On May 26, 2000, during victory celebrations in Bint Jbeil following the IDF’s withdrawal from Lebanon, Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah declared: “This Israel, with its nuclear weapons and most advanced warplanes in the region, I swear by Allah, is actually weaker than a spider’s web… Israeli society is war-weary and lacks the resilience to endure a bloody conflict or suffer casualties. Israel may appear strong from the outside, but it’s easily destroyed and defeated.”

These remarks, dubbed the “Spider Web Speech,” were long considered – even beyond Israel’s enemies – to reveal genuine trends in Israeli society. At the time, Nasrallah was viewed as someone who could read Israel like an open book. He clung to this belief even after the Second Lebanon War. The internal strife that plagued Israel throughout 2023 only reinforced his conviction that his prediction was coming true.

However, the past year, particularly its final weeks, is forcing Israel’s adversaries, and others, to reassess their fundamental assumptions about the country. They’re confronted with Israel’s unexpected stamina in a prolonged, multi-front war and its willingness to take bold, calculated risks. They failed to grasp the profound impact of Oct. 7 and the seismic shift it triggered in Israeli thinking and behavior.

This ongoing conflict is being closely watched not only by Iran and its proxy militias but also by those suffering under their oppression. It presents an opportunity for Lebanese power brokers to break free from Hezbollah’s suffocating influence. US presidential candidates, the leaders of Russia and China, and heads of state still formulating their stance towards Israel – be it partnership or rivalry – are all keenly observing.

The dust has yet to settle over the Dahieh district of Beirut. Hezbollah remains disoriented, struggling to chart its course. Tehran debates the extent of its involvement in any response. The world anxiously watches for signs of escalation into all-out war. Meanwhile, Israel experiences moments of resolve tempered with readiness for various scenarios – but certainly not complacency. Israel’s sustained military actions clearly demonstrate its determination to effect fundamental change, not merely settle for a symbolic victory.

Ironically, Israel may come to miss Nasrallah, as he can no longer face his followers and admit, “I was wrong.” His name joins the long list of terrorist leaders who bought into the flawed “spider web” theory. Their demise stands as a testament to its failure.

Published in  Israel Hayom, September 30, 2024.

In the last 48 hours, confirmation of Israel’s stunning elimination of arch-terrorists Mohammed Deif of Hamas and Fuad Shukr of Hezbollah, as well as the presumed elimination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran, will redefine Israeli deterrence and create a paradigm change in the Middle East, likely bringing the war with Hamas closer to an end.

Each of the three terrorists eliminated were the embodiment of evil, dripping with the blood of thousands of innocent civilians, both Israeli and foreign nationals, including Americans.

As leaders of Hamas, Haniyeh and Deif, were the masterminds of the October 7 massacre and decades of terror attacks in Israel. Shukr, the deputy leader of Hezbollah, was responsible for the Majdal Shams rocket attack last weekend in northern Israel, in which 12 children were murdered while playing football. He had also been directing Hezbollah’s rocket attacks on Israel since October 8 and responsible for procuring the terror group’s advanced weaponry.

In case it needs to be reiterated, the elimination of these arch-terrorists and murderers was entirely legal, just, and moral. The world today is a safer place without them and Israel ought to congratulated for their elimination.

But what is the military and geo-strategic impact of these operations?

There is no denying that the brazen October 7 attacks and abductions by Hamas, as well as the ongoing rocket fire by Hezbollah, struck a massive arrow through the heart of Israel’s much-vaunted defense and intelligence apparatus. In the last 72 hours, Israel not only regained its deterrence, but has taken it to a new level, with the potential to permanently alter the landscape of the Middle East.

The pin-point operations against Shukr in Beirut and Haniyeh, while asleep in an apartment building in Tehran on Day 1 of the new President’s tenure, were daring, audacious, and brilliantly executed, with minimum to no civilian casualties and no harm to Israeli soldiers and assets.

That they were carried out great distance away from Israel under the noses of the Hezbollah and Iranian leaderships, and relying on such precise intelligence, will also cause enormous embarrassment to Hezbollah and especially Tehran, because Haniyeh’s security was under their responsibility, underscoring that Israel can strike any target, at any time, effectively turning their leaders and military sites into sitting ducks.

This in turn ought to give them pause for consideration for any future military actions they might seek to undertake, knowing the possible response they might face.

There are those who now insist that the elimination of Haniyeh and Shukr will only escalate regional tensions. To them we ask: Where have you been the last 10 months?

Hamas initiated the massacre of October 7 and were joined by Hezbollah the day after, having since fired over 7,250 rockets at northern Israel from Lebanon.

Iran has meantime been pulling the strings from Tehran as the grandmaster of both Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as the Houthis, who joined long ago from Yemen.

If anyone has been escalating regional tensions, it has been the international community, which has been largely trying to pressure Israel into showing restraint or compromise, instead of demanding Hezbollah and Hamas, cease the attacks, disarm and release all the hostages, or that Iran reign in their proxies.

In doing so, the international community has only emboldened these terror groups and encouraged their regional patrons to escalate tensions further.

If anything, the world should thank Israel now, as the elimination of Haniyeh and Shukr ought to send a clear message to all the terror groups and their enablers that their actions come at a heavy price, and they should reconsider their involvement.

Israel’s renewed deterrence can also have a positive impact on the hostage negotiations. Although there will be some uncertainty with respect to the negotiations in the short-term, in the medium term, it should place greater pressure on Hamas to accept a deal.

There is no denying that Hamas has been utterly decimated and embarrassed. Their leadership is destroyed, its military dismantled into a fraction of its former self, and Sinwar has never been so isolated. Although Hamas is unlikely to re-engage in negotiations so soon for fear of losing face and being seen as succumbing to Israel’s overpowering, they will need to reach some kind of agreement, so as to have at least something to show and avoid the fate of Haniyeh and Deif.

Israel’s audacious targeted operations this past week only underscore that the path to stability in the region and return of the hostages, will come from renewed Israeli deterrence and strength.

The article was written together with John Spencer. 

Published in Newsweek, August 2, 2024.

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s meetings in the US this week with President Joe Biden, Vice President (and Democratic presidential candidate) Kamala Harris, and former President (and Republican presidential candidate) Donald Trump are certainly important. Certainly, as they relate to Israel’s immediate needs in confronting Iran’s Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi proxies.

But the shifting political winds on both sides of the political aisle in America make it clear that long-term reliance on Washington for all of Israel’s needs is an uncertain thing. It is time for Israel to diversify its strategic alliances, sources of raw materials and weaponry, technological partnerships, and more.

No, this is not a (ridiculous) call to ditch the US and seek alliances with China or Russia! The United States of America is and hopefully will remain a bedrock of democratic/moral, diplomatic, and defense backing for Israel for many decades hence. One surely asks G-d, as Netanyahu did Wednesday in Congress, to “bless the great alliance between Israel and America forever.”

But again, given progressive impulses on the Democratic left and isolationist trends on the Republican right, the passionate and generous backing for Israel in America of recent decades cannot be assumed to hold in all circumstances.

Simply put, resilience for the Israeli long-term requires broader circles and deeper reservoirs of support.

On the Democratic side, Kamala Harris could preside over a closer embrace than ever with the anti-Israel narrative that has swept “liberal” academic, political and media circles and become a potent political force in America. Harris’ demand way back in March for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza, when Israel was making substantial progress on dismantling Hamas, was outrageous from Israel’s perspective.

Her mollycoddling of the campus protests against Israel’s counter-offensive in Gaza is worrying too. Harris: “(The protestors) are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza. There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.”

Nor is it certain that a next Democratic administration will have the inclination or gumption to deflect the escalating international legal assaults on Israel, because Democrats seem to so assiduously believe in the “integrity” of international legal institutions, as well as “humanitarian” organizations (like UNRWA) – no matter how corrupt and disfigured they are.

Even before we get to a next administration, there is a danger that the current Democratic administration could move to unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood – a move that would plunge a knife into Israeli security and diplomacy, and lavish undeserved gains on the Palestinian national campaign to crush Israel.

On the Republican side, President Trump and his new ticket-mate Senator J.D. Vance are both instinctively pro-Israel for strategic (and religious) reasons, and will defend Israel against assaults at the UN, ICC and other institutions that are hostile to Washington too. If it were up to them, they would supply Israel at present with every weapons system it requested, and they would not be too perturbed about humanitarian aid for Palestinians loyal to Hamas.

But isolationist (and ultimately anti-Israel) impulses are on the rise in Republican camp. At the very least, Trump and Vance do not want to fight Middle East wars on their watch. They are quietly saying to Israel: Clobber your enemies now, before we take office next year, and we’ll run interference for you afterwards.

President Trump will have other priorities (immigration, economy, China), and he will not be rushing to confront Iran and its proxies. His “sequencing” or prioritization of issues certainly won’t begin with Iran or the Palestinians.

And if/when Trump gets around to dealing with Iran or the Palestinians, I sense that his instinct will be to seek a grand deal with them – no less than Presidents Obama and Biden did, over Israel’s objections. After all, Trump sees himself as the grandmaster businessman, the great dealmaker, who by force of his personality and blunt diplomacy can bend people and countries to his will.

In the short term, this could work to Israel’s benefit, because the tools of pressure Trump might again apply – maximum crushing sanctions along with targeted assassinations against Iranian terrorist leaders, and diplomatic diffidence to Palestinian tantrums – move the markers in the right direction.

But in the longer term I fear that Trump will overreach for a “huge” win, for tantalizing shiny trophies of grand “peace” deals that do not truly end the threats to Israel (and the West), at Israel’s (and the West’s) expense.

And whatever side of the American political aisle one might think more problematic, there is the simple reality that political vicissitudes make even the best long-term assessments uncertain and strongest long-term alliances unpredictable.

CONSEQUENTLY, Israel must build for itself resilience across many platforms – in defense, diplomacy, energy, technology, and society. Resilience, so that Israel can act independently in the national security sphere; resilience, reflected in multilateral alliances in the Middle East and beyond that do not depend exclusively on Washington; and resilience, so that Israeli citizens have confidence in their future despite many threats and challenges that surely are going to persist.

Israeli resilience needs to be developed in four areas: defense systems (development and manufacturing, including munitions); critical resources (the supply chain for minerals and other scarce materials like steel); national security technologies (including AI, homeland and cyber security, quantum computing, and space technologies); and perhaps most complex of all – social cohesion (which mainly means better integrating Arabs, Druze, and Bedouin citizens, and Haredi Jews, into Israeli economy and national defense frameworks).

For example, in the armaments sector, Israel needs to be much more independent; an estimated eight times over the current manufacturing capacity of Israeli defense industries. Israel needs to indigenously produce 10,000 surveillance and attack drones, 200 Thundermaker self-propelled artillery guns, 100 Namer armored personnel carriers, and 50 Merkava main battle tanks – per year.

Israel also needs to self-manufacture 155mm artillery shells, and precision-guided missiles for the air force, in insane numbers. (This is especially true since Israel faces increasing restrictions on the use of US-supplied weaponry, and because there is a global shortage of such ammunition.)

Israeli resilience also means ramping-up and reinforcing services such as hospitals, electricity grids, water and sewage networks, and food manufacturing and stockpiling. (Israel’s electrical grid has almost no excess capacity. Yet it needs many layers of redundancy in case of enemy attack.) Israel must have at hand massive supplies of medicines, food products, and core industrial ingredients to last-out a one-year-long interruption in air and sea imports.

The IDF needs to grow by at least three divisions. That is 50,000 soldiers more, with tons of military equipment. A gargantuan increase in the training of front-line troops is necessary, especially armored formations. The Israeli navy needs more than $5 billion in new ships, submarines, weapons systems, and personnel over the next decade.

The Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy, a leading think tank with which I am associated, has begun two massive projects to help Israel navigate its way forward in this regard. The first project called “Israel 2.0,” led by professors Gabi Siboni and Kobi Michael, is meant to lay down a vision for the State of Israel over the coming decades, following the collapse of last October.

The project is well underway. It revisits and reconsiders the conceptual foundations of Israeli diplomacy, security doctrine, internal security, civil-military relations, agricultural and settlement policies, constitutional and legal structures, majority-minority relations, immigration policies and institutions, and more. The project will offer a “reset” for Israel in these spheres and more.

A second project, involving thought leaders and professional advisors from different sectors, will commence soon, focused on building “robust resilience” across numerous platforms for the long-term; concrete plans for strategic endurance in defense, diplomacy, energy, technology, and society, as described above.

Published in The Jerusalem Post, July 26, 2024.