Is Israel Facing an Imminent Multifront War?
The Jewish state may face attacks from multiple enemies at once. Expert analysts disagree.
These days speculation is rife in Israel about the threat of a multifront war—one in which Israel would be attacked simultaneously by Iran itself as well as its proxy militias and terror organizations in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and possibly also Iraq and Yemen, with West Bank Palestinians and possibly also Israeli Arabs participating.
Recent events that some see as making such an attack more likely include: strife in Israel over the judicial overhaul, which Israel’s enemies perceive as a sign of weakness or even impending societal collapse; Israel’s diplomatic downturn over the past three months, in which ties have frayed with the Biden administration and with moderate Arab states; the China-sponsored diplomatic rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran; violent clashes at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, orchestrated and timed for the Ramadan holiday by Iran in an attempt to inflame the Arab street; and Iran’s increased international involvement as it supplies Russia with weapons for use against Ukraine.
Such apprehensions seem borne out this month, with Israel subjected to rocket attacks from Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, an Iranian drone launch from Syria, and ongoing murderous terror attacks by Palestinians and in one case, an Israeli Arab.
Estimates of the likelihood of a near-term multifront threat, however, vary widely among analysts. On April 9, Mordecai Kedar, a veteran Arab-affairs expert at Bar-Ilan University and former intelligence official, laid out (in Hebrew) a particularly chilling scenario.
“I hesitated quite a bit,” Kedar acknowledged,
about whether to publish [the words below] because of the panic they might cause in Israel… Well, a source I have known for years… who lives in Europe and is in continuous contact with people in Iran and Iraq… conveyed to me their assessment that Iran is planning to launch a combined attack on Israel in the foreseeable future that will include all the forces at its disposal in the Arab countries.
Those forces, Kedar says, include not only Hizballah and Hamas “with [their] many thousands of missiles and UAVs, some of them accurate,” but also combat units in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen that are also equipped with missiles and drones, including long-range ones that can reach Israel.
Iran, in Kedar’s assessment, believes that this airborne attack will be so heavy and intensive that Israel’s Iron Dome interceptor missiles will run out in two or three hours, “after which the Israeli skies will be open and the air force will be damaged and grounded.”
After a full day of the air attack accompanied by “a cyber attack on Israeli infrastructure,” a “coordinated ground attack from Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza” will start, with Israeli reserve forces unable to get to the front in time. “Also, the Iranians expect Arabs in the Galilee and the Negev to… block roads, damage bridges, spill oil on roads, block intersections, damage high-voltage lines, and attack Jewish communities.”
Kedar anticipates that “the American and European governments will not intervene militarily, but will content themselves with words because no one in the West is looking for another combat arena than the Ukrainian one… From the point of view of the West, the loss of Israel is not so terrible…”
Kedar acknowledges:
I don’t know how realistic this scenario… is, but even if the chance of it happening in the foreseeable future is only 1 percent, Israel must act as one body, and it is very important that the coalition work with the opposition… The public in Israel wants it to prepare… for war with the Iranian octopus that has managed to establish its grip on the failed countries adjacent to Israel: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Gaza, all countries that have almost nothing to lose… Guys, wake up. This dangerous scenario may be realistic.
Nightmarish as that scenario is for anyone who cares about Israel, it may help to know that other observers are less alarmed. For instance, in a piece called “Dogs of War Are All Bark and No Bite,” Ron Ben-Yishai, a seasoned military-affairs analyst for Yediot Aharonot with a pedigree no less honorable than Kedar’s, takes a much more sanguine view.
“First,” Ben-Yishai asserts, “it’s crucial to note that Israel’s intelligence community hasn’t issued any warnings or gathered concrete intelligence suggesting that our most dangerous adversaries are jointly planning or preparing to launch a surprise attack simultaneously and on all fronts.”
At present Ben-Yishai does not see
immediate danger, capable of surpassing the realm of attritional conflicts, which are typically short-lived. The recent rocket barrage by Hamas from South Lebanon may have been more pronounced than usual, but the damage to property was relatively minor, as the rockets were short-range… We have yet to see any extraordinary military prowess from either the Iranian “axis” or the Palestinians.
Ben-Yishai also underlines Iran’s severe economic and social problems at home, and the sorry, failed-state condition of the other countries in Iran’s “axis.” He also notes that the Palestinian West Bank regime remains dependent on Israel to protect it from being overrun by Hamas.
“According to Israeli intelligence sources,” Ben-Yishai adds, “tensions are expected to wane post-Ramadan. While the wave of terrorism in the West Bank will continue, the Al-Aqsa catalyst will lose much of its jihadi luster.”
Ben-Yishai goes on to charge both the governing coalition and the opposition with stoking fears of war to serve their own political purposes. Altogether, “you have the recipe for public angst about an impending war. This angst, however, doesn’t stand up to factual scrutiny.”
Kedar and Ben-Yishai could be seen as occupying opposite poles of a spectrum; other experts’ views (for instance, here and here) range somewhere in between that extreme alarm and that lack of any acute alarm. What does seem certain is that if the current coalition–opposition negotiations on the judicial overhaul fail, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to make sure to halt his coalition’s destructive, deeply divisive effort to push the overhaul through the Knesset.
Whether and to what extent the fears of a multifront attack are justified, undoubtedly Israel, as always, faces security and other challenges. Its record over the past seventy-five years shows that, when unified around certain core perceptions and values, it has a great ability to prevail.
To me this is just more obvious evidence that Zionism was an intellectual error which is precisely what most Jews thought when first presented with the ideas in the late 1800s. Chaim Weizmann lamented how "assimilated Jews" were "dead against Zionism" and identified Zionism (correctly IMHO) as "a primitive tribalism":
"For assimilated Jews...They looked upon it...as a primitive tribalism. They felt themselves...called upon to "rescue" Judaism from Zionism...these people are dead against Zionism...Zionism is not meant for those people who have cut themselves adrift from Jewry..."
Of course! That rapidly increasing number of very well educated cosmopolitan "assimilated Jews" spread all over Europe-USA in the lat 1800s just wanted to be fellow human beings or equal world citizens free of ancient tribalisms-mysticisms-identities. Unfortunately, for very understandable reasons-factors for which nobody is to blame and are ultimately rooted in economic ignorance, like a rocket that is just about to reach orbit but runs out of fuel and comes crashing down to earth, Zionism would inadvertently pull 'Jewish Identity' and all of Western Civilization back to an increasingly ethnocentric identity-worldview with disastrous consequences. The Zionist Jews began to tie their “identity” to a massive error and eventually reach the stage where we are today, where saying that Zionism and the resulting Israeli state as it currently functions has been a massive error, essentially what most Jews in the late 1800s were wisely saying, is seen by many Jews today as antisemitic. CEO of the Anti-Defamation League Jonathan Greenblatt has mentioned that "Anti-Zionism is antisemitism". Like a young ideologue who is persuaded by Marx’s "Communist Manifesto" and sees businessmen as sinister capitalists to be killed, as Israeli author of the excellent book 'The Invention of the Jewish People', Shlomo Sand, notices: "Zionism has become…. a sort of Stalinism" which seeks to make it a ‘hate crime’ to criticize or want to replace the current Israeli-Zionist state, and thus imprison, beat and ultimately kill those who disagree with Zionist mythology. Very importantly! This should NOT be seen as the “fault” of the fellow homo sapiens who have absorbed a 'Zionist identity'. The Bolshevik hordes and their intellectuals and politicians which brought about so much tyranny, like the witch burners, were just executing the myths that polluted their minds. Just like the obvious desire of some businessmen to pay employees less in order to make large profits is all Communists needed to see to justify their ideology and kill the businessmen-capitalists, similarly, the Zionists can easily find “anti-Semites” and people who erroneously accuse Jews of ‘plotting’ capitalism or communism or killing Jesus and all that nonsense to justify their Zionism. Again, there is no one to blame here, we just have 'identities' evolving and reacting to each other in various ways. Sadly, these 'identities' currently lack the intellectual tools to really solve this mess and are about to destroy humanity. Again, no one is to blame.