Weakness Invites War

As Israel will soon discover, sadly:

Another result of the war — perhaps the most important — is that the myth of Israeli invincibility has been shredded. Israel has always been weaker than it looks because it is a small population, living within frontiers that are militarily hard to defend, surrounded by far more numerous enemies. People forgot about these strategic weaknesses and thought of “Fortress Israel” as invincible because it has a powerful well-equipped army that had won its previous wars handsomely. But this war has undermined that belief.

The IDF of a generation ago would have carried out some daringly unexpected maneuver such as leaping over southern Lebanon to attack and destroy Hezbollah’s strategic reserve of fighters in their Bekaa Valley camps. (That, incidentally, would have advanced Israel’s objectives of destroying Hezbollah in order strengthen Lebanon.)

But the modern IDF relied too heavily on air power, stayed with this strategy when it was clearly failing, then carried out a mechanized frontal assault again guerrilla forces dug in for just such an assault, took longer to advance than anyone expected, and had still not achieved its objectives when the referee stopped the game. Maybe its terrorist-to-soldier kill ratio was impressive. But it still lost because it failed to win. Israel will learn from these mistakes. The entire Arab-cum-Islamic world is now less frightened of Israel than a month ago — and more frightened of Hezbollah. And there is no shortage of eager young Islamists eager to take the place of the “martyrs.”

All this suggests that the current ceasefire is merely the preliminary to another war. Hezbollah and its allies will feel that they have the Zionist enemy on the run. But such a war will very likely have a different course and outcome. Israel will be developing strategy and tactics designed to avoid its recent mistakes and to defeat this new sort of enemy.