Article

2019-12-22 Israel-Palestine-Jordan

[JPost] - David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father, took a leave of absence from his duties as the country’s prime minister in 1953 and moved South, to his rickety home perched over Nahal Zin in the desert kibbutz of Sde Boker.

Israel was five years old, but Ben-Gurion wasn’t sure it would survive another war. The Jewish state had barely made it through the War of Independence in 1948, when five Arab armies converged on the nascent state. Another war of that kind, he knew, could not be tolerated.

Over a period of seven weeks, Ben-Gurion sat and wrote. When he was done, the document he had drafted would become known as Israel’s national defense strategy, which rests on three pillars: Deterrence, Early Warning and Decisive Victory. Go into any senior IDF commander’s office and the list can usually be seen in a framed document hanging on the wall.

For years the document remained untouched, until Dan Meridor, a veteran minister and member of Knesset, was tasked in 2006 with drafting an updated defense concept. While the 250-page document he wrote was never officially adopted, one of its main tenets was to add a fourth pillar to Ben-Gurion’s three. That pillar is "Defense," a reference to Israel’s need to produce defensive systems that can intercept enemy missiles, like the Arrow and Iron Dome, as well as build bomb shelters to protect civilians throughout the country.

If Defense Minister Naftali Bennett has his way, a fifth pillar - based on what has been happening over the last few weeks ‐ might soon be added to Israel’s national defense concept: "Preemption," basically the need to take preemptive action to stop an enemy’s military buildup.

It’s an interesting idea. Until now, Israel has historically only taken preemptive action when encountering a threat of a nuclear nature. This was the case in 1981, when Menachem Begin decided to send IAF F-16s to destroy the Osirak reactor that Saddam Hussein was building outside of Baghdad, and in 2007, when Ehud Olmert did the same to the al-Kibar reactor Bashar Assad and North Korea were building in northeastern Syria.

But this was never done when Israel faced a conventional military buildup, or even one of biological or chemical weapons. The IDF closely followed Syria’s chemical weapons program, but never used military force to stop it. The same has happened with Hezbollah’s impressive military buildup since the Second Lebanon War in the summer of 2006.

...This scenario seems to be exactly what Bennett wants to avoid in Syria. As reported this week by The Jerusalem Post’s military correspondent Anna Ahronheim, Bennett is working to have the IDF escalate operations against Iran in Syria with the aim of persuading the Islamic Republic to leave the war-torn country in the near future. Earlier this month, Bennett warned that Israel will turn Syria into Iran’s Vietnam, a costly military quagmire, from which he hopes Tehran will decide to vacate and cut its losses.

Bennett’s calculation seems to run like this: Yes, Israel has reportedly struck hundreds of targets in Syria in recent years (as the IDF has openly admitted), but the desired result has yet to be achieved and Iran is still entrenching itself.
If nothing more is done to stop Iran, it could potentially grow a force in Syria like Hezbollah has grown in Lebanon. If that happens, Israel could find itself facing an enemy that it will hesitate to act against.

Posted by g(r)omgoru 2019-12-22 03:00|| || Front Page|| [7 views ] Top

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