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Hard Questions, Tough Answers with Yossi Alpher- April 19, 2010

On the occasion of Israel's Independence Day, Alpher presents a retrospective on the year in Israeli security. 

Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst, co-founder and co-editor of the Israeli-Palestinian internet dialogue bitterlemons.org and Middle East roundtable bitterlemons-international.org. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, and a former senior official with the Mossad, Israel's national intelligence agency. His views do not necessarily reflect those of Americans for Peace Now or Peace Now.

Q. On Tuesday, Israel celebrates its sixty-second independence day. What has changed in its security situation in the course of the past year?

A. The changes are a mixed bag, some good, most bad.

First, the threat posed by Iran and its militant Islamist proxies and allies has become incrementally more acute. The international campaign to constrain Iran's nuclear program has not yet borne fruit. The hope for reform inside Iran has fizzled out. Hezbollah is more heavily armed than ever; so is Hamas. The Arab world, while sharing Israel's concerns, has done essentially nothing to deal with them.

Here two important mitigating factors are the Obama administration's solid commitment to supporting Israeli military preparations and the positive post-Cast Lead regional and international cooperation against terrorism and arms supply to terrorists.

The Islamist resistance forces also draw encouragement from the failure of Obama administration efforts to bring about an Israeli-Palestinian peace process. In this regard, the Netanyahu government's ongoing settlement efforts in and around Arab East Jerusalem must be understood as a blow to Israel's long-term security, insofar as they reduce the chances of peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. On the other hand, the emergence during the past year of the Fayyad plan for creating a Palestinian state infrastructure may be seen as the most positive development ever in Palestinian state-building, hence a major contribution to an eventual two-state solution that fortifies Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

The "democratic" part of that slogan suffered during the past year under the Netanyahu government, along with Israel's international standing. Government policies regarding settlements and a peace process made a major contribution to the international campaign to isolate and delegitimize Israel (a campaign that is undoubtedly also fueled by currents over which Israel has little if any control). Netanyahu's coalition and its supporters reacted in near paranoid fashion by attacking NGOs that monitor human rights and the occupation, thereby endangering democratic values in Israel and exacerbating the country's isolation in a kind of vicious-circle effect. The manning of key IDF officer posts by pro-settler elements grew in the past year to the extent that Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi reportedly asked that the army no longer be tasked with removing settlers. Right-wing attacks on the justice system escalated. Anti-Arab incitement in the religious establishment and education system increased. 

None of these domestic Israeli issues has, I hope, yet reached critical mass. But an Israel isolated internationally and reducing democratic and human rights domestically is a less secure Israel.

Finally, through the "Petraeus doctrine", we have all become aware of the potential for friction between the ongoing large US military presence in the greater Middle East and the provocation posed to the Arab world by the absence of an effective Israel-Arab peace process. To the extent that Israel is held responsible for the peace process stalemate, this negatively affects US-Israel relations at the most sensitive level: security.


Q. Apropos Hezbollah's arms, how serious is the reported recent supply by Syria of SCUD missiles to that organization?

A. The report, in the Kuwaiti daily Ar-Rai Al-Aam, apparently reflects a development that took place some months ago, when the Israeli press (under military censorship) referred to the transfer from Syria to Lebanon of "weapons that tilt the strategic balance". Israel's Minister of Defense Ehud Barak confirmed the report. In response, Syria vehemently denied it while Hezbollah belittled it by referring to Israel's reputed nuclear capability.

One key question concerns the type of SCUD. The old SCUD B--the missile fired ineffectively by Iraq at Israel and Gulf states in the 1991 Gulf war--can hit most of Israel from Lebanon, but very inaccurately. The SCUD C and D are more accurate and carry larger payloads. The SCUD D can reportedly carry chemical or standard warheads to a range of 700 km., thereby covering all of Israel even from northern Lebanon.

Of greater importance is the alleged strategic significance of this missile supply by Syria to Hezbollah. The latter already has thousands of Iranian Fateh-110 missiles that can cover large parts of Israel with greater accuracy than the SCUD and carry a similar payload. Moreover, SCUDs require about an hour of open-air preparation for firing, rendering them highly vulnerable to attack, while the Fateh can be readied in minutes. If indeed the SCUDS had somehow tilted the strategic balance when they were supplied months ago, why didn't Israel preempt militarily?

The alleged SCUD supply brings us to two crucial questions concerning Israel's all-important northern front. First, under what circumstances, if at all, will a new war break out between Israel and Hezbollah? The latter is, with Iranian and Syrian help, arming itself to the teeth (Israel alleges that Syria also recently supplied Hezbollah with a sophisticated air defense system), building fortifications in various parts of Lebanon, and continuing to call for Israel's destruction. Does it have to cross some unknown threshold of munitions for Israel to determine that its ultimate redline has been violated? Is Israel waiting for some new Hezbollah atrocity--possibly the long-anticipated response to the assassination of Imad Moughniyeh--in order to escalate? Would an Israel-Hezbollah clash be part of a broader Israel-Iran clash or even Israel-Syria war?

Or, in contrast, is Israel resigned to living with the Hezbollah threat as long as it is not translated into direct aggression? Its response to the reports of SCUD supply by Syria appears to point in that direction. Yet at the same time, there is a strong sense that the countdown to another war with Hezbollah in Lebanon has begun.

The second crucial question concerns Syria. Here and there, comments by Israeli politicians and strategic thinkers suggest that a new war with Hezbollah would be extended by Israel to targets in Syria, in view of that country's ongoing role in supplying Iranian and other weapons to the Lebanese Shi'ite movement. On the other hand, there are rumors that some sort of Israeli-Syrian back-channel contacts are taking place. This makes sense if we assume that Netanyahu is looking for ways to both neutralize the Syrian threat and bypass a US-Israeli-Palestinian impasse over settlements and renewed final status talks, and in view of the crucial role an Israeli-Syrian process could play in weakening Iran's hegemonic drive into the Levant region.

As usual, a lot here depends on the United States. A lot also depends on Syria, which has recently gone out of its way to provoke the US at the rhetorical level and in its dealings with Iran. Is President Bashar Assad acting out an assessment of Syrian triumphalism, according to which Washington is all talk and Iran represents the wave of the future? Or does he think that upping the ante will force Israel back into negotiations? The sooner Robert Ford is approved and takes up his ambassadorship in Damascus, and the more initiative Washington takes toward bringing Damascus--despite its bad behavior--back into the peace process, the sooner we may know and the better for regional stability.


Q. Some Arab newspapers interpreted the leaks over SCUDs to Hezbollah as an Israeli attempt to preempt last week's Nuclear Security Summit in Washington. What are the ramifications of PM Netanyahu's absence from that meeting?

A. Netanyahu sent Deputy PM Dan Meridor to the summit. Meridor is a solid and experienced strategic thinker who holds the intelligence portfolio in Netanyahu's government and can discuss the nuclear issues at least as well as the prime minister. But he cannot discuss the Israel-Arab peace issues; nor does he have the prime minister's authority. 

These facts suggest that Netanyahu wanted to avoid a visit to Washington and a meeting, however brief, with President Barack Obama, in which he might be asked to deliver his response to Obama's very specific demands regarding the construction of Jewish neighborhoods in and around East Jerusalem. Netanyahu and his Cabinet of Seven have met several times to discuss the issue since the prime minister's ill-fated meetings with Obama at the time of the AIPAC annual conference last month but have not come up with answers that could conceivably satisfy the president.

A different take on Netanyahu's decision to sit out the nuclear summit was his reported fear that Egypt and Turkey would seek to raise the Israeli nuclear issue, use the summit as a platform to denounce Israel's nuclear policy, and in particular demand that Israel sign the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty). Israel is not a signatory, hence its nuclear program does not come under NPT monitoring procedures. Back in 1992, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir gave the definitive answer to demands that Israel sign the NPT and eliminate its alleged nuclear arsenal when he agreed to do this if and when the entire Arab world and Iran are at peace with Israel and there is no longer any threat to its existence. 

The Egyptians and Turks nevertheless raise the issue regularly. But this is not a persuasive explanation for Netanyahu's absence from this particular meeting, given the summit's importance. Indeed, Meridor, at the summit, went out of his way to tell the Israeli public that Israel was not being pressured there on this issue, and that the summit was, as planned, concentrating on the prevention of nuclear terrorism by non-state actors. He offered no explanation for his boss's absence.

One obvious ramification of that absence is that, the more Israel feels isolated in the world and pressured in one form or another to change its policies--whether on Jerusalem or nuclear issues--the more isolated it then becomes. This vicious-circle phenomenon (see also the first item above) is clearly one of the most negative developments that have taken place on Netanyahu's watch.