In the past two weeks, the noises coming out of Israel have sounded increasingly dire.
A Cascade of pessimism
The cascade of pessimism began with Daniel Hagari’s startling admission that Israel cannot destroy Hamas. As chief spokesperson for the IDF, Hagari’s views carry considerable weight.
Days later, Hezbollah released a 9-minute surveillance video of strategically important targets in northern Israel.
Panic swept across the land.
Shaul Goldstein, the CEO of Israel’s National Electrical System Management company, warned that Israel was woefully unprepared for war with Lebanon’s Islamic Resistance. According to Goldstein, Hezbollah could “easily cripple” Israel’s power grid. “After 72 hours without electricity”, he added, “it will not be possible to live in Israel.”
A retired Israeli Major-General soon upped the ante. Writing this week in Maariv, Itzhak Brik declared that “the initiative being rolled out in the [Israeli] security establishment to launch an attack on Hezbollah is collective suicide”.
Brik continued:
If we pay attention to what Hezbollah is doing to the Galilee in recent months – we find settlements crumbling, empty of people, on thousands of burned acres of land. Scenes that can be seen in Gaza are seen today in the North”.
Haim Tomer, a former senior Mossad official, echoed Brik’s bleak assessment. Among other dire predictions, Tomer argued that Hezbollah could cause “widespread paralysis for weeks”. Hezbollah has “better tactical intelligence than Israel” and “can blow up Israel’s gas fields in seconds”. Israel, Tomer opined, “has no answer to Hamas or Hezbollah”.
You know Israel’s in bad shape when Max Boot says he’s depressed about Israel
Surprisingly, one of the darkest prognostications came from the Washington Post.
Generally, U.S. and other Western media are much less informative than Israel’s media about the military realities confronting the country, but Max Boot’s recent trip to the apartheid state left the Post columnist catatonic.
In an op-ed titled “I’ve never seen Israelis as gloomy as they are today”, Boot conceded:
Visiting Israel, as I did last week, is a depressing experience as the war in Gaza nears its ninth month. I’ve been coming to Israel for a quarter-century, and I’ve never seen Israelis as gloomy as they are now — not even during the second intifada in the early 2000s, when Palestinian terrorists were regularly blowing up public buses.
My personal observations confirm the grim news coming out of Israel
In March of this year, I spent ten days in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Twice, I visited the Jenin refugee camp, known to Palestinians as “the martyr’s capital”. I also went to Eilat, Israel’s only Red Sea port. There, I saw how Ansar Allah’s attacks on Red Sea shipping had paralyzed Eilat’s shipping industry.
I’ve also visited South Lebanon three times since October 7. Although the mood in the region was tense, Hezbollah and its supporters seemed determined to punish Israel’s military for its destruction of Gaza, and for its repeated strikes on civilian targets in their own country.
Israel is a tiny Western outpost in a region seething with anger. After years of aggression and hubris, Israel now confronts an ‘axis of resistance’ that it can no longer dominate.
Meanwhile, Israel’s principal benefactor, the United States, is over-stretched, badly governed and internationally discredited.
America’s ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ is sinking.
It remains to be seen whether Washington will save Israel from itself.
I hope you are right, Dimitri. Perhaps then, Israel will become realistic about freedom for Palestinians, just as South African apartheid leaders were toward the end of the 1980’s. There it required the removal (by illness) of the hardline, old guard leader, to make room for a younger generation of Afrikaners to make decisions about the future. Perhaps Netanyahu and co. could be removed too? Maybe, just maybe, there are reasonable Israelis to change the direction of the country?