The coming war on Hezbollah
JVL Introduction
In an opinion piece in Haaretz, veteran reporter Gideon Levy warns, Cassandra-like, against the looming disaster of the coming war on Hezbollah.
This Third Lebanon War will once again be a war of choice. Ongoing skirmishes have already displaced large numbers of residents in northern Israel and southern Lebanon. More devastation is to come. All talk is of “intensifying” the war in the north.
As Levy puts it, “there are two alternatives: The one, towards which we are heading, is to replicate the fiasco of Gaza all the way to the outskirts of Beirut. The second, which is too good – is to stop the war in Gaza.”
And he affirms that “if it is working so well against Hamas, war is sure to work even better facing its elder and better-armed brother, Hezbollah. We shall strike and be stricken…”
Eventually there will be negotiations. But after how many more dead?
RK
This article was originally published by Haaretz on Wed 5 Jun 2024. Read the original here.
The Solution to Israel's Entanglement in the North Lies in Ending the War in Gaza
Loading article text…
Gideon Levy is correct to issue these warnings, some time ago this warning was given about the precarious position Israel faces with its small size and no defence in depth, the advent of new missile technology etc.
With this warning it was claimed that Israel could be made unviable simply by attacks from the ‘arc of resistance, here Uzi Rubin explains how.
Uzi Rubin, a former head of the Israel Missile Defense Organization and a preeminent missile expert, has a chilling presentation he gives on the all-but-existential threat posed by precision-guided munitions to small states. Rubin uses Greece as an example, but it’s obvious he’s really talking about Israel. By perusing easily available public sources, Rubin suggests there are roughly 30 facilities in all of Greece that allow modern society as we know it to function there — systems for water, fuel, electricity, sea and air transport, and communications. Generously assuming his tally of critical targets undercounts the actual number by a factor of three, Rubin soberly makes the point that with fewer than 300 precision-guided munitions, an adversary could quickly make life unviable for Greece’s 10 million citizens.
If anything, tiny Israel may be even more vulnerable than Greece. Though the two countries are close in population, Israel’s land area is not even 20 percent of Greece’s. And while Israeli counterproliferation efforts have severely limited Iran’s ability to transfer precision-guided munitions along various routes to Hezbollah, some Israeli officials privately suggest that the terrorist group could already have several hundred in its arsenal. Once it acquires 1,000, it could fire 10 precision strikes at each of Israel’s 100 most critical pieces of national infrastructure. Even assuming a 90 percent success rate for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence [missile expert at MIT Theodore Postol reckons Iron Dome possibly 5% effective, when not overwhelmed]
the math at that point will favor Hezbollah, putting the possible paralysis of Israeli civil society within its reach.
He points out that many years ago precision missiles used to cost millions; now with the introduction of the smart phone GPS and all the coordinates can be factored in to the missiles plus winglets for 10’s of dollars, These developments are game changers which even the Houthis have.
This is a must watch Webinar with Dr. Uzi Rubin on The Evolution of Iran’s Precision Guided Missile Threat
https://jinsa.org/watch-webinar-with-dr-uzi-rubin-on-the-evolution-of-irans-precision-guided-missile-threat