Watching CNN, as I do when Iran and Israel are shooting at each other, and reading the Washington Post, as I do every day, I’ve seen a new theme emerge from the Israel-disliking, Netanyahu-hating pundits on these outlets. The theme is that Israel, though proficient at combat, is poor at intelligence.
To support this claim, commentators like Max Boot say that (1) Israel failed to realize that Hamas was preparing its massive attack on Israel and (2) failed to anticipate that Iran would respond to the killing of its terrorist mastermind in Syria by trying to bombard Israel.
The first point is fair. Israel was asleep at the switch when it came to understanding what Hamas was up to.
But did Israel really fail to foresee the likelihood of Iran’s air attack? Israel has been prone to underestimate Hamas, but I don’t think it labors under a similar blind spot when it comes to Iran.
In fact, Israel has long understood Iran’s desire to exterminate its people, and rightly been obsessed with the threat the mullahs pose. Decades ago, when the U.S. was fixated on Iraq, Israel understood that Iran posed the real danger to the Jewish state.
Israeli officials also knew that when the U.S. took out Iran’s leading terrorist mastermind during the Trump years, Iran responded by bombarding U.S. bases in Iraq. It seems unlikely that Israeli intelligence thought Iran, faced with a deadly attack on its embassy in Syria, would decline to send missiles Israel’s way.
However, according to the New York Times, sources in the U.S. government plus one “senior Israeli official” say Israel didn’t expect Iran to “react strongly” to the killing of high-ranking Iranians at its embassy. This information is self-serving.
From the U.S. point of view, it makes Biden’s team look smarter than Netanyahu’s. prescient. In its telling, the U.S. knew the Iranians would hit back hard; Israel did not.
From Israel’s point of view, to admit that it expected Iran’s reaction strong and went ahead with the attack on the embassy anyway would be to concede that it wanted conflict with Iran to erupt, with the danger of escalation towards all-out war. This admission wouldn’t sit well with the Biden administration.
Moreover, claiming not to have foreseen Iran’s attack provides an excuse for the fact that Israel didn’t inform the Biden administration ahead of time of its plan to attack the embassy. We didn’t think this was a big deal, the excuse would go.
I believe Israel knew the attack was a big deal — how could it not? I think Israel probably expected the kind of response it got from Iran and wanted to go part way up the “escalation ladder” (to use the new favorite term of the pundits).
But why?
First, Israeli leaders probably knew the attack would be thwarted by the defense systems in place. Furthermore, they might have calculated that an unsuccessful air attack by Iran would provide justification for attacking sites inside Iran.
The advantage of this scenario to Israel is obvious. If the Iranians were unable to penetrate Israel’s defense while the Israelis succeeded in penetrating Iran’s, it would send this message to the mullahs: You are far more vulnerable to our power than we are to yours.
Not a bad reminder to an enemy that repeatedly states its intention to destroy Israel.
There’s a second possible advantage to going part way up the escalation ladder. Doing so would serve as a dress rehearsal for the true showdown between Israel and Iran that might be looming.
As Iran moves closer to having nuclear weapons, the need for Israel to attack Iranian nuclear facilities becomes more obvious. Ideally, Israel would have attacked one or more of them last week. However, it’s still fighting Hamas and would rather not fight Hezbollah and fend off more Iranian air attacks, all at the same time.
It’s unlikely that Israel could have avoided this kind of multi-front war if it had gone after Iran’s nuclear program. The far more limited strike likely has avoided it, while at the same time enabling the Israelis to test their capacity to hit the region in Iran where the nuclear program is centered and to test Iran’s air defense capacity.
Israel could not have accomplished this without going part way up the escalation ladder. Having now done so, Israel can, if it chooses to, go further up that ladder once the war with Hamas is over. And it can do so with better information about Iran’s air defense.
How confident am I that Israel intended all of this — the message and the rehearsal — when it took out the Iranian terrorists in Syria? Not as confident as the Israel-disliking, Netanyahu-hating pundits who insist that Israel miscalculated.
But the confidence of these pundits is misplaced. I believe it’s more likely than not that the war cabinet knew what it was doing and that, at a minimum, it had in mind an exchange of strikes that would remind Iran of its relative weakness
The war cabinet might not have been playing three-dimensional chess, but it wasn’t playing checkers.
Your analysis is almost certainly correct. Israel sent a fully received message to the Mullahs that While Israel is not interested in doing this dance now, it is fully capable of both defending against Iran and striking Iran with impunity. Israel also surely knew that Biden would publicly demand Israel not respond to the Iranian attack and in my view deliberately defied him to let the Mullahs know the US will not save them.
I think you're correct with your assessment of events. You do have an advantage though: You see the overall situation as it really is and not through the warped prism of the considerable anti-Israel/pro-Hamas crowd at CNN and The Washington Post.