Israel is regaining its deterrence mojo
While the world is worrying about the prospects of a regional Middle East war, Israel is winning the war it is fighting. Israel's enemies are taking note.
Israel has for months been warning Hezbollah in Lebanon that Israel has extraordinary capabilities to tame the Iran-backed Shia militia. Only now is the world seeing what that means.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has led the warnings with comments such as “they (Hezbollah) can’t even imagine what might happen” and would face “an unprecedented response, unlike anything they've experienced before."
Israeli army chief Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi has chimed in with ominous warnings such as, “We have many capabilities that we have not yet activated.”
This sounded like the usual bluster; it is no secret that the Jewish state has powerful military capabilities, including a nuclear arsenal. However, as Israel’s clandestine pager-and-walkie-talkie attacks followed by the systematic assassinations of key Hezbollah leaders shows, Israel’s defense big wigs were speaking facts.
Israel has indeed demonstrated intelligence and technological capabilities that Hezbollah could not have imagined or experienced.
While Hamas October 7 attacks from Gaza exposed defense vulnerabilities, one reason is that Israel had been (mistakenly) focused more on Hezbollah than Hamas.
That means Israel has been studying and infiltrating Hezbollah for years and has developed new and creative strategies to fight the Islamist militia. Few Hezbollah members will be sleeping well wondering what might come next that they cannot imagine.
The pager operation showed Israel is weakening its enemies and regaining its defense credibility, including the mystique and mojo that has made the IDF legendary.
Before October 7, Israel was seen as invincible and impenetrable. Denting this perception was a big win for Hamas, something Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh claimed was what made the October 7 attack so successful from Hamas’s warped point of view.
Israel is now showing its enemies - and its own concerned citizens - that the IDF remains the region’s strongest military and the world’s most imaginative one.
Since its sluggish response to the October 7 attacks, the IDF has shown that it retains its considerable prowess. The mainstream media has largely ignored this in favor of smearing the Jewish state with lies and blood libels because, well, it is a Jewish state.
While the media is busy opining about the prospect of a bigger regional war, which is a possibility, it has failed to report the extent to which Israel is winning its current war.
Here is what Israel has achieved, starting with the IDF’s campaign in Gaza because it is instructive of how wrong much of the analysis has been.
The IDF’s Gaza campaign has been objectively successful. Israel has taken all Hamas battalions out of action, dismantled extensive infrastructure from the vast tunnel network to weapons manufacturing capabilities, killed a third to a half of Hamas terrorists, and achieved the lowest civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio in history despite Hamas using two million people as human shields.
This contrasts sharply with predictions since the war’s start when media pundits and clueless bureaucrats said there was no way Israel would invade Gaza, that the IDF would incur enormous losses, that Hamas could not be defeated, that Israel would not invade the last Hamas stronghold of Rafah, that Israel could not avoid a high civilian death toll, and Israel’s fractured government would collapse.
Wrong.
It shows most people writing about the conflict know nothing. They just latch on to the prevailing narrative and start bloviating. They know less about this conflict than I know about living in igloos.
Haniyeh may have boasted that Israel no longer looked invincible but he is now lamenting with his 72 mothers-in-law because Israel was able to penetrate Iranian defenses undetected and assassinate him in a safehouse in Tehran. Clearly, Israel’s intelligence reach and technical prowess are formidable and Israel’s spooks have even infiltrated Iran’s revered Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Haniyeh’s assassination was the second time Israel showed it could hit Iran directly with relative ease.
After Iran’s drone-and-missile attack Israel in early April, which Israel and its allies defended against by shooting down 99 percent of them, Israel retaliated with several drones and a high-tech missile that passed undetected through Iran’s most advanced defenses to destroy a radar system near its Isfahan’s air base, used to protect Iran’s nuclear sites. The missile is believed not to have been fired far from Israeli or Iranian airspace.
How is that for outclassing your enemy? Iran’s main achievement from this attack was to spark a multibillion-dollar export boom for Israel’s David’s Sling missile defense system. Finland is the latest country to place an order.
Israeli special forces also launched a daring covert raid on a Hezbollah missile production site in Syria, destroying its manufacturing capabilities from the inside out. Israel’s intelligence capabilities seem more impressive by the day and this operation was part of an underreported months-long Israeli strategy of disrupting Hezbollah’s manufacturing and supply lines.
Beyond the remarkable pager attack, which Hezbollah said incapacitated 1500 of its fighters in one of military history’s boldest and most cunning operations, Israel’s killing of so many Hezbollah leaders indicates it knows where they are and how to get to them. High-technology eaves dropping only yields so much information; Israeli intelligence has infiltrated Hezbollah.
Israel followed its pager attack with an aggressive campaign, led by Israel’s vastly superior air power, with devastating attacks that, by some estimates, have put Lebanon back 20 years.
The media has spent the past year reporting on Hezbollah’s fearsome military capabilities, including its arsenal of up to 150,00 missiles. That number might be true, but left out of the analysis is that having missiles and being able to launch them are different things.
Israel has been targeting Hezbollah rocket launchers and may have destroyed up to half of them. This, along with its disrupted communications and decimated leadership, partly explains why Hezbollah has not managed to mount a major missile response, not even one on the scale that the much-weaker Hamas could launch from Gaza.
It is also because Israel has put Hezbollah on the back foot strategically, making it question its own capabilities and unsure whether it is willing to sustain the weakening a full war with Israel would bring.
While fears that this Israel-Hezbollah War could ignite into a larger regional war are valid, one reason that Iran has not yet got directly involved is because all of the above has shown it that Israeli deterrence is looking formidable again.
Iran will know that while it has enough firepower to get some missiles through Israeli air defenses, Israel can penetrate Iran’s air defenses easily. In short, Israel can defend against an Iranian attack better than Iran can defend against an Israeli one.
War is unpredictable and the Middle East is a tinder box, but Israel is clearly regaining its mojo. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: "In the last few days, we inflicted on Hezbollah a sequence of blows that they could not imagine. If Hezbollah did not understand the message, I promise you - it will understand the message."
Israelis, and Jews around the world, will take comfort from Israel finally addressing the threats on its borders, which it should never have allowed to get so strong. Despite setbacks and challenges, Israel is showing that it has still got it.
Did anyone ever doubt it?