June 7: Washington Is Leading Jerusalem Into More War

Gantz to withdraw from government; Hamas infiltrates Israel; AP vindicates Scroll

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The Big Story

We’ve covered the evolving situation on Israel’s northern border twice this week (here and here). Today we’re taking a deeper dive with the help of Tablet’s brain trust.

First, a brief recap: Over the past week, Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia that is the effective ruling power in Lebanon, has stepped up its campaign of destruction inside northern Israel, setting large swaths of territory on fire and conducting multiple successful penetrations of Israeli air defenses with missiles and suicide drones. One strike on an IDF base in the Druze village of Hurfeish wounded 11 and killed an IDF sergeant; another destroyed what the terror group claimed was an Iron Dome battery, but appears to have been a decoy. Israeli leaders, in turn, have signaled their readiness for an “extremely powerful” response to Hezbollah’s provocations.

The current situation, we’ve stressed before, is untenable for Israel. As Tablet’s geopolitical analyst wrote in an email to The Scroll:

A U.S.-backed status quo in which Hezbollah can set the north of Israel on fire at any time of its choosing must be a nonstarter for any Israeli government. The fact that Israel is in this position at all is evidence of a major strategic failure that began with Ehud Barak’s disastrous withdrawal from Lebanon 25 years ago, which created a vacuum that Hezbollah has filled with 100,000 rockets, a large portion of which are now guaranteed to land inside Israel.

While the strategic failure might have initially been Israel’s, it is now a cornerstone of U.S. policy. The U.S. posture adopted by Team Obama-Biden, as part of its wider project toward realignment (or “regional integration”) with Iran, is that the United States will invest tremendous resources in providing defensive capabilities to protect its traditional allies—Israel, but also Saudi Arabia—from Iranian aggression. The cost of this “protection,” however, is that Washington prohibits its allies from taking offensive action against Iran and its proxies. Thus one of the Biden administration’s first moves after Oct. 7 was to order the Israelis not to attack Hezbollah—an attack that much of the Israeli military establishment regarded as necessary, if reporting on the thinking of Yoav Gallant is to be believed.

This arrangement, sometimes called “mutual deterrence,” grants a structural advantage to the Iranian Axis due to the problem of “overmatch”—the fact that in the modern Middle East, offense trumps defense. As Michael Doran laid it out in an email to The Scroll:

Hezbollah possesses “overmatch,” in the sense that, with the indispensable help of Iran, it has developed an offense-dominant regime: a military balance that favors offensive action. It possesses disruptive military capabilities, weapons systems that can evade or overwhelm Israel’s defenses. These capabilities include ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and attack drones, but also antitank guided missiles (ATGMs), which have proven particularly effective in this conflict. Thanks to the broken terrain on the Lebanon-Israel border, Hezbollah fighters often benefit from a clear line of sight onto Israeli towns, villages, and military installations. Teams pop up with their ATGMs, fire, and then melt away.

The IDF has actually demonstrated a remarkable ability to spot and quickly destroy Hezbollah weapons teams and has therefore killed and wounded Hezbollah fighters at a highly disproportionate rate. Nevertheless, these counterattacks have not deterred Israel’s enemy, which is learning from the experience. Hezbollah and its Iranian advisers have been closely monitoring Israeli tactics and technologies, and they have adapted their weapons and procedures accordingly.

As a result, Israeli civilians along the northern border, for the first time in the country’s history, have been evacuated. This is the first conflict in which Israel’s enemies have succeeded in contesting territory inside Israel. The political and psychological effect has been much greater than the Biden administration understands.

In other words, the status quo is unambiguously a “win” for Hezbollah and Iran. As Doran explains:

The only way to counter an offense-dominant regime is by carrying out offensive attacks, by inflicting more pain on Hezbollah than it is prepared to take. This is no small challenge. Hezbollah possesses between 100,000 and 200,000 rockets and missiles, between 10,000 and 20,000 of which are both precision-guided and capable, potentially, of reaching any target in Israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu and his colleagues in the war cabinet cannot launch a no-holds-barred campaign against Hezbollah and assume that Iran, the Houthis, and the Iranian-controlled militias in Iraq and Syria will remain idle. The Israelis must assume that, by escalating against Hezbollah, they will enter into a full-blown war with Iran’s entire Resistance Axis.

The missile barrage that Iran launched on April 12 was but a small taste of what a war with Hezbollah will deliver. Hezbollah alone can overwhelm Israeli defenses. The numbers game tells a grim tale. Even if the Israelis enjoy a 90% interception rate against a massive missile and drone barrage from Lebanon, a significant number of weapons will reach their targets. If Iran unleashes on Israel simultaneously, that number will increase.

There is ample reason for Israel to be cautious in initiating such a war. Doran goes on:

The war will visit more destruction on Israel, especially on the home front, than it has ever experienced before. Polling suggests that the Israeli public is prepared for the destruction and death that Hezbollah and Iran will inflict. But the Israeli political and military leadership hesitates to escalate. The magnitude of the risks deters them. In addition, the IDF has its hands full in Gaza. They would prefer to finish what they started there before widening the front.

But the lack of will in Jerusalem is primarily a function of the Biden administration’s policy. Washington is restraining Jerusalem. Hezbollah and Iran understand well that American policy is their ace in the hole. They calibrate their attacks against Israel carefully, making sure that those attacks are just lethal enough to keep Israeli civilians from returning to their homes but below the threshold that would give Washington, politically, no choice but to support an Israeli escalation. In sum, American policy serves as a wall behind which Hezbollah and Iran hide in order to shoot at Israel.

A wall? A wall. As Tablet’s Tony Badran has observed at regular intervals over the past two years, the United States has acted as the de facto protector of Hezbollah against Israel since the 2022 maritime deal, when Washington worked hand in glove with the terror group to extract concessions from Israel under the guise of aiding “Lebanon.” (The scam works, in essence, by promising to “weaken” Hezbollah by strengthening “Lebanon,” when in fact “Lebanon” is a fiction, and Washington uses “Lebanese” institutions as cutouts to deal directly with the real power in the country: Hezbollah and, through it, Iran.) By formalizing the maritime border, the Biden administration constrained Israel’s ability to act unilaterally within the internationally recognized “territory” of the “Lebanese state.” The administration has also sought to check Israel’s freedom of maneuver—and funnel resources to Hezbollah—by promoting substantial Western investment in “Lebanon” and pouring money into the “Lebanese Armed Forces.”

The arrangement here is essentially an imperial one: The United States recognizes Lebanon as an Iranian possession while claiming Israel as its own possession, and negotiates directly with Iran to jointly decide the fates of their respective protectorates. This was the subtext of a Thursday report in Axios featuring the usual parade of anonymous U.S. officials cautioning that any Israeli “escalation” in Lebanon could spiral into a wider “regional war.” Rather than taking unilateral action to meet the Hezbollah threat, Israel must, according to the officials quoted in the report, wrap up its campaign in Gaza in order to “restore calm to the Israeli-Lebanese border”—a precise echo of the Iranian Axis position that the war will continue on all fronts until the “Zionist entity” ceases its aggression. In an email to The Scroll, Tony explained how the racket works: 

Not only does Washington prohibit a major Israeli campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, but also, it is now against even a limited campaign. For Team Obama-Biden, Lebanon is off-limits for Israel. There’s a word for that: protectorate.

But by placing it and Lebanon on equal footing (officially with the maritime deal), the United States is saying that Israel, too, is a less-than-sovereign province, with limits on its defense and national security policy. Those are to be managed by Washington, the arbiter and go-between with Hezbollah. 

On the other hand, Iran—now in the first row as America’s peer (with Israel relegated to the second row and reduced to being Hezbollah’s peer)—has the U.S.-recognized freedom of operation throughout the region, from the Gulf to the Mediterranean. Any attempt to contest that in any theater is classified now as an attempt to draw the United States into war with Iran and therefore is verboten. If you have a problem, you file a complaint with us, and we’ll determine how you should respond and what concessions you may have to offer in order to restore temporary quiet. Provinces don’t get to run their own foreign or defense policy.

For Team Obama-Biden, Israel’s forced accommodation with the Iranian terror militia next door is a small price to pay for Washington’s desired rapprochement with Iran—never mind that this rapprochement has not led to the predicted peace but to bloodshed and instability. Indeed, in a perverse irony, by blessing Iranian expansion, pumping Iran full of cash to fund that expansion, and constraining its own allies from deterring that expansion, the United States is making Iran confident and its allies insecure.

That makes war more, not less, likely—as we saw on Oct. 7. In an email to The Scroll, Lee Smith explains:

Naturally the Biden administration doesn’t want Israel going after Iran—it’s worked to hide Iran’s operational role in 10/7 from the outset—but the White House is doing all it can to prevent Israel from making Hezbollah pay a price, just as it’s hobbled Israel’s war against Hamas. The White House has left Israel no doors open—just ghoulish proposals according to which Israel gets to process, in stages, the corpses of its hostages in exchange for granting Hamas victory and allowing for the reconstruction of Gaza and the rearming of Hamas. 

Moreover, I don’t see how Israel accomplishes its stated aim to move Hezbollah north of the Litani. Will UNIFIL ensure that? Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t know if Israel has the appetite for occupying Lebanon again. You can’t keep trying to do things you can’t or don’t want to do since that’s a recipe for failure. By contrast, over the last few decades, Israel has poured huge resources into its air force and special forces in preparation for an attack on Iran’s nuclear and conventional capabilities. Presumably, Israeli strategists counted on a warmer relationship with its onetime, superpower patron, including political and diplomatic support as well as plentiful resupply of arms. But if you’re waiting for outside powers to permit you to exercise your national sovereignty, there’s no point in drawing up any plans at all.

On the logic of the status quo leading inexorably toward war with Iran, Tablet’s geopolitical analyst was in full agreement:

I would second what Lee says here in his last paragraph—the logic of which is that Israel must continue losing until and unless it hits Iran directly. By making it impossible for Israel to effectively deter Iran’s proxy warfare, the Obama-Biden team has placed a large bet on Israel’s appetite for assisted national suicide. Aside from the green-haired sectors of Tel Aviv and expats in Silicon Valley, I personally doubt this judgment is accurate. A people with the Holocaust still within living memory, and more than half of whose population fled from Arab countries where they would be lynched upon return, can’t have that many illusions about the unpleasantness of a second Holocaust. The Obama-Biden policy vis-à-vis Iran and Israel therefore strikes me as a reckless one that is fated to end in a full-scale war, in which one of America’s two leading local clients will shoot the other one in the head. The question for the past decade has been who will shoot first. By attacking Israel directly with 300 ballistic missiles and drones, Iran did Israel a favor—if the Israelis are wise and daring enough to decapitate the Iranian regime before it goes nuclear.

IN THE BACK PAGES: The United States is still playacting in Ukraine, writes Vladislav Davidzon

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The Rest

→Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz is expected to withdraw from the government on Saturday night along with his National Unity party. Gantz, the Biden administration’s preferred replacement for Netanyahu, issued an ultimatum last month demanding that the prime minister formulate a plan for postwar Gaza by June 8—a demand that Bibi ridiculed and then ignored. Recent polling shows that Gantz may well become prime minister if elections are held soon, including a Friday survey published in Maariv that gave Gantz a 42%-34% lead over Netanyahu. 

→Days after President Biden claimed publicly that Netanyahu is prolonging the war in Gaza for political gain, CNN reported Friday on a CIA intelligence assessment that concluded Netanyahu believes he can “get away with” not defining a plan for postwar Gaza. The headline here isn’t the content of the assessment, but that it was leaked to CNN by anonymous U.S. officials, along with background like the following: “[The assessment] comes amid a clear shift in how the Biden administration views Israel: less as a trusted partner and more as an unpredictable foreign government to be analyzed and understood.” In other words, what we’re seeing is more plausibly deniable sandbagging of the Israelis by the Biden administration via politicized intelligence leaks, in service of an anti-Israel messaging campaign directed at the American public. 

→An IDF soldier was killed Thursday by Hamas members attempting to infiltrate Israel from southern Gaza. According to statements from the IDF, a four-member Hamas cell armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades emerged from a tunnel shaft about 200 meters from the Israel border. The cell succeeded in crossing the first of two border fences but was intercepted by an Israeli patrol. The IDF soldier was killed in the ensuing firefight, while three of the four Hamas gunmen were killed by drone strikes and tank shelling. The attempted infiltration, however, demonstrates that there are “still thousands of Hamas terrorists, armed, and capable of conducting terror attacks,” as the former Israeli security official Shalom Ben Hanan told The Wall Street Journal. 

→An Associated Press analysis has revealed what you could have read in The Scroll on April 12: that the proportion of women and children killed in Gaza has declined sharply as the war has gone on, and that the Gaza Ministry of Health’s casualty statistics are unreliable. In our opinion, the AP undersells the latter conclusion, merely noting that the MOH’s “media reports” are “hard to verify” (in reality, they’re almost certainly made up to keep official casualty statistics in line with arbitrary totals determined by Hamas). However, the AP did get at least one amusing quote. When reporters asked Dr. Moatasem Salah, director of the MOH emergency center, to explain why Gazan authorities continued to claim that more than 70% of those killed were women and children when the agency’s own statistics showed that the figure was 54%, Dr. Salah answered, “This [question] shows disrespect to the humanity for any person who exists here. We are not numbers.” Dr. Salah then added that the 70% figure was accurate and that the overall death toll was much higher than reported. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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The West Is Still Playacting in Ukraine

The Biden administration’s recent approval for hitting targets inside Russia is still constrained by misguided fears of a Russian defeat

By Vladislav Davidzon

The Biden administration has given the Ukrainian army permission to return fire against some targets inside mainland Russian territory using U.S.-supplied weapons, easing a long-standing ban. The limited change in policy came after what had become a sadly familiar ritual of Ukrainian pleading, Western public clamoring, prolonged prevarication, and a protracted process of public shaming. Washington’s partial turnabout came only after many months of frustration in Kyiv and among its European allies. But the direct cause of the shift were fears engendered by the Russian summer offensive, now in full swing. On May 10, the Russian army commenced a quick and concentrated combined arms offensive deep into the northern Kharkiv region of Ukraine, triggering concerns of a possible Ukrainian collapse on that front.

As with the previous instances of the U.S. providing tanks, advanced missiles, and F-16 fighter jets to the exhausted Ukrainians, the constraints were rooted in the Biden administration’s fear of escalation with the Kremlin. The hesitation has been widely viewed by the Ukrainians as hobbling Kyiv while prolonging the war and needlessly sacrificing the lives of Ukrainian servicemen. However, even with this latest apparent shift, Washington continues to perform its familiar fan dance. “The president recently directed his team to ensure that Ukraine is able to use U.S. weapons for counter-fire purposes in Kharkiv so Ukraine can hit back at Russian forces hitting them or preparing to hit them,” a U.S. official told Politico on May 30, making sure to add that the policy of not allowing long-range strikes inside Russia “has not changed.”

As another official told ABC News also on May 30, the partial American shift does not apply to the long-range MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) which the Ukrainians have been using to excellent effect against Russian targets in occupied Crimea. Rather, it applies only to the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS). Immediately, the Ukrainian forces took their first open cross-border shot using a U.S.-supplied HIMARS rocket to destroy a Russian air defense system in Belgorod, which serves as a Russian base of operations some 25 miles from the border north of Kharkiv. In effect, Russian troop concentrations and weapons systems stationed on the other side of the Ukrainian border are no longer safe from Ukrainian fire—for now. But the Ukrainian army continues to sound the alarm about a massive buildup of Russian troops on the border, and Kyiv is intensifying its calls for international assistance as the Russian army attempts to break through Ukrainian lines.

Last week, the Ukrainian government released a six-minute-long video in which President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a plaintive speech calling for more assistance for the embattled city of Kharkiv. Attired in his signature olive green shirt, Zelensky stood in front of the ruins of recently bombed civilian infrastructure in the city. The camera pans over massive mounds of charred books inside the obliterated Kharkiv printing plant of the Vivat literary publishing house. With the destruction arrayed behind him, Zelensky, in slightly stilted English, demanded that world leaders act decisively against the Russian state.

Lack of air and counter-battery cover for the Ukrainians has meant that their defensive preparations were incomplete, as the Russians fired at Ukrainian soldiers constructing fortifications near the border. Barreling toward Ukraine’s second city in May, Russian forces punctured a hole through poorly protected gaps in the Ukrainian defensive lines. They rolled through the openings before Ukrainian reinforcements could arrive from other parts of the front. A Ukrainian Special Forces officer who had been operating in that sector admitted to me that Ukrainian defense fortifications in the sector were somewhat inadequate: “It is true that the minefields were not as deeply laid as they could have been,” he told me. The Ukrainian high command tacitly admitted the failure when they relieved the local field commander of his post.

The Russian incursion secured a 100-square-mile bridgehead along the Russian border and brought Russian troops several miles deeper into Ukraine. This was the first Russian success in taking Ukrainian territory in many months and the Russians managed to recapture a number of villages that the Ukrainians had retaken during the successful first counteroffensive in autumn of 2022.

The Russian advance may have been a preliminary probing assault in a campaign to take Kharkiv. Or it could have been part of a feint maneuver aimed at forcing the Ukrainians to reallocate troops from other sectors so as to create new opportunities for advancing along other sectors of the front. The Ukrainians successfully cauterized the damage and held off the advance and the Russians were unable to break through toward Kharkiv’s primary defense perimeter outside the city suburbs. Nor were they able to advance far enough to pin the city, or its suburbs, within range of artillery fire. They did however obliterate the neighboring Ukrainian town of Vovchansk in the process. It took only several days of artillery and aerial bombardment to pulverize the small city.

By June 2, some reports indicated that Ukrainian forces had advanced in central Vovchansk. For now, the situation around Kharkiv has been somewhat stabilized through the redeployment of scarce reserves of battle-hardened Ukrainian battalions. But it remains perilous all across Ukraine’s defensive lines in the region.

Over the last few months, the Russian military has perfected the use of so-called “glide bombs” against stationary Ukrainian targets. That class of munitions is deployed from Russian warplanes that fly far away from the Ukrainian border over Russian territory. These attacks have proved to be incredibly destructive against entrenched Ukrainian infantry and defensive positions. The Ukrainian forces have yet to figure out a way to intercept them effectively.

Moreover, still reeling from shortages of surface-to-air missiles, Ukrainian air defense crews have been intercepting ever-smaller numbers of projectiles from the Russian volleys targeting Ukrainian infrastructure. The national electrical grid has been degraded to the point that Kyiv is forced to ration power several hours a day in some neighborhoods.

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That the Russian assault is proceeding as well as it has been is partially due to the extreme discrepancies in artillery fire ratios between the two armies while the latest tranche of U.S. aid was held up in Congress. Over a month ago, President Biden signed the long-stalled aid package to provide $95.3 billion in military assistance to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. $61 billion of that assistance is now on its way to eastern Ukraine, though perhaps not quickly enough.

Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson finally brought the bill up for a vote in April, which allowed for its passage. Johnson had been a Ukraine skeptic, but over time transformed into a principled defender of aiding the Ukrainian cause—“the culmination of a remarkable personal and political arc for the Louisiana Republican,” as The New York Times put it.

Johnson spent weeks probing for ways to get the bill passed without losing the support of the isolationist, anti-aid votes on the right flank of his party. His change of heart can be attributed in part to the tacit political cover he received from former President Donald Trump in the lead-up to the House vote. While Trump put the onus of helping Ukraine on Europe, and did not endorse the aid package, he did say in April that Ukrainian survival and strength, which “should be more important to Europe than to us,” is “also important to us.” Trump’s carefully calibrated comment, and lack of criticism for the speaker, were enough for Johnson to proceed with the vote.

There was an additional factor that helped sway Johnson, namely appealing to the speaker’s deeply held Christian beliefs. American friends of Kyiv have long worked to communicate to a U.S. audience the plight of Ukrainian evangelicals and non-Orthodox Christians. In particular, exposition of Russian torture practices appear to have helped persuade the speaker.

Steven Moore, founder of the Ukraine Freedom Project, dubbed “the GOP’s man in Kyiv,” explained to me that “to get the word out on what was happening we even launched a site called RussiaTorturesChristians.org and paid for a slew of digital ads in order to build grassroots awareness of the issue. Especially in Louisiana. Speaker Johnson is a man of very deep faith and so while he was no doubt moved intellectually by the intelligence briefings that were offered to him, I am certain that our work and his many meetings with Ukrainian evangelicals moved him on an emotional and spiritual level.” Ukrainian political operatives agreed with this judgment. After the Senate vote, a senior member of the Ukrainian government quipped to me that she had been “very wrong to attend a Greek Orthodox church all these years,” and that she would have to think hard about converting to Baptist Protestantism.

The newest tranche of assistance will last the Ukrainians until the end of the year. That is, it’s enough to make sure the Ukrainian army won’t be overrun by the Russians before the U.S. elections. But the damage from the long holdup has arguably already been done. Even as the Ukrainians no longer need to husband resources and rush their dwindling stockpiles to front-line artillery units, the arrival of additional shells from the Americans had been hampered by logistical clogs that had temporarily slowed delivery.

Meanwhile, the lack of cohesion within the American political system has not gone unnoticed in Moscow, reinforcing the Kremlin's calculation that it can win the war over the long term, through grinding attrition, which will only exacerbate Western fatigue. Paradoxically, the passage of the bill, and the pledges of restored assistance and munitions deliveries to Ukraine, also may have incentivized the Russian high command to attempt to lock in its gains and capture as much territory and inflict as much pain as possible before the U.S.-supplied munitions revitalized Kyiv’s capacity to resist.

A cynical observer might say that despite the White House triumphantly celebrating the passage of the bill, it is entirely unclear if there will be any change to its policy of “escalation management”—that is, providing the Ukrainians with just enough to stave off catastrophic defeat, but not enough to secure victory.

In recent pleas for additional assistance, Zelensky has publicly embraced this cynical outlook as he escalated his criticism of the West. On May 16, Zelensky stated for the first time that he believes that Ukraine's partners "are afraid of Russia losing the war" and would like Kyiv “to win in such a way that Russia does not lose.” He went on to say that Ukraine’s allies “fear that Russian defeat would involve “unpredictable geopolitics” before asserting, “I don't think it works that way. For Ukraine to win, we need to be given everything with which one can win.” In an interview a few days later, he complained that “all Western aid decisions for Ukraine have been late by at least around one year.”

Ukrainian soldiers defending Kharkiv have routinely complained to me that they are “fighting with their hands tied behind their backs” as a result of American constraints. Although the prohibition on Ukrainian counter-battery fire against Russian artillery inside Russia has, for now, been partially lifted, the assessment of these Ukrainian soldiers sadly remains true. Still, Ukrainian commanders are grasping at straws. Oleksander Syrskyi, commander of the Ukrainian armed forces, recently announced that France was ready to send French officers to train Ukrainian troops—a claim quickly walked back by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.

But the rhetoric works well for President Macron, especially with the NATO summit in Washington, which will commemorate the 75th anniversary of the alliance, coming up in July. And to be sure, the French president standing alongside his American counterpart and embracing Zelensky to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day makes for stirring optics. But let's be clear: There won't be 300,000 NATO troops rushing to hold the eastern front. The reality is that, as Western leaders playact, Ukraine is running out of time.