Israel has rediscovered the power of the preemptive strike

America may have forgotten the meaning of deterrent in enforcing global stability, but Israel does not have that luxury

Has war between Israel and Hezbollah started? Will it involve Iran? In the early hours of Sunday, Israeli planes mounted simultaneous attacks on thousands of targets in Lebanon, after intelligence showed that the militia was preparing a major missile and drone assault on the Jewish state to be launched at 5am.
According to Israeli spy chiefs, Hezbollah was due to strike the Glilot base near Herzliya, an affluent town near Tel Aviv, where the headquarters of the Mossad and several military intelligence units are located. Taken by surprise by the assault from the air, the Lebanese terror group, which has rained thousands of rockets on Israel since October 8, desperately fired hundreds more projectiles over the border, causing scattered damage and injuries.
Hezbollah framed its plot as revenge for the killing of its commander Fuad Shukr – its most senior military leader, who was wanted by the Americans for decades for his part in the killing of 241 marines and 58 French soldiers in 1983 – in Beirut last month. But in the cycle of call and response that dominates the region, it is impossible to trace one act of retribution to a particular source. It’s turtles all the way down.
When it comes to the conflict between Israel and much of the Muslim world, the only way to judge the hostilities is by first principles. Hezbollah was set up by Iran with the single objective of destroying the Jewish state. In this it joins Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and various other bands of savages. From Jerusalem’s point of view, meanwhile, as Golda Meir famously remarked: “They say we must be dead and we say we want to be alive. Between life and death, I don’t know of a compromise.” It is from these two fundamental positions that all the blood and tears have flowed.
Meir made that comment in 1973, the year of the Yom Kippur War. That conflagration, which took place exactly 50 years before October 7, was the closest Israel has come to destruction. The way both conflicts unfolded was eerily similar. Five decades ago, a combination of complacency in its military superiority, lazy thinking and intelligence failure led Jerusalem to sit back when all the warning signs were there. In the resulting war, in which Egypt invaded from the south and Lebanon and Syria from the north, Israel came within a hair’s breadth of disaster, which was averted only when the Syrian army inexplicably halted its advance from the Golan Heights.
On October 7, Jerusalem was once again caught napping. In some cases, literally. Aharon Haliva, the former head of military intelligence who took responsibility for the disaster in his resignation speech this week, did not get out of bed to deal with warnings of an impending Hamas manoeuvre at 4am on October 7. Instead, the senior security leadership met with his assistant and decided to send a small IDF team to the border area. Without rousing the prime minister or defence minister, they went back to bed and agreed to pick it up at 8am. Hamas invaded at half-past six.
Despite the military effectiveness of the subsequent war in Gaza, in some ways Israel has struggled to completely shake off the sense of somnambulism that dominated its intelligence leadership during that period. The long pauses in the fighting, brought about due to pressure from Washington, have only increased the painful attrition to which Israel has been subjected. Some suggest that there were strategic mis-steps, too.
In an emergency meeting immediately after the October 7 attacks, the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, argued that the IDF should launch a surprise attack on Hezbollah – by far the greater foe – first. Hamas could be dealt with afterwards, he said. This plan was overruled by Benjamin Netanyahu, supported by the Americans. Whether this decision was right or wrong is a question for future historians; but with war in the north inching ever closer, Israeli forces find themselves combat-weary, with depleted ammunition, resources and international support. They need at least a year to rebuild. Hamas, meanwhile, has not yet been defeated, and Hezbollah and Iran have had almost a year to prepare.
This partly explains the pivot we have seen recently in Israeli strategy, which forms the background to the pre-emptive strikes last night. When it comes to Iran and Hezbollah, in recent months Jerusalem has taken the gloves off. In addition to the killing of Fuad Shukr, there was the obliteration of Mohammad Deif – the Hamas leader so elusive that by the time of his death, he had become mythical – and the audacious assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in the most secure compound in Tehran.
Now Hezbollah is feeling the might of the IDF, both in terms of intelligence and firepower. The White House may have forgotten the meaning of deterrent in enforcing global stability, but Israel does not have that luxury. If the Yom Kippur War was the unhappy template that led Israel into the valley of death, now Jerusalem appears to be drawing inspiration from another war: the one that was concluded in six days.
David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, insisted that as a tiny country, the Jewish state must fight wars both at lightning speed and on the enemy’s territory. Both of these principles were compromised 50 years ago and have faded almost completely now, with the war in its tenth month and Israel’s north uninhabitable amid constant rocket fire from Hezbollah.
The Six Day War of 1967, by contrast, was the archetypal moment of Israeli military genius. Observing the buildup of enemy forces on multiple fronts, prime minister Levi Eshkol, together with the legendary defence minister Moshe Dayan and chief of staff Yitzchak Rabin, the Israeli air force launched a surprise attack, obliterating the entire Egyptian air force before it had even left the ground. The result was a stunning success that reshaped the power dynamic of the region, and even the world, forever.
Much has been learnt since then. These are even darker and more cynical times. But in the Israeli military mind, decision-making takes place within the two poles of the Yom Kippur War and the war of Six Days. Jerusalem’s great mistake these last ten months has been to lapse into the habits of the former. But with its recovery of the 1967 spirit, there is every chance that the strikes of the early hours on Sunday will deter Hezbollah and Iran, pushing the prospect of open warfare into the future. For now.