Intelligence report: Uneasy quiet on all fronts

Despite the prime minister’s gloomy prognostications, Israel’s strategic and security posture has improved in the last few years.

By YOSSI MELMAN
Ahrar al-Sham Islamic rebel fighters stand beside tanks left behind by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad, in Idlib. (photo credit: KHALIL ASHAWI / REUTERS)
Ahrar al-Sham Islamic rebel fighters stand beside tanks left behind by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad, in Idlib.
(photo credit: KHALIL ASHAWI / REUTERS)
ON THE eve of Israel’s 67th Independence Day (April 23), Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the headquarters of the IDF, the Atomic Energy Commission, the National Security Council, the Mossad and the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet).
These were ceremonial calls and the usual platitudes were exchanged, but for Netanyahu even ordinary events are used as a launching pad to convey his bleak and gloomy worldview.
On every possible occasion, the prime minister prefers to emphasize the threats, risks and dangers facing Israel. But these are just one perspective of the new reality being shaped in the Middle East. There is another, more optimistic, way to analyze and examine the situation that is currently being shaped: namely, that Israel’s strategic and security posture has improved in the last few years.
But, listening to Netanyahu’s speeches, there is not even a hint that against the backdrop of a troubled and unstable region, Israel is not doing too badly at all.
Let’s give Netanyahu the benefit of the doubt that his views are a genuine reflection of deep convictions and not just a cynical political manipulation. Nevertheless, they stand in contradiction – or at the very least, are incompatible – with those of the IDF generals, senior commanders and officials in the respective institutions he visited on the eve of Independence Day.
These senior officials, trained to study and analyze the regional and international arena in which Israel operates, present an “intelligence picture” different to that of the prime minister.
They neither contradict the prime minister’s stance nor challenge him in public, but in closed-door sessions, in confidential briefings before Knesset committees and in off-the-record meetings with journalists and commentators they present less pessimistic insights.
At least four states in the Middle East are in the process of disintegration: Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen. Their central governments are failing to enforce their authority and control over all of their territories; their armies have lost substantial combat capability.
Just a decade ago, Israeli war planners were concerned about threatening scenarios involving what was then known as the “Eastern Front.” They envisioned the possibility that the combined armies of Syria and Iraq, with their thousands of tanks, nearly one million troops, tens of thousands of missiles and intimidating anti-aircraft missile arrays, would join in a military confrontation with Israel. Nowadays, little is left of these once mighty military machines.
The Syrian army is a pale shadow of its past. Its civil war, entering its fifth year, has reduced the Syrian armed forces by 50 percent. Tens of thousands of Syrian soldiers have been killed in battle, deserted to the opposition or fled the country. It lost scores of its top military commanders and thousands of its mid-level ranking officers.
Hundreds of its ballistic Scud missiles, which had been directed against Israel, were fired in desperation against rebel forces in the war to defend whatever remains of the authority and sovereignty of President Bashar Assad’s regime.
The regime is so weak and its energies so focused on the civil war that Israel allows itself – according to foreign reports – time and again to further humiliate Assad by attacking convoys and stored weapons destined for shipment to Hezbollah. In less than three years, at least 10, probably more, such strikes were reportedly carried out by the Israel Air Force. The last two attacks took place just recently before and after Israel’s Independence Day. Since Israel neither denies nor confirms the news, the reports originate only from the Syrian opposition and international media. So far, the hapless Assad regime has had to swallow its pride, ignore the attacks, and remain passive and inactive.
The mighty Iraqi army from the days of Saddam Hussein, rebuilt after the US invasion in 2003, turned out to be a toothless tiger, collapsing like a house of cards when faced with the Islamic State (ISIS) insurgency in spring 2014. Iraq still has difficulty regaining control of major cities such as Mosul, despite the generous assistance it is receiving from the coalition air forces, US trainers, Iranian advisers and Shi’ite volunteers.
The largest army now facing Israel is in Egypt, with which Israel has had a peace treaty since 1979. But the Egyptian army and the security forces are busy trying to defeat the jihadist terror of the Sinai Province of the Islamic State. The Egyptian military campaign in the Sinai Peninsula, and on the porous and threatening border with Libya has been relatively quite successful.
Moreover, since General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to power in Cairo nearly two years ago, he has increased the clandestine security and intelligence cooperation with Israel. Foreign reports even suggest that the Egyptian army occasionally calls in Israeli drones to execute the air strikes against the Sinai terrorists. The two states share mutual enemies: the Sinai Province terror group and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The Cairo government, which perceives Hamas as an extension of the hated and outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, seems to be even more hostile to the movement than Israel.
In effect, there is no real threat facing Israel from a foreign state or from a regular military force. Iran is the only state in the Middle East, which continually issues threats against Israel. But they are mostly empty words that are not accompanied by action. Iran does not have the military power capable of implementing these threats. True, Iran has hundreds of Shahab missiles that can reach Israel and could cause extensive damage, and it can also unleash a proxy like Hezbollah.
Hezbollah, with 100,000 rockets and missiles that could blanket every corner of Israel, including its most strategic sites such as the nuclear reactor in Dimona, air fields, power stations, Haifa port, the Ministry of Defense and IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv, many of them accurate with guidance systems, should not be underestimated.
The Lebanese Shi’ite organization is considered by the IDF as the most dangerous enemy. But Hezbollah is bleeding badly from the Syrian war, from which battles have consistently spilled over into its territory, and is itself now involved as a proxy, at the behest of its Iranian masters, in the wars in Iraq and Yemen.
Even the Iranian nuclear program – the “jewel” in the crown of Netanyahu’s domestic campaign of fear (which helped him win the elections) and in his international campaign seems to be less threatening.
This is due to the international efforts to clinch a deal with Tehran. If indeed an agreement is reached to reduce the Iranian nuclear program, Israel’s defense establishment will have to consider whether it is necessary to add billions more dollars to what it has already invested in the air force and intelligence to prepare for a military strike against a nuclear Iran.
With the threat of state military forces subsiding, that of terror groups like ISIS, in Syria and Sinai, and al-Qaida (the Jabhat al-Nusra Front on the Golan) is still present. But these forces do not pose a real military threat and surely not an existential one in the foreseeable future. Furthermore, so far, according to foreign reports, Israel is even coordinating and maintaining cordial relations with the Nusra fighters along the Golan border. The IDF is said to be providing medical and humanitarian aid, and doing everything possible to ensure that the Nusra guerrillas don’t turn their interests and weapons westward in the direction of the Jewish state.
With Independence Day just behind us, Israel can feel that not only is it the strongest power in the Middle East, but that there is calm on its borders. The greatest worry, however, is that without a political solution on the horizon, this relative quiet and the close security cooperation with the Palestinian Authority will not last forever, and the West Bank will once again erupt in violence – a popular uprising – though neither side has an interest in creating tension.
This improvement on the security front can, of course, change in a single moment, sparked by a single incident, and develop into another escalation that nobody wants.
It is, therefore, necessary to stay alert – but also to tell the public the truth.
Yossi Melman is an Israeli security commentator and co-author of ‘Spies Against Armageddon.’ He blogs at www.israelspy.com and tweets at yossi_melman