Hamas rockets, Gaza terror, and future Israeli defenses against Iran

Considered together with improved nuclear deterrence and cyber-defense, Israel's oft-tested shorter-range active defenses represent an indispensable component of the country's national security doctrine.

By LOUIS RENÉ BERES
Iron Dome batteries on Gaza border March 13 2014 (photo credit: BEN HARTMAN)
Iron Dome batteries on Gaza border March 13 2014
(photo credit: BEN HARTMAN)
Following the recent kidnapping of three Israeli teens, Iron Dome anti-missile defenses are back in action again, with recognizable and welcome success. The specific event linkages are clear. When Palestinian terrorists in Gaza began to step up attacks against Israel, the Iron Dome capably intercepted those rockets that had been fired toward the Hof Ashkelon Regional Council in the south. Looking ahead, the IDF initially deployed anti-missile units in the coastal region near Ashdod in mid-June, then correctly anticipating that renewed terror rocket attacks upon Israel would be unleashed from Gaza.
But Gaza is not Iran. Their respective tactical and strategic threats to Israel are very different, and so, too, are the country's required active defenses. Although a lower than 100% reliability of interception could be taken as more-or-less acceptable to Israel in the face of shorter-range and exclusively conventional rockets, a less-than-perfect level of reliability could not be tolerable following any nuclear missile attack from Iran. Such an attack is not yet technically possible, of course, but this current limitation on Iran's offensive military power is apt to change in the next several years.
  
For Israel, in the altogether plausible case of a future Iranian long-range rocket attack bearing nuclear warheads, not even a single incoming missile could be allowed to reach its target. Significantly, however, at least for the moment, no operational Israeli system of active defense could hope to assure such a total level of protection. This means that while the Iron Dome, Arrow, and still in development David's Sling (aka Magic Wand), can contribute mightily to Israel's assorted and intersecting security postures, any such contribution would still remain less than perfect. It is also clear that no system of Israeli missile defense could be of any protective service against enemy acts of nuclear terrorism that would employ non-missile delivery systems. In essence, this limitation references such foreseeable delivery systems as commercial trucks and container ships.
Even now, Israel's strategic options against a steadily nuclearizing Iran should not entirely exclude preemption, that is, a conspicuously final resort prerogative to launch suitably defensive first strikes. Under authoritative international law, if the nuclear danger posed by Iran were in any fashion potentially existential, and simultaneously "imminent in point of time," such Israeli strikes could be justified as "anticipatory self-defense." Going all the way back to an 1837 case known in jurisprudence as The Caroline, this particular sort of proper justification could be fully in line with customary international law.
The binding rules of legal custom are identified at Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice. Any needed consistency with these rules could be further enlarged by noting Iran's ongoing and still-unhidden disregard for the Genocide Convention (1948), a multilateral treaty that prohibits not only actual crimes against humanity, but also "conspiracy to commit genocide." In this connection, the clerical and political leadership in Tehran continues to make absolutely no secret of its persistently exterminatory goals for "the Zionist entity."
In effect, for Israel, the preemption option may already be off the table. More precisely, because the human and material costs to Israel of any defensive first-strike against Iran would now be very high, this residual option could remain rational for Jerusalem in only those unprecedented cases where pertinent intelligence (Israeli and/or American) had reliably revealed an impending Iranian nuclear aggression.
The principal strategic lesson to be drawn from the Iron Dome's ongoing technical successes, and from the corollary shortcomings of all active defense systems, is this: Israel must prepare to do everything possible to deter an already-nuclear Iran, even if that Islamic republic's authoritative decision-makers are not expected to satisfy the usual criteria of rationality in world politics. This preparation is required because even an Iranian leadership that would value certain religious preferences more highly than national and personal survival could still be dissuaded from launching nuclear first-strikes against Israel.
The key to any successful eleventh-hour deterrence of an already-nuclear Iran would lie in presenting credible threats to certain principal Shiite religious institutions and infrastructures. This dynamic of a partially reoriented strategy of deterrence may appear unseemly to many, but its geostrategic advantages are already being acknowledged and operationalized by all contending Islamic sides in the steadily expanding theaters of Sunni-Shia sectarian warfare. Most importantly, leaders in Jerusalem must be guided above all by utterly core considerations of national survival.
Always.
Nonetheless, the leaders of a nuclear Iran would likely remain subject to the standard threats of deterrence that function in world politics: threats that are based upon assumptions of rationality. With this prospect in mind, Israel's task must also be to assure these leaders that any Iranian excursions into nuclear violence would unhesitatingly elicit at least parallel forms of nuclear reprisal against Iranian civilian populations and civil institutions. Here, it would be essential to convince the Iranians that: (1) Israel's nuclear weapons were not "merely" counterforce targeted; (2) these nuclear weapons were sufficiently invulnerable to enemy first-strikes; and (3) these weapons were fully capable of penetrating Iran's own active (ballistic missile) defenses.
To succeed with any such assurances, Israel would first have to take certain appropriately incremental steps at ending its longstanding posture of deliberate nuclear ambiguity; measured steps designed to take the Israeli bomb out of the "basement." By implementing extremely selective and distinctly partial moves toward nuclear disclosure, Israel could enhance the credibility of its overall nuclear deterrence posture. Although seemingly counter-intuitive, the reasonableness and rationality of any such implementation would be dictated by the primary need to convince Iran that Israel's weapons were available, secure, and usable. Ironically, if Iran were in any manner inclined to believe that Israel's nuclear weapons were "too large," or "too destructive," they could then become less subject to Israeli nuclear deterrence.
There is more. All of these identified enhancements of Israeli nuclear deterrence would have to be accompanied by equally apt preparations for cyber-defense and cyber-war.
Israel needs to continue with its manifestly impressive progress on diverse active defenses, especially the Iron Dome, Arrow, and David's Sling. Under certain foreseeable circumstances, Israel could sometime find itself facing simultaneous rocket attacks from assorted terror groups (in Gaza and Lebanon), and belligerent frontline states (Iran). In this expectedly complex and "synergistic" situation, with special regard to any contemplated Iranian nuclear strike, the Arrow's defensive function would not be limited to the physical protection of otherwise unsafeguarded Israeli noncombatants. Rather, where it was deployed to protect Israel's nuclear arms and infrastructures, the Arrow's purpose would be to convince Iran that it could never hope to prevent an unacceptably destructive Israeli nuclear retaliation.
Never.
Considered together with improved nuclear deterrence and cyber-defense, Israel's oft-tested shorter-range active defenses represent an indispensable component of the country's national security doctrine. Still, there are substantial differences between the ongoing and escalating rocket threats from Gaza, and prospectively nuclear missile threats from Iran. It would be a serious mistake to conclude from current and previous Iron Dome successes that Arrow ballistic missile defenses could, by themselves, meaningfully protect Israelis from any future Iranian nuclear attack.
-----------   
Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is Professor of Political Science and International Law at Purdue. The author of ten major books and several hundred journal articles on both strategic and jurisprudential matters, his columns appear in many major newspapers and magazines, including US News & World Report; The Jerusalem Post; Oxford University Press; and The Atlantic. Professor Beres was born in Zürich, Switzerland, on August 31, 1945.