“Stay two or three weeks longer and you can be a war correspondent,” said my Israeli brother-in-law, partly in jest. Three Katyusha 122 mm rockets fired from southern Lebanon had just caused minor damage (but no injuries) near his home in northern Galilee late last month. Israeli artillery blasted the suspected launch point. Officers dryly suggested that UNIFIL, the hapless United Nations peace-keeping force in Lebanon, might want to investigate. But the cross-border rocketing did not affect daily life or even off-season tourism along the shores of the Sea of Galilee the same day.
The strike was the seventh from Lebanon since Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah — the “Party of God” — and its allies ended with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701. Among other things, that measure vainly called for Hezbollah’s disarmament. At that time, the Shi’ite movement, designated an international terrorist organization by the United States, was estimated to possess more than 10,000 short- and medium-range rockets and missiles. Today, under UNIFIL’s gaze, the arsenal has grown to an estimated 50,000 and Hezbollah is king-maker in Lebanon’s government.
That, some Israelis argue, makes the Lebanese state itself a legitimate target — a sign of where the debate is going, which may hint at a much more vigorous military response in the future.
Israelis with close government contacts describe Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barack and Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benjamin Gantz as having learned from the hesitancy shown by their respective predecessors in ’06 — Ehud Olmert, Amir Peretz and Dan Halutz. The military is now said to be better prepared and better trained.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah surprised Israel with anti-ship missiles and anti-armor tactics even while suffering heavy losses four years ago. Press reports say it too has been preparing relentlessly for “the next round.” Last month, Beirut-based correspondent Nicholas Blanford quoted a Hezbollah gunman as boasting, “Let them attack Iran. It will be great. It will mean that Israel is finished.”
Might a conflict with Hezbollah, Iran’s surrogate, not result in war directly with Iran? In fact, the war has been underway sub rosa a long time. Recent reports of explosions in an Iranian missile site, a Hezbollah arms depot, the exposure of CIA-linked spy rings in Lebanon and Iran, and the storming of the British embassy in Tehran suggest the struggle between Iran and its satellites on one side and Israel and the West on the other is intensifying.
The threat is always there. But in a country where hitch-hiking by armed troops to and from duty is an old custom, one might not see it. Lunching in the redeveloped Turkish-era train station in south Tel Aviv, now full of expensive bistros, boutiques and foreign press, one could easily forget that there is any conflict even with Palestinian Arabs, let alone Iranians.
“Israelis live in a bubble” regarding Palestinians, another former diplomat says. “No one expects anything of them” in what used to be called the peace process. So “we want to be left alone to live our own lives and succeed. Whether Hezbollah or Iran acts, who knows? But I think Israel is rarely surprised when it comes to security.”
An acquaintance, about to leave his white collar job in Jerusalem for a stint of reserve duty along the Gaza frontier, says the IDF knows of tunnels dug from the Strip into Israel so Hamas and its terrorist allies can attempt new kidnappings of soldiers. “We’re told to be alert — not only to what’s in front of us [facing Gaza] but behind us, toward Israel.”
In the Jewish state today, it doesn’t look like war. But it doesn’t feel like peace, either.
The author is Washington director of CAMERA, the 65,000-member Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.
