Early morning, October 7, 2023, in Kibbutz Nir Oz, just a few miles from the Gaza border, Yarden Bibas, 34, his wife Shiri, 32, and their two red headed little boys, Ariel, 4, and Kfir, just 9 months old, were at home. At 6:30 am, five thousand Hamas terrorists stormed across the border in a coordinated massacre. Nir Oz was hit particularly hard – one in four residents was either killed or kidnapped back to Gaza. The Bibas family ran to their safe room and locked themselves inside. Yarden and Shiri decided that the only way to survive was for Yarden to return fire. He left the safe room to fend off the terrorists, buying time for Shiri and the boys. It did not work. He was swarmed, beaten bloody, and hauled off on a motorcycle by gunmen. Video footage later surfaced showing “civilians” in the mob, some spitting, some beating him, even filming like it was some kind of a spectacle. Then the terrorists got to Shiri. A viral clip shot from a terrorist’s body cam shows her surrounded, terrified, Ariel sucking a pacifier, Kfir hidden against her chest. They were herded out, marched through Nir Oz, then driven into Gaza where they were kept in a terror tunnel.

On January 19, 2025, Hamas and Israel signed on a cease fire. In the first phase, 33 hostages were released, 25 of them alive. Yarden was freed on February 1, alive but alone. The fact that Shiri and the boys were not released with him all but verified that they were not among the living. On February 20, Hamas handed over four bodies, supposedly Ariel, Kfir, Shiri, and Oded Lifshitz, another Nir Oz hostage. Forensic analysis at the Abu Kabir Institute confirmed that Ariel and Kfir had been dead since November 2023. While Hamas had contended that they were killed in an IAF strike, the forensics unequivocally determined that they had been brutally murdered by captors. The body claimed to be Shiri’s body was not. It belonged to an unidentified Palestinian woman. Shiri’s real remains came home on February 21. Whether this “mix-up” was due to malice or ineptitude will never be known. Shiri had suffered the same fate as her children. She, too, had been murdered underground in a Hamas terror tunnel. On February 26, Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir were buried near Nir Oz in the same casket.

Since October 7, the Bibas family has become a national symbol. They became symbols because they embodied Israel’s ethos – no one gets left behind – and its vulnerability. Kfir, the youngest victim, mirrored Israel’s innocence under threat; Shiri and Yarden, its resilience. They weren’t just hostages; they were Israel’s hostages, a unifying rallying cry in a divided country. And the color of that national cry was orange.

The orange connection started with Ariel and Kfir’s red hair, a rare, striking trait in Israel, where less than 2% are natural redheads. That fiery shade, caught in hostage photos and CCTV, stuck in people’s minds. By late 2023, orange balloons marked Kfir’s missed milestones, his first steps, his first birthday. People painted orange ribbons on walls near Nir Oz. It snowballed. Orange became the hostage movement’s color. Tel Aviv’s Habima Theater glowed orange at night; children wore orange bracelets at school rallies. When Yarden was freed and the boys’ bodies were returned, orange flags lined highways. Orange wasn’t planned like a marketing campaign; it grew organically from those redheaded boys and then stuck. Like a national scar – vivid and impossible to ignore.

The week of the funeral, buildings around the world were bathed in orange light in respect and in support. The Empire State Building in NYC, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, The Chain Bridge in Budapest, and the Knesset in Jerusalem all glowed orange. Orange became Israel’s scar tissue, and last week, the world wore it briefly.

I remember another orange rallying cry that was also centered around Gaza. It was the summer of 2005, and the Ariel Sharon government was about to pull off what he called “Separation” and what I called “Forced Evacuation,” uprooting every Jewish settler from Gaza. 21 settlements, nearly 9,000 people would be gone by September 12. Sharon’s unilateral Disengagement Plan was greenlit by the Knesset in February and set to reshape the region. It would certainly take the spotlight away from the growing number of legal issues that Sharon was having. But not everyone was on board – enter the Orange Movement.

The Orange Movement was a grassroots surge. I remember it well – my wife and I were part of it. We believed that leaving Gaza went against everything we believed in – settling the land, long-term security, and a biblical importance to the Land of Israel. It meant trusting terrorists who had done everything they could to betray our trust. The Orange Movement picked orange as their badge, a nod to Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, where the color stood for defiance against a rigged election. Here, it screamed opposition to Sharon’s plan. Cars sprouted orange ribbons on antennas, children wore orange T-shirts, and Jerusalem’s hills bloomed with the hue. In preparation for forced evacuation, the IDF decided to add a blue and white patch of the Israeli flag to soldier’s uniforms, but orange owned the resistance.

Beyond the Ukraine vibe, orange was practical. It was bright, bold, impossible to miss. It unified a messy coalition: settlers from Gush Katif (Gaza’s main settlement bloc), religious nationalists, and Likud members like (Now Prime Minister) Benjamin Netanyahu, who had quit Sharon’s cabinet over the evacuation. The color turned personal protest into a visual megaphone. 

The movement kicked into gear as the August 15 deadline loomed. More than 50,000 Israelis marched toward Gaza, aiming to flood Gush Katif and stop the pullout. On July 18, police boxed them in at Kfar Maimon, a town near the Gazan border. For three days, under scorching heat, it was a Woodstock of dissent: orange-clad teens, rabbis – some calling for illegally entering Gaza and others calling for restraint, settlers chanting for their homes. The Yesha Council, the settlers’ leadership, orchestrated it, but the IDF held firm, locking Gaza off. Smaller stunts followed, highway blockades, orange banners at rallies, but the big push fizzled.

August hit hard. Evictions started, and orange became defiance incarnate. In Neve Dekalim, the largest Israeli town in the Gaza Strip, settlers in orange clashed with troops, some locking arms on rooftops, others torching tires. The media captured scenes of children in orange facing soldiers – raw, emotional chaos. By August 23, the last settlers were evacuated, and then their houses were destroyed by IDF D9 bulldozers. Orange lingered as a scar. Protesters wore it at Tel Aviv’s 150,000-strong Rabin Square rally on August 11, one of Israel’s biggest ever. The Orange Movement didn’t stop the disengagement, but it left a mark. 

Today, orange from 2005 feels like a ghost tied to a lost fight but reborn with the Bibas tragedy. It is less about victory, more about memory: a color that once tried to hold Gaza now mourns what that evacuation caused. It has become crystal clear that the orange of 2005 led inexorably to the second orange one generation later. In an article in last weekend’s Makor Rishon, a Hebrew newspaper favored by the religious and the politically conservative, Nadav Shargai, a political pundit, discusses the relationship between the two oranges. Over the past few days, the results of an inquiry on the colossal failure of the IDF on October 7 have been published. The results are impossibly horrific. The IDF disregarded good intelligence on continued Hamas exercises near the border, proof positive that they were preparing for an all-out assault. The night before the massacre, thousands of terrorists switched the SIM cards in their phones to Israeli SIMs in preparation for a lengthy stay in Israel. IDF Intelligence took notice but did not consider it important enough to report up the change of command. The aides of the Head of Intelligence and of the Prime Minister were in such a deep slumber that they could not be awakened so they could inform their bosses of impending doom. And when the IDF did respond after the border wall had been breached, they did so in all the wrong places. Instead of bombing terrorists who were still swarming over the border wall, the IAF went out and bombed homes of Hamas leadership. Nevertheless, Shargai asserts that while the IDF shoulders significant blame, the massacre of October 7, 2023, was born in August 2005. When the Sharon Government unilaterally retreated from Gaza, when it lost all Human Intelligence (HUMINT) on the ground, when it put its trust in the Palestinian Authority to run Gaza only to see it overthrown by Hamas two years later, when the Netanyahu government repeatedly tried to keep Hamas quiet with briefcases full of Qatari cash, believing that Hamas was deterred and that all they wanted to do was keep their citizens fed and warm, when government after government and General after General threw billions of dollars in a border wall that was not designed repel a massive invasion, lessons that should have been learned with the Great Wall of China that could not keep out the Mongol hordes, the Maginot Line that could not stop a German assault, and the Bar Lev line that fell like a house of cards in the face of the Egyptian Army. 

Orange bred orange. Orange bled orange. But where from here? Shargai ends his op-ed with chilling words: “[Understanding the connection between 2005 and 2023] is critical so that we can investigate ourselves, understand what happened and know what to do to prevent a recurrence. And most importantly, so that we might not make the same colossal mistakes that nearly led to our downfall.”  The correlation between the two oranges is more than just ironic – it is nothing less than criminal.  

Good things,

Ari Sacher

Dave (not his real name) and I go back a long time, more than 50 years. He and I see life differently: I am more conservative in my views, and he is far more liberal. We disagree on a whole lot, but both of us are ardent Zionists. Even though we live more than 10,000 kilometers away from each other, we still converse regularly. Our talks go from zero to warp speed very quickly. On Friday, we had a long conversation about the release of 4 dead hostages from Hamas terror tunnels the day before. At the time, Israel had just discovered that the body that Hamas called “Shiri Bibas” was not her body. It was the body of an unidentified Palestinian woman. Israelis were furious, as was anyone with a heart. At the time of our conversation, Hamas had not yet returned the actual body of Shiri, who they had brutally murdered about 6 weeks after they had kidnapped her. (Later that evening, Hamas returned Shiri’s body with a vague explanation that managed to say nothing other than blaming the IDF). I told Dave that we could not continue down this path any longer. If there was one thing Hamas had shown the world, it was that they are a demonic entity. This entity must be destroyed, the same way that the German Nazis were destroyed after WWII. I said that making any further concessions was not only unreasonable, it was unacceptably dangerous to Israeli security. After all, Hamas had vowed time and time again that they would carry out as many October 7s as they could. Dave asked me, “But what of the hostages? Restarting the war in Gaza would doom the rest of the living hostages.” I posited that this is not necessarily true, as the hostages are the only bargaining chip that remains in the hands of the Hamas. I countered, “Doesn’t the good of the many outweigh the good of the few?” What follows is an edited summary of a transcript of our conversation. It’s still a bit messy, but I wanted to get it out to the blogosphere before the news cycle changes:

Dave: Your question cuts to the core of a classic ethical and strategic dilemma: balancing the immediate needs of a few – the hostages and their families – against the long-term security of the many –  Israel’s population, which is threatened by Hamas’s existence. Let’s break this down based on Israel’s stated primary goal of dismantling Hamas, the public’s clamor for hostage release, and the philosophical tension you’ve raised—whether the needs of the many do outweigh the needs of the few. 

The first thing we need to look at is the Strategic Picture: If Israel’s overriding objective is to dismantle Hamas, then its actions should prioritize weakening the group’s military, political, and social infrastructure in Gaza. Hamas has had a reign of terror in Gaza since 2007, it launched the October 7 attack that killed 1,200 and took 251 hostages, and it has sustained a war that has killed more than 400 IDF soldiers and nearly 50,000 Palestinians (if you can believe the Gaza health officials) and devastated large swaths of the Gaza Strip. Despite the January 2025 ceasefire, Hamas retains significant leverage: it still holds another 76 hostages, about half who are believed to be alive, controls large swaths of Gaza, and it has shown surprising resilience through propaganda and negotiation tactics. Dismantling Hamas entirely means either destroying its leadership and fighters or breaking its ideological hold over the “Gazan of the Street,” which requires a viable alternative kind of governance structure, something neither Israel nor its allies have yet fully articulated. 

Ari: The IDF’s degradation of Hamas’ capabilities is a critical goal. After a rough start, the IDF has taken out Hamas’ military and political leadership, people like Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Def. And the IDF has also destroyed many of their terror tunnels. That said, Hamas’ adaptability and the ceasefire’s constraints limit further progress. Prioritizing this goal suggests Israel should use the ceasefire as a tactical pause, not a permanent concession, and exploit any Hamas violation – like the Shiri Bibas incident – to justify resuming operations aimed at eradication of the organization. 

Dave: The Israeli public’s loud push to “release all hostages now” reflects a visceral, human response to the ordeal, amplified by cases like the Bibas family who have become symbols of October 7’s brutality, their red hair, and helpless pleas haunting Israel’s conscience. Just count the number of orange balloons at Hostage Square in Tel Aviv since last week. The return of their bodies has fueled outrage and despair. Families and supporters argue that every day in captivity risks more deaths, especially after the IDF confirmed Ariel and Kfir Bibas were brutally murdered and not killed by airstrikes, as Hamas had claimed. Public protests show a growing sentiment that saving the remaining hostages is a moral imperative, even if it means pausing or compromising the fight against Hamas. But here’s the disconnect you’ve flagged: the hostages aren’t Israel’s to release – Hamas holds them. Israel can only negotiate, concede, or fight to retrieve them. The public’s framing indicates growing frustration with the government’s perceived inaction, as if Netanyahu’s cabinet could snap its fingers and bring them home. This ignores the reality that Hamas dictates the terms of release, as seen in the phased ceasefire deal. Every concession strengthens Hamas’ hand, potentially undermining the goal of dismantling it. 

Your invocation of “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” evokes Spock’s utilitarian logic from the second “Star Trek ” movie, but it’s a principle rooted in real-world philosophy too. Applied here, it suggests that Israel’s 9 million citizens, who face Hamas rockets, tunnels, and ideological threat, take precedence over the remaining hostages and their families. The math is stark: securing the nation’s future by eliminating Hamas could prevent countless future deaths, while prioritizing the hostages risks prolongs the group’s existence, emboldening it to repeat October 7 as many times as it can. Historically, Israel has leaned the other way, by valuing the few. The 2011 Gilad Shalit deal saw 1,027 prisoners swapped for one soldier, including Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of October 7. That trade saved Shalit but arguably cost lives later. The “needs of the few” resonates deeply in Jewish ethics. Pidyon Shvuyim (redeeming captives) is a core value, and it is part and parcel of Israel’s social contract, where every citizen’s life carries outsized weight in a small, tight-knit nation. The public clamor reflects this: letting the hostages die or rot in Gaza feels like abandoning the covenant that “no one gets left behind.” Yet, the strategic lens flips this. Hamas’ survival threatens the many because its charter calls for Israel’s destruction, and its actions prove intent. If Israel bends too far to free hostages now by releasing even more high-value terrorists or completely pulling the IDF out of Gaza, it might delay or even prevent dismantling Hamas, leaving the root intact to regrow. The Shiri Bibas incident, whether caused by evil or incompetence, underscores that Hamas can’t be trusted to honor deals, suggesting that concessions might not even guarantee the hostages’ safe return. 

Ari: So what should Israel do? I’m willing to concede that given the primary goal of dismantling Hamas, the needs of the many should guide policy, but not dogmatically. Israel can’t ignore the hostages because their plight fuels national unity and moral legitimacy. Nevertheless, it shouldn’t let that dictate strategy at the expense of long-term security. 

Dave and I thought about a what a pragmatic approach might look like, and we came up with this:

1. Exploit Hamas’ Violation: Use the Shiri Bibas corpse swap as leverage to suspend prisoner releases or escalate targeted strikes on Hamas assets, framing it as a response to bad faith. This pressures Hamas without fully breaking the ceasefire. (Israel did just this: After 6 living hostages were returned on Saturday, Israel refused to release 600 prisoners that it was meant to release that day).

2. Pursue Hostages Tactically: Intensify intelligence efforts to locate and extract more hostages, as done successfully in past rescues, rather than relying solely on negotiations that empower Hamas. This was more Dave’s idea than mine. I felt that the chances of locating additional hostages in Gaza are slim, especially after the IDF has pulled back most of their forces, severely reducing the amount of Human Intelligence (HUMINT). Even with the IDF in full force in Gaza, only 8 hostages were rescued. 

3. Prepare the Public: Netanyahu’s government should level with citizens that dismantling Hamas may come at a cost of the lives of some of the hostages, but it’s the only way to end the cycle. Transparency could temper the “release them now” outcry by aligning it with the broader mission. We both agreed that this was the most important part of our approach.

4. Set a Deadline: Give Hamas a firm timeline, say 48 hours after the next scheduled release, to return all of the remaining hostages, with clear consequences – military or otherwise – if the deadline goes unmet. 

The needs of the many do indeed outweigh the needs of the few in a cold, utilitarian sense – Israel’s survival trumps 76 lives in a vacuum. But in practice, the two aren’t fully separable: failing to save hostages will erode public trust, which Israel needs to sustain a war on Hamas. The trick is threading the needle, pushing to dismantle Hamas while seizing every feasible chance to free hostages, without letting the latter derail the former. Hamas thrives on this tension. Israel’s challenge is not to let it win by default.

Good things,

Ari Sacher

Last Thursday evening, February 13, 2025, a rocket was fired into Israel from a location in central Gaza. It was unclear who fired the rocket – Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), or some other terrorist group – and it was unclear what was its target. The going assumption is that given its trajectory, the rocket was aimed at Kibbutz Beeri. It is also unclear what type of rocket it was – it could have been a Katyusha, a mortar, or perhaps even some kind of home-made rocket. The reason that so little is known about the incident is because the rocket flew for only a very short period of time until it crashed in Gaza in the Nusseirat Refugee Camp, killing a 14-year old boy. The firing of the rocket at sovereign Israeli territory was a flagrant breach of the ceasefire agreement signed on January 19, not even one month ago.

Israel’s response would be critical. Would it strike back forcefully? Would it strike back in the sort of tit-for-tat game that Israel played with Hamas and Hezbollah until October 7? Or would Israel not respond at all? Betzalel Smotrich, the Ministry of Finance and the Head of the Religious Zionist Party, publicly reached out to Prime Minister Netanyahu on X telling him, “[This is] a moment for a harsh and disproportionate response that will make it clear that we are not returning to the [security] concept of October 6th.” Smotrich refers to what Israelis now refer to as the “conception” that posited that Hamas was deterred before the massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, and that all that was required was a slap on the wrist. Smotrich continued, “A rocket was fired from Gaza toward Israel. Mr. Prime Minister, this is a watershed moment. A moment for a strong and disproportionate response that will clarify that Israel isn’t going back to its pre-October 7 practice of limited reaction to rocket launches.” The word “disproportionate” might not be the correct word as it has a scent of being unfair. The word “powerful” would have been perhaps a better choice in relaying the message. Israel should not limit itself by destroying the launcher, rather, it should take out some buildings suspected of hiding munitions. And there are plenty of such buildings in Gaza.

Israel’s first official response after announcing that a rocket had been fired from Gaza was, “The IDF is committed to fully implementing the conditions of the agreement for the return of the hostages.” Later that evening, the IDF identified the location of the rocket launcher and promptly destroyed it. The right wing political pundit, Amit Segal, wrote on his X account, “Classic October 6 response.” Had Israel learned nothing from the Massacre of October 7? Did they not learn over the past year that our adversaries respect power, and only power? The only way Hamas was convinced to sign on the ceasefire, essentially the same ceasefire it had refused to sign on numerous times in the past sixteen months, was because the IDF had turned Gaza into a pile of smoking rubble. Hamas stood to lose more than it would gain by continuing the fighting. Why change a strategy that works? Is Israel that plain dumb?

Maybe not. Two days after the Gaza rocket attack, the IAF conducted an air raid in Lebanon that targeted and killed Hezbollah operative Abbas Ahmad Hamoud. Hamoud was responsible for Hezbollah’s fleet of drones. He was, for all intents and purposes, the Chief of the Hezbollah Air Force. After Fuad Shukr, the leader of Hezbollah’s military wing, had been assassinated by Israel in July 2024, Hamoud was about as high-ranking as they get. His assassination held long-term strategic importance for Israel. The IDF said that Hamoud was targeted after repeatedly violating the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire by launching drones toward Israel, in breach of the ceasefire signed with Hezbollah on December 15, 2024. Even though these drones were used only for reconnaissance – they were not “suicide drones” equipped with a warhead of any kind – Israel still considered the flights as breaches of the ceasefire. The IDF added in a statement, “The IDF continues to operate to remove any threat to the State of Israel and will operate to prevent any attempt by the Hezbollah terrorist organization to establish itself, which is contrary to the understandings reached between Israel and Lebanon.” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz described the launch of the drones as “a red line” and “a blatant violation” of the ceasefire agreement. He added, “As I warned, if there are drones, there will be no Hezbollah.” The IDF is fully capable of backing up that threat, and Hezbollah knows so. It is expected that Hezbollah reconnaissance drones will not be seen over Israeli skies for the near foreseeable future.

The obvious question is why did the Hamas rocket attack merit such a muted IDF response while the same IDF responded with such immense force over the Hezbollah drone overflights? Both provocations were in clear breach of a ceasefire. Why was this breach different from all other breaches?

An answer to this question can be found in the first words published by the IDF immediately after the Hamas rocket attack: “The IDF is committed to fully implementing the conditions of the agreement for the return of the hostages.” What does the return of the hostages have to do with exploding rockets? How was this statement meant to make Hamas shake in their boots? At the outset of war, Israel had two primary goals: the complete destruction of Hamas as a military and administrative power, and the return of the 251 Israelis, dead and alive, who had been taken hostage on the day of the Massacre. More recently, especially as Israel and Hamas entered earnest discussions towards a ceasefire, the primary goal of the government and the IDF had most definitely shifted to the release of the hostages. To many but not all Israelis, this has become the only goal of the war. Families and friends of the released hostages openly express immense relief and joy. Emotional scenes are witnessed as hostages are reunited with their loved ones. Israelis gather in public places to watch the live coverage of the releases. As the hostages are released emaciated and sickly, the criticality of the release of all the hostages, at any cost, has become imperative. The government and the IDF are afraid of doing anything that will jeopardize their safety. The hostages are a get-out-of-jail-free card to the Hamas. While Hamas cannot act with impunity, they are treated by the IDF with kid gloves in comparison with the treatment received by Hezbollah.

This could turn out to be very problematic for Israel. Hamas has no interest in freeing all of the hostages because once that happens, Israel will have no reason to step on the brakes. Even if the IDF leaves Gaza completely under the rubric of a peace treaty, there will remain no reason for them to hold their fire. It is all too possible that in the not-so-distant future, Chaim Katz might be quoted as saying, “As I warned, if there are [rockets/tunnels/signs-of-rearming], there will be no Hamas.” The IDF will be fully capable of backing up that threat and Hamas will know so.  But if the hostages remain in Hamas’ hands, then the safety of Hamas is guaranteed, at least for the meantime. It’s all a game of economics. We conclude with a quote from Robert Aumann, an American-born Israeli who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2005 for his work in Game Theory, “All these cries for peace we hear in Israel, especially from our side, do not bring peace any closer, they only push it away. If you chase peace it only eludes you. That’s not game theory; that’s history.”

Good things,

Ari Sacher

I was giving a talk last week about current events in Israel, and I was asked a seemingly innocuous question: “Is Israel getting everything it needs from the U.S. in order to defend itself?” I answered that the answer to the question was far more complex than a simple “yes” or “no.” 

From the outset, it must be stated that the arms provided to Israel by the U.S. since October 7 have been critical to the war effort. Until January 1, 2025, the U.S. had given Israel about $22 billion in aid. Broadly speaking, Israel operates two types of weapons: defensive weapons and offensive weapons.

Defensive weapons include anti-missile systems like Iron Dome and David’s Sling, systems that have been used in the war with great success to intercept weapons fired from Iran and her proxies. Defensive systems also include the Trophy Active Protection System (APS) installed on IDF tanks and other military vehicles. Trophy acts like a miniature Iron Dome, shooting down rocket propelled grenades and anti-armor missiles before they can hit the vehicle. Offensive systems include unguided heavy bombs, like the 1-ton Mk 84 and the half-ton Mk 83, precision GPS-guided munitions including JDAM and Small Diameter Bomb (SDB) munitions. The IDF uses these weapons to destroy large buildings hiding arms-caches, rocket production facilities, and more. Another offensive weapon is the Caterpillar D9 bulldozer. The D9 is a beast. It weighs 44 tons. Its size, durability, and reliability have made it one of the most large bulldozers in the world. The D9 was not designed as a military vehicle. It was designed for use in the construction industry, and it is used in construction sites around the world, Israel included. Nevertheless, the features that make the D9 popular for construction applications make it desirable for military applications, as well. The IDF has even added armor to the D9 to make it more survivable. The IDF uses the D9 to lead the way for the infantry. It demolishes buildings, clears wreckage, and removes Improvised Explosive Devices (IED). It is one of the main combat engineering tools of the IDF.

Getting back to the question of whether Israel is getting everything it needs from the U.S. to defend itself, the answer is “yes.” The U.S. has provided funding for procurement of Israeli interceptors manufactured or partially manufactured in the U.S., such as Iron Dome and Arrow-3. According to media reports, the U.S. even airlifted hardware to Israel. The hardware came from Iron Dome batteries that the U.S. purchased from Israel earlier in the decade. It can be unequivocally stated that any request to the U.S. for defensive aid by Israel since October 7 was immediately granted.

Offensive weaponry is a different kettle of fish. Immediately after the war began, the U.S. airlifted large quantities of military equipment to Israel, equipment that included precision guided munitions such as JDAM and SDB. But as the war dragged on, the flow of offensive weaponry slowed. The amount of bombs delivered was far below the quantity that Israel required. D9s that were ordered by Israel using U.S.-provided Foreign Military Funds (FMF) were not delivered at all. The alleged reason for this is that the U.S. took issue with Israeli offensives in southern Gaza, especially in the heavily-populated Hamas stronghold of Khan Yunis and the city of Rafah on the southern border, a border beneath which Hamas had been smuggling large amounts of weapons into Gaza. In October 2024, the U.S. openly threatened to curtail military aid to Israel unless it allowed “sufficient” humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. So while Israel did indeed receive from the U.S. everything that it needed to protect itself, it did not receive everything it needed to win the war.

The Trump Administration has not only returned the flow of offensive weaponry to Israel, it has supercharged it. Last month, President Trump lifted the suspension of provision of one-ton bombs to Israel because “they paid for them, and they have been waiting for them for a long time.” More than 100 D9s that had been put on the back burner by the previous Administration are also being shipped to Israel. Israel will use these weapons to accomplish its goal to utterly defeat Hamas so as to ensure that October 7 never repeats itself. 

There is a fallacy that Israel builds its defense posture on missile defense, and that if its defensive shield is strong enough, it will not have to go to war. This is a pipedream. Imagine a knight in shining armor. He meets a genie who gives him a suit of armor made of titanium and Kevlar, able to deflect not only the thrust of the enemy’s sword, but bullets from large-caliber guns. If that knight goes into battle wearing that suit of armor, he will not be defeated. But unless he is armed with a serious sword, he will not emerge victorious. For nearly 25 years, Israel has fought an essentially defensive war with Hamas. Hamas would fire rockets on Israel, and Israel would intercept them. Israel built a wall around Gaza to protect against an invasion. Every few years, Israel would fight a short and limited war with Hamas and its proxies. Israeli Military called it “mowing the lawn.” They referred to the situation as “the war between wars.” At the same time, the Hamas cancer was festering unabated. They used the cement that was provided as humanitarian aid to build a network of terror tunnels. They built underground rocket factories and accumulated nearly 100,000 rockets of all shapes and sizes. They smuggled in weapons made in places like North Korea and Syria under the Rafah border in tunnels that were large enough for a truck to drive through. Every few years, the Israelis attacked and incurred some relatively minor damage. Hamas continued to prepare for a battle that would implement its goal of the destruction of the State of Israel. On October 7, Hamas pulled the trigger, and Israel found itself woefully unprepared.

To prevent a recurrence of October 7, Israel must finish the job of rooting Hamas out of Gaza. This is possible, as discussed recently in this blog. But in order to finish the job, Israel requires full support from the U.S. – both diplomatic support and military support. A popular adage in Israel these days is “Together we will win.” All Israelis are under fire, regardless of politics, religion, or any other superficial characteristic. The same adage is equally relevant to the U.S. Only if the two countries work together can Israel be granted long-term security. 

Call me an optimist, but it certainly looks like things are moving in the right direction.

Good things,

Ari Sacher

On October 7, Hamas blew a gaping hole not only in the high-tech barrier separating Gaza from Israel, but, more importantly, in the IDF’s defense posture. The IDF based its defense posture on the use of remote weapon stations called “Ro’ah-Yora (RY),” or “See-and-Shoot.” Each RY consists of a television camera and a remote controlled gun. Both the camera and the gun are controlled from a distant location in some air-conditioned room in some army base. The camera is high-definition. It can see in both day and night, and it can zoom in and out as required by the mission. The concept of operations (CONOPS) goes something like this: 

1. The RY cameras are manned by a team of operators highly trained in reconnaissance.

2. When the operator detects a potential “event,” such as terrorists approaching the barrier, the operator zooms in and detects the number of terrorists as well as their armament.

3. The RY camera automatically tracks the terrorists. 

4. The RY gun automatically slews to the location at the center of the video picture.

5. If required, the operator fires the gun with extremely high accuracy.

Hamas knew about RY, and they had developed a plan to negate the system. By October 7, Hamas had accumulated a large number of DJI Matrice 600 Pro drones. These drones have 6 rotors and can carry quite a large payload. They are available on the internet for only $11,999.00, a small price to pay for a massacre. The only problem with the drones is smuggling them into Gaza, a problem that Hamas found easily surmountable. Hamas armed the drones with grenades and other readily available explosive charges. On the morning of October 7, the drones were launched, and they flew methodically, one-by-one, over each RY station on the barrier, dropping their explosive payload and putting the RY camera out of action. Once RY was put out of action, the IDF was flying blind. You cannot hit what you cannot see. Hamas operatives took advantage of the “darkness” and quickly swarmed out of nearby tunnels, storming and breaching the barrier, and entering Israel. The IDF was completely unaware of Hamas capabilities. They had put all their eggs in one basket, so to say, and in ten minutes, all of their eggs had been smashed.

Counterintuitively, remote cameras could have been used to repulse the Hamas invasion and perhaps even to prevent it. Let me explain. Hamas breached the barrier in four separate locations: One breach in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, near the town of Sederot, another two breaches, immediately north and south of Kibbutz Beeri in the middle of the Strip, and another breach near Kibbutz Magen, in the south of the Strip. From the northern breach, terrorists split up and attacked nearby towns including Kfar Azza and Nahal Oz. From the middle breaches, they attacked Beeri and the Nova Festival near Re’im. From the southern breach, they attacked towns that included Kerem Shalom and Nir Yitzchak. After the barrier was breached, an emergency alarm went out to all towns in the Gaza Envelope that an attack was underway, that the residents should hide in bomb shelters, and that local emergency squads should arm themselves and go to their designated positions. From that moment on, each town was essentially on its own. Each town had to fend for itself until the army showed up. In certain places, the army took more than ten hours to arrive. The main reasons for the delay were chaos and the lack of Situational Awareness (SA). SA, as far as the army is concerned, refers to the ability to identify, process, and comprehend the critical elements of information about an environment, particularly one that is variable and complex. You can only hit something if you know where it is. 

Air Defense lives and breathes on SA. An Iron Dome operator needs to know everything that is flying in the sky: Incoming threats, his own interceptors, and a 787 coming in to land at Ben Gurion Airport. He has to know where he may not overfly, such as over critical military installations and civilian infrastructure. Much of this information changes in real time, so the Iron Dome operator must keep up with the flow of information. On October 7, the IDF lacked SA. They did not have a clear picture of where Hamas terrorists were, how many of them were at any given location, and which direction they were heading. Had they had access to this information, they could have planned a response, sending soldiers to the places where they were needed when they were needed. They could have used SA to predict the location of the next attacks, for instance, at more distant cities such as Netivot and Ofakim.

Iron Dome SA uses a high-powered computer to fuse data from as many sensors as it can get its virtual hands on. It fuses radar data from Air Defense Systems, from airports, both civilian and military, and even from weather radars. The data is processed and an instantaneous “Sky Picture” is produced. This Sky Picture forms the backbone of SA. One can imagine a similar system for a ground-based SA, but where airborne SA requires radars, ground-based SA requires video. A ground-based SA would monitor a slew of video feeds. Sources could include highway cameras, cameras on the perimeter fences of towns, on drones, both civilian and military, on boats in the Mediterranean Sea, and even the cameras from the cell phones of passers-by. First, the data would be geo-located, meaning, determining the geographical location where the camera is looking. Then, real-time video analysis would be performed. The analysis would identify weapons, convoys of vehicles moving at high speed, and large gatherings of people. It would identify not only threats, but also their development. Due to the huge volume of data, the analysis would have to be performed automatically, using Artificial Intelligence (AI). With an SA system in place on October 7, things would have worked as follows: The SA would have scanned videos from the perimeter fences of Kibbutz Kfar Azza and Nahal Oz and from highway cameras on Route 25, connecting the two Kibbutzim with Netivot, and it would have predicted that those 14 pickup trucks with machine guns on the roof speeding at 80 miles an hour were headed for Netivot. Soldiers could have been sent in time to defend the town before the attack took place. Had such an SA been in place on October 7, things would have turned out very differently. The IDF would have known where to send troops, how many troops to send, and how to get there without being fired upon. Moreover, SA could have been used to prevent the massacre altogether. The nights before the massacre, IDF observers noticed strange activity from Hamas, as if they were rehearsing some kind of an attack. When the observers reported this activity to their superiors, they were rebuffed and accused of being alarmists. The last time they tried to alert their superiors was at 2:00 am on October 7, four and a half hours before the attack. IDF brass told them to stand down. Had an SA system been in place, it could have analyzed the video data and determined that the same terrorists were using the same tactics and the same weapons night after night, and that they were, with a high probability, practicing for an imminent attack. IDF troops would have preemptively been sent to the Gaza envelope. Helicopter gunships would have been launched, lying in wait for a Hamas assault. Hamas would either have changed their plans or been defeated.

Not only AI-driven SA systems deployed on Israeli borders, but there is a pressing need for deployment in Judea and Samaria (J&S) as well. “Operation Iron Wall” was started by the IDF on January 21, 2025 to eradicate terrorism in northern Samaria, especially branches of Hamas. The operation began in the Jenin refugee camp but has since expanded to other towns in Samaria, including Tulkarm, Qabatia, and Shechem. Over the past few months, the number of acts of terror in J&S, from shootings to stabbings to Molotov cocktails, has skyrocketed. The Palestinian Authority is either unwilling or unable to stem the violence. The only way to prevent another Gaza-like sovereign terror entity was to forcefully enter local towns.

Operation Iron Wall has uncovered not only terrorists and tools of terror, but it has also uncovered a well-organized and wide-reaching terror infrastructure. The potential for an event similar to the October 7 Massacre in J&S is no longer inconceivable. All Israeli towns in J&S – towns in settlement blocs as well as outposts – as well as Israeli towns near the Green Line, such as Kfar Saba or Hadera, are susceptible to a terror attack coming simultaneously from multiple towns in multiple directions. Having an AI-driven SA system in place would not only identify that a terror attack is taking place, but it could also piece together clues that such an attack is imminent. It could also predict the evolution of an attack that has already begun, enabling the IDF to optimize deployment and to save lives.

The U.S. can benefit greatly from an AI-driven SA system. The border wall between the U.S. and Mexico is designed primarily to prevent illegal entrance into the U.S. of individual aliens, perhaps a busload or two. Like the Gaza barrier, it is not designed to stop a concerted attack. AI-driven SA could enable capabilities on the border previously thought impossible. Deployed in towers across the border wall, on drones deployed across the entire length of the border, and even on ships in the Gulf of America and the Pacific Ocean, it will analyze foot traffic near the wall and traffic patterns on Mexican roads in order to identify potential infiltrations. It will recognize preparations for distributed multi-location acts of terror, and it will recognize armed pickup trucks that need special consideration. With seaborne access to videos of vehicle traffic, not only in Mexico but in countries all across Central America, the SA can recognize evolving trends before they come anywhere near the U.S. – Mexican border.

Development of such an AI-Driven SA is already beginning in Israel. Israel is an AI powerhouse, especially in the fields of SA, image processing, and Physical Security Information Management (SIM). A working system should be up and running within a few years. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has much to gain by collaborating with Israel to secure our borders and the borders of our allies.  

Good things,

Ari Sacher

A ceasefire and a hostage/prisoner exchange was agreed to by Israel and Hamas on January 15, and came into effect on January 19. The ceasefire was brokered by Egypt and Qatar. Most of the negotiations took place in Qatar, a country that does not currently have diplomatic relations with Israel. A lesser number of negotiations took place in Cairo. A large number of high-ranking Israeli officials engaged in a sort of inverse “shuttle diplomacy,” where the mediators remained in two locations and the warring parties traveled back and forth between mediators.

Nitzan David Fuchs (NDF) is a senior geopolitical analyst at Infinity Investment House, consultant in the field to the Ministry of Defense, a lecturer and an author. He is most famous for his Hebrew podcast, called “The Great Game,” in which he analyzes global geopolitical conundrums. NDF can always be counted on to offer a line of sight that most people have never thought of. This week, he peers under the hood of the agreement hammered out between Israel and Hamas. But rather than analyzing the content and terms of the agreement, he takes a step back and asks a simple question: “How is it that Egypt and Qatar are still part of the game?” 

Let me explain. Both Qatar and Egypt have supported Hamas, either directly or indirectly, above the table or below the table, since long before October 7. 

Qatar: Qatari support for Hamas is overt:

1. Until November, Qatar sheltered Hamas leadership within its borders. Most prominent was Khaled Mashal, the Hamas envoy abroad. Mashal’s wealth is estimated at $2-5 billion, and he has lived a life of luxury in Doha for the past 10 years. He survived a botched assassination attempt by the Israeli Mossad in 1997 in Jordan. He faced harsh criticism during the war for urging Gazans to hold their ground while he himself moved between Qatar’s 5-star resort hotels. Ismail Haniyeh, Mashal’s predecessor, also lived in Qatar until his assassination by Israel in July 2024 in Tehran. Haniyeh also lived in the lap of luxury. 

2. Qatar has until this day explicitly supported Hamas, including their right to retain sovereign power in Gaza. Qatar's education system has promoted antisemitic and anti-Israel content in kindergartens, schools, universities, and summer camps, conveying that Jews are “enemies of Allah” and presenting Palestine as stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, essentially negating Israel's existence. 

3. The Al-Jazeera network, one of the most vociferously anti-Israel media networks in the world, is based in Qatar and receives funding from the government of Qatar, making it a tool for Qatari projection of soft power.

   
   

Egypt: Egypt’s sin has been one of neglect. For years, Egypt has turned a blind eye as Hamas built a network of tunnels underneath the Philadelphi Corridor connecting Gaza with the Sinai Peninsula, fondly referred to in these parts as “Al-Kaedastan.” These tunnels served as conduits through which Hamas smuggled weapons, ammunition and explosives from Iran and North Korea into Gaza. Egypt could not have been unaware of these tunnels – the Egyptian Army is deployed in large numbers near the Gazan border. Either Army officers were taking bribes from Hamas operatives or the Egyptian government was giving its implicit approval.

Both Egypt and Qatar support Hamas. How, then, can they be considered fair brokers? Further, both countries have a vested strategic interest in Hamas remaining in control in Gaza. Hamas gives Egypt political leverage over Israel, and it amplifies Egyptian diplomatic importance in its ability to broker between Hamas and Israel. For Qatar, support for Hamas is its way of showing that it supports the Palestinian cause, an ever-popular topic in the Arab world, increasing its influence within the Middle East and with the U.S.  Removing Hamas from the equation would be a blow to both the Egyptians and the Qataris.

Qatar has worked long and hard to refine its global image and to increase its influence in the West. In 2011, Qatar purchased the prestigious Paris St Germain (PSG) soccer club. It has donated millions to universities (some accuse Qatar of fomenting pro-Hamas riots on university campuses around the world), and has situated itself as a broker in crises around the world, most notably in the Ukraine-Russia War. These investments have helped to deflect pressure being applied to Qatar at the beginning of the October 7 war as well as accusations that it was collaborating with Hamas.

NDF accuses Israel of misplaying its hand against Qatar. Rather than insisting on the replacement of Qatar and Egypt as brokers with Hamas, Israel has not only made its peace with the situation, it has promised to allow it to continue. According to media reports, Qatar will take a large part in the rebuilding of Gaza. It is highly conceivable that Qatari money will continue to finance Hamas and its institutions, cementing its influence on Gaza in the near term and likely in the long term, as well. And after the IDF retreat from the Philadelphi corridor, scheduled for Phase 2 of the ceasefire with Hamas, Egypt will once again retain ownership over the Gaza-Sinai border, including all the financial benefits therein.

Truth be told, Israel can claim that there is no other choice. These were the cards we were dealt – no other country has offered to broker the ceasefire with Hamas. Would Israel rather see Turkey and Iran, two countries vying for Middle Eastern hegemony, leading the negotiations? NDF asserts that this claim misses the point completely. Israel could have and should have applied force on Qatar and Egypt, making them pay for their brokership and for any concessions that Israel would have to make to Hamas. Qatari normalization with Israel and joint IDF-Egypt control of the Philadelphi Corridor come to mind. The least Israel could have done was to insist that Qatar and Egypt apply pressure to Hamas to meet Israel in the middle. This clearly did not happen, as Hamas has not substantially changed their bargaining position since October 7. Simultaneously, Israel could have begun ramping up the pressure on Gaza, perhaps by implementing the Segmentation Plan discussed last week in this column, and warning Hamas that if it did not bend to Israeli demands – say, buffer zones and IDF presence on the Philadelphi and Netzarim Corridors and deportation of Hamas leadership – then the pressure would be raised even further. 

This did not happen. Israel essentially backed into current cease fire, albeit with a certain amount of encouragement from the Trump Administration. Israel accepted essentially all of the directives issued by the “honest brokers,” and it certainly appears that this will remain the modus vivendi for the near foreseeable future.  Qatar and Egypt will continue to solidify their hold on Gaza, and Israel will continue to “benefit” from it in the next round.

And make no mistake, there will be a next round.

Good things,

Ari Sacher

Since October 7, 2023, Houthi rebels in Yemen have launched more than 40 ballistic missiles and some 320 drones and cruise missiles at Israel. In the vast majority of the attacks, the missiles have been intercepted by Israeli or American air defenses, or have fallen short before reaching the country. However, a few drones and missiles have impacted their targets, causing casualties and damage. In December 2024, 16 people were wounded in a drone attack. In July, a drone killed 1 Israeli and wounded several others. Both attacks occurred in Tel Aviv, Israel’s largest city. While the Houthis always claim to be targeting some military location, it is always civilian targets that are hit. 

Because of the tremendous performance of Israel’s integrated missile defense shield, Houthi attacks have been largely reduced to the category of “nuisance.” Most of the ballistic missiles are intercepted before they even enter Israeli airspace. That said, they have still caused considerable damage. The reason for this is that Israeli anti-missile systems are designed to destroy the warhead of the threat. After the destruction of the warhead, there is still a considerable amount of debris that falls to the earth, sometimes hundreds of miles from the intercept point. Recently, an empty 300-lb fuel tank from a Houthi missile fell on a house in a small town about 15 miles west of Jerusalem, embedding itself in the roof of a house. The residents escaped unharmed because they had entered a bomb shelter, as per the rules of the Home Front Command. An additional cost of the Houthi attacks stems from the Houthi strategy of firing at Israel’s densely populated midriff, consisting of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and everything in between, a total of about 5 million people, and launching their missiles at about 2:00 a.m. The ensuing disruption to civilian life, including the psychological stress of being awakened by sirens and the need to seek shelter – on any given night, dozens of Israelis have been injured running for bomb shelters – has led to lost productivity and increased healthcare costs. In addition, many of the Houthi missiles target the southern Israeli port city of Eilat. Eilat is now, for all intents and purposes, under siege. Before October 7, all new cars shipped from Asia were delivered to the Eilat Port. Today, that port no longer functions because it is economically unfeasible to ship goods via the Persian Gulf. Goods are now shipped around the Horn of Africa, increasing time and costs. The Eilat economy has suffered immensely.

The Houthis claim to be firing on Israel in support of Hamas in Gaza. This is only partially true. The Houthis are firing on Israel because they are the southernmost Iranian proxy in the Iranian “Ring of Fire” surrounding Israel. Iran supports the Houthi rebels in Yemen through various means. Iran supplies the Houthis with weapons, including ballistic missiles, drones, and launchers. Iranian military advisors and experts assist the Houthis with training and operational planning, providing guidance on using advanced weaponry and tactics. Financial assistance from Iran helps sustain the Houthi operations and maintain their control over Western Yemen. Additionally, Iran aids in smuggling weapons and other supplies to the Houthis through complex networks that evade international sanctions and blockades. Politically, Iran offers diplomatic backing to the Houthis, advocating for their cause in international forums and providing a platform for their political messages. In return for this multifaceted Iranian support, the Houthis serve as a southern base from which to attack Israel. Yemen, while close enough to Israel to attack it with inexpensive weapons, is far enough from Israel to make reprisal raids costly and complex.

This is not to say reprisal attacks have not happened. Israel has conducted three airstrikes on Yemen since the Massacre of October 7. The first attack occurred in July 2024, targeting the Hodeidah port after a drone hit Tel Aviv. A second, more extensive, strike took place in September, targeting infrastructure in western Yemen, including ports and power plants used by the Houthis. The most recent attack occurred in December, in which the Sana’a airport and power grid were severely damaged. This last attack was carried out immediately after a smaller airstrike by the American-British coalition currently based in the Persian Gulf to protect civilian shipping lanes, indicating that Israel is operating with full coalition support. The exact number of Israel Air Force (IAF) aircraft involved in these raids has not been publicly disclosed. However, these operations typically involve a combination of fighter jets, drones, and support aircraft to ensure the success and safety of the mission, and they require extensive preparation, making return fire costly and creating a time-lag between the cause and the effect.

Continued Houthi rocket fire is, for the moment, not untenable, but it is a disaster waiting to happen. It is also an economic strain. Its effect on shipping lanes to the Far East and on Eilat is considerable. What can Israel do about it? 

So far, reprisal attacks on Yemen have had no marked effect on reducing the frequency of attacks. When the ceasefire with Hamas was announced in mid-January, the Houthis publicly announced that they would be holding their fire. The ceasefire gives Israel some time to conceive a new strategy. Some assert that the next step should be to apply “maximum pressure” on Yemen by hitting its “Symbols of Sovereignty,” such as the House of Parliament, or its oil fields, or by targeted killings of its military and political leadership. 

Another approach that has been suggested is to work behind the scenes to expand the American-British coalition in the Persian Gulf to additional countries such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia, perhaps going so far as to create a naval siege on Yemen. The problem with this approach is that it has been tried in the past, and it has failed miserably. In 2015, Saudi Arabia imposed an air and sea blockade on Yemen that severely restricted the flow of vital commercial and humanitarian goods into the country. According to the UN World Food Programme (WFP), the blockade has created a humanitarian crisis in which hundreds of thousands of children are dying each year because of famine. Whether this is true or not is irrelevant – the optics of starving children is terrible. The Saudi blockade is still in place, and yet it has had no measurable effect on the Houthis. It will remain this way as long as the Iranians continue to airlift supplies and weapons into Yemen.

Dr. Yagil Henkin, a lecturer on military thought, history, and strategy at the IDF Command and Staff College, and a Research Associate at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies (JISS), wrote an Op-Ed on this topic in this week’s Makor Rishon, an Israeli newspaper aimed at the politically conservative and religiously observant. He posits unequivocally that Israel should not be striking back at Yemen, but, rather, at Iran. At the end of the day, the price for Houthi aggression must be paid for by the country that funded the aggression in the first place. According to this strategy, first Iran covers Houthi expenses and then it covers the mess made by the very same Houthis. Call it “paying in installments.” Henkin asserts that punishing Iran does not need to be accomplished to the sound of trumpets. Indeed, this would be counterproductive as Iran, according to its self-conceived rules of engagement, would be forced to respond. A “quiet” Israeli response could consist of attacks on Iranian shipping vessels, “accidents” at its military facilities, explosions for which no actor takes responsibility, cyber attacks on Iranian banks, sanctions against any Iranian involved in terror activity and any Iranian organization that funds terror. Henkin writes, “Yemen’s actions against Israel should lead to Iran’s life becoming more difficult, and it losing capabilities that it would have preferred to preserve. The Houthis are an Iranian proxy: it would be a mistake to respond against the envoy rather than the source.”

Attacking Iran directly, rather than Yemen, in response to Houthi aggression, could disrupt the primary source of support for the Houthis, serving as a stronger deterrent and having a more significant strategic impact. Striking Iran would send a clear message to both Iran and its proxies, potentially causing Iranian leadership to reconsider their actions. This approach targets the root of the problem, aiming to weaken Iran’s ability to project power in the region and to support proxy groups. Obviously such a move carries substantial risks, including potential escalation into a broader conflict and serious diplomatic repercussions. And of course the U.S. would have to give its blessing as its servicemen in the Persian Gulf could be put in danger from a Houthi / Iranian response. The decision to strike Iran would need to carefully weigh these benefits against the possible consequences to ensure it aligns with broader strategic goals. There is no better time than the military lull in which Israel finds itself to consider such a move.

Good things,

Ari Sacher

On Friday, Defense Minister Israel Katz instructed the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to devise a plan that would facilitate “the complete defeat of Hamas in Gaza" as soon as possible. The Defense Minister stated that "if the hostage deal is not realized by the time President Trump takes office, a complete defeat of Hamas in Gaza must be brought about." Speaking in a security situation assessment held with Maj. Gen. Herzi Halevi  (IDF Chief of Staff), Maj. Gen. (res.) Eyal Zamir (Director General of the Defense Ministry), Head of Military Intelligence, Head of Military Intelligence, Head of Military Intelligence, and Maj. Gen. (res.) Nitzan Alon (the Defense Minister) emphasized that “the issue of releasing the hostages is at the top of the security establishment's priority list."

Katz also emphasized that “[Israel] must not be drawn into a war of attrition against Hamas in Gaza,” and he directed the IDF to indicate what issues might make it difficult to implement such a plan, such as humanitarian issues and other similar issues. He noted that the determination of a political solution for the administration of Gaza "is not relevant to the issue at hand and the activity that is currently required, because no Arab or other factor will take responsibility for managing civilian life in Gaza as long as Hamas is not completely crushed." He also noted that "the IDF is waging a heroic war and its soldiers are doing an amazing job, but at the same time, we must change the method of operation in order to eliminate Hamas and end the war in Gaza." He warned against a prolonged war that could exact a heavy toll without achieving a strategic victory: "We must not settle for a war of attrition that costs us dearly while failing to deliver the fruits of victory and the decisive defeat of Hamas," he said.

After more than 450 days since the October 7 Massacre, Hamas has well and truly been defeated as a military organization. Its upper echelons of both political and military leaders have been killed by the IDF. Its capability to operate holistically as an organization has disappeared. Nearly all of its stockpile of tens of thousands of rockets and missiles has been decimated from the air and from the ground. Its underground tunnel network used for command and control, weapons production and storage and other nefarious things, that was, at the beginning of the war, larger than the London Underground, lies in ruins. Its underground “Interstate Highways” that connect Gaza City in the north with Khan Yunis and Rafah in the south have been destroyed while the thousands of smaller tunnels that branch off of these superhighways have also been demolished.

And yet, the fighting goes on unabated. Hamas, while no longer operating as an organized army, still has thousands of operatives engaging the IDF in guerilla warfare. Guerillas hide out in the shells of empty buildings and in the remaining tunnels, and they try as best as they can to kill Israeli soldiers. They use sniper rifles, anti-tank missiles and rocket-propelled grenades, and their weapon of choice, explosives in the form of Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) and booby-trapped houses. Yesterday, four IDF soldiers were killed when a massive IED blew up next to their HMMWV (Humvee). Since this past October, more than 80 IDF soldiers have been killed in Gaza, a rate of nearly one soldier each day. Hamas is not trying to defeat the IDF – they know that this is an impossible task. What they are trying to do is to cause sufficient Israeli casualties to convince the Israeli government that Hamas will never be defeated and to come to some sort of deal and to permanently leave Gaza, so that Hamas can rebuild its military presence.

The Gaza War has morphed into a War of Attrition. Israel cannot sustain this kind of war because of a combination of building public pressure – too many funerals are being aired on the nightly news combined with building global pressure. Enough is enough. Defense Minister Katz recognizes this and is looking for a way to quickly and decisively solve the problem. Out of the many solutions being aired in the newspapers, blogs, and social media, the solution with the greatest potential in my eyes, is the solution we will refer to as the “Segmentation Solution.”

The “Segmentation Solution” begins with the segmentation of the Gaza Strip by dividing it into many small, separate territorial cells, each cell having clear geographical demarcations. One such example is the Netzarim Corridor, which lies between Gaza City in the north and Nuseirat in the south. Israel took over the corridor in order to cut Gaza in half. The next step is to purge each of these territorial cells of terrorists and to turn them into sterile weapon-free and Hamas-free zones. This step would be performed with pinpoint and overwhelming force, as the IDF will be operating only in these cells such that it could concentrate its offensive power. Entry to any such territorial cell, once cleansed, would be permitted to any Gazan resident, contingent upon undergoing a physical check and a background check with the intelligence agencies. Repopulation will set the stage for the gradual rebuilding of Gaza. After one cell has been purged, the IDF will move on to the next one. In this way, within a few months, most of the territorial cells in the Gaza Strip would be clean and sterile and would have little to no residual IDF presence, reducing friction with the Gazans who have moved back to their homes in these cells. Israel would continue to operate according to the geographical logic of its choice, likely moving southwards from Beit Lahiya in the north to Rafah in the south.  Meanwhile, in the territorial cells that have already been cleared and (at least partially) repopulated, new local Hamas-free governments would be established. Local government officials could rule without fear that Hamas would do them harm. Within a short period of time, Israel will be able to present to the world the first territorial cells that operate in this format and will thus demonstrate that there is such a thing as a "day after" without Hamas. Moving segment by segment, the Gaza Strip would slowly become a demilitarized zone that could work together with Israel. Schools would begin operating in these territorial cells with a new education program that replaces antisemitism and Jihad with coexistence, a system perhaps based on the Alternate Gaza Education System (AGES) proposed by USIEA. Civilian infrastructure will be established which will administer the cell, especially the distribution of humanitarian aid. Today, Hamas performs this role, raising its stature and power among the local population. These cells will be the antitheses of the areas where Hamas is still present. Israel will earn high marks in the international arena by advancing a solution that offers a path for long-term management of Gaza. And as an additional benefit, purging of cells will also enable the IDF to pinpoint the location of any hostages being hidden.

The “Segmentation Plan” achieves the two goals stated by the Minister of Defense: it facilitates the total defeat of Hamas, and it prevents the continuation of the current War of Attrition by enabling the IDF to concentrate its force in a way that makes resistance futile. Implementation of this plan will take time. While the casualty rate of soldiers will fall, the war will go on at a slower cadence than today. The Segmentation Plan requires patience and spirit from Israelis. The U.S. can also play a critical role by

(1) using its political weight to gain Israel the time it needs and

(2) to recognize, support, and work together with the new Gazan entities.

In this way, the two countries will march together until total victory, once thought of as an impossibility, has finally been achieved.

Good things,

Ari Sacher

Last week, I went with my entire family on a vacation to the Dead Sea. We stayed in a villa in Neve Zohar, about half a mile from the ritzy hotels in Ein Bokek. The villa was huge – we are 28 people, so it had to be large – about 4500 square feet. It had three swimming pools, two of them with a gigantic TV screen, two Jacuzzis, and an outdoor fireplace. It cost a pretty penny, but that’s the only way we can all get together.

The neighborhood consists exclusively of huge villas. Five of them were going up right next to ours. As I was unloading the car, the contractor came over to me and apologized that construction would begin promptly at a quarter to six the next morning. We got to talking, and he told me that every single villa in the neighborhood is being built for short-term rental to large groups of people: family get-togethers, parties, that sort of thing. He is very proud of the villas he is building. They are of the highest standard, he told me. The best marble, the best windows, and his workers are all from China. I asked him where else workers in the construction industry come from. He told me that most of them come from India, Sri Lanka, Moldova, and the Ukraine. But the Chinese are by far the best. They work hard, and they know what they are doing. Of course they come at a premium, he said, but it’s worth it. “What about Palestinian workers?,” I asked him. He gave me a look of disbelief. Since October 7, there are no Palestinian workers in the local construction industry, and that number does not look to be changing significantly at any time in the near future. 

Before October 7, about 100,000 Palestinians from Judea and Samaria came every day to work in Greater Israel. After the massacre, that number was slashed to zero. Not one Palestinian comes to work in Israel. The industry that has suffered the most is the construction industry. About one third of the slack has been taken up by foreign workers. Due to the reduction in labor, the rate of construction in Israel has plummeted. The demand far outweighs the supply. Over the past twenty years, the price of housing here has been increasing exponentially. Governments come and governments go, each with a new plan to reduce the cost of housing, and, inevitably, each one fails. Basic economic theory shows that a reduction in supply combined with an increase in the cost of labor will push the price of housing even higher. According to the Bank of Israel, replacement of Palestinians with imported workers has cost Israelis more than 25 billion shekels. While the government is working to increase the number of foreign workers that come to Israel, the numbers that the government is talking about is less than half of what is required. Meanwhile, the local construction industry is crashing. Beyond the lack of workers, the price of raw materials has skyrocketed, as Turkey has recently imposed a ban on exporting certain construction materials to Israel, including cement, steel, aluminum, and iron. Until October 7, Turkey was Israel’s largest supplier of these materials. The Startup Nation is coming to a standstill.

The Israel Ministry of Defence (IMOD) along with the Israel Defense Force (IDF) are pushing the government to allow Palestinians to enter into Israel. IMOD and IDF are unconcerned with the cost of housing. What does concern them is the cumulative effect of unemployment in Judea and Samaria. According to high ranking officials in IMOD, the fear is that local Palestinians will be reduced to poverty, and the resulting pressure cooker will cause them to turn to terror. IMOD maintains that the Palestinians are reaching the boiling point. The problem is that there is general public unwillingness to allow Palestinians to enter Israel at this moment. An anonymous government official said, “Perhaps one day in the future.” 

But maybe help is on the way. At the end of October, Israeli news Kan 11 reported that the government had approved the entry of 8,000 Palestinian workers into Israel. According to the report, the move was approved by the IDF and by the General Security Service (GSS), better known as the Shabak, Israel’s FBI. Nevertheless, these particular workers would not be working in construction. They would be working in other blue collar industries in which it is notoriously difficult to find Israeli workers. This includes digging graves and working in the hospitality industry. Many hotels have absorbed Northerners who have been evacuated from their homes and one year later remain understaffed. The hope is that if this initiative goes well, then more Palestinians will be granted entry into Israel, and they will be diverted to construction and agriculture. 

Not everyone is pleased that Palestinians are beginning to return. The Police Force objects strongly to the move. Ophir Binder, the representative of the Police Force at the cabinet meeting to approve the move, said, “We in the Police Force believe that this is not the time to allow Palestinians from Judea and Samaria to return to Greater Israel. They are burying their own dead and there is a strong chance that they will enter Israel with the goal of vengeance.” Binder was referring to a persistent IDF crackdown in Judea and Samaria that has taken place since October 7, particularly in the cities of Jenin and Shechem, in which hundreds of Palestinians have been killed while the IDF destroyed rocket factories, arms caches, and terrorist hideouts.

Certain members of the coalition government are also against the move. Orit Struck, the Minister of Settlements and National Missions, who hails from the National Zionist Party, had strong words to say to the Shabak: “They said it was all right to allow Palestinians to enter Israel before October 7 and look how that ended!” She was referring to the fact that before October 7, many Gazans had worked in Israeli communities in the Gaza Envelope. Some of these workers not only actively participated in the massacre, but they also mapped out the towns and the individual houses, reporting back to Hamas as to which windows were usually open, who usually carried a gun, and in which rooms the children slept. Ministers Betzalel Smotrich, Finance Minister and the head of the National Religious Party, and Isaac Wasserloff, the Minister for the Development of the Periphery from the Otzma Yehudit party, joined Struck, stating that at this moment, it is simply unfeasible to allow the entry of any Palestinian into Greater Israel.

A study by Estaban Clore, from the prestigious Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), used statistical methods to understand if there was any correlation between the number of Palestinians who entered Greater Israel from Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, with the number of Israelis killed in acts of terror. The study used data pertaining to the murders of 153 Israelis between January 1, 2007 and October 6, 2023. According to the study, 44 percent of those killed were killed by rocket fire and sniper fire from within Gaza and another 33 percent were killed by Palestinians with Israeli citizenship who live in East Jerusalem, an area that Israel annexed in 1967. This means that 77 percent of those murdered were murdered in acts of terror that would not have been prevented by prohibiting the entry of Palestinian Arabs into Greater Israel. While Clore admits that he cannot be absolutely certain that an act of terror will not be committed by a Palestinian worker, the odds are definitely in his favor.

This encapsulates the problem. It is a sort of “head versus heart.” Logically, the right thing to do is to gradually increase the number of work visas to Palestinians until the construction industry is on more firm economic ground, and the economy in Judea and Samaria returns to equilibrium. The process is tried and true, and the chances for disaster are small. This is what the head would argue. The heart, on the other hand, would vociferously reject the head’s claim. October 7 was a watershed moment. Any trust Israelis had for Palestinians on October 6 was incinerated along with the residents of the Gaza Envelope. Israelis will never go down that path ever again. Even if it is the logical thing to do. Even if it means a spike in housing prices. Even if it means that contractors might lose their livelihood, even if it means that Joe Palestinian will not be able to feed his family, and as a result, might turn violent. What was will no longer be. Security trumps everything else. October 7 showed that if we don’t take care of our own security, then nobody will.

Good things,

Ari Sacher

This week, Jews around the world will be celebrating Chanukah, a holiday that commemorates the victory of the Israelites over the Hellenist Greeks, who had taken over the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and converted it into a Temple for their god Zeus. Chanukah celebrates a lamp that held enough oil for one day and yet miraculously burnt for eight days. Chanukah always falls out on the 25th day of the Hebrew month of Kislev. Because the Hebrew Calander is lunar, Chanukah can fall anywhere from late November all the way to the end of the year. This year, the first night of Chanukah coincides with Christmas. 

Another thing that Chanukah shares with Christmas is the giving of gifts. Some rabbis assert that the source of Chanukah presents dates back to the offering of gifts by the Princes of the Tribes at the consecration of the Tabernacle in the Sinai Desert described in the bible in the Book of Numbers. This makes sense. After all, the Hebrew word “Chanukah” means “consecration,” in our case, the reconsecration of the Holy Temple after it had been taken back from the Greeks. But if we want to be honest with ourselves, it is a whole lot more plausible to assert that the concept of Chanukah presents comes from Christmas presents, so as not to leave Jewish children staring with raw envy at their Christian friend’s new 1000-piece Lego set that Santa left him under the tree.

A gift that many Israeli children will be receiving this year is called “Israeli Heroes.” “Israeli Heroes” are G.I. Joe-esquian action figures of Israel Defense Force soldiers. There are seven different soldiers to choose from, including men, women, an Israeli Arab, an Ethiopian, and a wheel-chair-bound soldier named Yisrael Amar who works in the Cyber Division. Each soldier comes with accessories that include guns, a helmet with night-vision goggles, a real dog-tag, and a miniature Israeli flag. Each soldier comes with a biography and a message for children who purchase (or are purchased) the doll. For instance, Tomer Tal, also known as the “Guardian of Justice,” “believes wholeheartedly that the world can be a better place, and so since he was a child, he has fought for justice and goodness. He is a born leader, who knows how to carry everyone along with him, and even in difficult moments he overcomes all difficulties.” Tomer’s message to children is, “When we train and prepare for anything in life, nothing can scare us.” Meital Cohen, a female Border Policeman, tells children, “Be who you are no matter what anyone tells you.” Each doll costs 139 shekels, nearly 40 dollars, quite a steep price. That said, the dolls are of very high quality – they are produced in the same factory that produces Spiderman and Marvel Comics Action figures, which cost about 15 dollars on Amazon, sans the accessories. Specially designed dolls in the image of a soldier who was killed in action can be specially ordered but this costs significantly more than 139 shekels.

“Israeli Heroes” is not just another Middle Eastern G.I. Joe. The idea for the figures came from Yarden and Elad Stefanski, two Israelis who have done more than their fair share of reserve duty since October 7. The dolls – which were designed while the inventors were still serving in emergency reserve duty – are designed to address two major needs of Israeli children that have come to the fore since the beginning of this war: The first is the need of a child who has been living continuously under fire. Many Israeli children have spent the last year without a father figure. And while the statistics are still being analyzed, many Israeli children are already suffering from PTSD. Their fathers return from reserve duty once every few weeks. When a father does come home, he spends much of his time resting and recuperating. The “Israeli Heroes” dolls are not intended to supplant the role of the father, but, rather, to augment it. When the father is away, the doll can serve as a temporary surrogate. Parents report that this is indeed happening.

The second need of Israeli children is the need to believe that our soldiers are fighting in a just war. Israelis have never gratuitously flouted power. Israel does not glorify the projection of power. While Israel has by far the most powerful army in the Middle East, it does not throw military parades as in other countries. Once a year, on Independence Day, a few Israel Air Force jets fly over the country for about an hour. In Israel, the army means something else entirely: the army is here to protect us. Even more than that, the army is us. Each Israeli must serve three years of mandatory army service and then afterwards must serve in reserve duty until the age of 45 – even older for some soldiers. In 2024, Israeli reservists will serve 70 days of reserve duty. Each soldier is someone’s father or brother or uncle. The country is still small enough that there is no person I have met that does not have a close friend or relative who was killed or injured in action since October 7. Because our soldiers are protecting us from a horrible enemy, we call our soldiers “Heroes.” It is the enemy who have killed people in their homes and who will do it over and over again until we stop him, an enemy who has fired rockets incessantly, keeping us locked in bomb shelters and making even a trip to the supermarket perilous. This “Hero” title is especially pertinent to a soldier who has been killed in combat. He immediately attains the title “Hero of Israel” appended to his name. Pictures of those soldiers adorn streets all over Israel in tribute to their ultimate sacrifice. Children know their names. They are our heroes. They are their heroes.

Yarden Stefanski summarizes things succinctly, “There was a sense of a crisis of trust between the people and the army [after the debacle that led to the massacre of October 7], and on the other hand, a new generation of heroes emerged who left everything behind and went out to fight for the country… We started thinking about how to get out of this loop and restore morale and unity in the people, certainly around our soldiers.”

“Israeli Heroes” is not an Israeli invention. In 1940, before the U.S. entered World War II, Timely Comics created a new superhero called “Captain America.” This move was intentionally political. Timely Comics was stridently opposed to the actions of Nazi Germany and supported U.S. intervention in World War II. It intended the hero to be a response to the American non-interventionism movement. Timely worked out the details of the character, who was eventually named "Captain America." Captain America was Steven Rogers, an undersized youth who wanted desperately to fight overseas. Classified “4-F,” or unfit for military service, Rogers accepted a role in an experimental program meant to create an army of super soldiers to defeat the Nazis, only to become the program’s only participant when German agents murdered the scientist leading the research. Together, he and the United States would – in the words of the first issue – “gain the strength and the will to safeguard our shores.” While Captain America has become a blisteringly successful comic franchise and has produced multiple blockbuster movies, the concept goes back to a time when Americans brimmed with national pride, when Americans believed that while America may not be exceptional, it was certainly just. “Israeli Heros” replicates that feeling and transplants it into 2024 Israel. 

The public response is good. The Stefanskis are inundated with requests from soldiers to design dolls for their units. Right now, a series of dolls is being specially designed for the police force. The question is if the “Israeli Heroes” will survive after the war is over. Yarden Stefanski believes that they will: “The war was just the trigger. The soldiers and security forces in Israel are an integral part of culture and life, and we will continue to make sure that the children of Israel see those who protect them as superheroes.”

I believe that Yarden is right. One of the most popular songs during the war is a song by a band called Hatikva 6, whose songs often consist of Zionist overturns to a reggae beat. The song is called “Superheroes (Giborei-Al)”. Here are some of the words:

So the Bible teacher serves in [the] Givati [Brigade]

The language teacher in Intelligence

The neighbor upstairs is a construction contractor but has been in the reserves for a month

The lawyer is a Operations Officer

Does shifts in the division

Her brother is a senior high-tech guy now he's a sniper on rooftops in the Gaza Strip

The tough bank branch manager is a General in Judea and Samaria

Doron is a toy store owner now he's a company commander in the Armored Corps

And [Fauda actor Idan] Amedi who usually sings in Caesarea

A fighter in the Engineering Corps 

Is recovering bravely after being wounded in the heart of Gaza

[Chorus]

It's true that everyone here looks ordinary, but

We are a nation of superheroes

There is always a soldier hidden inside everyone

Ready to save the world

This war has changed Israelis, ultimately for the better. Ask anyone you meet if he is willing to return to October 6. The answer will be a resounding “Never!”

“Israeli Heroes” are available now at https://israeliheroes.com/. Buy now while supplies last.

Wishing one and all a happy holiday season,

Ari Sacher

Since its inception in 1948, Israel has been at war with Syria four times – in 1948, 1967, 1973, and 1982. In 1967, Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria and annexed them in 1981. Over the years, Israel offered to return the Golan Heights in exchange for a lasting peace, most recently in 2000, but were rebuffed time and time again. In 2019, the U.S. officially recognized the Golan Heights as being under Israeli sovereignty. In 2007, Israel destroyed an undeclared nuclear reactor that Syria was in the process of building. The Syrian Civil War that has been raging since 2011 has taken a toll on Syria’s military capability.  While its army is but a shadow of once it once was, it still remains a force to be reckoned with. The Israeli nightmare scenario of swarms of Syrian tanks coming down the Golan Heights into the Galilee still has an effect upon its defense posture. 

In the Middle East, things happen very quickly. Over the weekend of December 6-8, 2024, the Syrian Regime crashed and burned. Syrian rebels captured the Syrian capital of Damascus with next to no resistance. Syrian soldiers cast off their uniforms and ran. The government collapsed. President Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia where he and his family were granted asylum.

Who are these “rebels” that overthrew Assad? Rather than a homogenous army, they are a diverse group of factions that vary widely in their ideologies, goals, and affiliations. The most prominent of these groups is called “Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)” – “Organization for the Liberation of the Levant” – a coalition of northern Syria-based Sunni Islamist insurgent groups that evolved from Jabhat al-Nusrah, or “Nusrah Front,” al-Qa‘ida’s former branch in Syria. Although HTS has distanced itself from al-Qaeda, it remains a devoutly Jihadist organization. HTS has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United Nations Security Council and by the U.S. HTS is led by Abu Mohammad al-Julani, a man who has been designated a global terrorist by the U.S. and who has a $10 million bounty on his head. HTS has been accused of an assortment of human rights abuses, including arbitrary detentions and execution. Recently, HTS has attempted to present itself as a more pragmatic and locally focused organization, distancing itself from global jihadist ambitions. Al-Julani is trying to reinvent himself. Once clad in traditional jihadist militant attire and an uncut bushy beard, he has adopted a more Western-style wardrobe in the past years. His beard is well-kept, and he often wears a jacket. After HTS captured Damascus, al-Julani took to the radio and urged his followers not to fire their machine guns in the air as a sign of their joy, lest an innocent bystander be injured by a stray bullet. HTS has granted general amnesty to soldiers in the Syrian Army. Yet at the same time, the internet is flooded with videos of executions of Assad officials and their bodies thrown into mass graves. Needless to say, the burden of proof is on HTS.

So, as Israelis are prone to ask, is the new Syrian government good for the Jews or bad for the Jews? 

The Israelis have offered a very Israeli answer to this question: “What will be in the future is far less important than what we can do now to shape what will be.” To this end, Israel has embarked upon “Operation Bashan Arrow,” aimed at neutralizing current and future threats by destroying military assets that could be used by a future foe – whoever that may be – to threaten or to harm the State of Israel. 

On the morning of December 8, Avri Gilead, a well-known Israeli pundit, wrote in his column in the Hebrew daily Yisrael Hayom, “Bashar has left, and it is highly doubtful that he will return. The regime in Syria is falling. Syria is falling apart. Its parts are lying on the floor, and all we have to do is bend over and pick them up.” I thought that these words coming from Gilead, who is not known as a hawk, made a lot of sense. But then reality caught up. In which universe does Israel carry out an unprovoked attack on Syria? 

In our universe, apparently. Seeing as Syria had no longer had an acting government, Israel announced that the Disengagement Agreement of 1974 reached with Syria was null and void until order is restored. Israel announced that it would do all that was necessary to prevent Syria from becoming a staging ground for attacks from Syria into Israel. Over the next three days, Israel carried out a set of massive air strikes, essentially destroying the Syrian Air force and Navy:

• Modern Fighter Bombers: Over 90% of the Russian-supplied MiG-29 aircraft and about 80% of the Sukhoi-24 aircraft were destroyed. Videos of Israel UAV operators “plinking” parked aircraft with their signature “2-3-fi-re (sha-geir)” are all over YouTube.

• Air Defense: More than 80% of the Syrian air defense systems have been destroyed. The country-wide integrated Syrian anti-aircraft system, which was once considered the densest in the world, particularly around Damascus, has fired hundreds of times at Israeli aircraft in recent years. The Israel Air Force (IAF) placed emphasis on the two most advanced systems, which managed to shoot down some of the Israeli missiles used to attack Syria – the medium-range SA-17 “Buk” system, of which 80% were estimated to have been destroyed, and the short-range SA-22 “Pantsir” system, of which 86% were destroyed. Whether or not Syria’s S-300 long-range systems have been destroyed remains unclear. In October, the IAF destroyed the radars of all 4 of Iran’s S-300, leaving the country open to attack at any time. This explains Iran’s hesitance to return fire to Israel’s October attack. Without the S-300, Syria suffers the same fate.

• Rockets and Missiles: Here, the achievements are more modest: certain missile arrays were destroyed in high percentages (80-90%), but there are other arrays that were damaged to a much lesser extent (20-30%). The IDF estimates that it is certainly possible that advanced weapons, missiles, and other military capabilities that Israel does not know about could fall into the hands of HTS and so the hunting continues.

• Research and Development: The Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center, Syria’s version of RAFAEL, was destroyed as was its national laboratory for chemical weapons.

• Strategic Targets: More than 300 strategic targets, including arms depots, command and control centers, and potential storehouses for chemical weapons were wiped off the face of the earth.

In total, in the operation to destroy Assad's army, the IAF attacked more than 500 targets and used 1,800 munitions. The IAF admits that until a few days before the operation began, it had not been planned at all, and certainly not the extensive use of munitions that were intended for other fronts. Necessity is the mother of innovation.

At the same time, the Israeli Army crossed the border into the demilitarized zone between Israel and Syria, capturing the Syrian Hermon Mountain, Syria’s tallest peak, without firing a shot. Tanks moved into Syria, capturing towns and military installations. Israel told the United Nations Security Council that it was taking “limited and temporary measures… to counter any threats to the Israeli Golan Heights.”

The importance of Operation Bashan Arrow cannot be overestimated. First and foremost, the operation will ensure that Syria will not become a military threat anytime in the next generation. If HTS, or any other Syrian organization, wants to wage war against Israel, they’ll be doing it with Kalashnikov rifles and pickup trucks and they’ll be facing F-35 stealth fighters armed with JDAM one-ton GPS-guided bombs, Merkava IV tanks and precision guided tactical missiles.

Another important outcome is the exiting of foreign forces from Syria. After the U.S. ceded control in Syria to Russia in 2011, the Russian military firmly ensconced itself. Russia took over the Tartus Naval Base on the Mediterranean, turning it into a crucial refueling and repair station for Russian naval vessels, and the Hmeimim Air Base, basing its top of the line Sukhoi SU-35 fighter bombers. In order for Israel to strike targets in Syria, it had to deconflict with Russian forces so as not to accidentally cause the downing of a Russian aircraft. Indeed, in 2018 Syria accidentally shot down a Russian aircraft after mistaking it for an Israeli jet, killing all 15 on board. Russian freighters were seen leaving Tartus before Operation Bashan Arrow began, and Russian forces have continued leaving the country ever since. Regardless of Russia’s recent pledge to return to Syria, it is safe to assume that they will play the same wait-and-see game that the rest of the world is playing. And not only did Russia leave Syria, Shiite Iranian and Hezbollah forces ran for their lives from the Sunni onslaught, showing themselves to be paper tigers. 

But by far the most important outcome of the HTS victory is the severing of the Iranian land-bridge that runs from Tehran to Lebanon. For the past 25 years, Iran has been arming Hezbollah, its Lebanese proxy, to the teeth, transferring large amounts of munitions, including the latest guided anti-tank missiles and ballistic surface-to-surface missiles that can strike any point in Israel with high precision. Broadly speaking, weapons are transferred in one of two routes: Either they are transported by ship to Latakia port in Syria and then smuggled into Lebanon through its northern border, or they are transported by truck to Lebanon’s eastern border where they are smuggled in via Hezbollah’s “Land of Tunnels,” a massive underground tunnel network capable of moving heavy vehicles and missiles that was recently discovered and destroyed by the Israelis. With Syria now under sole control of HTS, those routes are no longer available. Iran can no longer rearm Hezbollah, an organization that is already reeling from Israeli attacks that have decapitated its political and military leadership and destroyed a large majority of its rockets and missiles. Without any new resources, Hezbollah finds itself with a limited supply of weapons, such that even if it wants to renew its war against Israel, it will soon run out of bullets. On December 14, Hezbollah Secretary General Naim Qassem, in his “face the nation” speech, stated this openly when he admitted to his great regret, “Hezbollah has lost its land military supply route in Syria.”

An old Jewish adage roughly reads, “The work of the righteous is performed by others.” What Israel unsuccessfully tried to do for the past twenty years was done successfully by HTS in just two weeks. The Middle East is a changing place and it just so happens that Israel is leveraging that change, setting itself up for forty years of peace and quiet. Now if we could only figure out what to do about Iran…

Good things,

Ari Sacher

This past weekend, I accompanied my wife, Tova, to a conference in Munich, Germany. The conference pertained to authorship of ancient Jewish texts. Seeing as I have little to offer in that field, I spent two days touring the city while my wife spent her time with her colleagues.

Since World War II, Germany has been a complex country for Jews. I was born less than a generation after the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews. When I was a child, my parents would not purchase German goods of any kind. In the mid 70’s, my parents bought a Volkswagen Beetle, to the consternation of my grandparents, who had lost most of their family in the gas chambers of Poland. My parents would never think of flying to Israel with a stopover in Germany or Poland. What? Give the Nazis my money? Never! 

The State of Israel has had an even more complex relationship with Germany. Many of the Israelis who fought in the War of Independence in 1948 were refugees from Eastern Europe. Germany does not deny their role in the Holocaust. They have built into their national culture the understanding of what Germany once was and what Germans once did, so as to prevent a future recurrence. Never again. Germany’s relationship with Israel is defined to a large extent by this principle. In 1952, the German government agreed to pay reparations to the Government of Israel, as the representative of the Jewish People. The reparations were to cover the costs of "resettling so great a number of uprooted and destitute Jewish refugees" after the war, and to compensate individual Jews for losses in Jewish livelihood and property resulting from Nazi persecution. The reparations nearly tore the country apart. Menachem Begin, who was at the time the Leader of the Opposition, called them “blood money” and led Israelis to the streets in protest. After five hours of rioting, the police finally were able to take control of the situation using hoses and tear gas. Hundreds were arrested, and hundreds were injured. Over the years, reparations money has not only bolstered the Israeli economy, but it has also bolstered their military, as well. Israel receives its Dolphin-Class submarines from the German ThyssenKrupp company at a heavily subsidized cost. These submarines can project Israeli force far beyond the country’s borders. Defense collaboration with Germany runs in both directions. Germany is one of the largest customers in the world of the SPIKE LR precision tactical missile. SPIKE LR can hit tanks or a window at ranges of 3.5 miles with precision and lethality that is unparalleled. The only similar missile in the world is made by MDBA, a European consortium that includes German companies. The fact that Germany would procure thousands of these missiles overseas rather than form its own backyard is telling. Israel has also recently sold Germany the Arrow-3 anti-missile system in a 3.5 billion dollar deal, the largest foreign sale of weapons in Israel’s history. Arrow-3 intercepts targets in outer space and has been used with great success to defend Israel against Iranian and Yemeni missiles over the past year. And, yes, MBDA also makes an anti-missile system of its own that did not meet German requirements.

Munich is a beautiful city. It has a great vibe. It has bustling plazas with outlets of every international store you could possibly desire: Apple, Tommy Hilfiger, and H&M. This time of the year, it hosts Christmas Markets, selling Christmas tree decorations, nativity scenes, and food – so much food. Shops sell German delicacies such Bratwurst, fried donuts, and beer, so much beer. Munich refers to itself as the “Birthplace of Beer.” The town has stunning architecture – skyscrapers, cobblestone plazas, and ancient church steeples. At least they look ancient, but actually, they’re not. The allies bombed Munich to rubble during World War II. Around 90% of the old part of the city was severely damaged due to the Allied policy of carpet bombing. Everything has been rebuilt since then. 

Munich is such an amazing town. And yet.

Everywhere I went I had this feeling that something was, somehow, out of place. One morning, I went to the BMW Museum. For automobile aficionados like myself, this was nirvana. The museum complex is split into two parts. One part, called “BMW Welt,” is a huge showroom of new BMW cars, as well as brands that are owned by BMW, such as Rolls-Royce. Most of the cars are unlocked so that a person could jump into the car and try things out. (Unsurprisingly, the Rolls-Royce cars were off limits, set behind a knee-high glass wall). Across the street lies the second part of the complex, called the “BMW Museum.” The museum is designed as a helix that guides the visitor through the history of BMW, technology development, and design. And of course there are a large number of BMW passenger cars, race cars, and motorcycles to look at. The “out-of-place-ness” began at the entrance to the museum, where a large computer screen displayed the BMW Company Timeline: “1900 – the Role of Motor Sport, 1920 – the Start of Mass Production, 1945 – Difficult New Start in Germany.” Difficult New Start? What did that even mean? I found out when I got to the last exhibit, “A Place of Remembrance, The Bayerische Motoren Werke 1933-1945.” At the entrance to the exhibit is a description: “The BMW Group acknowledges its history and confronts it with a critical eye. The company’s aim with this exhibition, which tells the story of forced labor during the NS dictatorship, is to help ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.” NS, by the way, stands for “Nazi Socialist.” The word “Nazi” appears nowhere in the exhibition. The exhibition contains pictures of people who were incarcerated in the Buchenwald concentration camp. They would work at the factory, many clearing potash mines below the factory’s surface, in deadly conditions. Most of these people were Jews, although the word “Jew” appears nowhere in the exhibition. I lingered at the exhibit until I could take no more. I left in tears. I am fairly certain that I was the only adult in the museum that day who was crying. Complex.

After I exited the museum, I noticed that I was in what once was the Olympic Park, venue of the 1972 Summer Olympics. On September 5, eight terrorists from “Black September,” an organization that eventually morphed into the PLO, broke into the dorms in which the Israeli Olympic Team were sleeping and took them hostage. The Germans tried negotiating with the terrorists and eventually they bungled a rescue operation, killing all eleven of the hostages. A famous picture of a terrorist on the balcony with a sock on his head still frightens me. I looked for and found a memorial for the athletes. It consists of two large screens upon which the events of the day are screened. It was cold and rainy, but I was not the only one there. Exiting the memorial, I saw the building that housed the Israeli team. Its balcony had an orange awning, and I could almost see the terrorist with the sock on his head. Something new to keep me up at night. I had had enough crying for one day and so I headed back to the hotel. Complex, you say?

On Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, we went to the new Central Synagogue. Outside the synagogue, German police patrol the area with automatic rifles. The synagogue is an official landmark in Munich. It cost about around $70 million dollars to build, and much of the funding was provided by the city of Munich and the German state of Bavaria. The new synagogue is stunningly beautiful. Munich's original main synagogue was destroyed in June 1938 and stood a few blocks away from the new synagogue, on ground that is now a parking ramp. A Star of David from an archway that once stood at its entrance is proudly displayed at the entrance. And then I noticed that one thing was missing: Windows. According to Jewish Law, a synagogue should have windows so as to put the worshipper in the proper state of mind for prayer, to free the soul, as it were. This synagogue had windows but they were about thirty feet above the floor. The reasons for the lack of windows are obvious – windows offer would-be terrorists an easy target. Munich Jewry has much experience in that sort of thing. Complex, indeed.

To get from our hotel to the synagogue, we walked through a plaza and passed a store that sold memorabilia from Bayern Munchen, the local Football (soccer) club, traditionally one of Europe’s powerhouse teams pretty much since the ball was invented. On one of trips past the store, I took a photo and sent it to my sons, both of whom are mad about soccer. When I sent the photo, my older son told me that when he was in High School, about 15 years ago, rooting for Bayern Munchen was taboo in Israel. Today, they’re just another team, no different than Real Madrid or Manchester City. Does it mean that Israelis have moved on? Are we letting bygones be bygones? In no way, shape, or form. The world can never be allowed to forget. But in the same way that modern-day Italians are not the same Romans who destroyed the Second Holy Temple and killed more than a million Jews in the process, today’s Germans are nearly a century separated from their Nazi ancestors. In October, German Foreign Minister Analena Baerbock spoke in the German Parliament (Bundestag) on the first anniversary of the October 7 massacre. She said, “A major task for German foreign policy over the past 11 months has been to work together to ensure that the terrorists’ perfidious playbook does not come to fruition. The aim of the attack on 7 October was, after all, to isolate Israel around the world, to destroy all efforts to normalize relations with its neighbors – the Abraham Accords, the reconciliation with Arab countries, the joint commitment to security… But if we give up hope now that there will be a shared, secure life for the people in the Middle East – for everyone – then terrorism will have won. It is the task of German foreign policy and German domestic policy to prevent precisely this. ‘Never again!’ means standing up for Israel’s security, for protecting Jewish life in Germany. ‘Never again!’ means doing the right thing every day and not what is convenient.”

Our time in Munich brought back feelings of a horrific past mixed with a future brimming with potential. I have been around the world, and Munich is one of the most amazing cities I have ever visited. But would we ever want to return there? That question is just too complex for this rocket scientist.

Good things,

Ari Sacher

On Wednesday, November 27, at 4:00 am local time, Israel and Lebanon declared a ceasefire. Since October 8, 2023, Hezbollah and Israel had been engaged in a sort of tit-for-tat in which Hezbollah would fire over a few rockets and Israel would return fire. On the afternoon of September 17, 2024, the pagers of thousands of high-ranking Hezbollah officials blew up in their pockets, in their hands, and over their ears. The next day, Hezbollah walkie-talkies exploded in a very similar fashion. Two days later, Israel bombed a building in the Dahia district in Beirut in which more than 60 senior Hezbollah officers were meeting. The result was the “3rd Lebanon War.” Israel sent multiple divisions of forces into Lebanon, capturing towns and dismantling Hezbollah infrastructure. By the end of the war, they had reached the Litani River, more than 10 miles north of the border. At the same time, Hezbollah fired hundreds of rockets, missiles, and killer drones at Israel. The vast majority were intercepted by the Iron Dome and David’s Sling anti-missile systems, but the rockets that managed to pierce the Israeli missile shield injured more than 200 people and killed 47.

The ceasefire was brokered by the U.S. and France, a country with strong Lebanese ties. Over the past month, this blog has laid out critical parameters of any ceasefire – what needs to be included and what should at all costs be excluded. Based solely on these parameters, the ceasefire that was signed is suboptimal. For example, the ceasefire mandates that the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) will be responsible for ensuring that armed Hezbollah terrorists remain north of the Litani River. As we have shown, the LAF are infiltrated by and simultaneously beholden to Hezbollah, such that handing security arrangements over to the LAF is like leaving the cat in charge of the cream. High-ranking Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officers I have spoken with admit that the ceasefire will not lead to “peace in our time” and that an imminent 4th Lebanon War will be fought in a decade or so. Support of Israelis for the terms of the ceasefire is divided. According to a poll taken by Channel 12 News, one of Israel’s largest news outlet, 37% of respondents supported the terms, 32% opposed them, and 31% didn’t know.

And yet, whether or not Israelis support the terms of the ceasefire agreement, there is overwhelming support for the cessation of the hostilities, and for a number of reasons. The first reason is that the ceasefire will enable the IDF to release a large number of reservists – indeed, many have already been released – and will significantly reduce the amount of reserve duty that will be required in the near term. Since October 7, most reservists have served more than 200 days of emergency reserve duty. My two sons have each served about 260 days over two rounds. Some people have already begun a third round of reserve duty, this time for “only” seventy days. The substantial amount of time being spent in the army is taking a toll on the reservists. While on the whole they are in high spirits and determined to crush the enemy, they are admittedly suffering the effects of months spent away from home and work. Some own businesses that are failing. Some have families that they see all too rarely. Some are trying to study in university; most of them with limited success. It is often too difficult to fight Hezbollah during the day and catch up on lectures and homework at night. The families of the reservists are also suffering. Above and beyond the sleepless nights spent in fear of the lives of their father/son/grandson/husband/partner who is in harm’s way, and above and beyond their panicking from every knock on the door and every time the phone rings, families have been forced into “single-parenthood.” Wives of soldiers are raising their children by themselves. Since September 17, many of these women have spent more time at home than they have spent at work. The ceasefire in Lebanon combined with the victory in Gaza is returning reservists to the lives they left stored in a box on October 7. They can return to work. They can salvage what is left of their businesses. They can once again be fathers, sons, and husbands. Israelis are embracing this with both hands.

Another reason that Israelis are relieved that the fighting is over is because their children finally can return to school. Since September 17, schools as far south as Haifa, about 20 miles from the Lebanese border, have been severely impacted by rocket attacks. The IDF Home Front Command can impose restrictions on whether or not a school can open and how many children can attend classes on any given day. The restrictions are a function of the town’s proximity to the border and the frequency of rocket fire in that particular area, and they are applicable to all schools from pre-kindergarten all the way to the 12th Grade. Schools furthest from the border were completely shut down for only a few weeks. During this time, students attended classes virtually. From the experience gained during the COVID-19 pandemic, it should not be surprising that virtual classes, especially for the younger grades, were completely and entirely ineffective. When schools were allowed to open, the number of children permitted to come to school was limited by the space in the school’s bomb shelters. In most cases, there was sufficient space for about half the total number of enrolled children. The classes would alternate children coming to school on one day and attending virtual classes the next. The schools nearest to the border have, for all intents and purposes, been shut down since September 17. My son lives in Acco, about 10 miles from the border. He has four children from pre-K to 3rd Grade. Today, December 1, was the first day in two and a half months that all of his children went to school. Being able to attend school full-time is not only important for the children, it gives parents the freedom to go back to work full-time.  

And then there is the rocket fire. Since September 17, the IDF Home Front Command has published a periodic update on location-based safety regulations: How many people could congregate indoors and outdoors, who could enter his place of employment and under which conditions, and, as mentioned above, where children could go to school and under which conditions. At the beginning of the war, gatherings of more than 100 people from Haifa northward were prohibited. This essentially precluded most Israelis from praying at their local synagogues. As this coincided with the High Holidays, the impact of this restriction was tangible. Many arranged services on the street, bringing back memories of those heady days of COVID-19. Movie theaters were empty. Even when gatherings were permitted, nobody wanted to be in a movie theater when an alarm sounded. Concerts were cancelled. Even traffic arrangements were modified to prevent large clots of cars from forming. In RAFAEL, a large defense contractor in the north, a “Green Front Door” policy was implemented in which when entering and leaving the plant, employees merely brandished their badges for the security guards instead of swiping them, speeding up the flow of vehicles.

There was the sound of airplanes flying overhead all the time. Some of the time it was the throaty whine of fighter-bombers. Some of the time it was the growling of Apache helicopters. Often the airplanes flew low to escape detection from Hezbollah radar. The sound of low-flying aircraft is deafening, and, by the way, sounds a lot like the launch of an Iron Dome interceptor.

There was the sound of air raid sirens, a haunting rising and falling moan signifying that one’s life was in mortal danger. Sometimes a siren would go off in a person’s current location, causing him to rush to the nearest bomb shelter. Sometimes the siren was from a nearby town, close enough to hear but not signifying an imminent attack. Those alarms were nearly as bad as the first kind. There was always this uncertainty – should we continue with our lives or should we enter the bomb shelter, just to be safe? Sometimes the alarm would go off on the Homefront Command application on mobile phones with a “chic-a-chic-a-chic-a.” The phone's alerts did not always signify that the area around the phone was under attack. More often than not, the application was linked to that person’s hometown, and he would rush to call his children to make certain they had entered the bomb shelter. And then there was the rush to the bomb-shelter or some other “safe-ish” location. One night, my daughter and I were driving in Acco to visit my son and his family when the air raid siren went off. It was a killer drone. We stopped the car right there in the middle of the street and ran to the sidewalk, where we lay down with our hands cupped over our heads until the sirens stopped. The problem was that where we stopped the car, there was no sidewalk so to speak. There was only a patch of grass which was muddy from the recent rain. The feeling of sheer helplessness was indescribable. I was thankful it was only a drone. A rocket attack would have had the added threat of shrapnel – “interceptor residue,” the media called it – falling from the sky. There, on the muddy grass, we would have been just as exposed to the elements as we had been before the threat was destroyed.

There was the sound of explosions of interceptions. From my home, we could hear the explosions from nearly every interception in the north. We learned to know where and when Hezbollah rockets had been intercepted and when they had impacted the ground – ground impact produces a much louder and higher-pitched bang. We learned to identify the lower-pitched thud of IDF artillery launches. Even schoolchildren were able to discern between the various booms.

But the worst part of the war was the complete sense of helplessness. Life had been turned upside down, and there was not a thing we could do about it. As far as we knew, the war was going to go on forever. One study predicts that over half a million Israelis are at risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks and the ensuing war. To handle the elevated stress levels, Israelis practiced “Shigrat Herum” – “Emergency Routine.” While this term is admittedly a contradiction in terms, it is perhaps the most straightforward way of understanding how Israelis have managed not only to live, but, to thrive under the most strenuous conditions – by compartmentalizing their panic, by converting the source of that panic from an ever-present threat into something that required management. The first time I heard the term “Shigrat Herum” was in the first Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein fired 39 SCUD-B guided missiles into Israel, missiles that, we were warned, could be carrying Chemical and Biological warheads. And so every day we would send off the kids to school with their gas masks and their epi-pens. Nothing extraordinary here – just another thing to send to school along with their lunchbox. In the current war, most people treated air raid sirens as a nuisance. “For crying out loud! I’m in the middle of putting together a PowerPoint presentation for the boss and now I have to burn ten minutes in the bomb shelter. Seriously??” That is “Shigrat Herum.”

The ceasefire agreement signed last week may be suboptimal, but given the current situation in Israel, it is critical. It gives us time to breathe, to go back to real normalcy, to assess and to plan for the 4th Lebanon War that, as a direct result of the terms of the ceasefire, is all but a certainty.

Good things,

Ari Sacher

Over the past few weeks, this blog has been elaborating upon the background necessary to better understand Israel’s northern front – Operation Northern Arrows – against the Hezbollah as the fighting seems to be drawing toward a close. U.S. Envoy Amos Hochstein visited the region last week in a bid to broker a ceasefire. This week, we will try to understand what that ceasefire would look like, at least in broad strokes. While in the inimitable words of baseball great Yogi Berra, “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” we can suggest certain components would more than likely be part of any ceasefire agreement.

The first step in any agreement is the understanding of Israel’s strategic goals, and then we can begin to understand how Israel can accomplish these goals. Israel Defense Force (IDF) officials have been quoted as stating that the primary goal of  Operation Northern Arrows was to prevent an October-7-like catastrophe from occurring in Israel’s north. 

For the past twenty years, Hezbollah had been building an infrastructure that would enable commando terrorists from the Radwan Brigade to cross the border en masse, likely under the cover of rocket fire as per October 7, overwhelm the IDF, capture Israeli towns, slaughter Israeli citizens, and take thousands back to Lebanon as captives and human shields. Hezbollah explicitly referred to this doomsday scenario as “Operation Conquer the Galilee.” To this end, Hezbollah had built an infrastructure of garrisons, weapons and logistic material storage facilities, rockets, and launchers. This infrastructure was located primarily underground and nearly entirely within a few miles of the border. Homes of “ordinary” Lebanese citizens served as entry points to the tunnels, facilitating access to the tunnels without the risk of being detected by Israeli reconnaissance. The tunnels were close enough to the border that a sudden assault would leave the IDF with insufficient reaction time with which to contain the assault. To preempt such a Hezbollah attack, by the early hours of October 8, the Israeli Government had evacuated all towns within 3 miles of the Lebanese border. More than 70,000 Israelis left their homes, and nearly all of them remain to this day refugees in their own country. 

More than two months into the operation, this goal has largely been accomplished. Lebanese border towns have been reduced to rubble. Dozens of miles of tunnels have been blown up. Hundreds of arms caches have been discovered and destroyed. The IDF has taken the fight northward and is in the process of creating a new front line more than five miles from the border. Hezbollah no longer has the means with which to carry out a surprise attack on Israel’s north. Refugees from the Galilee can consider returning home.

The secondary goal of Operation Northern Arrows was to destroy the Hezbollah arsenal of rockets, missiles, and killer drones. According to most experts, Hezbollah began the war with more than 150,000 of these weapons. Rockets and missiles could reach every location in Israel, some of them with pinpoint accuracy, placing Israel’s critical infrastructure – power plants, desalination stations, and sea-based natural gas rigs – in clear and present danger. The IDF has been extremely successful in achieving its secondary goal. Israel Air Force (IAF) strikes since September 17 have decimated the Hezbollah arsenal, leaving, according to many accounts, about one third of what once existed. This is not an inconsiderable number, and Hezbollah has been firing one hundred or so rockets into Israel daily over the past month, showing that they still have a significant residual capability. While Israel missile defense systems such as Iron Dome and David’s sling intercept the vast majority of these threats, Hezbollah rockets are still capable of incurring damage. Most IDF officials maintain that it will be impossible to completely destroy the Hezbollah rocket arsenal because they are spread out over the entire country. 

Any agreement for a ceasefire or cessation of hostilities would have to be in line with Israel’s two strategic goals: It would have to prevent Hezbollah from retaking and rebuilding the border towns that were destroyed, and it would have to prevent Hezbollah from firing rockets into Israel. The following points will also need to be accounted for in any ceasefire agreement:

1. The agreement will have to lie under the rubric of UN Resolution 1701 (UNR-1701). UNR-1701 has been accepted in some way or another by all sides of the conflict, even while Hezbollah has been in the process of abrogating it since it was ratified. The most critical part of UNR-1701, as far as Israel is concerned, is the disarming of all “armed personnel” between the Lebanon-Israel border (known as the Blue Line) the Litani River, which lies about twenty kilometers north of the Blue Line. Israel cannot allow any armed force to enter an area that will facilitate recapture of towns captured and destroyed by the IDF. 

2. An agreement cannot be enforced by either the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) or by UNIFIL. The LAF is, on the one hand, beholden to Hezbollah and, on the other hand, deeply infiltrated by Hezbollah. A recent statement by a high-ranking LAF official made it clear that LAF would not stand in the way of Hezbollah were it to move forces below the Litani. UNIFIL, on the other hand, does not have the military capability to enforce any kind of treaty. Assuming that the IDF pulls out of Southern Lebanon as part of a ceasefire, security would have to be maintained by a third party. One potential way ahead would be to replace UNIFIL with an alliance of first-world nations that (1) maintain diplomatic relations with Israel, (2) have well-equipped and well-trained forces, and (3) would gain nothing from collaborating with the Hezbollah. The alliance would be tasked with ensuring that Hezbollah does not attempt to rebuild its local infrastructure. Its Rules of Engagement would enable the projection of power necessary to perform its mission, including the mandate to open fire not only in self defense and the mandate to proactively destroy any and all Hezbollah military assets below the Litani River.

3. Israel has an unstated end-game – the destruction of the Hezbollah. Israel has been striving to achieve this goal via the targeted killing of its political and military leadership and has been largely successful. Naim Qassem, the Secretary-General of Hezbollah, who succeeded Hassan Nasrallah, the long-time Secretary-General who was killed in an Israeli Air Strike in September, is afraid to appear in public for fear that it will jeopardize his safety. He speaks only via pre-recorded speeches, and his location is known by only a handful of people. Hezbollah is now reeling. More and more Lebanese are vocally expressing their anger, accusing Hezbollah of destroying Lebanon. To complete its unstated goal, Israel requires, at minimum, two things:

   
   

   1. Hezbollah cannot be allowed to rearm. Currently, Hezbollah receives the brunt of its weapons from Iran. Weapons are transported via air and sea to Syria and ferried over the border into Lebanon with trucks. To prevent weapons from entering Lebanon, this supply chain must be disrupted. This can be accomplished both militarily, via destruction of roads and bridges that connect Lebanon with Syria, and politically, by incentivizing authorities in Syria – both Syrian and Russian – to prevent cross-border trafficking. 

   2. To fund its social and military programs, Hezbollah requires a large amount of money. This money is primarily supplied by Iran (A not insignificant portion of Hezbollah’s income comes from drug trade in South America). Reinstatement of sanctions in Iran would have a considerable effect on all of Iran’s terror proxies, particularly Hezbollah. Without Iranian financial aid, Hezbollah would not be able to purchase weapons, build infrastructure, or train its soldiers – they would not even be able to pay their salary. They would not be able to “rent” rooms in Southern Lebanese houses to hide entrances to terror tunnels and to launch cruise missiles. While reinstatement sanctions on Iran could obviously not be a stated part of a ceasefire deal, they could be part of a background element to help cement a ceasefire. 

The final point we will address is what the U.S. can do to foster a lasting ceasefire that will bring long-term security to Israelis and Lebanese. Based on the points brought forward in the previous section, the following avenues should be investigated:

1. UNR-1701 could be folded into congressional legislation. For instance, countries that aid and abet the breaching of UNR-1701, either financially or military, would not be eligible for American financial aid or be sold American weapons.

2. The U.S. could be part of an international alliance that would be responsible for enforcing UNR-1701. The U.S. Army is well-equipped and well-trained and has copious experience working in international collaboration. This task could be added to the bailiwick of CENTCOM. 

3. The U.S. could use its relationship with Russia and Syria to encourage them to prevent arms from flowing from Syria into Lebanon. Reports that Israel has been courting Russia for this very purpose have been appearing regularly over the past two weeks. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar recently underlined the importance of this principle: “The Russians are, as you know, present in Syria. And if they are in agreement with this principle, I think they can contribute effectively to this objective.” American assistance would be invaluable.

4. The U.S. could apply snapback sanctions on Iran in order to impose export controls, travel bans, asset freezes, and other restrictions on individuals, entities, and banks involved in Iranian nuclear and missile activities. Snapback sanctions also include reinstating the expired UN arms embargo that barred countries from supplying, selling, or transferring most combat equipment to Iran and prohibited Iran from exporting weapons.

One last point must be made. Hezbollah, regardless of what they might state in the media, has well and truly lost this war. Southern Lebanon is uninhabitable. Beirut is being taken apart building by building, and there is nothing Hezbollah can do to stop it. Their political and military leadership has been gutted, and Israel is now targeting the replacements of the replacements. The damage that Hezbollah can incur with their rockets and missiles is limited, and most attacks are blunted by Israel’s multilayer missile defense system. Hezbollah has been vanquished, and it must be treated as such. They cannot be allowed to make more than minimal demands. They must understand that the alternative to a ceasefire is the continuation of their own destruction. 

It could very well be that some or even all of the options described above are already being negotiated. According to many media outlets, a ceasefire in Southern Lebanon will be declared in only a matter of days. It is critical that if these points are not being actively negotiated, they must at least be considered as part of the gamut of constraints that color the ceasefire. This would go a long way in ensuring that the “Third Lebanon War” becomes known as the “Last Lebanon War.” 

Good things,

Ari Sacher

Over the past few weeks, this blog has been discussing a new reality in northern Israel today in which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), after having decapitated Hezbollah leadership, are slowly but surely dismantling the Hezbollah terror infrastructure in Southern Lebanon, the Bekaah Valley, and Beirut. According to news reports, the IDF is now advancing northward in three separate vectors in order to deepen the achievement (an IDF term). Hezbollah will likely continue its death throes for months or even years. Rockets will continue to be fired on northern Israel and every so often on Tel Aviv and even Ben Gurion Airport. What options does Israel have? Are we destined to spend the near foreseeable future running in and out of bomb shelters? Must the IDF conquer the entire country of Lebanon? Is this possible or even desirable? Before we address these questions, there is one more piece to the puzzle that we must add.

The United Nations (UN) has a checkered history vis-à-vis Israel. The UN played a vital part in the creation of the State of Israel. On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, known as the “Partition Plan.” This plan proposed the creation of independent Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem, the capital of both states, under international administration. Despite opposition from Arab countries, the plan was approved by a large majority, including many countries that typically vote against Israel. But since 1948, the UN treatment of Israel has gone from bad to worse. Over the past ten years, the UN General Assembly has adopted 140 resolutions condemning Israel. In comparison, during the same period, the General Assembly passed a total of 68 resolutions against all other countries combined. The UN Human Rights Council has a permanent agenda item dedicated to discussing Israel’s actions in the West Bank. This disproportionate focus on Israel reflects, shall we say, a certain bias within the UN. 

In the context of the “Day After” in Lebanon, the UN is responsible for two pivotal parameters: United Nations Resolution (UNR) 1701 and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). 

UNR-1701:

On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah militants crossed the border into Israel, attacked a military convoy, killed five IDF soldiers, and took the bodies of two soldiers back into Lebanon to be used as bargaining chips. Five more IDF soldiers were killed in Lebanon in an aborted rescue attempt. Israel responded by attacking Lebanon with overwhelming force, predominantly via air and artillery, and Hezbollah responded by firing 4,500 rockets into Israel. A subsequent Israeli ground incursion into Lebanon proved ineffective at staunching the rocket fire. As the death toll of Israeli soldiers began to mount, a cease-fire was brokered. The terms of the cease-fire were woven into United Nations Resolution (UNR) 1701. UNR-1701 went into effect on August 14, 2006, after having been confirmed by both the Israeli and Lebanese governments. The unstated purpose of UNR-1701 was to recreate the buffer zone north of Israel that existed until Israel’s unilateral withdrawal in June 2000.

Here are the key points of UNR-1701 (available here):

1. Imposing the full sovereignty of the Government of Lebanon throughout Lebanese territory. The Government of Lebanon must attain full sovereignty, so that there will be no weapons without their consent and there shall be no local authority other than that of the Government of Lebanon.

2. The Lebanese army (LAF) will be supported by a more powerful version of the United Nations Forces In Lebanon (UNIFIL) (more on this later).

3. The disarming of all “armed personnel” between the Lebanon-Israel border (known as the Blue Line) the Litani River, which lies about twenty kilometers north of the Blue Line. While the Hezbollah is not explicitly mentioned as being one of these “armed personnel,” it is clear that this clause is referring primarily, if not exclusively, to them.

4. Preventing the entrance of weapons into Lebanon without the authorization of the Government of Lebanon.

Between August 2006 and October 7, 2024, Hezbollah repeatedly and systematically violated UNR-1701.  

1. Hezbollah armed itself to the teeth. To replace the “Nature Reserves,” a network of subterranean tunnels and depots that were damaged during the Second Lebanon War, Hezbollah constructed an upgraded and a more extensive network of “Nature Reserves.” According to public sources, on October 7, 2023, Hezbollah had more than 150,000 rockets pointed at Israel. There is no place in Israel that is not threatened by Hezbollah rocket fire. Some of these rockets have precision guidance systems that enable Hezbollah to target critical Israeli infrastructure including power plants, water desalination plants, offshore gas rigs, and cell-phone towers. If the Hezbollah so desired, Israeli citizens would quickly find themselves without power, water, and cell-phone coverage. Since October 8, Hezbollah has fired more than 8,000 of them on Israel and, either by desire or by consequence of Israeli attacks, has not fired on Israeli infrastructure. 

2. Hezbollah forces were located immediately across the Blue Line. A few months before October 7, Hezbollah set up a tent on the border as a show of sovereignty and as a finger in the eye of the Israelis. 

3. Hezbollah repeatedly dug tunnels under the border fence to facilitate the capture of Israeli territory. 

The primary enabler for Hezbollah to openly flaunt UNR-1701 was the impotence and the apathy of the Lebanese government and its army. As we saw last week, Hezbollah makes up a full third of the Lebanese parliament such that in many ways, the Hezbollah is the Lebanese army. More worrisome was the continued silence of the UN. Its member nations showed no gumption or willingness to stand up against open violations of their own resolution. The UN is fully aware of this. UN Resolution 2650, signed in August 2023, expressed “deep concern” at the continued lack of progress… of key provisions of UNR-1701 sixteen years after its adoption.”

Since September 23, 2024, when the IDF launched Operation Northern Arrows, the situation on the ground has changed drastically.

1. Much of the arsenal of Hezbollah missiles and launchers has been decimated by IDF attacks. In some estimates, more than two thirds of the arsenal has been destroyed. In addition, rocket launchers that are used to attack Israel are targeted and destroyed within minutes after launch.

2. Nearly every Lebanese town within 3 miles of the Blue Line has been turned into gravel. Weapon caches have been located and destroyed, buildings that were once used to fire anti-tank weapons into Israel no longer exist, and the Hezbollah terrorists who once inhabited the towns have fled northwards.

3. Tunnels that were to have been used by Hezbollah terrorists to swarm into Israel have been located, mapped, and destroyed.

The situation on the ground in Lebanon has changed drastically. Hezbollah has been weakened such that it is a mere shadow of itself. Implementation of UNR-1701 is no longer a pipe-dream.

UNIFIL:

The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) was established on March 19, 1978, by UN Security Council Resolutions 425 and 426. Its initial goals were to confirm the withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon, restore international peace and security, and assist the Lebanese government in regaining authority in the area.

Over the years, UNIFIL’s role has evolved, especially after key events such as the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the abrupt Israeli withdrawal in 2000. After the 2006 Lebanon War, the UN expanded UNIFIL’s mandate to include monitoring the cessation of hostilities, supporting the Lebanese Armed Forces in deploying throughout southern Lebanon, and ensuring humanitarian access to civilian populations. According to the UN, UNIFIL’s current mission focuses on maintaining peace and security along the Blue Line. As of October 2024, UNIFIL includes peacekeepers from 48 countries. Some of the major contributors are Indonesia, Italy, India, Nepal, Ghana, and Malaysia. Other countries with smaller but still significant contributions include Spain, China, Ireland, and France.

Unfortunately, according to the many people I have spoken with who serve or have served in the IDF and in UNIFIL, the letters “UN” in UNIFIL stand for UNnecessary. UNIFIL, more often than not, has been a hindrance to peacekeeping than a help. There are three primary reasons for this lack of success: UNIFIL’s composition, its relationship with Hezbollah, and its Rules of Engagement.

UNIFIL Composition

Looking at the primary countries contributing to UNIFIL, the first striking phenomenon that one notices is that most of the countries are third-world countries. Their armies are, generally speaking, underequipped, under-trained, and suffer from corruption. They do not have maneuver capability and therefore effectively act as localized separate units, not as a holistic army. The only outlier to this phenomenon is Italy, which is a well-equipped and well-trained NATO force. The second striking phenomenon is that one of the primary contributors, Indonesia, does not have diplomatic relations with Israel. This makes IDF-UNIFIL collaboration and coordination difficult, if not impossible. 

Relationship with Hezbollah

There have been criticisms and accusations that UNIFIL has not been effective in curbing Hezbollah's activities in the region. Some reports suggest that Hezbollah continues to operate in areas where UNIFIL is present, questioning the mission's effectiveness. Other reports claim that UNIFIL's actions, or lack thereof, have empowered Hezbollah to operate with relative impunity, effectively turning a blind eye to the group's activities. This has led to credible accusations that UNIFIL is enabling Hezbollah rather than deterring it.

Rules of Engagement

In order for an armed force to be effective, it must have the purview to impose force on the enemy. This purview is governed by Rules of Engagement (ROE), directives that define the circumstances, conditions, and manner in which the use of force may be applied. UNIFIL’s ROE are very narrow. As a peacekeeping mission operating under a UN Charter, UNIFIL has the mandate to ensure stability in the area, protect the civilian population, and support the parties in discharging their respective responsibilities towards achieving a permanent ceasefire.  In carrying their mandate, UNIFIL personnel may exercise their inherent right of self-defense. In addition to the use of force beyond self-defense, UNIFIL may under certain circumstances and conditions resort to the “proportionate and gradual use of force” to ensure that its area of operations is not utilized for hostile activities; to resist attempts by forceful means to prevent UNIFIL from discharging its duties under the mandate authorized by the Security Council; to protect UN personnel, facilities, installations, and equipment; to ensure the security and freedom of movement of UN personnel and humanitarian workers; and to protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence.

This is their mandate. How UNIFIL implements their mandate is another story. In practice, they are generally reactive if they do anything at all. The more professional units will do what they can with a restrictive ROE, and with few heavy weapons or a wider force maneuver capability. The others ignore, hide, and try to survive. They are often without pay, food, and other critical supplies as a result of internal corruption, completely unrelated to the UN.

One former Finnish UNIFIL soldier published a scathing j’accuse: “Our main duty was to assist and patrol with the Lebanese Army in the area. We would observe and gather information. Before the conflict when there wasn’t much going on we would, for example, count the amount of… Hezbollah flags in a village, are stores open, was the attitude of the population positive or hostile. When the conflict started, we started counting destroyed buildings in villages, civilians in the streets, any women or children, groups of men, ambulances, etc. If we found weapons or rocket sites, then we would inform the Lebanese army (LAF) soldiers patrolling with us and they would handle it. Our ROE before the conflict was that if we observed a possible/imminent rocket launch then we would intervene and attempt to prevent it by any means necessary. When the [October 2023] conflict began, this changed. We would inform the Lebanese and follow their lead. Also we were told if they managed to launch , then we should leave ASAP as the Israelis were quick with counter battery fire… 

I think UNIFIL is a failure. A lot of the forces are composed of 3rd world countries who are there merely because the UN pays them. They drive around in… vehicles with bad visibility, foot patrols were no longer allowed after the conflict started so they can’t see [anything] on their patrols. Some countries were also not performing their patrols, they would drive somewhere and wait for a few hours, then drive back to base and say they completed the patrol. We were tasked on a few occasions to patrol the sectors of other countries and report how many patrols we saw because the higher ups… didn’t trust them.

The Lebanese Army is incapable of stopping Hezbollah. They drive in Humvees that break down uphill or can’t drive too slowly because the car will die otherwise… They would refuse to drive certain paths claiming it was dangerous, they would take wrong turns, they got mad when we took photos of weapons we found. Also all patrol paths are sent to the Lebanese Army, they know which route and which time we’ll drive it. This information is almost certainly relayed to Hezbollah, so they know to avoid us or hide their stuff.  The most UNIFIL has done is stimulate the local economy.”

UNIFIL with its current composition, with its current equipment, and with its current Rules of Engagement, cannot carry out their mandate, let alone enforce UNR-1701 against a semi-sovereign, belligerent, and well-armed Hezbollah. UNR-1701 can only be enforced by an army that is well-armed, well-trained, and that has Rules of Engagement that give it the freedom to project force where required. 

With our background on Lebanon, the LAF, Hezbollah, and the UN, we now have sufficient information to proceed towards resolution of the problem. Next week, we will propose some potential ways ahead.

Good things,

Ari Sacher

Last week, we discussed a new reality in northern Israel today. Hezbollah will likely continue its death throes for months or even years. Rockets will continue to be fired on northern Israel and every so often on Tel Aviv and Ben Gurion Airport. What options does Israel have? Are we destined to spend the near foreseeable future running in and out of bomb shelters? Must the IDF conquer the entire country of Lebanon? Is this possible or even desirable? Before we begin to propose solutions, we must understand the parameters. Over the next few weeks, we will garner some background information that will instruct our ability to make decisions. 

One of the most important parameters in the equation is the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), which will have a vital role to play once the IDF withdraws from Lebanon, assuming that it does not plan on retaining forces across the border. Any treaty or agreement with Lebanon will require a security entity to supplant the Hezbollah, which will either be banished north of the Litani River or dismantled completely. This entity will more than likely be based on the LAF. In order to understand the structure and the mission of the LAF, as well as the difficulties it faces in performing its mission, some geopolitical background is necessary.

Lebanon is made up of a collage of three religions: Maronite Christians, Sunni Moslems, and Shiite Moslems, with each religion making up more or less one third of the total population. In general, the Christians live in the western part of the country. The Sunnis live in the north and the southeast. The Shiites live in the south, on the border with Israel, and in the northeast in the Beqaa Valley. There is no love lost between the three religions. 

Between 1975-1990, Lebanon was torn by a Civil War in which more than 150,000 people were killed. Since the end of the war, Lebanon has essentially spiraled into a failed state. Lebanon is more of a patchwork quilt than a coherent country. This makes governing the country extremely difficult. The central government is frail at best and non-existent at worst. Lebanon has not had a President since 2022. Lebanon’s political system is based on sectarian quotas, which complicates the election process: The president must be a Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim, and the Speaker of the Parliament a Shia Muslim. The parliament is similarly based on sectarian quotas, resulting in a body that is deeply divided among various political factions, including pro- and anti-Hezbollah groups. The parliament has become so dysfunctional to the point that it simply cannot govern, meaning that day-to-day governance has become the job of the local authorities. This arrangement has become a source of power for Hezbollah, as they, and not the government, have been providing for the welfare of the South-Lebanese for more than a generation. They provide the civilian population schooling, food, and healthcare, all largely funded by Iran.

It is only natural that a failed state should have a failed army. The primary source of the LAF’s problems is economics. The LAF lacks resources, both financial and military, to act as a functioning army. Salaries are too low to entice people to enlist. The budget is too small to purchase military equipment that would enable it to conduct operations, maintain its equipment, and train its soldiers. As a result, the LAF proves no match militarily for non-state actors such as Hezbollah. Another result of the Lebanese Civil War is the change in the demographics of the LAF over the past twenty years. While Christians were once heavily represented in the army, particularly among commanders and officers, Shiites now hold a strong majority. Hezbollah has a clear interest in the growth of Shiite personnel in the Lebanese armed forces, who are likely to support and identify with Hezbollah. The rise of Shi’ism, combined with the fall in Christian recruiting, has played an important role in strengthening the Lebanese army’s links with Hezbollah. It is unsurprising that LAF orientation manuals teach new recruits that “support for the resistance” (i.e., Hezbollah) is “a legitimate right for the Lebanese.”

Entanglement with Hezbollah has had a tangible effect on the role of the LAF in Southern Lebanon, especially as it pertains to controlling the border with Israel:

1. The line separating Hezbollah from the LAF is fine, indeed. On one hand, Hezbollah recruits LAF army commanders, enabling coordination with the LAF while turning it into an arm of the Hezbollah. Hezbollah has built watchtowers on the Israel border under the guise of them being LAF watchtowers. The IDF have verified that these watchtowers were operated by Hezbollah personnel. On the other hand, Hezbollah has infiltrated the ranks of the LAF, giving Hezbollah access to western weaponry and technology. In this way, Hezbollah gained access to security radars at Beirut International Airport and the Lebanese Navy, curtailing the freedom of movement of the IDF.

2. Not only has Hezbollah infiltrated the LAF, they have also infiltrated the governmental security system. Until recently, the role of Chief of General Security was designated to a Maronite Christian, but Hezbollah successfully petitioned to have it redesignated to a Shiite. Hezbollah relies heavily on general security intelligence, as well as counterintelligence to prevent infiltration of spies. 

3. Just as Hezbollah manipulates the Southern Lebanese with financial aid, it also manipulates LAF soldiers and officers, attracting non-Shiite officers and soldiers to its cause. Hezbollah appeals to all soldiers from diverse communities who are in dire economic situations by offering “economic assistance” and receiving benefits in return. 

Past efforts to enforce UN resolutions in Southern Lebanon, such as Resolution 1701, which calls for the disarmament of all militias in Lebanon, have not been implemented. Hezbollah has continued its activities in southern Lebanon, often with the LAF turning a blind eye. Given the amount of overlap between the LAF and the Hezbollah, this should not be surprising. Given the analysis presented here, it is unlikely that the LAF can enforce a new political outline in southern Lebanon or serve as an effective counterbalance to Hezbollah under the current circumstances. Any plan for “The Day After” in Southern Lebanon must take this into consideration.

For the LAF to effectively control Lebanon and disentangle from Hezbollah, several key changes and improvements are necessary:

1. Increased Funding and Resources: The LAF needs substantial financial support to improve its operational capabilities. This includes better salaries for soldiers, modern equipment, and sufficient supplies.

2. International Support: Enhanced international assistance, particularly from European countries and the United States, is crucial. This support should include training, advanced military hardware, and logistical aid.

3. Political Will and Reform: The Lebanese government must demonstrate a strong political will to empower the LAF. This includes implementing reforms to reduce corruption and ensure that the military operates independently of sectarian influences.

4. Strategic Partnerships: Forming strategic partnerships with international forces, such as the US Central Command (CENTCOM) can help the LAF in maintaining security and stability, especially in volatile regions like southern Lebanon.

These steps, if implemented effectively, could significantly enhance the LAF’s ability to control Lebanon and maintain stability in the long term as part of a peace agreement with Israel. 

Next week we’ll look at how the United Nations (UN) fits into the equation.

Good Things,

Ari Sacher

The war on Israel’s northern front – its rarely-used official name is “Operating Northern Arrows” – is winding to an end. The IDF has incurred serious damage to the Hezbollah. Most of its leadership has been killed. In some cases, the replacements of the replacements have been killed.

A clip on TikTok shows a group of Lebanese men in an underground parking lot. One of them says, “We in Beirut are afraid of nothing. And I would like to introduce you to the new Secretary General of the Hezbollah.” He points to the person standing next to him who is wearing the clothing of a Moslem cleric. The cleric, with a look of shock on his face,  punches the speaker, starts running away, and everyone else in the scene breaks into raucous laughter. Nobody wants to be the next Secretary General of Hezbollah because it is a short-term job. When Naim Qassem, who replaced Hashem Safieddine who replaced Hassan Nasrallah, was appointed Secretary General on October 29, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant tweeted “The countdown has begun.” 

The IDF has destroyed, according to many estimates, nearly 80% of the Hezbollah arsenal of rockets and launchers. All villages within three miles of the Israel border lie in ruins. The IDF methodically entered the villages, located and exploded large stockpiles of arms – rockets, mortars, mines, rocket propelled grenades, sniper rifles and then some – and destroyed underground tunnels that were entered via the homes of the local civilian population. Some of these tunnels were a mile long and came within a few feet of the border. These tunnels were built to be used as staging grounds for their “Conquer the Galilee” plan in which the terrorist army vowed to commit another October 7-style massacre in northern Israel. The tunnels contained enough food to literally feed an army. 400 tons of explosives were required to destroy one of the longer tunnels. The blast was so powerful that in many locations in Israel, including my home town of Moreshet, 20 miles away, that it triggered the earthquake alarms. The villages were all empty. They are ghost towns. Their residents left months ago to safer areas in the Lebanese north. IDF soldiers have encountered minimal resistance. 

Avihai Edri, the IDF spokesman in Arabic, has become a sort of legend in Lebanon. When he says to evacuate an area so that the IDF can bomb it, his words are heeded. This does not go unnoticed by the Hezbollah’s local opposition. Starting October 31, Edri began emptying out Baalbek, a town northeast of Beirut on the Syrian border, far from Israel. An opposition newspaper was quoted as saying, “[The IDF] tell you to leave and you leave… Don’t tell us afterwards that you stood tall and defeated the IDF – these are empty words. You fled and you left Baalbek to the thieves…” 

The IDF seems to have completed most of its goals in its ground incursion of Lebanon. I say this because many of the people I know that served on the Lebanese front have been released or will shortly be released from months of emergency active reserve duty. The number of aircraft flying overhead has lessened to a small fraction of what it was only a few weeks ago meaning the IAF is dropping fewer bombs. Hezbollah is truly a broken organization. Its ability to project power is a fraction of what it once was. The IDF have blown up most of the bridges and border crossings that connect Lebanon to Syria, blocking the channels that were used to send arms from Iran. The Hezbollah ship is slowly and inexorably sinking.

And yet. The Hezbollah are still wreaking havoc in Israel. They still possess thousands of rockets that have sufficient range to hit targets in Israel even when launched far from the border in areas that Israel has no plans to conquer or to destroy. Granted that the extent of the rocket fire is greatly reduced from what it once was and is a small fraction of what Israeli citizens had prepared for.  

As late as two months ago, we had been warned that a war with Hezbollah would see between 2,000-4,000 rockets a day. We had been warned that Hezbollah rockets would destroy our power plants, our water desalination plants, and our cell phone towers. We had been warned to stock our bomb shelters with sufficient food and water for at least three days. The number of rockets fired at Israel each day is usually less than 100, about 5% of what was once imagined, and Iron Dome intercepts nearly all of them. Nearly, but not always. 

Last Thursday, in two separate incidents, 7 Israelis were killed by Hezbollah rocket fire. 5 people were killed while farming near Metulla on the northern border, and another 2 were killed a few hours later while picking olives in a field near Shefaram about 5 miles from my home. In these two instances, Iron Dome was not even used. The reason is that the system intercepts only those targets predicted to impact predefined areas that have a high population density. “Open Areas,” such as fields and roads, are more often than not unprotected. This makes driving on country roads a potentially deadly endeavor. Even when Hezbollah rockets are intercepted, a key component of Israel’s strategy of protection from rocket fire includes entering a bomb-shelter for 10 minutes. Each salvo on the Haifa area sends more than one million people into bomb shelters. Yesterday, Haifa residents experienced six alarms. My son in Acco had five, the first at 4:00 am. When large missiles are fired from northern Lebanon toward the center of the country, even larger swaths of people are sent to bomb shelters for fear of debris falling on their heads. Traumatic psychological effects aside, the effect on work productivity is not insignificant.

Recently, a new threat has entered the scene – a new family of killer drones. These drones are difficult to detect. They can fly at an altitude of less than 50 feet above ground. They have electric motors with low acoustic signatures, and they are stealthy such that radar detection at long range is nearly impossible. These drones use GPS to fly on pre-planned trajectories, usually coming in over the sea and flying a circuitous route to confuse Israeli defenses. The drones have small warheads when compared with rockets and missiles, but they are deadly all the same. On October 13, a drone crashed into the dining room of the Golani Brigade Training Base. The drone was programmed to crash into the building at dinner time when it was at its fullest. 4 soldiers were killed, and 61 were injured. The drones are often detected near the northern border. As they make their way southwards, nearby citizens enter their bomb shelters. 

Last week we were driving north on Highway 6, the Trans-Israel highway. As we passed the city of Yoqneam, we noticed a large number of cars parked on the side of the road. Quickly understanding that there was an attack going on, we parked our car at the side of the road, exited the vehicle, and moved off the highway. As we exited the car, we heard a nearby siren. One of the people next to us told us that it was not a rocket attack, but rather a drone attack. With a rocket attack, a person who is caught outdoors should lie down in a ditch to minimize the chance of injury from blast and shrapnel. With a drone attack, there is nothing that can be done other than to stay away from the car and to get inside a bomb shelter as quickly as possible. And so we stood helpless at the side of the road until the drone made its way southward. Eventually, it turned back north and exploded not far from where we had stood, but by then, we were already far away.

Not only is detection of the new killer drones difficult, but shooting them down is also a challenge. Using a missile like Iron Dome or an air-to-air missile launched by a fighter jet is like using a hammer to kill a fly – the cost per intercept is considerable and as the intercept usually takes place at low altitude, and the potential for collateral damage is also great. The optimal solution would be to use a high-powered laser, but the Iron Beam system that is tasked to perform that mission is still not yet operational. Even if it were, the number of systems that would have to be procured in order to defend the entire country would be beyond our budget. In order to intercept the new killer drones, the IDF is thinking out of the box. Large Vulcan Phalanx cannons are being positioned at the border to take out the drones before they enter Israeli airspace. In a viral video from this weekend, an AH-64 Apache helicopter is seen using its cannon to intercept a killer drone. This intercept took place across the street from an outdoor amphitheater which was hosting a rock concert. A coworker, who had attended that concert, told me that it was “surreal.” 

This is the new reality, or perhaps surreality, in Israel today. Hezbollah will likely continue its death throes for months or even years. Naim Qassem, in a speech last week, said that Hezbollah has no intention whatsoever of waving a white flag. They will defeat Israel or die trying. Surrender is not an option. 

What options does Israel have? Are we destined to spend the near foreseeable future running in and out of bomb shelters? Must the IDF conquer the entire country of Lebanon? Is this possible or even desirable? In next week’s essay, we will offer some potential solutions.

Good Things,

Ari Sacher

On the night between April 13-14, 2024, Iran launched a salvo of close to 300 cruise missiles, killer drones, and ballistic missiles at Israel. Nearly 99 percent of the drones and cruise missiles were destroyed by a coalition that included Israel, the U.S., and the U.K. Most were destroyed before entering Israeli airspace while nine of the ballistic missiles struck two Israeli air bases, causing minor damage. Israel’s response was muted: On April 19, three missiles were launched at an anti-aircraft battery next to an Iranian nuclear facility in Isfahan, destroying the radar. While Israel never officially took credit for the attack, there are no other suspects. Israel seemed to be telling Iran that it could hit Iran’s most sensitive sites at will and that this should serve as a warning shot.

The lesson was not heeded. On the night of October 1, Iran launched a salvo of about 200 ballistic missiles at Israel. While most of the missiles were intercepted by the Arrow-3 Anti-Ballistic-Missile System, a small number of them managed to impact Israeli Air Force Bases, again causing limited damage and not affecting the readiness of the Israel Air Force. After this second salvo, an Israeli retaliatory response was a sure thing. In the Middle East, deterrence is vital. In order to maintain its deterrence, Israel needed to strike back hard at Iran. The question was what would be targeted.

Four primary options were on the table:

1. Oil and gas production facilities

2. Symbols of sovereignty, such as high-ranking officials, parliament buildings, and the clock in Palestine Square that shows the countdown to Israel’s destruction.

3. Nuclear facilities

4. Military facilities

While all options had their strengths and their weaknesses, Israel chose Option #4. On the night between October 25-26, more than 140 Israeli warplanes attacked targets in and around Tehran. While the Israel Defense Force (IDF) is not divulging any information, sources on the internet are in agreement that two types of targets were struck:

1. Ballistic missile production facilities:

Most of Iran’s ballistic missiles have solid fuel rocket motors. The rocket fuel is made using a “batter,” similar to the way one would make a cake. Unsurprisingly, a key component in the production of rocket fuel is a mixer. Because the rocket propellant is extremely volatile, it is mixed using a special liquid-sealed mixer. Because the missiles are so large, these mixers can mix up to 600 gallons of rocket fuel. A mixer can cost about $2 million each, and Iran owns between 12-20 of them. All of the mixers were destroyed in a strike on a facility in Parchin, about 30 miles from Tehran. A very small number of companies around the world produce these kinds of mixers, and most of the companies are in western countries that are forbidden from selling ballistic missile components to Iran. This leaves China and Russia as the only two potential vendors for such mixers. The lead time to procure mixers is estimated between one and two years. The destruction of the mixers will be a significant setback for the Iranian ballistic missile program. While Iran still possesses a considerable arsenal of ballistic missiles, it will now have to manage their use because they are, for the moment, irreplaceable. 

1. Air Defense System radars:

The most potent weapon in the Iranian air and missile defense arsenal is the Russian S-300. The system has similar performance to the well-known and venerable American PATRIOT system. The S-300 has a range of more than 100 miles. The S-300 is Iran’s only strategic air-defense system – all of its other systems have significantly less range and are designed to counter a much smaller threat set. Iran received four S-300 batteries from Russia in 2016, each consisting of a target-acquisition radar, a target-engagement radar, and four towed transporter-erector-launchers (TEL). The Israeli retaliatory strike destroyed all 4 target engagement radars, rendering the systems useless and leaving Tehran and Western Iran essentially unprotected to any follow-on Israeli attack.

The Israeli retaliatory raid can be deemed a success, for a number of reasons:

1. Israel attacked Iran in a “noisy” manner that caused serious damage to Iranian air defense systems and long-range ballistic missile production facilities. The raid itself cannot be denied or explained away by the Iranians. Deterrence consists of “Capability, Credibility, and Communication,” and Israel’s attack showed an abundance of all three components.

2. The Iranian attack on October 1 had limited success. No real damage was incurred, and only one Israeli casualty was sustained. What little success the attack had was due to the extent of the barrage and the penetration of several dozen missiles into the defense system.  In the Israeli raid, most of the munitions accurately impacted their targets and caused significant damage. Air Defense capabilities were taken away and the production of ballistic missiles was damaged. No Iranian civilians were injured by errant missiles. Compare this to the Iranian attacks that targeted the heart of the Tel Aviv metropolitan area with an unstated goal of causing as many civilian casualties as possible. The fact that all Israeli aircraft successfully penetrated the Iranian Air Defense and returned home safely is nothing short of remarkable. And this is the difference – Iran has great difficulty penetrating Israeli air defense, and anything that does manage to penetrate its defense is highly inaccurate. Israel, on the other hand, can hit any point in Iran accurately and painfully and negate critical capabilities. Iran has a rudimentary Air Force and Navy. Its capability to project power is limited to its ballistic missile force. As long as the exchange of blows continues, Israel will become more powerful, and Iran will become more weak.

   
   

On the other hand, the Israeli raid was not without its limitations:

1. Iran attacked with all its might. It launched two salvos using its most advanced missiles. These salvos were the largest in modern military history. Even though the damage was limited due to the prowess of the Israeli Integrated Air and Missile Defense, the attack had the potential to be far more deadly. Israel, on the other hand, operated using tweezers. It chose to damage a small number of military sites, which in a matter of months or years, despite the localized damage, will be repaired. No long term damage was incurred.

2. While Israel can still say, “We can do more than that!,” the attack left Iranian oil facilities and symbols of sovereignty standing. Destruction of these facilities would have had a far greater near-term and long-term effect. 

It is clear that the Israeli attack catered to the interests of the current U.S. administration. Iranian nuclear facilities were not attacked due to the Israeli Air Force’s inability to single-handedly destroy the important targets deep underground – American GBU-57 MOP penetrator bombs are needed for that mission. And the Iranian oil industry, a vulnerable and relatively easy target that would have been particularly painful for the Iranian economy, was not attacked, more than likely due to Western pressure.

From a military standpoint, a stronger Israeli response is possible and even required, but Israel's political considerations in view of the growing criticism of the war makes Israel largely dependent on American support. The Biden Administration is interested in de-escalation, and more forceful Israeli strikes would likely spur an immediate Iranian response. Ten days before a presidential election, this is a scenario the administration very badly wanted to avoid.

The U.S. is not the only country from which Israel needed tacit approval. Based on the debris found in Iraq – booster motors of long-range weapons and the like – it appears that the IAF flew over Syria and Iraq on their way to Iran, destroying detection radars along the way in order to keep their approach clandestine. Today, Syrian airspace is if not controlled by, then at least monitored by the Russians. According to reports on the internet, Israel and Russia have set up methods for deconfliction in order to ensure that Israel has the freedom to attack targets in Syria without accidentally hitting any Russian targets. Any route to Tehran that went through Syria, knocking out targets along the way, would have required Russian knowledge and sign-off. This would also serve to limit the target set, seeing as Iran and Russia have an agreement for a gas-oil swap in which Iran purchases Russian natural gas in return for crude oil. The Russians have a vested interest in keeping the Iranian crude flowing.

All things considered, Israel maximized the utility of its attack on Iran. It chose its targets in a way that would be useful but would not upset the world body politic. It removed Iran’s ability to defend itself in case of a future Israeli attack. It hit its targets with deadly accuracy, and all of its aircraft returned home safely. Not bad for one night’s work.

Good Things,

Ari Sacher

Since October 7, four soldiers from my home town of Moreshet, a hamlet of 400 families in the Western Galilee, have been killed in action. Yakir Levi was killed on October 7, when Hamas terrorists overran his army base on the Gazan Border. A month later, Naaran Eshchar was killed when his tank fell off a cliff in the Northern Galilee. Naaran was a reservist who had to beg to return to his unit because he had recently donated a kidney. He left a pregnant wife and two children. Last month, Daniel Toaff was killed in Southern Gaza when he and his soldiers took shelter in a booby-trapped building, a building that supposedly had been cleared by another unit. Hamas terrorists were watching from a cell-phone, and when Daiel entered the building, they brought the building down.

On Thursday, Ori Borenstein fell in Gaza. Ori was 32 years old. I went to high school with his father, Abe, in Toronto. They live across the street from us. I have known Ori since his birth. He was named ”Ori Moshe.” He received Ori because he was born on Chanukah, the Festival of Lights. He received Moshe after his great-great grandfather who was shot by the Nazis when they overran his village. I taught Ori for his Bar Mitzvah. I always enjoyed talking to him. He had studied engineering and he liked cars. What’s not to like? Like many other Israelis, Ori was recently drafted for emergency reserve duty. His job was to carry supplies from an area immediately north of the Gaza Strip to soldiers who were positioned in Jabalya, about 2 miles north of Gaza City, about 5 miles south of the border. Each day Ori would enter Gaza in a convoy of Hummers, drop off his supplies, and return to Israel. On Thursday, a powerful Improvised Explosive Device (IED) exploded next to the convoy, killing Ori along with another two reservists. 

Parents of soldiers live in a state of constant fear. Sleep is a rarity. Sitting at the dining-room table with Ori’s mother, Dahlia, waiting for the army to pass the tragic news to Ori’s siblings, Dahlia said, “Now I understand what [Daniel Toaff’s mother] meant when she said that at least she no longer must worry about her son.” One cannot hear a mother say this about her child without shedding a tear. Many tears.

The first decision that stood before Ori’s parents was where to bury him. The most obvious place would be in the regional cemetery about 5 miles down the road. The problem with this solution was that because of the threat of Hezbollah rocket fire, outdoor gatherings in our part of the country are limited to 50 people. This was a non-starter. The other alternative was to bury him at Mount Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem. This would remove any limitation on the number of people at the funeral as Jerusalem has not sustained any rocket fire since the first days of the war. The down-side with having the funeral at Mount Herzl would be the distance: Jerusalem is a two-hour drive from Moreshet. As the funeral was scheduled for 11:00 pm, most buses would not be running. This problem was solved by the IDF, who committed to send as many buses as required from Moreshet to Jerusalem. At the end, they sent four. Abe and Dahlia chose to bury Ori on Mount Herzl.

The funeral was jam-packed. There were hundreds of people, maybe more. It was mostly solemn with most people weeping quietly with one exception. Ori was about to become engaged. The day before, he had sent his girlfriend a bouquet of flowers to try to bridge the distance. The next day, she brought flowers from that bouquet to the funeral. At the end of the funeral, wreaths were laid on the fresh grave, she laid her flowers on top of them. Her cries of anguish pierced the hearts of every single person in attendance. Her sense of loss, of tragedy, of what will never be, was just too immense for any human being to contain.

Abe’s eulogy of his son was not what I expected. Abe was angry. He lashed out at the army and at the government, accusing them of managing the war in Gaza and not trying to win it. He accused them of a lack of courage, something that Ori had in spades. He kept on repeating the word “le’nitzachon” – “on to victory.” Abe’s eulogy was far more than the words of a mourning father. His words make tremendous geopolitical sense. How can it be that more than one year after the war in Gaza began that the IDF still cannot secure a major artery that brings daily supplies to the front line? How can it be that Israeli soldiers are still encountering booby-trapped buildings? How can the government announce that Hamas has been militarily defeated if terrorists are returning to areas that were cleaned out months ago? Yes, it is true that Hamas operational leadership has been crippled and their capability to build or import weapons is essentially zero, but for how long will the IDF continue to play whack-a-mole with terrorists?

These questions bear much more weight given the events of the past few weeks on the northern border. When Israel (reportedly) detonated the pagers of the Hezbollah leadership on September 17 in “Operation Grim Beeper,” it set into motion a chain of events that in two short weeks has decapitated Hezbollah leadership, destroyed a large portion of their vaunted arsenal of missiles and launchers, and pushed their fighters miles from the northern border. The IDF has four divisions in Gaza and yet only 50 Hezbollah fighters were killed over the weekend. The reason this number is so small is because most of the Hezbollah fighters have fled from the south to safer areas in the center and north of the country. In the meanwhile, the IDF is dismantling Hezbollah infrastructure, destroying terror tunnels, bombing ordnance warehouses, clearing bush, taking down reconnaissance towers, and making it impossible for Hezbollah to ever return to the south. The IDF is turning the Dahia district in Beirut, Hezbollah’s command and control center and the storehouse of much of its long-range weaponry, into rubble. The southern 3 miles of Lebanon is one big ghost town. Anyone entering the area pays for it with his life. No part of Lebanon is off limits in this war. The IDF is fighting a war in Lebanon with the goal of defeating Hezbollah. There is no Plan B.

Why is Gaza so different? Lest it be said that the population density in Gaza is much greater than that in Southern Lebanon, the IDF has successfully moved large numbers of people out of harm’s way so that the IDF could fight in what once were heavily populated areas without collateral damage. I suggest that the difference between Gaza and Lebanon is that the IDF had always prepared for war in Lebanon. It was just a matter of time. Such that when the order was given, a plan was taken out of the desktop drawer and implemented. Not so with Gaza. The IDF had never planned on capturing Gaza. For twenty years, the government and the IDF were content on “containing “ Hamas. Every so often, they would “mow the lawn” when things got out of hand, but it was always believed that Hamas would administer Gaza. Israel wanted no part of it. 

After the October 7 attacks, the IDF had to plan and execute an invasion of Gaza on the fly. There was always going to be a certain amount of “cut-and-try.” The IDF is still playing catch up. Add to this the overhead of pressure from allied countries not to do things that were necessary to win the war, such as entering Rafah and securing the Philadelphia corridor on the Egyptian border. In the war against Hezbollah, the IDF is acting first and responding to questions later.

It all goes back to courage. The “Northern Arrows” war against Hezbollah has shown how a war can be won if the goals are understood, if tactics and strategy are well-planned, and if the army is allowed to execute said strategy, world opinion be damned. If we want to win the war in Gaza, we need to take a page from the Northern Command’s playbook. And we need courage to see things play out until the end.

Abe is giving interviews to anyone who will listen. This morning he spoke on Israeli radio, and this afternoon he is being interviewed together with Benny Gantz and Gadi Eizenkot, two former IDF Chiefs of Staff. Abe knows that this will not bring his son back, but he prays that it may save the lives of the sons of other Israeli parents. It’s the least he can do.

Ori Moshe Borenstein

1991-2024

May his memory be a blessing.

On to victory.

One Year Later:

I am writing these words on October 7, 2024, one year after the most terrible massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. It was a massacre in which more than 1,200 men, women, and children were brutally raped and murdered, in which Israeli towns were razed to the ground. It was a massacre in which 251 Israelis were taken as hostages into Gaza. 

One year later, we are now actively fighting a two-front war, 101 hostages remain unaccounted for, more than 700 soldiers have been killed in action, nearly 11,000 of them have been seriously injured, and more than 60,000 Israelis remain homeless. How does our situation today compare to our situation one year ago?

Yotam Zimri is one of my favorite pundits. He writes a weekly column in the Hebrew newspaper called “Makor Rishon.” Zimri has a way of merging humor, cynicism, and optimism without mangling the facts and in a way that comes across as genuine. In this week’s column, he states unequivocally that regardless of potential causes for despondency that appear in the previous paragraph, the following must be realized. If one looks at the situation from a national perspective, things are far better today than they were one year ago, a day before the October 7 Massacre.

• Last year, we believed that our strategic security situation was under control. We were on the cusp of signing an agreement with Saudi Arabia. We were certain that our enemies were deterred and that “quiet” on the other side of the border was equivalent to “safety.” This year, Israel is more secure than it has been in decades. Israel has utterly destroyed Hamas as a fighting organization. Israel is well on its way to doing the same to Hezbollah. Israel has inflicted considerable damage on the Houthis in Yemen, and it appears to be planning to do the same to Iran. Israel has not yet won this war, but at least Israel is now acting like a country that wants to win this war.

• Last year, we were arrogant, too sure of ourselves and of our capabilities. We were convinced that our “small and smart” army could defeat any enemy. This year, we learned a lesson in humility. We now understand that an army must be large, powerful, and brilliant in order to protect its citizens and to impose its will upon the enemy.

• Last year, we were certain that there was no longer any requirement for infantry. Our defense posture was based on far more glamorous things, like intel, AI, and air power. This year, we understand how much we owe to the hundreds of thousands of infantry soldiers who walked through dangerous urban combat zones in order to storm, to conquer, to free hostages, and to tear Gaza limb from limb. We saw how these soldiers experienced trauma and loss, sending video clips to the home front to pick up their spirits. Last year, “reserve duty” was something we “once did.” This year, many people have served more than 300 days in emergency reserve and still ask their commanders, “So, when are you calling us back already?”

• Last year, we believed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, when he equated Israel to a “spider web.” This year, we are proving to our enemies that our strategy has always been to win wars quickly and decisively and to prevent protracted wars of attrition. In cases where this is impossible, the “Eternal Nation” will willingly spend a year or two winning an historic victory.

• Last year, we were too frightened to touch a tent that Hezbollah had erected next to the border. We were terrified that it would lead to a disastrous war. This year, we have no qualms dropping 60 tons of explosives on the Dahia neighborhood in Beirut in order to remove from power the person who ordered the erection of that tent.

• Last year, we believed in ourselves a little bit too much. This year, we are rebuilding our belief in ourselves brick by brick, slowly, carefully, with a heaping tablespoon of self-doubt that enables us to better ourselves and to sharpen ourselves. To paraphrase a quote made by a rabbi nearly 2000 years ago, “If we are not for ourselves, then who is?”

• Last year, we were a divided nation. Too much abundance and too much good had caused us to rot from within and to whittle away the social norms that held our society together. While it is true that this year will not be the year in which the wolf lies down with the lambs – after all, we are a contentious people – it has become evident that people are beginning to understand the enormity of the moment. We are living in a time in which, assuming we play our cards right, 300 years from now people will look back and ask how it felt to be living in such auspicious times.

Zimri concludes: “Yes, we have paid a terrible price over the past year. We have lost nearly 2,000 of our brothers and sisters. We have seen things that the human eye was never meant to behold. We felt the same insecurity that our grandparents felt in Auschwitz, in the Warsaw Ghetto, and in the forest on the run from the Nazis, but in our own country. For the first time, we were concerned about the very future of our country – we still are. Nevertheless, this year I will know that through all that we have been through, the death, the suffering and the fear, we are still far better off than we were last year when we were blinded by an imaginary quiet and a false sense of security. Let us pray that next year we will be joined by another 101 of our brothers who are not here with us today. We must believe. Anything can happen. After all, we live in biblical times.”

Let me add another layer to Zimri’s words. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has not convincingly won a war since 1967. Since the late 1990s, Israel has been content to manage the conflict rather than to win it. We have not only begun to doubt the utility of fighting and winning a war, we have begun to doubt our capability of winning that war. And yet, Israelis remain arrogant. We need a little more self-esteem and a little less humility. Is it even possible to reconcile the two? Dr. Abraham Twerski, a rabbi and a world-renowned psychiatrist, specializing in substance abuse, suggested the following definitions:

Self-esteem comes from knowing what one has accomplished. Humility comes from knowing what one has not yet accomplished, although he has the potential to do so. One should be proud of who he is and where he is, but he should always remain cognizant of all that still needs to be done. Humility does not spring from self-abnegation. It springs from self-confidence.

Last year, we were taught a lesson in humility. We found out that we knew far less than we thought we knew about our enemies and about ourselves. Over this past year, we were taught a lesson in self-esteem. Israel is methodically taking apart Iran’s “Ring of Fire” that surrounds us, rendering Iran a “spider’s web” and changing the Middle East for the better and forever. Not only is Israel becoming a better place, new vistas have been opened for international cooperation both economic and military. Israelis will perform a lot more reserve duty than we once did, but our children will live in a country that is truly secure and a country with more allies than ever before. It almost sounds biblical. 

So how did we merit living in such “biblical times”? I’m not sure exactly what we did, but whatever we did, we did it together. 

Good Things,

Ari Sacher