It has a history of military opportunism.
By: Hilal Khashan
The situation in
Ukraine is a timely reminder that states that declare war usually find a
way to justify it, regardless of how convincing it is.
Consider the
recent history of the Middle East. A few days before the Israelis
invaded Sinai in 1956, Hungary's anti-communist revolution broke out.
Taking advantage of the world's focus on the Suez Crisis, the Soviet
army stormed Budapest. In 1967, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's
decision to close the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping gave Prime
Minister Levi Eshkol the casus belli to launch the Six-Day War.
Right after
Russia invaded Ukraine, an Israeli media report expressed concern that
Iran might take advantage of the war and instruct its Middle Eastern
proxies to launch attacks against Israel. To be fair, its concerns seem
more grounded in 19th-century pogroms and the Holocaust than they do in,
say, the revival of the Iran nuclear talks. Israel is loud about the
security threat presented by Iran, not the other way around. A serious
provocation by Iran will undoubtedly further complicate the talks. In
any case, Israel will likely use the Ukraine war to target Iran's
nuclear assets or regional proxy groups.
There is no
shortage of speculation about Israel's plans to attack the Iranian
nuclear program. It’s not so much about accumulating enough
weapons-grade uranium to build an atomic bomb – Iran can do that in a
matter of weeks. It’s about acquiring a delivery system, which will take
at least two years to develop. There is no indication that Iran is
rushing to develop its ballistic nuclear missile system because it is
not something that it could hide. It doesn’t want to give Israel the
pretext for an attack.
Israeli officials
maintain that they are not bound to a nuclear agreement between Iran
and major world powers. They reserve the right to act unilaterally to
remove the atomic threat. Even so, they will have difficulty convincing
the U.S. that an attack on Iran is justifiable at the current rate of
its nuclear program progress. Even if Israel chooses to attack Iran's
nuclear facilities without direct U.S. involvement, it can only hamper
its program for a few years, after which Tehran would resume and advance
its activities.
In any case,
Israel would have to precede its attack on Iran by destroying
Hezbollah’s precision missile and drone capabilities. Hezbollah is
Iran’s first line of defense against Israel and the main force in
furthering its ambition and influence through subversive activities.
Israel unilaterally withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000 without
reaching a peace agreement. It has been its consistent policy to avoid
escalation against Hezbollah, which understood the new game rules and
made no attempt to violate them. (A notable exception was in July 2006,
when a limited border raid to take Israel Defense Forces prisoners went
wrong, inflicting more casualties than Israel could accept.)
In the years
since, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has made pompous claims about
acquiring and developing precision ballistic missiles. He said his group
had therefore achieved the capability to deter Israel, allegedly
establishing a balance of power with the IDF. Even more recently, he
bragged about sending a drone over northern Israel that neither the IDF
nor its touted Iron Dome system could intercept. A tiny drone will not
alter the military balance of power that overwhelmingly favors Israel,
of course, but it's notable that, according to Nasrallah, Hezbollah is
now manufacturing and selling drones. Israel responded by sending two
Israeli Air Force jets to fly over Beirut and its southern suburbs,
Hezbollah’s key stronghold. In the 1980s and 1990s, a provocation of
this magnitude would have invited a heavy Israeli retaliation.
If Israel ever
decides to strike Iran's nuclear sites, it will have to negotiate
Hezbollah's military assets in advance. For IDF commanders, the question
is not if they would again go to war against Hezbollah, but when. The
preconditions for a decisive Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear
infrastructure are not ready yet, but they are already in place for
Hezbollah. It might be difficult for the U.S. to stop Israeli action
against Hezbollah after Russia invaded Ukraine despite repeated warnings
not to. Israel can claim that it has more convincing security reasons
to take on Hezbollah than Russia to dismember Ukraine and topple its
government. |