Israel Brought to Its Knees

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

In 2006, Israel, together with its accomplices among Arab rulers and officials, put on airs of arrogance, straining to convince itself that it had achieved something through UN Security Council Resolution 1701. It tried to claim that the July War had brought the Lebanese army to the colonial-drawn border between Palestine and Lebanon, and that UN forces had become more numerous and better equipped, meaning the war had at least achieved some of its objectives. Its Arab accomplices, for their part, kept arguing against Hezbollah and insisting on defeat, simply because any Arab victory in any arena of life, in the face of invaders and covetous powers, is itself a defeat for them.

Now, though, after the release of Samir Kuntar and his comrades, Israel has found nothing left to do but shed tears and, in every one of its political currents, admit defeat, collapsing into mutual internal recriminations among its various politicians and political groupings. Israel can no longer hide its defeat now, nor find a way around it, and has no choice but to finally acknowledge that the 2006 war was nothing but a defeat that opened the doors to further defeats. Prisoner exchanges have taken place before, but this exchange has absolutely no precedent, even though it is not the largest in scale. This exchange is the completion of a war that produced a major disruption in the traditional balance of power; it is the completion of a military defeat that has brought the region into new equations; and it is the crowning of a Hezbollah victory that the Arab regimes and their lackeys refused to acknowledge.

The world watched, on television screens and across the media, the verbal clashes inside Israel, the accusations and counter-accusations. There is no need here to recall them or replay the scenes. What matters here is that Israel no longer speaks of victories, but of defeats; it no longer speaks with joy and elation, but with sorrow and pain; it no longer speaks with confidence and steadiness, but with feebleness and tremor; it no longer repeats to us its phrases of vigor and strength, but instead we hear from it phrases of doubt and weakness; it no longer looks down on people with arrogance, conceit, and haughtiness, but bows, humbled and reluctant.

Israel is growing weaker day by day, and what Hezbollah and the resistance factions are achieving against it is gradually pushing it back down to the small size it ought to occupy. It is now certain that its victories were never due to its own strength, but to Arab weakness and the decay of Arab rulers, and that its former mastery of the battlefield was never due to Arab cowardice, but to the treachery of Arab leaderships. This is why it now realizes it is shrinking, and why many of its thinkers and intellectuals recognize that the countdown began some time ago, and the acceleration toward catastrophe is already underway.

Israel is now facing people who love their Lord, who cherish martyrdom, and who refuse to turn their backs on bullets and flee. Those old confrontations built on the art of running away no longer hold; Israel must now face people who refuse to abandon their positions except to advance. Things have changed, and the Arab-Islamic region is now pregnant with a new gestation that will give birth to a fundamental transformation at every level of life — bearing no resemblance whatsoever to Condoleezza Rice’s much-touted “birth pangs” that never actually gave birth to anything. Israel’s own interior, by contrast, will also witness fundamental transformations — but in the opposite direction. Arab-Islamic organizations will witness further ascent, and Israel will witness further decline.

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…its military and civilian institutions, the drift toward comfort and luxury, the slackening of commitment and collective effort, the excessive concern for the individual soldier’s life — which ends in cowardice — and the conclusion, more than twenty years ago now, of the state-building phase, along with the absence of historic leaders.

Israel has now been humbled, and finds itself belittled and disgraced before a world that long praised it and believed it to be an undefeatable power. It is now a dwarf before a small party spread over a small geographic area, and it cannot find, before its own friends, anything to justify this shrinking. There are two possibilities here: either Israel resigns itself to its current situation and decides to halt its aggression, or it attacks in a desperate attempt to recover its prestige. The first possibility has its own justifications and its own dangers, and so does the second. Whatever Israel chooses, it remains before a grave danger. It cannot guarantee the outcome if it attacks, and it cannot predict how its enemies’ strength will develop if it waits. It can no longer even count on the United States, because America has more than enough of its own troubles to occupy it.

So what are we waiting for? My assessment is that Hezbollah is intent on changing the face of the region, and that this change will not come except by inflicting a routing, field-level defeat on the Israeli army. Hezbollah may be waiting for an Israeli attack, but what will it do if Israel does not attack? The road now lies open before Hezbollah to avenge the martyrdom of Hajj Imad Mughniyeh. It is likely the party has been waiting for the prisoner exchange to be completed, and I do not believe the party will fail to keep its promise this time. Hezbollah will avenge the martyr Mughniyeh, and its vengeance will be very harsh, placing Israel before a fresh humiliation and disgrace. My assessment, based on scattered pieces of information gathered here and there from the media, is that Hezbollah now possesses the ability to maneuver on the ground, thanks to its capacity to paralyze Israeli aircraft, even if only partially, and that if it wants the face of the region to change, it will find itself facing the necessity of carrying out a mobile military operation.

Hezbollah possesses weapons and military tactics that allow it to absorb Israel’s initial military strikes and then strike back, which constitutes a powerful deterrent against Israel. But we do not fully know what military tactics it might follow if it decides to be the one delivering the first mobile strike. In any case, Syria cannot this time remain outside the field of action.

We must not underestimate Israel’s strength, but neither must we exaggerate it; we must calculate precisely every element of its power, so that our own preparation is exact. Israel will bring enormous firepower to bear in any coming war, but we must remember it spared no effort and held back no weapon in the July 2006 war either. Israel has added further weapons to its arsenal, particularly in aviation, but these weapons are not expected to achieve any breakthrough on a front like South Lebanon. Hezbollah, for its part, has added new and lethal combat means to its own arsenal, which will provide elements of surprise against the Israeli army — quite apart from new military tactics that Israel will not find easy to adapt to quickly on the ground.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “إسرائيل تجثو” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.