A Jellyfish's Bones
Since the current round in the war against Hezbollah, and in fact against Iran, has ended, Israel has been tormenting itself regarding the lessons it should learn from the confrontation. A few diplomatic and military lessons are becoming apparent. The first relates to the period before the war, after Israel withdrew in coordination with the United Nations from southern Lebanon to the international border. It quickly became clear that Hezbollah, backed by Iran and Syria, was building a tremendous stockpile of rockets in south Lebanon, digging tunnels, and erecting outposts close to the border. From time to time Israel was attacked. The lesson here is that Israel should have responded to those attacks, and to the growing arsenal of rockets, much earlier. It should have acted decisively to prevent the threat from growing, instead of leaving itself no choice but to fight a large-scale war to counter the threat.
From the outset, the Hezbollah threat should have been examined not from the narrow perspective of Israel facing a Shiite terrorist organization but from the broader understanding that Iran, with its unbridled nuclear aspirations, is involved. Iran supports the terrorism of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad against Israel, provides all those rockets to Hezbollah, establishes Revolutionary Guard cells in different countries, and does its level best to subvert Egypt and Jordan. All the signs indicate that Tehran wanted Hezbollah's rockets ready for when it finally developed a nuclear weapon. It hardly expected Israel's decisive response. Many of Hezbollah's long-range rockets were destroyed in the first stage of the war in a precise and spectacular operation by the Israeli Air Force, acting on precise intelligence. The result was that Hezbollah was unable to attack cities deep inside Israel. However, Israel failed in its actions against short-range rockets positioned in southern Lebanon.
Answers. In contrast to the success of its Air Force, Israel faced problems with its ground forces. The reserve unit call-up was delayed, and the Israeli General Staff did not rush to ask the government to approve a ground operation. The approval was given toward the end of the war but was stalled twice because of U.N. Security Council deliberations, infuriating the troops. In the few ground battles in southern Lebanon, it became clear that the Israeli Defense Forces' prolonged involvement in the Palestinian territories against relatively "soft" guerrilla and terrorist activities damaged the IDF as an offensive power. In Lebanon, the IDF was faced with a different challenge. On the one hand, it was an asymmetrical war (Hezbollah had no air force or armored corps), but on the other, the IDF faced an enemy with large supplies of the most up-to-date antitank missiles, which Syria had purchased from Russia and transferred to Hezbollah. These missiles caused most of the casualties among the armored corps soldiers and the Israeli infantry. It is clear that in limited wars the target should be clearly defined in advance, as well as the exit strategy, even when the opponent has not been fully defeated.
Someone defined the war as an Israeli attempt to break the bones of a jellyfish. The state infrastructure, in other words, belongs mainly to Lebanon, not Hezbollah. Heavy damage was inflicted on Hezbollah, but it is impossible to defeat and destroy an organization that draws from, and hides among, the largest minority in Lebanon.
The confrontation with Hezbollah is seen by Israel as part of a global war in which Hezbollah's Iranian and Syrian missiles are the international community's problem, just as Iran's nuclear development is. This is very different from the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
Israel must now find the answers to the continuing Hezbollah threat. It has done so in the past, when it destroyed 19 Syrian missile batteries during the first few hours of the first Lebanon war. As a small state, Israel must decide what to focus on strategically. It is clear that the first priority is diplomatic agreements that will include mutual concessions, but Israel must not concede to those who would launch rockets at its cities. Israel must focus, instead, with the international community, on the nuclear threat in Iran. And it must make the necessary technological and scientific effort to deal with the new missile threat.
Ze'ev Schiff is the chief military correspondent of Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper.
This story appears in the September 18, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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