DOES NETANYAHU REALLY THINK ISRAEL CAN TAKE ON IRAN ALONE?

Does Netanyahu Really Think Israel Can Take on Iran Alone?

Israel's military and technological prowess, backed by an extraordinary international coalition, beat back the fundamentalist forces in the region still sworn to destroy Israel on Sunday. But very soon that strategic synthesis may be a vision of the past

April 18th, 21PM April 18th, 21PM

What would have happened in the early hours of Sunday morning if the United States – along with Britain, France, Germany and a number of Arab countries – hadn't joined Israel in fending off Iran's drone and missile attack?

Somewhere, military planners are probably running complex simulations, but it's not too hard to answer that question. The Israel Air Force's fighter jets, operating on their own, would have almost certainly intercepted most of the drones, and the Arrow and David's Sling defense batteries most of the incoming missiles. But more would have got through.

Even with the added layers of defense from the international coalition coordinated by U. S. Central Command (CENTCOM), at least four Iranian missiles got through, causing damage to a taxiway within the Nevatim Air Base, very close to the flight line of the air force's cargo and aerial tanker squadrons (the aircraft themselves were probably in the air at the time and wouldn't have been damaged). Shrapnel from rocket interceptions seriously wounded one young Bedouin girl near Arad.

Without the coalition's help, the casualties would have likely been much higher and the damage to military and civilian infrastructure significant, perhaps even devastating. Israel would have been forced to retaliate immediately with its own massive strike, and we would now be at all-out war with Iran and its proxies, eclipsing in its ferocity the last six months of the war in Gaza.

This international coalition wasn't built overnight. It was the result of regional trends and quiet alliances that have been decades in the making. But as one Israeli security official put it this week: "Even though we were working on this for years, everyone seeing it all of a sudden work out in the open is a huge event."

Such a big event that it has just about caused the ministers and generals, who for the past six months have been on an unstoppable rampage through Gaza, to pause for a moment and rein in their initial instinct to immediately hit back at the Iranians. It was a much-needed reminder that strategic thinking and caution, and not just overwhelming firepower, were once part of Israel's strength.

Israel's religious politicians and pundits were, of course, quick to cast the events of Sunday morning as a heavenly miracle and to demand a "crushing response," as far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir put it.

It's tempting to frame the "hit back now" or "think more carefully" debate in reference to the current language of the two Israels. That of Benjamin Netanyahu's government, which champions fundamentalism, fascism and parochialism, wedded to the myth of an Israel that must prove to the region and entire world that "the landlord is crazy," as Ben-Gvir puts it.

Then there's the other Israel, which builds international partnerships and whose scientific community developed the most advanced missile defense systems.

One Israeli scientist said this week that "the old Israel came back to save the new Israel." That framing is not wrong, but the schism isn't that new.

Netanyahu, who has remained strangely silent since Sunday morning, is by no means Israel's first leader who in public propagated the myth that Israel is powerful enough to go it alone, even as it relies on the support of foreign powers.

"Our future doesn't depend on what the goyim will say but on what the Jews will do," David Ben-Gurion famously said at the Israel Defense Forces' Independence Day military parade in 1955. In private, he was planning a preemptive war against Egypt, before Gamal Abdel Nasser's army could complete its modernization with Soviet weapons – which, Ben-Gurion feared, would enable it to strike first.

But it was only when Israel was assured of the support of Britain and France that he went ahead. "For the first time, there are signs on the horizon that Israel will not be entirely without an ally in the world," he told party members a month before the war began.

The validity of the Ben-Gurion defense doctrine – a combination of self-reliance on the IDF (especially its reserves), a domestic arms industry, along with the acceptance that a small country with scant natural resources needs strong alliances – was proven once again this week, some 50 years after his death.

It was enhanced by the doctrine of Ben-Gurion's protégé, Shimon Peres, who, as foreign minister – first in the 1980s in the Shamir governments, and then in the '90s under Yitzhak Rabin – worked to achieve the 1994 peace treaty with Jordan, which played a key role on Sunday morning as well.

Six months after the debacle of October 7 and the criminal mismanagement of the war in Gaza ever since, Israel has had a vision of how things can work differently. April 13 showed how, with its own technology, backed up by Western and regional allies, it can beat back the fundamentalist forces in the region still sworn to destroy Israel.

But that may already be a vision of the past. That extraordinary coalition may turn out to be the last gasp of Israel's original success story, temporarily resuscitated by an 81-year-old American president who still clings to the version of what Israel once was and hoped to be, much more than its current leaders do.

On its current track, Israel won't have these allies to rely upon again. And its scientific community will be drained of its brightest brains if the next governments continue the current budgetary policies diverting funding to the growing ultra-Orthodox community, which refuses to teach its young generation even the most basic of general subjects.

Iran's fundamentalist leaders, unlike ours, invest in scientific research. Iran, in another generation, has a good chance of winning the technological arms race, along with its allies, China and Russia. Unless Israel drastically changes trajectory, the glimpse of success it had on Sunday morning will become a brief, even tragic, reminder of a squandered vision.

2024-04-18T18:09:05Z dg43tfdfdgfd