Israel’s quandary: Can it afford to win in the face of international opprobrium?
The life of Israel is a split screen.
Caroline S. Glick
The first screen shows the life of a nation and a country fending off a coordinated seven-front assault whose goal is the Jewish state’s physical obliteration with heroism, ingenuity and fortitude that takes your breath away.
The second screen shows the envy and hatred that the nations of the world direct at the State of Israel.
And this week, with the U.N. General Assembly taking place in New York at the precise moment Israel has taken the initiative vis à vis the Lebanese front, the dissonance between the two sides is so glaring that it gives you whiplash.
Over the past week, for the first time since it unilaterally removed its forces from Southern Lebanon in 2000, Israel took the initiative in its war with Iran’s largest proxy force, Hezbollah, which controls Lebanon. The threat Hezbollah poses to Israel is orders of magnitude greater than the threat Hamas posed on Oct. 7. Hezbollah’s arsenal, which numbers some 200,000 short- and medium-range rockets and ballistic missiles, is nearly 35 times larger than Hamas’s arsenal of 6,000. Hezbollah’s missiles are capable of hitting nearly every strategic military and industrial site in Israel. They are capable of laying waste to northern communities and devastating cities and towns throughout the country.
And they are embedded in civilian neighborhoods. After the 2006 war, due to its control over the Lebanese government and military, Hezbollah oversaw the reconstruction of the areas in Southern Lebanon that were damaged and destroyed in the war. Hezbollah built the apartments as dual-use structures with missile launchers and missiles in many apartments. Residents received monthly payments for permitting their homes to be for this purpose.
Since the start of the war, Hezbollah shot 8,000 such projectiles into northern Israel. They severely damaged several critical military installations. They destroyed hundreds of homes. They ravaged the landscape of northern Israel, burning forests, as well as destroying nature and wildlife reserves from the Golan Heights to the Upper Galilee.
If the missile arsenals weren’t sufficient to keep Israel’s north depopulated, there is also the conventional threat of Hezbollah’s land forces. Citing U.S. and regional officials, The Wall Street Journal reported, “Those with knowledge of Hezbollah say the group accelerated its war preparations in recent months, expanding its network of tunnels in Southern Lebanon, repositioning fighters and weapons and smuggling in more arms. Iran has increased supplies of small arms and rocket-propelled grenades, along with guided and unguided long-range missiles.”
“The south is like a beehive right now,” said a former Hezbollah military officer referring to the military preparations to the newspaper. “Everything the Iranians have, we have.”
Hezbollah’ ground forces number some 40,000 men. Thousands in the so-called Radwan brigades are battle-hardened veterans of Iran’s insurgent wars in Syria and Iraq. They have oceans of American, British, Iraqi and Syrian blood on their hands.
Hezbollah’s operational concept since Oct. 7 (basically since Israel removed its forces from Southern Lebanon in May 2000) has been attrition warfare. Hezbollah’s massive and ever-growing arsenal deters Israel from getting into a major war with the terror army. At the same time, the terror group expands its effective control over northern Israel by gradually expanding the expanse of Israeli territory it can strike at will. In the past month, emboldened by Israel’s largely defense posture since Oct. 7, Hezbollah has massively escalated its missile assault on Israel, increasing the number and range of the projectiles its forces shot over daily from a few to a couple dozen to between 60 and 120.
Last week, it was the ingenious decapitation strikes that successfully targeted Hezbollah’s operational leadership attributed to Israel involving the detonation of hand-held communications devices that enabled Israel to seize the operational initiative for the first time since 2000. Its follow-on airstrikes against the commanders of the Radwan Force in Beirut decimated Hezbollah’s senior ranks, leaving Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and his bosses in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps with a largely commander-less terror army.
Israel’s airstrikes on Monday against missiles and missile launchers in Southern Lebanon, Beirut and the Beqaa Valley, based on stunning intelligence superiority, reportedly devastated Hezbollah’s strategic missile power. A diplomatic source divulged Tuesday morning that the air force’s 1,400 hits destroyed half of Hezbollah’s precision-guided missiles. The source claimed further that now, Hezbollah possesses only one-quarter of the rockets with ranges up to 40 kilometers it had at the start of the war.
Critically, the source said that Hezbollah’s capacity to launch coordinated missile strikes involving hundreds of projectiles simultaneously has been severely damaged. Hezbollah’s operational concept throughout has been that in the event of an all-out war, it would swarm Israel with hundreds of projectiles simultaneously, overwhelming Israel’s air-defense systems. If Israel has indeed taken out that capability, it means that Hezbollah’s threat to Israeli territory is no longer existential.
By achieving something approaching operational control over Gaza, blocking avenues of resupply by controlling the Philadephi corridor controlling the 14-kilometer border with Egypt and preventing the reinforcement of Hamas’s terror forces in northern Gaza by controlling the Netzarim corridor, Israel has been able to scale back its force size in Gaza. Israel’s military Division 98, the main maneuver unit in Gaza, was moved to the north, providing the IDF both the means to prevent or defeat a Hezbollah invasion by land, including underground, border-crossing tunnels. Division 98 is also capable of carrying out incursions up to and including an invasion of Southern Lebanon if so commanded.
Jerusalem’s intelligence capabilities have enabled it to carry out the most precise airstrikes in history. Almost no ordnance has been wasted or misdirected. Thanks to the experience Israel has garnered in Gaza over the past year, it has developed the capacity to give civilians an opportunity to vacate areas, including their apartments, housing missiles before striking, thus again, bringing the number of civilians killed nearly to zero.
It is hard to ignore the global implications of what is happening on the ground. It isn’t simply that Ibrahim Aqil, Hezbollah’s operations commander who was killed at the leadership meeting in Beirut, had a $7 million FBI award on his head for his role in carrying out the 1983 bombings of the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 that murdered some 300 Americans, as well as 64 French paratroopers.
Hezbollah is the most powerful and well-seeded terror force in the world. Its operational and financial tentacles reach throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America. An Israeli victory would mean that Hezbollah’s threat worldwide would be massively diminished.
Then there is Iran. For the past four years, Iran has moved steadily towards completing its nuclear weapons program. It is widely considered a threshold nuclear state. It is suspected of adapting its missile force to carry nuclear warheads. To date, Hezbollah has served as Iran’s protector. By using the prospect of an all-out combined missile strike and ground invasion of Israel from Lebanon as a deterrent, Iran was able to deter Israel from striking its missile and nuclear installations or its oil platforms. Now with Hezbollah in the most vulnerable and weakest position it has suffered in decades—and Hamas effectively defeated as an offensive force—Iran faces the specter of an Israel free to destroy its nuclear and regional hegemonic ambitions.
International law turned on its head
And this brings us to the second half of the screen. As Israel fights the free world’s fight against Iran and its terrorist forces, the nations of the world have congregated at the U.N. General Assembly for their annual diplomatic lynch mob against the lone Jewish state. The General Assembly opened last week by passing a resolution demanding that Israel remove 800,000 citizens from their homes in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria within a year and transfer their communities to the Palestinian Authority, which shares the goal of Iran and its other proxies to annihilate Israel.
If Israel fails to abide by the U.N. dictate, or even if it does, the resolution calls on the U.N. member states to enact an arms embargo on Israel. António Guterres, the U.N.’s Israel-hating secretary-general helpfully proclaimed that he will use his powers of office to enforce the resolution.
It was all downhill from there. At the United Nations, in Paris, in Washington, policymakers and lawmakers have spared no effort to demonize Israel. President Joe Biden and Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates, met in Washington on Monday. Rather than congratulate (or thank) Israel for systematically removing the gravest threats to the stability and security of the Middle East, including to the UAE and the United States, Biden and MBZ focused their statements on demanding that Israel move to establish a Palestinian state in Gaza, Judea and Samaria—and Jerusalem.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and his fellow progressives in Congress responded with rage to the simultaneous detonation of Hezbollah’s pages and walkie-talkies that took out thousands of terrorists in one fell swoop. They called it international terrorism and demanded a U.S. arms embargo on Israel. Even Leon Panetta, former secretary of defense, also called the strike that decimated the leadership of the most powerful terror army in the world a terror attack.
All of those clamoring to declare Israel the enemy of all that is good, and Hezbollah and Hamas as the good guys, predicate their condemnations on an entirely imaginary version of international law that turns morality and the very concept of legality on their heads to punish defenders—or one specific defender, Israel—and reward aggressors.
The dissonance between the reality on the ground and the diplomatic assault on Israel—now joined by nearly every nation on earth at the United Nations—presents Israel with an epic quandary.
Obviously, it cannot scale back the level or nature of the assault with reason. People cannot be reasoned out of positions they weren’t reasoned into. The international community’s hostility towards Israel owes to a poisonous mix of political expedience, greed, opportunism and prejudice.
And so, we come to the quandary. Can Israel afford to ignore these forces and just fight to victory or not?
Can Israel afford not to ignore them?
The Biden administration and its comrades at the United Nations are betting that Israel will decide that it cannot afford to ignore these voices. But in reaching this conclusion, they ignore the one overriding factor that has informed Israel’s actions since Oct. 7.
This is a war for Israel’s survival. Israelis back this war because they understand that the lesson of Oct. 7 is that the can has been kicked to the end of the road. Claims that we can stop and pick up where we left off in a year or so fall like artillery duds. No one will accept them because no one can accept them. It is literally now or never.
And so the United Nations and the United States, and their diplomatic lynch mob, will be ignored. Maybe the diplomatic chips falling today can be picked up at a later date. But this war must be won. And after the stunning successes in Lebanon, more and more Israelis are reinforced in their conviction that it is being won.
