The war is not going well for the Israelis is it? One of the Israeli warships blockading Lebalon was hit yesterday, killing four sailors by either an “explosives-laden drone” (the story Friday) or an “Iran-manufactured C-802 missile” (according to the Israeli army today and very convenient it is too in the ongoing quest to subject Iran to regime change). This is not supposed to happen and the instinctive impulse to blame it on Iranese supplied supermissiles is telling: Hezbollah is not supposed to be this smart, so the only way they could’ve damaged a superior Israeli warship must’ve been with a supermissile supplied by somebody else, somebody more respectable. Twenty years ago the USSR would’ve been blamed, today it’s Iran. The ship btw is very likely a Eilat class large missile corvette, the largest ships Israel has in service…
At the same time, the Palestinians showed they were not stupid either, when “Hamas gunmen” blew a hole in the wall separating Gaza from Egypt, allowing around a 1,000 Palestinians caught on the wrong side of the border to finally go home. Again, this is not according to the script. Palestinians are supposed to suffer whatever indignities Israel inflicts on them, not find a way around them!
Meanwhile, the Israeli tactics are the same tactics that failed to work in Lebanon last time and since then similar tactics have spectacularly failed for the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq: aerial and artillery bombardments to destroy infrastructure and supposed enemy strongholds combined with blockading actions and a reluctance to get too deep into enemy territory and suffer casualties. The strategy behind these tactics for the Israelis is to bully the Palestinian Authority in Gaza and the Lebanese government respectively into leaning on the militants in their areas: “if we make their life miserable enough, they’re bound to hand back our captured soldiers”. So far that does not seem to work.
There’s no real expectance that it will work. The militants in question are barely touched by the bombing, instead it’s the civilian population that suffers. Worse for Israel, the bombardments have the opposite effect than they’re intended to have: they serve to bind the population of Gaza tighter to Hamas and in Lebanon tighter to Hezbollah. It is not as if this was unexpected, so what were the Israeli commanders thinking? It may just be stupidity born from arrogance, something not new to the Israelis, who after all have had more than half a century of continuing military succes, which leads them to underestimate their enemies. Or it may be something more.
There’s a recurring tendency within Israeli strategic thinking to go for the big, conclusive strike that will destroy once and for all their enemies capabilities to attack Israel. In 1982 this thinking led to the invasion of Lebanon, with the idea being that if only South Lebanon was under Israeli control, attacks on the north of Israel would cease. It would be a quick action, with a friendly puppet regime to rule the region backed up by a small Israeli force afterwards and no more worries. Instead, they got sucked further and further into the country and had to remain in South Lebanon themselves until finally withdrawn in 2000. In the process they helped create Hezbollah, but nevermind.
Whatif this kind of thinking is again in fashion? What if the Israeli army wants to use this crisis to launch a proper war, not just targeting Hamas in the Occuppied Territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon, but also getting rid of her last two state enemies, Syria and Iran, the alleged sponsors of Hezbollah/Hamas? If the Palestinians have no more state sponsors, Palestinian resistance will collapse, Israel will not have to fear anymore suicide bombings and can do what it wants in the Occupied Territories. Yes, not very realistic, but realism is often absent when these decisions are made (viz. Iraq).
In any event, there is little hope this war is going to stop soon. Israel in particular is now in a position in which it either has to scale up its efforts to win it, or withdraw and lose face. In its military history, the moments that it has chosen the second option are rare.