Get ready for Israel’s next war, people, because it might be coming soon.
First thing: read what Jeffrey Goldberg has to say in The Atlantic. He points out that the point of no return is likely upon us and that, because President Obama is so reluctant to act, Netanyahu will feel compelled to attack Iran’s nuclear program even if only to delay its progress.
After such a long buildup, certainly it’s a bit anticlimactic now to read such an article and to comment on it. I remember Iran’s nuclear program as one of the big issues facing Israel in the late 1990s, and in particular a conversation I had in September 1999 with a close friend who speaks Farsi fluently (besides Hebrew, English, Arabic and French) and had already spent time in Iran. Since then, I admit that I’ve often ignored the dire warnings in article after article in all sorts of Israeli and American news website (and I haven’t been to Debka in years!).
But Iran’s nuke is going to change our lives forever in the way that other countries’ nukes haven’t. Goldberg says it, but it’s worth saying again anyway – there’s no reason to paint an apocalyptic scenario that on Tuesday Iran will have the bomb and on Wednesday Israel will be a heap of smoldering ruins. In fact, Iran can bring Israel to its knees without a single explosion. They will mobilize for war against us, we’ll have to mobilize in response, and our entire country will grind to a halt. Then they’ll demobilize, mobilize again, demobilize, mobilize again, etc., which they can do forever because – as crap as their economy is – they have oil and we don’t have it. An Iranian mobilization could also last for weeks – what do the mullahs care? – but a full Israeli mobilization for war means that our crops rot in the fields, our buses don’t get driven and the simple, day-to-day business of life doesn’t get done. A single full mobilization for war every year could wipe us off the map, let alone having to mobilize the whole military on a monthly or weekly basis.
And if that alone doesn’t change the rules of the game, almost all of Israel is now in range of Hezballah’s missiles. In the era of the Mullahs’ Bomb, Hezballah can begin to strike at Israel with relative impunity. Any response will mean another Iranian mobilization, triggering what we know we don’t want. Does anyone doubt that Tel Aviv will be hit by missiles from Lebanon in the next war? I fully expect to see the inside of a bomb shelter in the not-too-distant future.
Over the past few months, I’ve begun to notice a few things here and there that suggest a coming war, in the same way that their absence suggested no coming war in spring 2006 (remember – we were surprised that summer). I have no access to any information that anyone else doesn’t have, so this amounts to little more than a gut feeling, but things like being contacted by the military’s homefront command to be fitted with a gas mask, for the first time since I’ve lived here, give me the distinct impression that someone thinks there’s a chance I might need one. Also, my friends’ calls to reserve duty seem to be coming more frequently and for longer durations than I remember in the past. It’s possible that Israel will try to do a stealth mobilization, calling up critical reservists strategically in advance to take the places of active-duty conscripts, for the time of Israel’s strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
I am very critical of Israel’s rather shoddy, ineffectual military in general, but our air force is good. Goldberg consistently makes the point that it would be much easier for the USAF to do the job than for the IAF to do it. Even in the wildest scenario, however, I just can’t imagine actual American planes with American pilots bombing Iran. I don’t think any Americans want that, and I don’t think any Israelis want that either. Perhaps some Arab countries would prefer it, so they wouldn’t have to owe anything to Israel, but I presume they’d be comfortable excoriating Israel for daring to attack a Muslim country, with a wink-wink and just try to spin the whole situation into another diplomatic initiative.
As good as our air force is, I don’t have a lot of good things to say about our army. In summer 2006, Israel’s soldiers showed that most of their training was in the martial art of expelling Jews from their homes, which they’d expertly performed in summer 2005. They learned the hard way that 10,000 Shia Lebanese Arabs with decent arms and very good planning are not anything like 10,000 voluntarily disarmed Jews who only wanted to protest, not to subvert. But those conscripts are reservists now; how will the conscripts of 2008-2010 perform? I’d like to say that I’ve seen encouraging signs, but I can’t. I only hope that the Mavi Marmara incident – the major problem with which was the over-reliance on, and misuse of, commandos – will not be repeated. But who am I kidding? This is a commando culture and everyone knows that the Israeli military doesn’t know of any problem that can’t be solved with a few commandos.
The most surreal thing about this whole mess is that, by many accounts, obtaining nuclear weapons is an Iranian national goal that transcends Iran’s present regime. If the mullahs were replaced tomorrow by the green movement protesters from last summer, the following day the Iranian nuclear effort would be redoubled. Only in the event of a counter-revolution (returning the Shahs to their rightful throne) could I imagine an Iran satisfied with not having the bomb. That isn’t to say that I wouldn’t prefer the Green movement to the mullahs – I would – but bringing them somehow to power would not just end the story.
My prediction is that Goldberg’s scenario – Barak and Arad call Washington to announce that an attack is underway – will not happen in a vacuum. Israel will provoke a war with Hezballah in 2010 to defeat them and to deplete their arsenal in the context of a conventional war. Either after this war’s conclusion, or in its concluding stages, Israel will then attack Iran to ensure that the next war stays conventional too.
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Also, my friends’ calls to reserve duty seem to be coming more frequently and for longer durations than I remember in the past.
How far back is “the past”? Calls for reserve duty have been more frequent ever since Gabi Ashkenazi became Chief of Staff.
Israel will provoke a war with Hezballah in 2010 to defeat them
In a just world, the destruction of Hezbollah would be a declared strategic goal of the State of Israel, and the world would help us do this.
Though I’m not sure if it’s possible to do without killing Shi’ites the way General Sherman killed Southerners.
How far back is “the past”? Calls for reserve duty have been more frequent ever since Gabi Ashkenazi became Chief of Staff.
I didn’t grow up here, so I don’t have a strong sense of what’s normal from seeing my father or older brothers going for a month out of the year. I feel like some of my friends are getting called to miluim several times almost in a row, and that other friends who normally don’t seem to go at all are getting called, and some others who go for three days at a time are suddenly getting called for three weeks at a time.
In a just world, the destruction of Hezbollah would be a declared strategic goal of the State of Israel, and the world would help us do this.
Though I’m not sure if it’s possible to do without killing Shi’ites the way General Sherman killed Southerners.
Sherman waged a war of conquest, and decimated Georgia and South Carolina in order to do it. Though I once proposed that Israel apply its laws to any territory occupied in war and expel the enemy population from those areas, this country is stuck in the mentality of defensive wars – which means we’ll have to keep fighting them over and over again.
My suspicion is that Israel doesn’t have the will to seriously derail Iran’s nuclear program. There are really only two ways you can do this, unless you get incredibly lucky with your targetted air strikes. The first way is by destroying Iran’s electrical infrastructure. You can’t run those centrifuges without a terrific amount of electricity. Strike the electrical generation and distribution system and you’ll have a humanitarian catastrophe, but you’ll also likely derail the nuclear program permanently. People can get revenge for minor wrongs, but not usually for grievous ones. The second way of course is to simply do a preemptive nuclear strike, perhaps with relatively small bunker-buster type nukes. This of course also has exceptionally negative political consequences.
On the outside chance that your country DOES elect one of those 2 options. I would also suggest implementing an aggressive program of ethnic cleansing in your homeland to ensure that you don’t have any problem maintaining demographic hegemony into the foreseeable future. After all, if you’re going to be pariahs in the international community, you might as well remove the sword of Damocles from over your collective head. Simply put, all of your options suck. Even if Iran does absolutely nothing with its nukes once it gets them, and stays quiet, you’re still going to suffer a massive capital and brain drain as companies and talented individuals decide that the costs of living in Israel are just potentially too high.
My suspicion is that Israel doesn’t have the will to seriously derail Iran’s nuclear program.
If you mean the population, I’d estimate that there’s no serious issue – and there hasn’t been in a generation – that unifies Israelis more than the necessity of stopping Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. It’s the only issue that comes to mind for which Israelis are more than 90% solidly behind the position of the current government and at least the past five or six governments.
As I mentioned above, as much as Israelis don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons, to Iranians it is a national goal that transcends the regime. So they will have them one way or another, and our only hope is to delay their progress and/or to pray that someone else comes to power in Tehran who’s less malevolent (I don’t think there’s anything Israel can do to harm the mullahs’ regime with the exception of nuking the whole country).
So as far as the will of Israelis – yes, there is definitely the will here in Israel to put everything we have on the line to stop the Iranian nuclear program (I hope IHTG and any other Israelis who read my blog will comment on this point specifically). But the politicians who’ll make this decision, chiefly Netanyahu, are the wildcard. Jeffrey Goldberg’s analysis of Bibi kow-towing to his father Ben-Zion struck me as rather weak. He almost makes it seem that Ben-Zion has the power preemptively to veto the prime minister’s ideas, and if that were the case, I don’t think we’d see Bibi endorsing ideas such as the current settlement freeze, or Expulsion 2005 (which he supported in three votes before finally resigning to protest it). The line about Jabotinsky’s influence also seemed weird to me, since Jabotinsky was an Anglophile, a parliamentarian and a liberal until his last months who certainly did favor an armed style of Zionism, but who had nothing at all to say about the Iranian nuclear threat or even the Islamized regime in Iran (or about Islamism, Islamic terrorism or nuclear weapons) before he died in 1940.
There are really only two ways you can do this, unless you get incredibly lucky with your targetted air strikes. The first way is by destroying Iran’s electrical infrastructure. You can’t run those centrifuges without a terrific amount of electricity. Strike the electrical generation and distribution system and you’ll have a humanitarian catastrophe, but you’ll also likely derail the nuclear program permanently. People can get revenge for minor wrongs, but not usually for grievous ones. The second way of course is to simply do a preemptive nuclear strike, perhaps with relatively small bunker-buster type nukes. This of course also has exceptionally negative political consequences.
I have little to comment on the technical matters except to reflect again on the possibility that Netanyahu will order a strike that’s intended only to delay Iran’s nuclear program, not to derail it. In this case, the risks might seem too high to be worth the time bought, but on the other hand, he might not feel like he has much to lose.
On the outside chance that your country DOES elect one of those 2 options. I would also suggest implementing an aggressive program of ethnic cleansing in your homeland to ensure that you don’t have any problem maintaining demographic hegemony into the foreseeable future. After all, if you’re going to be pariahs in the international community, you might as well remove the sword of Damocles from over your collective head. Simply put, all of your options suck. Even if Iran does absolutely nothing with its nukes once it gets them, and stays quiet, you’re still going to suffer a massive capital and brain drain as companies and talented individuals decide that the costs of living in Israel are just potentially too high.
Interestingly, the past decade has seen Israelis slowly come around (again) to the notion that certain things may be done in a time of conflict that can not be done when there is quiet. Many of the great diplomatic achievements of the early Ariel Sharon era were made in the hours and days following various terrorist attacks that killed dozens of civilians each (obviously plans had been drawn up in advance). It’s more than a little sick that a certain number of dead Jews would buy a certain leeway to take some necessary actions – like finally closing the Orient House or allowing Jews to enter (but not to pray on) the Temple Mount – but nobody ever said this world was not a fucked up place.
In those cases, the Israeli government seized the opportunity to act with capital accrued by letting its citizens be massacred. What you propose is the opposite: to seize the opportunity to act because the capital has been so obliterated that its absence no longer is a restraint. I think Israel’s situation would have to become a lot worse before that could happen. There would need to be at least some moderately severe economic sanctions against us already – so people would really feel that they’d have nothing to lose. I would love to see the enemy population expelled from Israel and I can also see a number of scenarios leading up to it, but it that is not one of the easier ways, and without a doubt there’s no way it will happen when Netanyahu is prime minister.
Conscript armies tend to degenerate fast during peacetime since the conscripts put pressure on the government through back channels to to leave then alone.
Also, all of the conscripts found to be unfit for service in the more technical branches of the military end up by default in the ground forces. All of those Ethiopian Jews have to serve somewhere in the military once they are drafted.
Conscript armies tend to degenerate fast during peacetime since the conscripts put pressure on the government through back channels to to leave then alone.
I guess in normal countries they use back channels? Here in Israel they just get their parents to demonstrate in the streets.
Also, all of the conscripts found to be unfit for service in the more technical branches of the military end up by default in the ground forces. All of those Ethiopian Jews have to serve somewhere in the military once they are drafted.
I don’t have any statistics to back this up, but I don’t think there are a lot of Ethiopian Jews in the infantry, which requires a higher physical profile (and probably also socio-economic profile) than the artillery and the armored corps require. I know a lot of immigrants from Ethiopia gravitate toward serving in the Magav, which gives them a good few years to release their aggression by regularly beating people up. The low class jobs in the IDF are things like driving trucks, helping out in the kitchens, folding parachutes, stocking and re-stocking warehouses, etc., and in those positions you’d likely find a lot of Ethiopian immigrants and a lot of other people from lower class backgrounds.
My comment about conscript armies was inspired by the early 1970′s book The Death of the Army: A Pre-Mortem by retired Army colonel Edward L. King. In the book King relates how he was assigned to be an adviser to a state National Guard organization, and he relates how the job was a lot like advising a foreign army, except everyone spoke English as their native tongue. One of King’s complaints about the NG is that unfit unit commanders often have political connections in the state capital the prevent them from being removed from their commands. Thinking about this I concluded reading your post that at least some of the conscripts have political connections in the state that protect them from the consequences of their actions, and that such favoritism was tolerated in a branch of the service that is probably considered less important that the more technically inclined services.
Further, all peacetime armies that are not rapidly expanding for a coming war tend to decay over time, and I suspect that this especially true for armies that are composed of men who are not there voluntarily. Conscripts, as opposed to volunteers, will often put in as little effort as possible and may shirk their duties outright.
Behind all of this lies the belief in the upper reaches of Israeli society that the ground forces are less important that the air forces, as I stated above.
As for the Israeli Border Police, I can completely understand the tendency for violence. Israel is surrounded by 3rd world countries, and part of this belt of poverty extends into Israel itself. Israel needs one of these to guard its borders:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_barrier#South_Africa
If you have time I would recommend reading the whole article.
My comment about conscript armies was inspired by the early 1970′s book The Death of the Army: A Pre-Mortem by retired Army colonel Edward L. King. In the book King relates how he was assigned to be an adviser to a state National Guard organization, and he relates how the job was a lot like advising a foreign army, except everyone spoke English as their native tongue. One of King’s complaints about the NG is that unfit unit commanders often have political connections in the state capital the prevent them from being removed from their commands. Thinking about this I concluded reading your post that at least some of the conscripts have political connections in the state that protect them from the consequences of their actions, and that such favoritism was tolerated in a branch of the service that is probably considered less important that the more technically inclined services.
I don’t think we’re seeing in Israel the kind of things that happened during the Vietnam era in the United States. Most conscripts go into a branch of the service and a unit that matches either their desires or their abilities or both. No one gets sent into combat without volunteering for it. If you’re cool with being conscripted into a combat unit, there’s a good chance you won’t mind when your unit is sent into action.
To my knowledge, people aren’t getting themselves exempted from service by using political connections. People who want to get out of the service can pretend to be religious (if they’re girls) or learning in a yeshiva full-time (if they’re boys and Haredi) or medically/psychologically disabled (lots of people). There are also “conscientious objectors” but they’re very rare and it’s notoriously difficult to do. I’ve dated several of them, but I’ve dated many more girls who were in “Intelligence,” which is the biggest unit in the whole military by far.
The political connections, which do exist and which are important here, are being used to get into choice units like the Spokesman’s office. I know a lot of people who’ve gotten to serve in the Spokesman’s office because they were qualified for the job (immigrants from overseas with a university degree in international relations / communications and fluent in at least two languages), but people serving there who aren’t immigrants are overwhelmingly taking advantage of some plum connections.
Further, all peacetime armies that are not rapidly expanding for a coming war tend to decay over time, and I suspect that this especially true for armies that are composed of men who are not there voluntarily.
I believe that this is true in most situations but that the decay in our military is so advanced that it’s slowed and not noticeable anymore.
Conscripts, as opposed to volunteers, will often put in as little effort as possible and may shirk their duties outright.
That’s of course true, but the culture here still really emphasizes military service, even among many of the progressives who don’t have anything else good to say about Israel. I dated a girl whose mother was a fanatical leftist professor of “gender studies,” but when the girl turned 17 her parents shipped her back to Israel from where they were living in voluntary exile so she could be conscripted with her cohort. She went into “Intelligence,” of course, and the great thing is that she was able to discuss her military work with her radical mother because they shared the same level of security clearance.
Behind all of this lies the belief in the upper reaches of Israeli society that the ground forces are less important that the air forces, as I stated above.
There’s been a lot of criticism and public debate about that. Dan Halutz, the man who was appointed Chief of Staff to organize and oversee Expulsion 2005, is considered to have misunderstood how to fight the war in Lebanon the following summer by being too cautious about using ground troops. Personally, I think it has less to do with air vs. ground and more to do with a desire to defeat the enemy by engaging in actual combat / McClellanism (I can’t figure out why the American Civil War is of no interest to anyone who’s not an American). Bit I definitely don’t think it’s a coincidence that his replacement was from the Golani brigade.
As for the Israeli Border Police, I can completely understand the tendency for violence. Israel is surrounded by 3rd world countries, and part of this belt of poverty extends into Israel itself. Israel needs one of these to guard its borders:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_barrier#South_Africa
If you have time I would recommend reading the whole article.
I don’t like that idea so much. I’d feel more restricted and enclosed by something like that than I’d feel protected.
“Intelligence,” which is the biggest unit in the whole military by far.
LOL, it seems that way in Tel Aviv, doesn’t it?
The political connections, which do exist and which are important here, are being used to get into choice units like the Spokesman’s office.
Don’t forget Galei Tzahal (the military radio station).
Isn’t Intelligence the biggest? What would be larger?
I didn’t forget the radio, and I’ve heard it’s a very hard unit to get into, but I don’t know anybody who got to serve there.
Well, what do you know – apparently 8200 is supposed to be “the largest unit” in the IDF.
But still, I doubt the Intelligence Corps as a whole is bigger than, say, the Air Force.
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