John Podhoretz: Israel Chose, and the World Changed
The great delusion of post-Marx history is that change results from vast impersonal forces rather than the workings of individual human actions and unforeseen circumstances. What history records is the way free will and sheer contingency gum up the works of the Great Machine of Progress.Jake Wallis Simons: With Assad gone, now is the time to bomb Iran’s nukes
Would there have been an Arab Spring without a fruit vendor in Tunisia setting himself on fire in 2010? What if Derek Chauvin had taken the day off on June 20, 2020? What if there had been a blizzard on January 6, 2021?
And…what if Yahya Sinwar had hit his head on a pipe in a tunnel on October 6, been concussed, and hadn’t given the order to move on the kibbutzim and the Nova festival on October 7? Had he hit his head, would we be living in a world today in which Hamas has been all but destroyed, in which Hezbollah has been literally and perhaps fatally crippled, in which Iranian strikes against Israel have led to the mullahs losing their air defenses while steeling themselves for the loss of their nuclear program—and with the Assads gone from power in Syria after 53 years of ghoulish evil the likes of which the world has rarely ever witnessed?
All for the want of a horseshoe nail.
You could argue that a war conducted by Israel to destroy Hamas was always in the cards, just as the Israelis demonstrated they had thought the same with Hezbollah, since, beginning in 2015, they planned to destroy the Iranian catamite army by creating a shell import-export company that specialized in communications devices—and then laid in wait to activate the plan.
The war happened, though, because Sinwar made it happen. It was different north of Israel. The Jewish state chose the time, manner, and place of the pager detonation. They chose. It didn’t just happen. Impersonal forces didn’t move the levers in Gaza or in Lebanon. Leaders did.
Now, why Israel waited as the country’s north was depopulated and the financial, logistical, and psychological costs of that depopulation mounted will be matters of controversy there for the coming generation. Clearly its leaders believed they had to deal with Sinwar’s unprecedented blow first. And clearly they were managing world opinion, which is to say American opinion.
Israel knew it needed to win the war with Hamas, and that there was no way to conclude the war with Hamas without turning north and taking out Hezbollah. And I think Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet (as much as they all hated and hate each other) knew that the United States under Joe Biden simply did not want Israel to win. Biden and Co. may have wanted Israel to prevail in some fashion—but not if it was going to be too much of a pain in the Democratic Party’s ass.
The other day, an Israeli intelligence officer who shares information with British agencies in London told me about her work. “Iran is the big focus for us. But for the British, it is maybe third on their priority list,” she said.‘Opportunity’ to weaken Iran amid Syrian regime collapse, national security experts say
Fair enough. Tehran may be a grave threat to Britain but due to its apocalyptic obsession with Jerusalem, it poses a far greater danger to Israel. Despite the differences in priorities, however, the Britain-Israel intelligence collaboration has long been very fruitful.
In 2015, for instance, a tip-off from Mossad led British police to uncover a Hezbollah bomb factory in northwest London with three tons of ammonium nitrate hidden in disposable ice packs. And as we saw this week, when it comes to the threat of nuclear weapons, the London-Jerusalem relationship has proven priceless.
When I visited him at his home a few years ago, Ram Ben-Barak, the former deputy director of Mossad, told me that in the early-2000s, British spies had alerted Mossad to rumours about a nuclear programme in Deir ez-Zor in eastern Syria.
MI6 didn’t take the reports particularly seriously, he said. Mossad, however, viewed even a slim chance as a great danger and investigated the matter urgently. Thank God they did. On September 6, 2007 the Ehud Olmert government ordered the bombing of Bashar al-Assad’s nuclear programme.
At the time, many voices, both domestic and international, opposed the attack due to fears of escalation and instability. Even George W Bush – hardly a shrinking violet when it came to military action – refused to give it his blessing. Undeterred, Olmert and his defence minister, Ehud Barak, elected to go it alone.
Now that the contemptible Assad regime has collapsed, that decision looks especially shrewd. If Assad’s nukes hadn’t been destroyed by Israeli jets 17 years ago, Abu Mohammad al Jolani, the obscure 42-year-old terror chief who seized power in Syria last weekend, might well have found himself in control of them today.
It doesn’t bear thinking about. This is a man who took up the cause of jihad after being radicalised by the Second Intifada. This is a man who is literally named after the Golan Heights. Would he have been able to resist placing Tel Aviv in the nuclear crosshairs and pulling the trigger?
Bashar Assad’s rapid fall as president of Syria offers Israel and the United States a chance to bolster their regional security interests, experts said on Monday during a Jewish Institute for National Security of America online event.
“The Israelis don’t know what’s coming next—whether the next Syrian government will be hostile, and they want it to be as weak as possible, so they are actively targeting the Syrian military,” said Elliott Abrams, a former U.S. deputy national security advisor.
“What’s critical from the American national security point of view is that Syria not become a terrorist state along the lines of Al-Qaeda or ISIS, and that Syria no longer continues to be a highway of support for Hezbollah,” Abrams.
Israel has been using its air force to target chemical weapons stockpiles in recent days—“something they never could have done when there was an existing Syrian state because it would have been taken to be an act of war,” Abrams said.
“There are significant American interests in the region and now with this opportunity to destroy weaponry, Russia is losing out on its bases in the Mediterranean and this will weaken President Vladimir Putin,” he said.
John Hannah, a senior fellow at JINSA’s Center for Defense and Strategy, also addressed the online event. The incoming Trump administration won’t want to spend political capital intervening in Syria, he said.
“The president is making declarations about U.S. policy and meeting with foreign leaders, so we’re in this odd situation where it’s not exactly clear what U.S. policy is at a time of enormous opportunity to further weaken our worst adversaries in the region and establish a less threatening Syria,” Hannah said.
“I hope somehow we can get our act together with the Israelis to figure out what to do, because we may not have another opportunity to achieve the most important national security imperative for the United States, preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear weapon state,” he added.