WarSclerotic

IDF Conducts ‘Lebanon Attack’ Drill – Defense/Security – News – Israel National News.

Lebanon border

Flash 90

IDF forces carried out a series of contingency maneuvers along the Blue Line on Tuesday to prepare for a possible attack as it constructs a 6-meter high separation wall between Israel and Lebanon.

According to Lebanese sources, tens of Israeli soldiers were deployed in the defacto border region and were visible from the border town of Kfar Kila.

The troops – said to number in the “tens” – deployed using Hummers and asked the construction company to evacuate the area for practice.

Villagers in Kfar Kila told the Lebanon Daily Star that IDF soldiers were seen transferring pretend wounded army personnel to an ambulance as part of an emergency scenario.

Other soldiers were said to have taken up positions at different points along the fence.

Israel notified the UN Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) earlier Tuesday of the maneuvers, which in turn notified the Lebanese Army so as to avoid unnecessary alarm.

The Lebanese Army deployed a similar sized force to observe after informing UNIFIL that it expected the IDF not to cross the Blue Line during the construction process.

Israel began construction of the separation wall between Lebanon and the Jewish state on Monday. The wire fence currently in use will eventually be replaced with 4-meter-high concrete blocks topped by 2-meters of fencing and barbed wire.

Jerusalem says the wall, which will stretch from the former Jidar al-Tayyib Gate to the Fatima Gate crossing, is intended to protect residents of the border town of Metula, which faces Kfar Kila.

Lebanese officers were given topographical maps to follow the construction as it happened and ensure that it met the prearranged conditions.

Members of the UN Disengagement Observer Force worked with the Israeli army to ensure that the wall was erected within Israeli territory.

The Blue Line serves as a defacto border between Israel and Lebanon based on a United Nations survey endorced by UN Security Council Resolution 425.

On 25 May 2000, following Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon, Jerusalem notified the Secretary-General that Israel had redeployed its forces in compliance with the resolution.

The decision to follow the UN recommendation came after Beirut declined to participate in negotiations aimed at formally demarcating its border with Israel.

Nonetheless, the Blue Line closely follows the internationally recognized boundaries of Lebanon from 1949, but does differ by some 475 meters along half a dozen stretches.

Between 1950 and 1975 teams of Israeli and Lebanese surveyors did complete a topographical survey of approximately 50% of the border between the two nations, but no formal treaty was ever signed.

Meanwhile, Hizbullah members have placed pictures of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad along the border road connecting Fatima Gate to Adaysseh.

Surprise Copter Drill Simulates Raid near Tel Aviv – Defense/Security – News – Israel National News.

Black Hawk helicopter

Israel news photo: IDF spokesmen

Air Force helicopter pilots staged a surprise drill Tuesday in a simulated attack on its base near Tel Aviv. “As far as we’re concerned a war broke out today,” said Black Hawk squadron commander Major “Amir.”

The exercise was conducted to increase preparedness for a rocket attack on the Air Force’s Palmachim base, near Rishon LeTzion, located on the southern edge of metropolitan Tel Aviv.

Israeli intelligence officials have frequently stated that Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists in Gaza possess medium-range missiles that can hit Tel Aviv. Missiles previously have struck as far as the area of Yavne, located less than five miles from Rishon LeTzion.

“The main emphasis today is on cooperation between the different forces stationed at the air base, especially between helicopters and UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles),” said the squadron commander.

Combat helicopter pilots were confronted with surprise attacks and more. “Upon taking off the pilots did not know where they would land,” explained Lt. Col. “N.”

“We were sitting at the station and were suddenly surprised,” said Cpl. Tzachi, one of the pilots that participated in the drill. “Exercises like this one are important and should be taken seriously.”

Vice prime minister: Early elections not a factor in possible Iran strike | The Times of Israel.

Moshe Yaalon says ‘Iranian issue is beyond other considerations,’ but 1981 Osirak attack echoes

Moshe Yaalon (photo credit: Miriam Alster/Flash90)

“Elections will not be a factor on the Iran issue,” said Moshe Yaalon, vice prime minister, minister of strategic affairs and former IDF chief of General Staff on Wednesday to Maariv. “If we need to make decisions, we will. The Iranian issue is beyond other considerations. The Iranian issue is dealt with in a balanced way, and political considerations won’t dictate decisions in any direction,” Yaalon said.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak said things in a similar vein on Tuesday, responding to a question on his Facebook page. Barak wrote that “during elections the executive branch continues to function normally, so elections will not affect professional considerations with regards to the Iranian issue.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to call for September 4th elections next Sunday at the Likud party convention, a full year before they were to have taken place, in a move seen as an attempt to consolidate power for the right-wing coalition for another four years.

A strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is expected to be a major election issue. In 1981, Menachem Begin’s Likud retained power in general elections which took place three weeks after Israel bombed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. At the time, Begin’s authorization of the raid was seen as a major factor in his victory.

Are Netanyahu and Barak bluffing on Iran, or are they already committed to war? | JTA – Jewish & Israel News.

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Has Israel’s game of chicken with Iran jumped the shark?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak in recent months have been more explicit than ever about the likelihood of an Israeli strike on Iran to keep it from obtaining nuclear weapons capability.

A number of current and former top military officials are now suggesting that the duo has gone too far, turning what was meant to be a calculated bluff into a commitment to a strike that could accelerate Iran’s nuclear program and engulf the region in war.

Are Barak and Netanyahu merely posturing, or are they really intent on waging war?

Last week, Barak marked Israeli Independence Day with a speech dismissing the likelihood that Iran will succumb to diplomatic pressure to end its suspected nuclear weapons program. He said that while the likely success of an Israeli military strike was not “marvelous,” it was preferable to allowing Iran to press forward.

A week earlier, Netanyahu had made a searing Holocaust Remembrance Day speech in which he likened Iran to Nazi Germany and stressed his commitment to Israel’s self-defense.

Such posturing is not novel: Israel, like other parties to longstanding conflicts, for years has used brinksmanship to ward off actual warfare. Statements from its military ending with the threat “we will know how to respond” are routine.

The target of such pronouncements is not only Iran but also the international community, said Steve Rosen, a former foreign policy director for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who maintains close ties with some of Netanyahu’s top advisers. Western leaders are likelier to act to isolate Iran when they are faced with the real prospect of Israel going it alone, he said.

“It’s no secret that American and European interest starts with Israel doing something,” Rosen said.

Eitan Barak, a Hebrew University expert on international relations (and no relation to the defense minister), described the tactic as one of brinksmanship.

“There is a possibility that Barak is saying in a closed forum, ‘The military option is not on the table, but let’s say it in public in order to keep this position of brinksmanship,’ ” the professor said.

The problem might be that the “closed forum” now encompasses only Barak and Netanyahu, he said.

“If this is a diplomatic game, the game should be stopped when you discuss this with people like the Mossad and the Shabak,” Eitan Barak said, using the Israeli acronym for the Shin Bet internal security service. “But it could be that Netanyahu and Barak decided it’s such an important issue, they should make themselves really warlike even in the Cabinet, so that there will be no doubt in eyes of foreigners and diplomats that they are ready to launch a military attack.”

On April 27, the day after Barak spoke, Yuval Diskin, the former head of the Shin Bet, said he believed that Barak and Netanyahu are serious in contemplating an attack on Iran — and that they are driving Israel into a strike that likely would have severe consequences.

“They create a sense that if the State of Israel does not act there will be a nuclear Iran,” Diskin said. “That part of the sentence, let’s say there’s an element of truth to it — but the second part of the sentence, they tell the public, the ‘idiot’ public, if Israel acts there won’t be an Iranian nuclear bomb. And that’s the part of the sentence that is wrong. After an Israeli attack on Iran, there may well be a dramatic acceleration of the Iranian nuclear program.”

Diskin, speaking to a town hall-type meeting in Kfar Saba, the central Israeli town where he lives, continued: “I do not have confidence in the current leadership of the State of Israel that could bring us into a war with Iran or into a regional war.”

Diskin’s attack was the bluntest so far on Barak and Netanyahu, but he is not alone.

Meir Dagan, the former chief of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, last year delivered similar warnings, and the current military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, last week said he believed the Iranian leadership was rational and that the country did not pose an existential threat to Israel.

Rosen noted that many of the critics now speaking were either disgruntled or may entertain political ambitions.

“A lot of them feel snubbed,” he said. “There’s a cadre of security professionals who feel that their views were not adequately taken into account.”

Dagan wanted to stay on as Mossad chief and Diskin had ambitions of replacing him. Ehud Olmert, a former prime minister who over the weekend joined the chorus criticizing Netanyahu, is a longtime rival of Netanyahu’s who is facing a corruption trial in Israel that could bury his comeback prospects.

David Makovsky, a top analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said it was not unusual for the military establishment to exercise greater caution than the political establishment, noting such tensions surfaced in 1981, before Israel took out the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq.

“This will be decided by the political echelon, and the security establishment will weigh in, but they won’t necessarily be decisive,” Makovsky said.

None of the officials criticizing Barak and Netanyahu has broken with the Israeli consensus that an Iranian bomb is something to be prevented and not accommodated or “contained.”

The issue concerning the Israeli defense establishment, according to a number of Israeli experts, is whether Barak and Netanyahu have lost site of the utility of threats to strike Iran — to rally the international community toward stopping Iran from acquiring the bomb.

“The threat of an attack remains a tactical measure which has achieved results,” said Shlomo Aronson, a political scientist who was the Schusterman visiting professor of Israel studies at the University of Arizona from 2007 to 2009. “It should not be pursued in practical terms.”

Aronson said that until now, the tactic has helped focus the international community, led by the Obama administration, on isolating Iran through sanctions and diplomatic pressure.

The concern now permeating the Israeli defense establishment is that Barak and Netanyahu are no longer bluffing, said Avraham Sela, a research fellow of the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace who served as an intelligence officer under Barak when he was military chief of staff in the 1990s.

He noted that in the ‘70s his former commander and Netanyahu were both members of the General Commando Squad, and had preserved from that training the tendency to play one’s cards close to one’s vest.

Barak “remains that commando officer, which means I don’t know to what extent he is calculating and to what extent he is willing to take the risk for such an operation — in the best case a temporary achievement that will maybe give Israel some time and which could eventually instigate Iran even more to get this weapon, even if they haven’t until now sought it,” Sela said.

Sela noted that during his term as chief of staff, during the 1991 Gulf War, Barak had to credibly threaten to strike Iraqi targets in order to get the U.S.-led alliance to take out Iraqi batteries launching missiles. The George H. W. Bush administration feared that an Israeli strike would shatter the coalition of western and Arab states it had cobbled together.

Barak said recently that Israel would suffer no more than 500 deaths in the event of a war following a preemptive strike on Iran.

Gabriel Sheffer, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University who also served under Barak in the military, said the prediction was greeted with much skepticism and derision by the Israeli media and defense establishment.

“It is pretty sure that the people who will be killed, that the number will be much greater,” he said. “I think that this was part of his attempt to persuade everybody Israel should attack Iran.”

Makovksy said Barak and Netanyahu must convey seriousness of intent in order to have the West pay attention.

“Israel is the only country being threatened with its existence, so it has to take it seriously because they’re not a superpower and their window for action closes early,” he said. “They want to get America’s attention, but it does mean they’re necessarily trigger-happy.”

‘Iran could accelerate nuclear p… JPost – Iranian Threat – News.