The systematic, cunning, and spectacular dismantling of Hezbollah, the most well-equipped, well-trained, and threatening terrorist organization to Israel in recent decades, served in the past week as a much-needed refreshing proof of Israel’s creativity, audacity, and out-of-the-box thinking.
Former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah made a decision on October 8th that he and his masters in Tehran saw as a first-rate strategic choice. He chose not to join the massacre and deliver crushing blows to Israeli city centers, but an endless war of attrition against the Jewish state to force it to stop the retaliatory war in Gaza. If only he had known that by tying his fate to that of Sinwar, he essentially led to the near-total destruction of his organization’s capabilities and leadership and to his own demise, one can only ponder whether he would have chosen differently.
The dismantling of Hezbollah is being carried out in an exemplary manner. The mysterious explosion of communication devices affected the middle command level and its ability to communicate securely and transmit orders in an orderly manner. Then, hundreds of sustained strikes over long days, in locations that surprised Hezbollah themselves, led to the de-facto disabling of Nasrallah’s crown jewel: the advanced arsenal of precision missiles and drones.
Finally, the elimination of the militia’s leadership, both the military and organizational ones, led the Iranian proxy to disintegrate, and the organization’s members in Lebanon, who had become accustomed to controlling the streets of the Land of Cedars by force and behaving as neighborhood bullies since the bloody May 2008 coup in Beirut, to go back decades to the past, all to the viral cheers of oppressed Christian, Druze, and Sunni communities – in Lebanon and Syria alike.
It’s mind boggling to think how many hundreds of millions of dollars the Mullah regime in Tehran invested in Nasrallah’s monstrous organization instead of providing for their own citizens, as pointed out correctly by Prime Minister Netanyahu on Monday – and all this went down the drain in just ten days.
A long time in the making
There have been reported rumors that Hezbollah members were close to finding out the pager issue, and that this is what triggered the activation of those hidden weapons. It is not clear how true these rumors are, but what is clear is that Israel had been preparing for this battle for a long time in advance, gathering intelligence, penetrating deep into the organization – possibly under the cover of the war in Syria as reported – and demonstrated a creative vision.
For many years, Israelis have been warned about the grave threat posed by Hezbollah’s missile array posed, and rightly so. The capabilities it developed undoubtedly allowed for potential nightmare scenarios of incessant falls of thousands of missiles and drones per day on city centers and vital infrastructure, which would clearly lead to an existential danger to Israel, certainly if it had occurred on that cursed morning of October 7th.
And it’s comforting to know that Israel had prepared for this threat and took it seriously, doing what the Jewish people have been doing for thousands of years: thinking outside the box to ensure Jewish perseverance. The given situation was a threat of 150,000 missiles, a scandal that must be discussed at another time, and it’s impossible to expect an army to destroy 150,000 missiles without facing heavy damage. So how can the threat still be “bypassed”? The spectacular Israeli answer was given in the form of years and years of planning, disabling those who would fire the missiles, disabling the command chain that passes those orders, and only then turning to deal with the missiles and leadership.
This is exceptional creative thinking that proves that the strength of the people in Israel still stands, especially a measurable and realistic goal is set, just like the goal of returning tens of thousands of northern residents to their homes.
A future pact, a shared fight
Indeed, the ten-day war to destroy Hezbollah’s organizational infrastructure was spectacular. Yet another question remains: how can Israel make sure that this isn’t just a band-aid solution to the much larger threat that is Hezbollah’s sponsor, the Islamic Republic?
The writer is certainly not in the know of Israel’s directives behind closed doors. But from the reality of recent years, it appears that Israel may have set itself a humble goal of hitting the Iranian octopus’s arms, and occasionally disrupting its plans. However, in order to ensure a stable and prosperous Middle East, Israel must, across all its security and political bodies alike, set itself a more far-reaching goal: the demise of the Iranian regime, period.
Many activists interviewed by the writer for the Jerusalem Post in the past year, form across the Arab World, all pointed to the Islamic Republic as an actor that lives, prospers and thrives from a state of destabilization in the region. These interviewees were Sunni, Druze, Christian, Kurdish, Arab, hailing from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and more; and all highlighted the Islamic Republic’s destructive and disruptive role in every country to which it extended its influence.
Learning from past failures
The Islamic Republic acts with great wisdom in its nefarious quest to destroy Israel. It has learned from the mistakes of Arab countries in the last seven decades and understood that in wars of state against state, tank against tank, plane against plane, and soldier against soldier – Israel managed to defeat its enemies, still maintaining international legitimacy. For this reason, Iran decided to act differently: to produce, arm, and inject huge sums into proxy organizations within failed states surrounding Israel, that would be loyal to it and to its violent ideology of “exporting the revolution,” thereby creating confusion and complicating Israel internationally and legally, all the while sacrificing the lives of millions throughout the Middle East to carry out its malicious plans.
And if so, what is required of Israel now is to continue the creative thinking it showed so far, and turn the tables on Iran. Because in its geopolitical “genius,” Iran has also created bitter enemies for itself in every country it reached and where it sowed destruction. In Yemen there are the separatist forces of South Arabia fighting fiercely against their Houthi oppressors. In Syria and Lebanon – large populations of Druze, Maronite Christians and Sunnis who lived under real persecution to the point of murder and killing by Iran’s militias. In Iraq – the Kurdish minority was forced to watch as their native land disappeared and became nothing short of a strategic depth for the Shiite clerical rule.
And even in Iran itself, many minorities live under oppression – Arabs in the south, Azeris and Kurds in the north, Baha’is and regular everyday Iranians throughout the country, who do not endorse the murderous oppressive regime that kidnapped Iran and its long heritage; a regime that can only pride itself on death penalty rates, imprisonment sentences, killing of protesters and ‘immodestly’ dressed women, and funneling money to terrorist organizations.
If so, Israel’s challenge in the next stage is to create a mirror image of that bloody proxy war. Everywhere Iran has sent its arms – that’s where Israel needs to forge alliances and contribute to the cutting of the regime’s arms. Following Ben-Gurion’s “Periphery Alliance” and Begin’s “Minority Alliance” policies, Israel must now forge the “Indigenous Alliance” between the Jewish people and other indigenous peoples and religious communities in the Middle East who are suffering under the oppression of Khamenei and his emissaries throughout the region: Druze, Arabs, Kurds, Sunnis, Christian denominations, anti-regime Shiites – and fight the Islamic Republic together.
This alliance needs to be strategic and smart, learning from past mistakes made, for example, in the First Lebanon War. It can be open and public or hidden and secretive, but it must be promoted as part of a broad vision for a thriving Middle East, and not as part of a band-aid or patch upon patch in the well-known Israeli style.
Let’s hope that, just as Israel excelled in the past days in finding a creative answer to its threats – so too it will excel in seizing its opportunities and building its friendships creatively.
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