Israel decides enough is enough

When the sirens sounded in the Golan Heights region of Israel this week, no one was surprised. Why would they have been?

The attack, missiles fired by Iranian and Syrian forces nearby, was expected. The area had been on high alert already after Russia and Syria blamed Israel for a missile strike in Syria in mid-April that killed seven Iranian soldiers, and more recently due to expected blowback from U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to pull his country out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear pact with Tehran. Israel had been observing unusual enemy movements along the Syrian border nearby before the attack. No Israeli civilians or troops were killed during the bombardment. Israel’s retaliation was apparently much more significant, inflicting serious damage on Iran’s forces in Syria. A military spokesman called the counterstrike — which targeted intelligence sites, logistics headquarters, weapons depots, airports, intelligence installations and missile launch sites — “one of the greatest operations of the Israel Air Force in the past decade.”

It’s no surprise Israel was so ready to respond with such effectiveness. This is a conflict that has been brewing for years. And there is no guarantee it will stay limited to exchanges of missiles and artillery near the Golan. A regional war is not certain, but the risk is high.

Israel is prepared. It has been preparing for years. Unfortunately, so has Iran. Amid all the frantic writing this week about Trump’s decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal, something critical has been overlooked: whatever the deal claimed to do as far as curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, it did nothing to contain the regime’s overall agenda: regional domination, and threatening, if not destroying, Israel.

The chaos unleashed by Syria’s long-running civil war has been a tremendous opportunity for Iran. The desperate Assad regime has invited in Iranian troops and imported huge quantities of weapons from the mullahs. The Iranians have helped defeat the Syrian government’s enemies. And for that, they have demanded a price: control of military bases in Syria, within direct striking distance of Israel.

There are echoes here of an earlier crisis more familiar to North Americans: 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. The Soviets, struggling with their long-range missile programs, had introduced their much more reliable medium- and intermediaterange missiles to communist Cuba, within striking distance of most of the United States. This posed a massive and immediate threat to America’s cities and bomber bases (manned bombers, at the time, formed the bulk of America’s nuclear deterrent). Almost two weeks of intense military posturing and diplomacy, both public and private, resolved the crisis peacefully, but only because, in the end, the Soviets blinked and agreed to withdraw their missiles.

This Mideast crisis is certainly not identical. But it does provide an interesting point of comparison: when America saw a strategic rival setting up within a few minutes’ flight time of its territory, and judged the threat to be existential, it was willing to go to the brink and even chance a nuclear war to eliminate that threat.

It’s not hard to see how this applies to Israel. Iran, its most dangerous enemy, whose leaders often speak of annihilating the Jewish state outright, has moved in next door. The Iranians are at the same time arming other anti-Israel proxy forces in the region. Their weapons in Syria go well beyond defensive munitions, and even beyond those offensive weapons that would be useful in defeating the groups rebelling against the Assad regime. Given the devastation in Syria and the prospect of the civil conflict there continuing indefinitely, there’s no reason to expect that Iran’s forces will be leaving any time soon. They are there to directly threaten the safety of Israel’s towns and cities, and they are there to stay.

Israel, as its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, often reminds us, lives in a tough neighbourhood. North Americans have never known anything even remotely like it. But when the security of this part of the world was threatened, the United States and its allies came together and forced that threat out — thankfully, through diplomacy. Iran will not allow Israel to pursue a diplomatic solution. The regime used the sanctions relief provided by the Obamabrokered nuclear deal to buy up the advanced weapons it now sends to Syria and points at Israel. The deal did nothing to help moderate the regime’s worst impulses. It’s still as brutal as ever, including to (especially to) its own people. It’s exporting as much terrorism as before. And now it has bases within easy striking range of Israel.

No one should want a war. A full-on conflict between Israel and Iran could be utterly devastating. But diplomatic failures have consequences. Iran’s strategic ambitions have not been contained. The nuclear pact didn’t even attempt it. Denying Iran a nuke might once have sufficed for European and American leaders, but Israel has had to live next door to an aggressive buildup of Iran’s conventional weapons. At the very least, it seems to have decided that enough is enough, and that it has nothing to gain from allowing Iranian forces in the region to become ever stronger. This is risky. But Israel has judged, rightly, that the greater risk is doing nothing.

THERE IS NO GUARANTEE IT WILL STAY LIMITED TO EXCHANGES OF MISSILES AND ARTILLERY NEAR THE GOLAN.