Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s public promise a week ago, in a meeting with IAF pilots, that “after we strike in Iran, everyone will understand what you did in the preparation and training process,” has indeed come to pass.
Israel’s response to Iran’s massive ballistic missile assault on October 1, which sent almost the entire country dashing for bomb shelters and safe rooms, has gradually been revealed to have had strategic implications.
In its relatively brief series of strikes predawn Saturday morning, the IAF destroyed Iran’s long-range air defense systems — in the process humiliating Russia, which supplied them. It severely reduced Iran’s capacity to produce more ballistic missiles — though Iran retains considerable existing stocks. And it dropped heavy hints — literally dropped and literally heavy — as regards precision and reach, by hitting non-crucial targets in southeast Iran mere hundreds of meters from sensitive energy facilities.
Iran is now weighing whether and how to respond, and it is widely assessed in Israel that it will try to do so — sooner or later, and in a way that seeks to cause real harm to Israel or Israeli interests and avoid further humiliation.
But if and when it does hit back, Israel, in the words of the IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi on Tuesday, will strike with capabilities it didn’t use this time, and against targets that it spared this time.
Halevi was almost certainly referring to Iranian energy facilities, which Israel, under US pressure, indeed refrained from targeting on Saturday, but not to nuclear facilities.
But if and when it does hit back, Israel, in the words of the IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi on Tuesday, will strike with capabilities it didn’t use this time, and against targets that it spared this time.
Halevi was almost certainly referring to Iranian energy facilities, which Israel, under US pressure, indeed refrained from targeting on Saturday, but not to nuclear facilities.
In the new reality of direct Iranian-Israeli military confrontation, the regime, by twice launching massive, somewhat imprecise missile attacks across Israel, causing harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure, has legitimized Israeli responses that, to date, have focused entirely and precisely on military targets. In that new equation, Israel might well seek to preempt a third Iranian assault.
In a last resort, if it believed that the Iranian guillotine was at our throat, as the late Mossad chief Meir Dagan once put it, Israel would go it alone against the regime’s nuclear weapons program. But it would emphatically prefer to mount any assault on Iran’s nuclear targets in concert with the US, rather than in defiance of it: Saturday’s strike took out Iran’s long-range air defenses, not its short-range capabilities — which would come into play if Israel was seeking to drop its heaviest bombs directly over underground Iranian nuclear targets. US involvement would enable a less high-risk assault, with a far greater prospect of success.
Israel is not there yet.
But as Gallant warned this week, in another of his likely prescient remarks, Saturday’s strikes created “a big disadvantage for the enemy when we want to attack later.” (My emphasis.)
Much more harm than good
The United States and other stronger and weaker Israeli allies are urging the government not to implement laws passed by the Knesset on Monday night that shut down the operations in Israel of UNRWA — the UN’s Palestinian welfare agency — and that radically constrict its capacity to operate in the West Bank and Gaza (since Israel will no longer enable UNRWA’s access to those territories via Israeli-run crossing points).
The overwhelming coalition and opposition support for the two new laws demonstrated that UNRWA — long widely unloved in Israel for perpetuating rather than helping solve the Palestinian refugee problem, and for alleged deep complicity with Hamas in Gaza — had placed itself far beyond the pale for the Israeli mainstream by its response, or lack thereof, to Israel’s evidence of its staffers’ direct involvement in the October 7 invasion and slaughter.
Doubtless bolstering the Knesset backing for the laws was the revelation, immediately acknowledged by UNRWA, that the Hamas terrorist who led the killing and kidnapping of Israelis from a roadside bomb shelter near Kibbutz Re’im on October 7, and who was finally killed by the IDF in a Gaza strike last week, had been employed by UNRWA since July 2022 while serving as a Nukbha commander in Hamas’s Bureij Battalion. (Aner Shapiro was among those who were killed in the bomb shelter; Hersh Goldberg-Pollin was among those abducted from it.)
Muhammad Abu Attawi’s name was included on a list Israel sent to UNRWA in July of 100 UNRWA staff members who were also allegedly members of terror groups, the UN agency confirmed. But it did not take any action against Attawi — who it said worked as a driver — because, it explained, Israel did not respond to a request for further information.
Of course UNRWA did not take any action. Just as any self-respecting organization dedicated to the preservation of life would refrain from mounting its own urgent investigation into allegations that it was employing a prominent mass murderer from a barbaric and avowedly would-be genocidal terrorist movement.
Israel has gradually sought to reduce UNRWA’s role in distributing aid and other activities in Gaza, but there is no sign that the government has properly prepared for the consequences of the new ban by ensuring that all necessary alternative arrangements are in place. And it thus leaves Israel vulnerable to fresh allegations and concerns, from allies and its most vicious critics alike, about the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
Israel widely believes that UNRWA does considerably more harm than good in Gaza. The Netanyahu coalition argues that the Palestinian Authority cannot possibly play a role in Gaza. The IDF is currently repeating its efforts to assert full control over northern Gaza, with further loss of life among IDF troops and Gazan civilians, after a Hamas resurgence there. And the prime minister has yet to offer a coherent, viable plan for a “day after” in Gaza.
His far-right partners, and much of his own Likud party, meanwhile, are championing the expansion of Israeli rule to Gaza and the renewal of Jewish settlement there. If that is not Netanyahu’s game plan, and he certainly knows that it is unsustainable for all manner of diplomatic, economic and military reasons, then where is his strategic vision?
A plea from the bereaved heart of religious Zionism
Encouraging Israeli leaders to pay condolence visits, the family of Rabbi Avraham Goldberg, 43, a Jerusalem father of eight and much-loved teacher at the Himmelfarb school who was killed fighting in southern Lebanon this weekend, made a highly unusual request: Politicians from across the spectrum would be welcome… provided they paired up, one for one, with somebody from across the aisle.
This request, issued in the spirit of Goldberg’s own efforts to bridge gaps and build bonds within our people, was indeed heeded, with several Knesset members recognizing the importance of the plea and partnering up to attend the shiva.
On Tuesday, his widow Rachel issued a second request — that ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students join the army, even as their political and rabbinical leadership have been doing its utmost to maintain the ultra-Orthodox community’s thoroughly un-Jewish exclusion from military or national service.
Political extortion has enabled this perversion of Jewish values and Orthodox Jewish principles to persist for decades, its disgraceful inequality eating away at Israeli society. But the injustice that sees much of Israel risking life and limb while also financially subsidizing the fastest-growing sector of the populace — which insists on playing no practical role in protecting the country, and in some cases mocks and derides those who do — has never been as divisive and manifestly untenable as it is today, more than a year into a multifront war. What began with the cataclysmic deaths of some 1,200 people in the Hamas invasion continues to exact a terrible price, with some 70 soldiers — including many, many reservists like Goldberg — losing their lives this month alone.
Rachel Goldberg directed her plea, issued from the bereaved heart of the religious Zionist community, at the draft-dodgers themselves: “They need to understand that the people of Israel need them,” she implored. “Give us strength! What is this insensitivity of those that don’t get drafted?” she asked.
Unlike so many of Israel’s challenges, this is one that can be swiftly resolved by Israel’s leaders.
At the moment, the Netanyahu coalition is desperately trying to evade the High Court’s ruling that the draft needs to be applied to the ultra-Orthodox community. In the spirit of partnership across the aisle that prevailed briefly at the shiva of Avraham Goldberg, in light of his widow’s plea for an equitable sharing of the burden, and for the sake of a return to authentic Jewish values, legislators across the political spectrum need to join forces and put an end to an untenable, nationally corrosive aberration.
Source » timesofisrael