(AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)
An Israeli soldier works on a tank near the Israel-Lebanon Border, northern Israel, Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2015. Israel is on high alert for possible attacks from the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah following an airstrike on Hezbollah fighters in Syria, Israeli defense officials said Tuesday. Israel has boosted deployment of its "Iron Dome" anti-missile aerial defense system along its northern frontier, which borders Lebanon and Syria, and has increased surveillance activities in the area, the officials said. Israel's Security Cabinet is scheduled to meet to discuss a potential escalation in violence, they said.
This much is clear: On Sunday afternoon, a helicopter gunship fired two missiles at a Hezbollah convoy in southwestern Syria, near the de facto border with Israel. The dozen dead included three of the Lebanese Shi'ite movement's senior military figures and an Iranian general. Since none of the rebel groups that Hezbollah is fighting in Syria-the chaotic realm that was once a country-have helicopters, it's fairly obvious that Israel carried out the attack.
What's much less clear is the motivation, a question that has a lot to do with timing. It's two months to Election Day in Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party is sagging in the polls. The air strike was ostensibly intended to prevent Hezbollah from opening a new front with Israel from Syria-but could in fact ignite more fighting. When Netanyahu gave his personal approval for the attack, was he thinking purely about the security of Israel or also about his political welfare?
The question is underlined by aggressive foreign policy moves in in recent days-including the back-channel arrangements with House Speaker John Boehner that produced an invitation for Netanyahu to address Congress.
Is this a special election-season effort?
Israeli policy in the Syrian civil war has been to support neither the regime nor its many opponents, and to act militarily only when Israel is threatened-as when advanced Iranian arms are being shipped via Syria to Hezbollah. After an air attack on an arms shipment, the Israeli government has never said, "We did it." This policy of careful silence is based on the assumption that a direct statement of Israeli responsibility would put the Syrian regime or Hezbollah under much more pressure to strike back.
Keeping Syria's chaos from leaking across the border has appeared more difficult since Hezbollah took a direct role in the fighting on the side of the Assad regime. In the Israeli media, the explanation for Sunday's attack-attributed to "western sources" or not attributed at all-was that Abu Ali al-Tabtabai, Mohammed Issa, and Jihad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah commanders in the convoy, were laying the groundwork for attacks on Israel from Syrian territory.
Then again, Hezbollah's involvement in the Syrian morass has actually diverted its resources and attention from its 30-year war with Israel-until now. Anger and shame over this week's air strike could push its leaders to refocus on Israel and to retaliate. The death of Iranian Revolutionary Guard General Mohammed Allahdadi in the attack means that Tehran-chief backer of Hezbollah and the Syrian regime-also has a direct interest in retribution.
In an effort at damage control, a "senior security official" told Reuters that Israel hadn't known that General Allahdadi was in the convoy, or that the Hezbollah operatives were so high-ranking. Then another "senior official" had to deny that it had made any comment via Reuters, since Israel officially isn't saying anything about the ambush. Meanwhile, the army closed the Israeli road on the Lebanese border to civilian traffic and the army deployed Iron Dome anti-missile batteries in the area.
None of this produces great confidence that Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon were considering the full military consequences-or that they weren't influenced by short-term electoral consequences-when they gave the army the go-ahead on Sunday.
Nor is the messaging from the prime minister's camp reassuring. In a radio interview the afternoon of the air strike, Ya'alon perfunctorily avoided saying Israel had conducted the raid-and then blasted the left-of-center alliance challenging Netanyahu as dangerous and defeatist. If Labor Party leader Isaac "Buji" Herzog and his political partner Tzipi Livni were in power, Ya'alon said, Israel "would have long since become Hamastan." Translation: Though I can't say out loud that we're responsible for the attack (wink-wink) you can see once more that the Likud will strike our enemies, and the left won't. So much for the policy of careful silence.
Wary of backlash, most opposition candidates have avoided mentioning the elections and the attack together. The exception is ex-general Yoav Galant, who has just entered politics on the new center-right Kulanu ("All of Us") ticket, which aims at attracting Likud voters tired of Netanyahu. "I assume we acted responsibly," Galant said in a television interview. "But we can learn from past incidents that sometimes the timing is not unrelated to the elections." The next day, Galant walked back his hint that the prime minister had personal motives for creating a military crisis.
Military and political commentators have been less guarded, and Haaretz's daily cartoonist Amos Biderman was free to state the case most bluntly: He drew a helicopter piloted by Netanyahu and Ya'alon firing a missile at an exploding car, with the caption, "Eliminating Buji."
Despite his rhetorical retreat, Galant was right: This isn't the first time a prime minister has ordered a military action suspiciously close to an election. The classic case was Israel's air attack on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in early June 1981. Election Day was three weeks off, and polls showed the Likud under Prime Minister Menachem Begin trailing Labor, led by Shimon Peres.
Even more suspect than the timing was the government's announcement the day afterward that Israel had carried out the bombing. Iraq and Iran were at war, and the reactor had already been damaged once. Keeping silent and letting Iran appear responsible would have avoided international condemnation of Israel, but denied Begin the chance to say that raid ensured that "There won't be another Holocaust in history." Post-mortems persuasively argue that the Osirak attack accelerated rather than stopped Iraq's nuclear arms program. Begin, however, narrowly won the 1981 election. To be fair, defiant rhetoric and fear of a new Holocaust characterized Begin even when elections weren't near.
There's also a present-day context for the question about Netanyahu's motives. After the terror attacks in France, Netanyahu ignored French President Francois Hollande's requests that he not come to the mass rally in Paris, in order to avoid linking it to Middle East issues. In France, Netanyahu upset both the government and local Jewish leaders by calling on French Jews to move to Israel. On another front, the prime minister has reportedly rejected a recommendation by Foreign Ministry professionals for a low-key response to the International Criminal Court's probe of Israeli actions in the occupied territories. Instead, he began a frontal media campaign against the court.
Outside of antagonizing the court, the PR offensive will have little effect abroad. At home, defiance-diplomatic and military-may appeal to voters. The Likud is at risk of losing hawkish voters to rival right-wing parties, and pocketbook voters to the center and left. Killing Hezbollah leaders could show the hawks that the Likud is still as aggressive as ever, while putting security rather than economics in the center of the campaign.
Boehner's announcement yesterday that Netanyahu will speak to Congress about Iran on February 11 is another fairly blatant example of the pattern. Boehner and Netanyahu cooked up the plan without notifying the White House. Republicans in Congress will get a boost for passing sanctions legislation intended to thwart negotiations with Iran. Netanyahu will get Israeli media coverage of members of Congress applauding his never-compromise stance on Iran. The prime minister has rarely missed an opportunity to show his distaste for President Barack Obama-but the direct intervention in American politics shows reckless disregard for the future of U.S.-Israel relations. For Netanyahu, winning votes is plainly a greater concern.
The damage, diplomatic and military, will be more apparent with time, and there's not much time till the election. To be fair, though, defiance is Netanyahu's style even when elections aren't near, and a person's full motives are not always clear even to himself.
So is Netanyahu consciously calculating the electoral advantages as he makes military and diplomatic decisions? Let's say that there are strong grounds for suspicion.
