Israel’s message to Hezbollah is falling on deaf ears

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.

“If Hezbollah didn’t get the message, I promise you, it will get the message,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Sunday.

The Israeli leader was speaking in the wake of a dramatic few days that saw Israel launch one of the most audacious and innovative attacks on its archenemy, Lebanon’s Iran-aligned Hezbollah movement. But what exactly is the message?

The irony is that Netanyahu’s inflammatory statement was sent via Hezbollah’s pagers and walkie-talkies when, according to Hezbollah, at least a thousand of them “belonging to employees of various Hezbollah units and institutions [had] exploded” simultaneously around Lebanon the previous Tuesday. Several people died, and hundreds were wounded. Then, the following day, at least 20 more were killed and more than 450 injured after dozens of booby-trapped walkie-talkies similarly exploded.

In keeping with its now expected pattern, Israel has denied responsibility, but hints and nudges loudly say otherwise — including from Netanyahu himself on Sunday. Israel had motive and has historically shown ferocious relentlessness when striking back at foes. And as last week’s sci-fi attack came just a few days after Israel’s security service divulged it had thwarted an alleged Hezbollah plot to murder a defense official with a bomb hidden in a security camera, there’s been talk that the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies were a response to that foiled conspiracy.

However, that is unlikely.

First off, according to a MOSSAD officer who spoke to POLITICO on condition of anonymity to speak freely, Israeli intelligence tampered with around 5,000 pagers, introducing explosives into the devices. To do that, and to set up the supply chain that fooled Hezbollah, took months — well before Hezbollah targeted the Israeli defense official.

Shell companies had to be set up; false identities had to be created for the players. So, except for the final months, when Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah ordered his men to ditch their cell phones as they were too easily tracked by Israeli intelligence, this wasn’t a rushed job. The switch to pagers was a golden opportunity for MOSSAD, the officer said.

Ya’akov Peri, a former head of the Israeli security agency Shin Bet, agrees. “An operation to prepare the pagers and the walkie-talkies would have taken very precise intelligence on Hezbollah’s supply chains and purchasing organizations around the world, mainly in the Far East and Europe,” he told POLITICO. “You need time to prepare, to produce these pagers and organize the right contacts to then send them to Lebanon and secure a clean passage through customs and airports.”

Nasrallah’s switch to pagers gave the operation a tremendous boost, of course, enabling Netanyahu to deliver his message, which could be summed up as: We can strike not just your missile and rocket launch sites, your weapons depots with airstrikes and drones, but we can also hit you too — in ways large and small, drilling right down to individual Hezbollah members — and we can turn your communication systems against you. You can’t match us.

And that message was underscored again this week, with a wave of Israeli airstrikes on alleged Hezbollah targets, leaving Lebanon with its highest daily death toll since the end of the 1975–1990 civil war.

However, while Israel is now being accused of escalating the conflict with Hezbollah, the country’s leadership takes a different view. For them, this was an attack to preempt escalation — to emphasize that Israel has many other tricks up its sleeve; that the cost of maintaining rocket attacks on northern Israel, which have forced the evacuation of over 80,000 Israelis, will be high; as will be the price for Hezbollah’s refusal to withdraw from the Lebanese border to the other side of the Litani River, in accordance with the U.N. resolution that brought the 2006 Lebanon War to a close.

According to Israeli officials, they’re the ones who’ve shown patience. They’ve been warning they’ll force Hezbollah, whether by war or diplomacy, to cease firing rockets into Israel and withdraw north of the river since December. Netanyahu’s been under intense political pressure from evacuees to make the northern communities safe for return, and as both sides continue to break the “rules of the game” — informally established to reduce miscalculation by Israel and Hezbollah since 2006 — and hit targets deeper into each other’s territory, patience is wearing thin.

Iran was also sent a “think twice” message in much the same way this summer. It was more subtle and largely missed by commentators, but it likely wasn’t lost on Tehran. Think back to June, when the Islamic Republic launched its unprecedented direct bombardment on Israel, crossing what, for decades, had been an unthinkable red line. At the time, Mohammad Jamshidi, a deputy chief of staff to Iran’s president, had bragged that the “strategic equation” between Tehran and Israel was now changed. But Israel had a quiet and surgically precise response in mind.

Under international pressure to not up the ante and risk a region-wide war, Israel launched a mini-drone strike on targets in Isfahan. Tehran downplayed the incident, claiming the drones had been intercepted and caused no damage or loss of life. Meanwhile, Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington, said: “Israel tried to calibrate between the need to respond and a desire not to enter into a cycle of action and counter-reaction that would just escalate endlessly.”

And what calibration it was. It wasn’t an attack on the city of Isfahan, as Tehran claimed, but rather a highly targeted one aimed at the air defenses of an Iranian military airbase where F-14 Tomcat aircraft are based. And despite Iranian claims that the drones had caused no damage, satellite imagery picked up damage to the air-defense system.

The message there? Again, be careful — we can take out your air defenses wherever and whenever we wish, and not with a massive bombardment but with pinpoint strikes.

However, the messages may be falling on deaf ears. And as Hezbollah maintains its rocket attacks on Israel — firing a ballistic missile this week at Tel Aviv — and as Israel continues to take out more of the organization’s top commanders, with top army commander Herzi Halevi warning Wednesday that Israel’s preparing for a ground offensive against Hezbollah, what was meant to preempt escalation into a full-blown war is having quite the opposite effect. This, despite both sides knowing full well that another war would make the conflict of 2006 look like a skirmish.

The Levant is peering over the edge of an abyss.