A few mega-pundits have tried to play down Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's warning to the people of Israel on the day the 22nd Knesset was sworn in, about the country being on the brink of war. One of the recurring motifs of the punditry was that if for the past several years, we have been told that Israel is a rising superpower that it deters its enemies, why all the talk of war all of a sudden?
Anyone who thinks that, of course, doesn't know that this was the main reasoning behind the assessments that war was unlikely ahead of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Israel of 1973 saw itself as a regional power. A major part of that perception lay with its deterrent capabilities, or in other words maintaining the status quo through the threat of wiping out an Egyptian attack in short order.
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That perception formed the foundation of Israel's relations with the US. If Israel had suddenly said that a war on two fronts would erupt in another 48 hours or a week, it would have tipped its hand. A war meant the collapse of deterrence. And a collapse of deterrence meant that Israel would not be a power worth investing in.
Benjamin Netanyahu appears not to suffer from the complex that requires people to dismiss threats by reasoning that if a threat exists and deterrence doesn't work, it's a sign that you're not the prime minister of a powerful nation. Since he thinks that we will eventually find ourselves fighting a war, Netanyahu is doing everything he can to prepare the public for a state of emergency, while at the same time trying to bolster deterrence against Hezbollah and expose the various terrorist organizations and Iran as the ones who are working to create a serious threat to Israel's homefront.
This was the purpose of lifting the policy of ambiguity about the IDF's recent surgical strikes. Maj. Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror, writing in Israel Hayom, characterized it as being what could turn into a "terrible war."
But the Israeli media not only covered Netanyahu's warning at the Knesset with apathy, it also took too long to realize what was happening in Saudi Arabia a month ago. The Iranians started operating in a much more aggressive manner than expected due to economic pressure of US sanctions. For the past six months, the entire Gulf region and Saudi Arabia has demonstrated terrible weakness. Yemen turned into a test case for the Iranians because Saudi Arabia fought so ineffectively there.
The Iranians use tools and techniques similar to the ones the IDF uses, including highly advanced German tanks. Senior IDF officials have already been warned that they must learn from what happened in Yemen and find solutions to the tactics used by the sandal-clad Houthi fighters. Later on, a giant drone was shot down, there were repeated attacks on oil tankers, and recently half the Saudi oil industry was paralyzed.
Israel suddenly woke up to the clear and present danger of Iran having cruise missiles. This past year, doubts about the efficacy of Iron Dome have crept in – might it have outlived its usefulness? It was never intended to intercept cruise missiles, but its limitations helped Israeli officials understand that we have no complete response for cruise missiles, which fly at a low altitude. The existing answer is mostly to do what the IDF and the Israeli Air Force have been doing in Syria, activity that recently thwarted a drone attack.
There has recently been a dramatic escalation in the security and defense tensions around us. While Israel was bogged down in the political impasse that followed the Sept. 17 election, Iran continues to train a few Hezbollah-like organizations, similar to the one we know in Lebanon but that will operate in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.
Retired heads of the defense and security establishment parrot the mantra of 2019: there is no existential threat to Israel, we cannot be beaten. It appears as if IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi has already abandoned that way of thinking. It happened a short while ago, during IDF drills. The top army echelon realized for the first time the scope of the attempts to attack Israel, and the need to build both defensive and offensive responses. Which is why Netanyahu was talking about budgets of tens of millions of shekels. The next state budget, when it is passed, will emphasize military needs over welfare.
Are these the same Kurds?
The US move in Syria does not empower Iran, but it sends a message of American weakness in a critical area of the Middle East.
One of the problems with US President Donald Trump's announcement that the US was opening the door to a Turkish incursion into northeast Syria and abandoning the Kurds was exactly the use of the general name "Kurds."
The mid-1970s saw the first major US abandonment of the Kurds. Henry Kissinger managed to mediate a deal between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Iran, which was still ruled by the shah. The Kurds paid the price of the deal, and Kissinger forced Israel to cut off its ties with and assistance to the Kurds.
They were the Kurds of Iraqi Kurdistan, whereas the Kurds of northern Syria – no matter what initials you assign them – are the PKK, which is basically a communist terrorist group.
There have been endless analyses of and responses to Trump's announcement, and in the meantime, the Turks have already started aerial bombardments ahead of a ground incursion. I'm backing strategic analyst Michael Doran from the Hudson Institute, who was able to – in real time – parse former President Obama's complicated decisions and how he was moving closer to the Iranians and the Russians.
Doran lays out Trump's latest move in light of the long-standing war between the PKK and the Turks. Some 40,000 Turks have been killed in that war, and in the ongoing battle against the Islamic State, the Kurds of northern Syria occupied areas they had never dreamed of. Obama had bet on them as part of the deals he struck with Russia and Iran.
So no one needs to panic about Trump abandoning the Kurds; the problem is that it happened immediately after the Iranian attack on Saudi Arabia. The message received was that America was weak and fleeing the Middle East and betraying its allies.
Some claim that the move puts Iran into a stronger position, but Tehran was furious about it since the American move paved the way for the Turks. The Kurds, who will withstand the Turkish assault, were allies of Iran. During the years they were fighting ISIS, they received a lot of air support from the Americans, but the alliance was only temporary.
Can Israel depend on Trump? In a war, the US will provide both logistical and diplomatic backing. It's a huge difference from the Obama administration.
Dayan, without panic
The new transcripts from the Yom Kippur War show us that then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was not a god who failed to deliver, but focused and realistic.
Like every year, more parts of the protocols of the top command in the Yom Kippur War are made public. And as always, the transcripts fall into the hands of new reporters who reinvent the war. What was new this year was that Moshe Dayan, in contrast to being seen as a god who disappointed his worshippers, comes off well. At least better than most of the others in the military leadership. He was much sharper than then-Chief of Staff David Elazar, and more focused and able to decide what to do.
Dayan identified problems with the command. Because most of the published material isn't well-dated, we can assume that the following comes from a late-night discussion on Oct. 8 or later: "We know that we have weak links in the command chain somewhere," he says. "I have great appreciation for the old guard, but not everyone." He wonders aloud which senior commanders to enlist and who should be left aside: "I think a lot of Motti [Hod] and Tolkovsky. I wouldn't take Mulik Eyal. I wouldn't take Ezer and I brought him up as an example because we all know what I mean, but we are missing good, experienced commanders. I wouldn't take Yitzhak Rabin, and I would take Haim Bar-Lev."
Here we have an example of matter-of-fact thinking from Dayan, who knew the difference between a time of peace and a time of war. Bar-Lev was a political rival and they didn't like each other. But Dayan wanted him in a command position right then.
Dayan wasn't one to panic but he was the first top official to understand what was happening and how Israel should act. He was the one who decided that we would not retreat an inch from the Golan Heights and would fight there until our last soldier. At the time, Dado wanted to send Mussa Peled's 146th Armored Division to the south, and only Rehavam "Gandhi" Zeevi prevented him from making that terrible mistake. The division was sent to wage the counter-offensive that saved the Golan.
