southern Lebanon, and has a great deal of power over the country as a whole—fired nineteen rockets into northern Israel. The IDF again responded with artillery fire directed at unpopulated areas. Yaakov Katz comments on this “dangerous and complicated” situation:

The IDF spokesperson, Brigadier General Ran Kochav, went so far as to explain that the fact Hizballah fired its . . . rockets into open fields meant that the Lebanese terrorist group was deterred and scared of a larger conflict with Israel. If that wasn’t the case, he told reporters in a briefing on Friday, it would have attacked population centers.

Is this true? We don’t know. What we do know is that this is a dangerous way to think, since it sets up Israel to allow its northern border to turn into something like the border with Gaza. There, for years, Israel restrained itself after rocket attacks. If it responded, it hit sand dunes or makeshift Hamas observation posts. Nothing too serious. This [strategy] normalized rocket fire into sovereign Israel. So long as no one was hurt or killed and so long as the rocket fire was sporadic, Israel could restrain itself. Did [this policy] make sense? Maybe. Did it also erode Israel’s deterrence? Definitely.

What comments like Kochav’s potentially do, when coupled with a mild military response, is to create for Hizballah a feeling that it—like Hamas—can normalize rocket attacks against Israel’s north. This would be disastrous for Israel but difficult to stop. Too strong a response could lead to a larger escalation—something Israel does not want—while too weak a response could lead Hizballah to learn a bad lesson, something Israel also does not want.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Hizballah, Israeli Security, Lebanon

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF