Ahead of the drills the Homefront Command will be holding this week, Israel's newspapers published a description of "the next war" that the drills are designed to simulate. It turns out that the IDF assesses that it will be a war waged by missiles, similar to the 2006 Second Lebanon War and Operations Pillar of Defense (2012) and Protective Edge (2014). The arsenal in the hands of Hezbollah and Hamas, not to mention Syria and Iran, comprises some 230,000 missiles, as many as 5% of which are long-range. Some are powerful precision missiles. The IDF expects that between 1,000 and 1,500 missiles would be fired at Israel each day of the war, leading to thousands of strikes on populated areas and hundreds of injuries of civilians. And as a special treat, the drill indicates that the IDF is preparing for the possibility that Hezbollah operatives, and possibly Hamas, would try to attack communities and military positions along the border. All this shows, of course, that Israel still has not found a solution to address the roots of the security challenge it has faced for the past two decades: Hezbollah and Hamas' missile stores. Israel has indeed secured long-term quiet along its northern border, and even the southern one, but the price of that quiet -- the very essence of the mutual deterrence between Israel, Hezbollah, and Hamas -- is that these organizations have grown two or three times as strong as they were, and have improved the quality and amount of their missiles. All this under the half-open eyes of Israel, which has preferred to preserve the calm as long as possible until war eventually breaks out. The story of the IDF drill raises the question of how realistic a war of this type is. In the end, no one in the region, not the leaders of Hamas or Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, has an interest in lighting up the border and getting pulled into a full-scale war with Israel. After all, what the drill is not practicing is the force of an Israeli response to an attack. The strikes on the Shiites of southern Lebanon would be much more painful than in the Second Lebanon War or in the Gaza Strip in the recent flare-ups. But the Middle East is used to wars that break out even though nobody wanted them. A glitch or a mistaken decision is sufficient to cause things to go downhill and spiral out of control. The Syrian missiles fired at Israeli aircraft last week demonstrates the growing confidence on the other side of the border, and it's possible that now that Russia is back in the neighborhood, Nasrallah and Syrian President Bashar Assad are feeling more sure of themselves and about fighting alongside Syria as backup and support. Russia is very relevant too. In any future descent into war, Russia would play an important part, hopefully a positive and stabilizing one. In 1967, it was the Soviet Union that pushed the region into war, but since then, and certainly in the past few years, it appears that Russia and the U.S. have lost any influence they had on what happens here. Now Russia is back and playing a leading role. Moscow has good relations with both Israel and Syria, as well as with Iran and, indirectly, Hezbollah. Since Russia has no interest in a conflict that could damage its interests in the region and harm its allies (which include Israel), it could act to prevent things from going to pieces and pressure all sides involved to put on the brakes before they go skidding over the edge. This of course means limiting Israel's freedom to operate if Moscow does not approve of its actions. But the bottom line is that Israel's victory will not come through protecting the homefront or being able to withstand attacks on a stalwart civilian population, because wars are not won by defense. Israel must prepare itself to deliver a blow to the enemy from which it will not recover easily, allowing Israel to dictate conditions for ending the war that will prevent the enemy from rehabilitating itself soon afterward and starting the countdown to the next round.
Know how to defend, prepare to attack
פרופ' אייל זיסר
פרופ' אייל זיסר הוא מומחה למזה"ת ואפריקה וסגן הרקטור באוניברסיטת תל אביב
