More and more, Israel is becoming a case study in national pathology. It keeps relentlessly and savagely killing Gazans and oblitherating their social structures, apparently in case their genocide-in-progress falls short. It is defiant despite its near-complete global isolation, seemingly secure in the idea that the US will always come to its rescue, when it finally may have come to a nexus where the US can’t bail them out.
High on its hubris, Israel looks determined to go to war with Lebanon, a conflict that many experts say that Israel will not only lose, but could lose so badly that it will jeopardize Israel’s existence as a state. After the IDF announced that it had approved war plans for a Lebanon operation, Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Brown said directly that the US might not be able to defend Israel in a war with Hezbollah.
Another alarm came from the head of the company that manages Israel’s grid. From The Cradle late last week:
Israel’s power grid is vulnerable to a Hezbollah attack that could render it “uninhabitable” 72 hours later, Haaretz reported on 21 June.
According to the CEO of a company that manages and oversees Israel’s electrical systems on behalf of the government, Israel is entirely unprepared for a war with Hezbollah that would likely target the country’s power infrastructure.
“We are not ready for a real war. We live in a fantasy world, in my eyes,” said Shaul Goldstein, head of Noga – the Israel Independent System Operator.
But Israel has gone into “shoot the messenger” mode, with Naga debating Goldstein’s ouster, even as a former Israel Energy Ministry official backed Goldstein’s concerns.
No amount of Israel Lobby arm-twisting can surmount the fact that the US is overextended and can’t do much beyond bolstering Israel’s air offenses a bit and air defenses a bit less, when Israel’s key opponents are well bunkered and have also become expert at attritting US and Israel firepower on the cheap.
As readers may recall, the immediate cause for Israel action is that Hezbollah started shelling northern Israel after October 7. Hezbollah has said it will stop the attacks when Israel enters into a lasting ceasefire in Gaza, which is a non-starter. Hezbollah’s campaign has succeeded in driving at least 60,000 and by some estimates as many as 200,000 settlers out of the border area. Israel regards this situation as intolerable. At a minimum it is costly, since any economic activity in that area is kaput and the residents are beign housed at government expense. Israel and the US emissary, who is also an Israeli citizen, Amos Hochstein, have been trying to pretend that their proposal, that Lebanon pull back its forces to the Litani River, which is tantamount to ceding that part of Lebanon to Israel, as reasonable. Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has said Lebanon will not surrender any of its land to Israel.
Now admittedly, neither Hezbollah nor Lebanon want a war. Even though Lebanon won the 2006 war that Israel launched, the economic and physical costs were high. The economy was already in a crisis when Lebanon was severely damaged by a massive fertilizer ship explosion in Beirut in 2020, one of the biggest non-nuclear blasts in history, which left over 300,000 homeless and destroyed important grain stores. A friend who comes from a very wealthy family described the currency collapse and the difficulty in importing many type of supplies, which had massive knock-on effects to businesses and households. So with the country still in very difficult straits, even the damage sustained in a minor conflict would do disproportionate economic harm.
But militarily, Hezbollah is generally acknowledged to be more than the IDF’s match. Scott Ritter, who knows Israel well, has opined that Hezbollah learned from the 2006 conflict and will not allow Israel to take the war into Lebanon, but will instead push into Israel.
So why is Israel gunning to take this mad step? Is it merely its deeply ingrained belief in its own superiority? An excellent post by Joseph Jordan gives some insight. He describes how throughly Hezbollah bested the IDF in 2006, a fact not presented as clearly as it ought to be in the Anglosphere media, and apparently not well internalized by Israelis either. From his piece:
On July 14th, 2006, two days into Israel’s bombing campaign against Lebanon, Hezbollah announced a special televised address from Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah.
During his speech, he promised the Lebanese people a cathartic surprise. “Now, in the middle of the sea, facing Beirut, the Israeli warship that has attacked the infrastructure, people’s homes, and civilians” he teed up, “look at it burning.” Viewers followed his instruction and looked onto the Mediterranean sea with disbelief when, right on Nasrallah’s cue, the Israeli naval vessel parked off their coast was suddenly engulfed by a bright orange fireball. Hezbollah’s anti-ship missiles, which Israelis were unsure they possessed until this strike, successfully penetrated the American-built Israeli warship, the INS Hanit, killing multiple sailors and decommissioning it for the rest of the war’s duration.
This was just one of 33 days of embarrassments the Israelis endured during their last confrontation with the Shia nationalists in South Lebanon.
Expecting a hit-and-run insurgency, poorly trained IDF soldiers were astonished to find fortified fighting positions and a professional army capable of holding ground and defeating them in set-piece battles. IDF Commander Dan Halutz, who was later forced to resign as the scapegoat for Israel’s abysmal performance in the conflict, had focused his battle doctrine entirely on Iraq war style “shock and awe” aerial bombing, except in his case, in lieu of any coherent plan for a follow-up ground invasion. This strategy was a failure from the start. Hezbollah had prepared to counter Israeli air supremacy by orienting their logistics around a network of underground bunkers and tunnels. When all was said and done, just 7% of Hezbollah’s military resources were damaged by the Israeli Air Force…
Looking back on the conflict, pop historians and mainstream journalists have refused to grant Hezbollah victory and instead settled on referring to the outcome of the 2006 war as a stalemate. But this view is not held by experts with skin in the game, such as Matt M. Matthews of the US Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, who has written about Israel’s performance in the war as a textbook example of what a catastrophic military failure looks like. The Israeli government’s own 2007 Winograd Commission excoriated every facet of the campaign, from the top generals to the average soldiers to the IDF’s core doctrine, prompting Nasrallah to react with praise for the candidness of the Israeli investigators.
Mind you, Hezbollah has become even more formidable and better armed since then, while the IDF’s shambolic performance in Gaza (except in flattening buildings and killing defenseless civilians) says if anything it is weaker than in 2006.
As Alastair Crooke has repeatedly pointed out, Israel has not changed its doctrine. It still acts as if it can win a short, airpower dominated war, when it decisively lost using that strategy against Lebanon. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran all are set up to counter that, with deep tunnels and very large caches of missiles and rockets. Iran demonstrated in its reply to Israel’s bombing of an embassy compound in Beirut that it can hit Israel’s best-defended installations, and at enormous cost to Israel too. Israel admitted its response cost $1.35 billion; other experts have estimated that if US support were properly counted, the total expenditure was more on the order of $2.3 billion.
Mind you, there is no indication that Iran would become directly involved in a Lebanon conflict. The example above illustrates that Israel has yet to meaningfully change its approach in light of the Axis of Resistance developing an approach to Israel designed to vitiate its strength. But the Houthis, who are happily messing with Israel-related Red Sea shipping and even US aircraft carriers, are sure to do whatever they can to help Hezbollah in a hot war.
Hezbollah has also received manpower offers but so far is turning them down. From Associated Press over the weekend:
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech Wednesday that militant leaders from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and other countries have previously offered to send tens of thousands of fighters to help Hezbollah, but he said the group already has more than 100,000 fighters.
“We told them, thank you, but we are overwhelmed by the numbers we have,” Nasrallah said….
Officials from Lebanese and Iraqi groups backed by Iran say Iran-backed fighters from around the region will join in if war erupts on the the Lebanon-Israel border. Thousands of such fighters are already deployed in Syria and could easily slip through the porous and unmarked border.
The Western media has started pointing out the vaunted Iron Dome is not what it is cracked up to be. Two days ago, the Guardian discounted Nasrallah’s ground forces to a mere 1/3 of his claimed 100,000. But it depicted Israel’s allies as mighty worried about Hezollah’s missiles. From Israel’s Iron Dome risks being overwhelmed in all-out war with Hezbollah, says US:
Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile batteries risk being overwhelmed in the opening strikes of any significantly escalated conflict with Hezbollah.
The assessment delivered by US officials late last week, echoing recent analysis by experts in Israel and the United States, comes amid fears that a war with Hezbollah could be a far more dangerous undertaking than the devastating 2006 second Lebanon war, when Israeli bombing caused huge destruction in Lebanon…
Since 2006, Hezbollah, the world’s best-armed non-state group, has significantly expanded its arsenal and capabilities, including acquiring suicide drones which Israel has struggled to counter, an anti-aircraft missile capability and a widely expanded array of missiles which experts now believe number between 120,000 and 200,000….
While the majority of Hezbollah’s stockpile comprises tens of thousands of unguided missiles – both short and long range – since 2006 it has acquired hundreds of guided ballistic missiles, with the ability to fire them from hardened bunkers and from mobile launchers.
Complicating the issue has been Hezbollah’s increasing and effective use of drones, including kamikaze weapons, which Israel’s existing air defences have struggled to counter.
A three-year research project by Reichman University’s Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Israel, completed not long before the Hamas attack on 7 October, concluded Hezbollah could fire up to 3,000 missiles a day, a rate that could be sustained for up to three weeks. Its key aim would be to force the collapse of Israel’s air defences.
Let us return to the Joseph Jordan piece. He explains that Hezbollah has an acute sense of Israel weakness:
The key to understanding Hezbollah’s approach to Israel is in Nasrallah’s view that Jews are weak and opportunistic bullies. Nasrallah holds that the Israeli public is a fragile “spider web,” one which constantly cries out for Arab blood but simultaneously has a low threshold for pain and inconvenience. By inflicting heavy military casualties and forcing Israelis in towns and cities either into bunkers or to flee their homes, Hezbollah believes the Zionist state can collapse under its internal contradictions.
One of those contradictions is that the ultra-orthodox refuse to serve in the military, putting the burden on secular Israelis.
Jordan continues:
The typical Israelis ambitions are completely out of sync with their actual will power and abilities. This petulant and craven citizenry’s inability to connect actions to reactions is so stunning that it has prompted IDF army chief Herzl Halevi to issue a statement telling the public that they do not seem to understand the magnitude of the consequences that await them once the war in Lebanon formally begins.
Reader raspberry jam provided some intel that helps explain why Israelis are detached from their conduct and risks. Aside from diminished tourist and other business activity, they don’t see much evidence the war is on. I am reproducing it in full even though it goes beyond observations related to the conflict:
I just returned yesterday from a business trip to Israel. Some anecdata to share:
– the flight there was three-quarters full; the return was entirely full. Lots of families on both. At passport control on the US side of the return most of the people on the flight went through the Israeli passport line, not the US passport line. So it was mostly Israelis leaving, not tourists.
– news in Tel Aviv does not show much about what is going on in Gaza. The nightly news was more focused on the fires at the Lebanon border and the death of multiple IDF soldier in a Rafah attack. Nothing really about the counter-attacks and communal responses.
– there are protests almost nightly in front of the IDF headquarters and many nights in front of Netanyahu’s personal residence in Jerusalem. The protesters are mostly the secular types (or “State of Israel” types as defined in the Pappe piece linked here yesterday).
– even the secular types are rabidly racist against anyone deemed ‘arab’. Was subjected to a six-hour tour of Jerusalem organized by work where the tour guide ranted about ‘the arab mindset’ and went to great pains to point out how Israel was not an apartheid state because a single muslim woman was working as a tour bus driver. Israeli execs at company dinner made multiple casually racist comments about employees at a vendor with Persian surnames being arab terrorists (the vendor and employees are canadian, didn’t matter).
– People in Tel Aviv are partying and behaving like nothing bad is going on. If you had been there since last October and were only exposed to local news I doubt you’d have any idea of how bad the situation in Gaza really was. And this feeds into the paranoid/delusional mindset around ‘the arabs’ and ‘antisemitism’.
– the touristic industries have completely collapsed. There were no lines in Jerusalem for the big religious sites, we walked right into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and there were maybe 30 people inside the entire complex and no real lines on the tomb and site of the crucifixion. The tour guide said it had been like this since the war started and many in his line of work had gone bankrupt.
– most of the big tourist hotels are being propped up by direct payments from the government in exchange for housing settlers from the north who were evacuated. Our hotel, right on the Tel Aviv beach, was at least half full of these people who had been living there full time for months. On the weekends Israelis from outside of Tel Aviv would fill up the hotel for beach going but during the week it was empty except for the housing. We only realized this because there were tons of children during the week who were being shuttled to and from schools and it didn’t make sense that would be happening for tourists.
– as an American what stood out to me was the lack of homeless people in Israel because this is utterly inescapable in the US. I guess I’m glad my taxes are ensuring people somewhere are staying off the streets but it made me angry that my taxes are being used to prop up a foreign social safety net at the expense of mine here. The housing market in Tel Aviv is grossly overpriced relative to wages. Most of the people I talked to wanted to immigrate to the US for the higher salaries.
Jordan finally turns to the Israeli plans:
A factor working against Hezbollah is that the amount of pain such a war will cause the Lebanese people is unimaginable. Netanyahu has publicly stated that the IDF’s plan is to turn Beirut, a city of 2.4 million, into Gaza. During the 2006 war, Israeli forces frustrated by their inability to advance more than a few miles into Lebanese territory eventually gave up on fighting Hezbollah and leaned into the Dahiya Doctrine, which deliberately targets civilians in hopes of breaking the spirits of defenders and generating internal political pressure against Hezbollah. Many believe that in the next war, Israel and its Western sponsors will be taking the Dahiya Doctrine to new heights in hopes of compelling the Lebanese army, Christian militias and even some Sunni purist groups to attack the Shia fighters from behind and fight another civil war inside the multi-confessional state.
We’ve seen in the Ukraine war that attacks on civilians harder the resolve to beat the enemy, so the idea that the Dahiya Doctrine would foment a civil war seems far-fetched. But one wonders how much punishment the Lebanese people could take. However, Nasrallah’s assessment of Israel seems intuitively correct: the Israelis are not prepared to take much if any. And yet they are still itching for this fight.
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