by Yaakov Lappin
Whichever Israeli government ends up coming to power will be faced with a set of urgent security challenges that are coming from a range of arenas all at the same time.
An Israeli soldier looks over the Syrian
and Jordanian borders from the Golan Heights, Israel, DoD
photo by D.
Myles Cullen/Released
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,334, November 3, 2019
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The
next Israeli government will have to make critical decisions on urgent
security challenges stemming from multiple arenas simultaneously. It
will also have to waste no time in securing the next defense budget.
Whichever Israeli government ends up coming to
power will be faced with a set of urgent security challenges that are
coming from a range of arenas all at the same time. Critical decisions
on these challenges will be the order of the day for the PM and his
security-diplomatic cabinet.
The fragile state of the current security
situation was summed up on October 23 in a brief yet telling statement
by IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi. He said both the
northern and southern fronts are tense and “might deteriorate to
conflict, despite the fact that our enemies are not interested in war.
The IDF has executed an accelerated preparation process.”
Kochavi identified the northern front as Israel’s
top strategic challenge, which takes two forms. The first is the
establishment of the Iran-led attack axis in Syria. The second is the
Hezbollah-Iranian program to convert unguided rockets into precision
guided missiles in Lebanon and point them at sensitive Israeli strategic
sites.
“Iran leads both of these efforts by utilizing the territory of states with limited sovereignty,” Kochavi warned.
In recent weeks and months, the Israeli defense
establishment has been dealing with a significant increase in Iranian
attack plots against Israel throughout the Middle East, particularly in
Syria. Attack attempts have risen, both qualitatively and
quantitatively.
The Iranian Quds Force, commanded by Gen. Qassem Soleimani, has stepped up efforts to organize and orchestrate the attacks.
As a result, the IDF has been on high alert on the
Syrian front. The next Israeli government will have to make tough
decisions about the future of the War Between Wars—the ongoing Israeli
low profile military and intelligence campaign to disrupt Iranian
entrenchment in Syria. The War Between Wars has been very successful at
disrupting Tehran’s regional force buildup without plunging the Israeli
civilian home front into a full-scale conflict.
Allowing Iran to build a war machine in Syria, as
it has already done in Lebanon, is not an option Israel can live with.
But Tehran is vowing to retaliate for future Israeli preventative
strikes, meaning the risks of an escalation are significantly higher
than they were in the past.
Israel must not allow Iran to benefit from the
illogical idea that it is free to construct missile, drone, and terror
attack bases in Syria, but that Israel must be punished for eliminating
these threats when it detects them.
Russia’s potential role in any future escalation
with the Iranian axis in Syria is a question mark that must be carefully
taken into account by any future government. Russia’s military presence
in Syria means it has become Israel’s neighbor, with all the ensuing
implications.
Meanwhile, as part of its face-off with the Trump
administration and in response to American sanctions, Iran is gradually
reactivating parts of its nuclear program. The next Israeli government
will have to gauge American willingness to take military action in the
event of an Iranian break-out to the bomb and decide what Israel’s own
red line would be in such a scenario.
In light of growing American isolationist
tendencies, Israel must be prepared for the possibility of finding
itself alone in a military confrontation with Iran and its
proxies—including a situation in which it alone needs to target Iran’s
nuclear sites and deal with the war against Hezbollah and Gazan terror
factions that would likely follow.
Gaza, for its part, represents the least stable
arena in Israel’s environment. Hamas is currently avoiding an escalation
as it seeks to follow through on talks with Egypt and the international
community aimed at searching for ways to avoid an economic meltdown in
the Gaza Strip. But should those efforts fail, Hamas could turn to
escalation to avoid the prospect of a domestic revolt. The
Iranian-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) has been testing Hamas’s
control over Gaza in recent months, initiating escalations with Israel
as it competes with Hamas for power and prestige. PIJ is free from
Hamas’s governing woes and has no responsibility for Gaza’s two million
inhabitants or economic problems.
The next Israeli government will have to formulate
a policy that first decides how far Jerusalem is willing to go to try
to avoid an escalation by assisting Gaza’s economy without allowing the
terror factions to build up their forces freely. If those efforts fail,
it will have to formulate the objective of a new Israeli operation in
Gaza in response to an escalation.
Some 40,000 well-armed Hamas and PIJ operatives
are active in Gaza, and the two terror factions have a combined rocket
arsenal of over 20,000 projectiles pointed at Israeli cities. Should the
Gazan arena catch fire, the next Israeli government will urgently have
to define what it wants out of an operation: should it adopt the goal of
severely harming Hamas while keeping it in power, or of toppling the
Hamas regime altogether? The latter scenario would in turn raise the
prospects of armed jihadist gangs running Gaza in the style of Somalia
or Israel occupying the crowded Strip indefinitely, establishing
military rule, and getting bogged down in years of draining security
operations.
The second Palestinian arena, the West Bank, also
remains highly flammable, although Israel is far more able to influence
this area due to its presence on the ground. This presence is what
enables a tight intelligence network and nightly counter-terrorism
raids. The ongoing security coordination in place with the Palestinian
Authority has proven highly beneficial to both sides.
The defense establishment’s formula of “mowing the
lawn” in the West Bank, through security raids that target terrorists
while minimizing disruption to the remainder of Palestinians and
encouraging economic opportunities, has succeeded for the time being at
maintaining relative calm.
Yet the future of the West Bank represents a
loaded political-diplomatic-security issue that the next Israeli
government will have to engage. The government will need to decide
whether the status quo is viable, particularly after PA president
Mahmoud Abbas departs the scene.
Meanwhile, domestically, the government will need
to approve a new budget for the IDF’s next multi-year program, which
will be essential for restructuring the IDF and preparing it for future
battlefields. Navigating the friction between the Ministries of Defense
and Finance, and coming up with the necessary defense budget to meet
Israel’s very large security needs, will be another formidable challenge
the future government will have to address.
Yaakov Lappin is a Research Associate
at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies and a military and
strategic affairs correspondent. He conducts research and analysis for
defense think tanks and is the Israel correspondent for IHS Jane’s Defense Weekly. His book The Virtual Caliphate explores the online jihadist presence.
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/security-tasks-awaiting-the-next-israeli-pm/
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