According to foreign sources, Israel attacked a convoy that was to transfer advanced weapons – apparently SA-17 ground-to-air missiles – from Syria to Lebanon. The question of whether Israel should launch a preventive military strike against enemy force buildup and potential threats is shaped by four considerations: intelligence and operational capability; the value of the action in question; the costs and risks involved; and issues beyond the attack itself. This article examines these considerations in context of the attack that...
Operation Change of Direction, the code name given to Israel’s war against Hizbollah in Lebanon in 2006 by the Operations Directorate of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), was the most inconclusive performance by far in the IDF’s many trials by fire since 1948, in that it represented the first time that a major regional confrontation ended without a clear cut victory on Israel’s part. The campaign’s uneven course and outcome resulted from a more overarching deficiency in strategy choice, whose most flawed...
Most of the 10 percent of the Lebanese population using social media (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and YouTube) are identified with the March 14 camp. They comprise primarily Sunni Muslims, but also figure a good number of Christians, Lebanese media figures, foreign journalists, and Lebanese expatriates. At the outset of the regional upheavals, Shiites and Druze participated little in the intra-Lebanese discourse in the social media, but their participation has increased over time. Furthermore, some Lebanese politicians, among them...
In Israeli research there are two types of discourse regarding how to assess and judge warfare in densely populated areas: the normative discourse and the operative discourse. Conspicuously absent is the interactive discourse with the non-state enemy, i.e., the willingness to look at oneself through the eyes of the enemy in the course of the fighting. This discourse exists among non-state organizations such as Hizbollah and Hamas.
Current assessments are that fighting in densely populated areas will be one of the main types of combat the IDF will face in the foreseeable future. This essay will focus on three points: one, change in threats facing the State of Israel; two, the main characteristics of the military response necessitated by the change in the threat; and three, some components of the necessary method of action in such confrontations.
Following Lebanon’s 2005 “Cedar Revolution,” which culminated in Syria’s withdrawal, many commentators referred to this small Middle Eastern country as a model of successful democratization. The hope was that Lebanon’s experience would be emulated by other countries in the region. However, while the winds of change brought forth by the “Arab spring” have finally reached the rest of the Arab world, Lebanon seems to be struggling to keep both internal stability and the legacy of the 2005...
In the last decade, Israel unilaterally withdrew from two areas: the security zone in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. Israel had previously withdrawn unilaterally from occupied territories without political agreements, but these two withdrawals were more significant and traumatic, both socially and politically, than any prior withdrawal. The time that has passed since these unilateral withdrawals affords us some historical perspective and allows us to compare them in terms of their outcomes and the processes they generated, both...
Israel’s military engagement with Hizbollah in the summer of 2006 has been called by many different names and monikers, including, of course, the Second Lebanon War, which was adopted by Israel as the official name of the war. Some commentators on Arab television stations called it the sixth Arab-Israeli round. In truth, however, most of the Arab world, at least its leaders and important segments of its ruling elites, supported Israel, and more precisely, stood aside with the expectation, which ultimately was not met, that...
Beyond the political and strategic ramifications of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), there are important legal issues that may also have an impact on Lebanon’s future and regional security. On January 17, 2011, Daniel Bellemare, the STL independent prosecutor, submitted an indictment in the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. A basic familiarity with the Tribunal’s legal dynamics can add to an understanding of the story that will develop in the coming weeks and months.
In 2010, Lebanon yet again embarked on another round of “national dialogue” to formulate a comprehensive and unified national defense strategy, and to tackle the regulation of armed militias and “resistance” groups, including Hizbollah. The process, which was first inaugurated in 2006, has highlighted the differences between the ruling March 14 coalition – advocating a normalization of the internal power distribution by disarming all armed groups – and the Hizbollah-led opposition forces, which reject this...
The recent campaigns in Lebanon and Gaza compelled Israel to conduct a serious self-examination and take a wide ranging look at the strategic developments of the past decade. In this period, which began with the second intifada and ended with Operation Cast Lead, Israel found itself facing qualitatively different threats from those it had faced in the first fifty years of its existence. The threat began to change with the awareness on the part of Israel’s enemies that they were unable to achieve significant gains against Israel...
