Oct. 1, 2024: The Second Iranian Attack

Israel has been raiding Lebanon for months; East coast dock workers strike; Hurricane Helene devastates South

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The Big Story

On Tuesday, as Israel began what it described as a “limited” ground operation in southern Lebanon, Iran launched a barrage of some 200 ballistic missiles into Israel. “Effective” air defenses intercepted a “large number” of the missiles, per statements from Israeli officials, but social media on Tuesday was full of videos like the following, showing dozens of missiles striking Israeli territory:

Israeli officials said Tuesday afternoon that two Israelis were lightly wounded by shrapnel in Tel Aviv, but that no other casualties had been reported. One Palestinian—a Gazan—was killed in the West Bank, where crowds nonetheless gathered around burnt-out missile fuselages to celebrate. 

Israel has promised retaliation. The Wall Street Journal reported that Iran had telegraphed to its Arab allies on Monday that it was planning a missile strike “similar in scale” to the attack in April. Israel replied that it would “directly hit Iran’s nuclear or oil facilities” in response to “any hit on Israeli territory, no matter how small or large, and that it didn’t matter whether there were any casualties or not.” Following the attack on Tuesday, IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said that “tonight’s event will have consequences.” We will likely get a sense in the coming hours of what those consequences will be. 

The U.S. posture has been schizophrenic, which is at least an improvement over its prior posture of being actively malicious. Yesterday, U.S. officials leaked Israel’s invasion plans to The Washington Post, much to the Israelis’ annoyance; this morning Politico “reported” that senior Obama-Biden officials like Amos Hochstein had in fact encouraged the invasion, even as the U.S. Treasury Department slapped a new round of sanctions on Israeli settlers. Following the attack, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan declared that “there will be severe consequences…and we will work with Israel to make that the case.” State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller echoed Sullivan’s suddenly hawkish tone, calling the Iranian attack “brazen and unacceptable” and defending Israel’s targeted killings of Iranian and Iranian proxy leaders. Said Miller, in reference to today’s attack:

This event had nothing to do with Iran’s sovereignty. It has to do with the fact that a number of the terrorist organizations that Iran has set up for years as a way to undermine and attack the State of Israel have been weakened first over the past few months and then most recently over the past few weeks. To the extent that any Iranian officials have been killed in the past few days in Lebanon or in Syria, it’s because they were meeting with terrorist leaders.

We agree, though we’d note if the United States really does want to impose “severe consequences” on Iran, it could start by enforcing sanctions on Iranian oil production, or by not issuing waivers every few months allowing Iran to earn billions from its electricity sales to Iraq (subsidized by Washington). Still, it’s an improvement on the rhetoric from back in April, when the White House urged Israel to “take the win” after absorbing the first Iranian missile attack. 

We’re not so optimistic, though, as to think we’re witnessing a change of heart from the Biden crew. Rather, we suspect that what we’re seeing is a rudderless administration watching the Middle Eastern “order” it has carefully sought to construct over the past decade go up in flames before its eyes. It can’t control events, it can’t control the Iranians and their proxies, and it can’t control the Israelis—at least not anymore. Its various diplomatic efforts are in shambles, best symbolized by the $230 million Gazan aid pier that was shelled by Hamas before being ripped apart in a storm and ultimately dismantled.

Given all that, and given the need to put up a brave face five weeks before an election, we suspect that there’s only one thing left for the administration to do, which is what they’re doing right now: accept what the Israelis do as a fait accompli and pretend that they’re still the ones in charge.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Bernard-Henri Lévy on Israel’s victories for freedom in the Middle East

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The Rest

→As Israel began its ground operations in southern Lebanon yesterday, clearing tunnels and capturing or destroying Hezbollah infrastructure, Israeli officials revealed to The Wall Street Journal that the IDF had already been quietly operating in Lebanon for months. Israeli sources told the paper that they had carried out “at least 70 cross-border raids” since November 2023, with teams of 20-40 soldiers crossing up to 1.5 miles into Lebanon and sometimes staying overnight. As Tablet’s Armin Rosen observed, apropos some of the hyperventilating on Monday about Israel’s impending violation of Lebanon’s “sovereignty”:

→Those cross-border raids discovered evidence of a Hezbollah plan to invade the Galilee in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, according to statements by the IDF in a Tuesday press briefing. Per the writeup in The Times of Israel: 

According to IDF assessments, some 2,400 Radwan terrorists and another 500 Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists—trained by Radwan—had been waiting in southern Lebanon villages to attack Israel in the days after Palestinian terror group Hamas carried out its October 7, 2023, mass invasion from Gaza, in which some 1,200 people were murdered in Israel and 251 were kidnapped to the Strip amid widely documented atrocities and systematic targeting of civilians.

That would certainly seem to offer confirmation, reported in The Wall Street Journal but denied by the Biden administration at the time, that the Oct. 7 attack had been jointly planned by Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. It is unclear from the report why Hezbollah decided not to intervene in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack (and we can’t ask Nasrallah), but the IDF said that it had managed to drive Hezbollah’s Radwan forces “several kilometers” back from the border in the weeks following Oct. 7. 

→Just after midnight on Tuesday, more than 45,000 members of the International Longshoremen’s Association walked off the job following the expiration of their contract with the shipping industry. The ILA, which represents dock workers at the United States’ Atlantic and Gulf Coast ports, is striking for a 77% wage increase over the next six years—necessary due to inflation, per ILA President Harold Daggett—and a total ban on automation regarding “cranes, gates, and moving containers,” according to Fox Business. A spokesman for the U.S. Maritime Alliance, which represents shipping industry employers, said that the industry had offered a 50% raise and other benefits but failed to reach a deal with the workers, despite both sides moving off their initial offers. The strike affects 36 ports in the eastern United States and could, according to an analysis from J.P. Morgan, cost the U.S. economy some $5 billion per day. Efforts from the White House to mediate the dispute have thus far proved unsuccessful. 

→Hurricane Helene, which made landfall in Florida late last week, has wrought “biblical devastation” in the Upland South, killing at least 131 people across several states, washing away roads and homes, and leaving hundreds of thousands without water, power, or cell service. Western North Carolina has been particularly hard-hit; in Buncombe County, which contains the popular tourist destination of Asheville, more than 600 people remained missing as of Tuesday morning, as rescue crews struggled to access remote locations where roads have been rendered unusable by flooding. In some locations, the AP reports, North Carolina state authorities have been reduced to delivering supplies by mule. Flooding and employee displacement have also shut down mining operations in Spruce Pine, North Carolina—the world’s only natural source of quartz pure enough to melt polysilicon, a critical step in the semiconductor manufacturing process. President Biden has approved a federal Major Disaster Declaration for North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee and plans to visit North Carolina on Wednesday—late, according to critics, who note that Donald Trump arrived in Valdosta, Georgia, to survey hurricane damage on Monday. 

→Here’s Vice President Kamala Harris explaining in 2022 that the U.S. government needs to be “giving resources based on equity” when it comes to disaster relief, i.e., distributing it on the basis of race: 

To be fair to Kamala, she was merely channeling the official policy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Biden. Indeed, “Goal 1” of FEMA’s 2022-2026 Strategic Plan was to “instill equity as a foundation of emergency management,” following Biden’s Executive Order 13985, which established that “affirmatively advancing equity, civil rights, racial justice, and equal opportunity is the responsibility of the whole of our Government.” A 2022 FEMA Equity Action Plan touts the agency’s participation in the White House’s Justice40 initiative, which requires that 40% of federal spending on climate, environmental, and other programs flow to “disadvantaged communities.” Among the FEMA programs participating in Justice40 are the Hazard Mitigation Assistance, Flood Mitigation Assistance, and Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant programs. In fiscal year 2023, FEMA announced that 67% of all its grants through BRIC, which sets aside 6% of federal post-disaster relief funds to pay for hazard mitigation and planning projects, had been awarded to “Justice40 communities.” 

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TODAY IN TABLET:

Eternity Is Beneath My Feet, by Dara Horn

A mosaic on the Lower East Side by the late artist Mark Podwal shows who we are, and must be

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Israel Acts Alone

A string of startling victories has opened new pathways to freedom in the Middle East

By Bernard-Henri Lévy

We know Lenin’s quote, apocryphal but so true: “There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen.”

Well this is exactly what has happened, and is still happening, in the Middle East and beyond, with the booby-trapped pagers of Sept. 17, the defeat, in Lebanon, on Sept. 29, of Hezbollah and one day later, with the advancement of Israeli ground troops into southern Lebanon.

A terrorist army, more powerful than al-Qaida and ISIS combined, is permanently diminished and, for now, decapitated.

The Iranian regime, for which Hezbollah was the avant-garde, the jewel in the crown, or to continue the Bolshevik metaphor, its most precious capital, is weakened by a defeat that comes on the heels of the bombing of its embassy complex in Syria, the execution of Ismael Haniyeh, head of Hamas, in the heart of Tehran, and the failure of its general offensive, April 17, against Israel. And it seems that, for the first time in nearly a half-century, the regime is finally on the defensive, fragile and flailing …

The ports of Hodeidah and Ras Issa, in western Yemen, have been targeted by a squadron of fighter jets after the Houthis, another of the ayatollah’s puppets, made the mistake of hitting Ben-Gurion airport where the prime minister had just landed …

Lebanon decolonizing …

Yes, Lebanon, this glorious country of Adonis and Gibran, which amazed Nerval, Lamartine, and Chateaubriand and was, for a long time, an example of cosmopolitanism and tolerance, then became nothing more than a colony of Iran, a pawn in its imperial strategy and, because of that, a failed state—now the vise is loosening and the Lebanese people, if they wish, can take their own destiny back in hand …

Israel breathes …

Iranian women smile …

What’s left of democrats in Syria remember that Hezbollah was on the front lines of the massacre, by Bashar Assad, of hundreds of thousands of their own, and in Idlib there are great outpourings of joy …

The families of the 58 French paratroopers and the 241 American Marines killed in the dual suicide truck-bombing attacks of 1983, the survivors of the attacks in 1986, in Paris, against the Tati department store, the Renault pub, the police precinct, the RER regional train, the TGV high-speed Paris-Lyon train, and so on, estimate, as does President Biden, that justice is done …

In short, the free world, the real one, the one that stretches from New York, Paris, and Rome to the crowds that, from Tehran to Ankara and from Moscow to Beijing and Kabul, do not resign themselves to living under imbecilic and bloody dictatorships, can breathe a little easier and see the signs of possible change.

Of course, nothing is yet decided.

Hezbollah still has tens of thousands of missiles pointed at Israel.

And history having, as Marx said, to remain in the same metaphorical register, more imagination than man, the “five kings” that are Iran, Russia, the Islamist International, Turkey, and China are not without recourse, far from it.

But the Israelis have delivered a lesson in determination and courage.

They did the opposite to what the European and American Munich Agreement cheerleaders were repeating like broken records: “De-escalate! De-escalate!” After all, according to the theories of just war, and after that, according to Clausewitz, there are situations in the world where, alas, escalation is necessary and the only option.

And the Israelis reminded the world that there are moments in history, when your (Israel’s) survival is at stake, when entire peoples (Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraqi and Syrian Kurds) are taken hostage and threatened, when the strategy of compromise is taken by the enemy (formerly Nazi Germany, today the Islamic Republic of Iran) as an invitation to hit even harder—moments, then, where one of those strong acts that the cowards call “escalation” can turn the tide, redraw the power map, and save lives.

The IDF acts alone because that is, today, its situation.

But it acts—contrary to what armchair strategists castigating an “Israel now out of control” repeat everywhere—with measure and without hubris.

It breaks the operational capabilities of a state within a state that terrorized the world. And it does this, as always, while trying to do everything it could to spare innocent civilians.

And, as we all now know since the fall of the great empires and, more recently, of the USSR, dictators fear, not just failure, but the external humiliation that leaves them naked before their internal opposition—such that Israel may well be in the process of fulfilling in Iran itself the great dream of Western republics, moderate Arab countries, and, again, heroines of democracy who have courageously paraded for two years now in Tehran to the shouts of “Woman, Life, Freedom.”

For these reasons, Israel’s allies must urgently regroup to support it, not just in defense, but for victory.