Meanwhile, the IDF carried out two separate airstrikes in Beirut last night, one of them hitting the city proper, rather than the Hizballah-dominated suburb of Dahiya. In trying to make sense of the progress of Israel’s campaign in Lebanon, I found very helpful both this in-depth conversation and this essay by Eran Ortal, even if much has happened since the latter was published two weeks ago. Among much else, Ortal puts the war in the context of IDF’s own history:
In the decades since the 1990s, with the exception of Operation Defensive Shield, [which crushed the second intifada], Israel has refrained from embarking on decisive military moves. Operational decisiveness, let’s remember, is an original Israeli-military concept. Israel has never aimed for absolute victory and the evaporation of its enemies as political bodies—only for the removal of an immediate military threat. The war on terror, which focused on terror groups rather than armies, accustomed the IDF to a pattern of surgical (and eternal) pursuit of terrorist leadership on the one hand and deterrence operations from the air, usually according to the “steps of escalation” method, on the other.
More about: Gaza War 2023, IDF, Lebanon