When Israel Went to War Against Russia

via Wikipedia

The Russian jets burning on the desert sands illuminated a momentous fact: Israel had gone to war against Russia. 

It was 1970, and Israeli leaders were worried. Soviet jets had begun patrolling the Suez Canal to discourage Israeli air strikes against Moscow’s Cold War ally Egypt. The events of that hot, violent summer should give pause to today’s Israeli government that’s forced to choose between supporting Ukraine against Russian aggression—and antagonizing a Russian government whose aircraft and missiles in Syria could threaten Israeli air operations. 

In the drama of Middle Eastern conflict, the characters change, but the plot does not. Just 50 years ago, Israel’s mortal enemy wasn’t Iran, but Egypt. Humiliated by the disastrous defeat of the 1967 Six-Day War, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser chose to neither make peace nor risk engaging Israel in open battle. Instead, Egypt launched constant artillery barrages and commando raids on Israeli garrisons on the east bank of the Suez Canal, in an attempt to wear down Israeli morale without triggering full-scale war. 

For Israel, the War of Attrition of 1967-70 was a death by a thousand cuts that the casualty-conscious Israeli public could not be expected to endure. But Israel had a weapon of its own: the elite Israeli Air Force (IAF) could strike deep inside Egypt without risking Israeli boots on the ground. Newly equipped with American F-4 Phantom and A-4 Skyhawk jets, Israel launched its own regular retaliation raids against Egyptian military and industrial targets. 

And that’s how a local conflict brought Israel into direct combat with the Soviet Union. Nasser responded to Israel’s air campaign by convincing the Kremlin to dispatch Soviet air defense units equipped with MiG-21 fighters and SA-2 and SA-3 surface-to-air missiles—the same weapons that inflicted a heavy toll on U.S. aircraft over North Vietnam. By the summer of 1970, fierce air battles were raging along the Suez Canal zone, with Israel downing numerous Egyptian planes in dogfights. But the cost was prohibitive: The IAF lost precious planes and pilots as Egypt steadily moved its air defense network closer to the west bank of the Suez Canal, hoping to drive Israeli airpower out of the area. 

June 1970 brought an even more disturbing development. Initially cautious about engaging in combat, the Soviet MiG-21s were now aggressively intercepting and firing on Israeli planes, including a Skyhawk damaged by an air-to-air missile on July 25, 1970. Contemptuous of their Egyptian counterparts—and perhaps also of Jewish military prowess—the Soviet pilots had crossed the line from Egyptian allies into co-belligerents. The skies over the Suez Canal became so dangerous that Israeli pilots nicknamed the area “Texas,” as in a Hollywood Western.

Frustrated by their inability to achieve air superiority, and determined to teach the Russians a lesson, the IAF set a trap. The plan for Operation Rimon 20 “was quite simple,” writes Israeli military historian Shlomo Aloni. “Four Mirages were to fly the pattern of a high-altitude reconnaissance mission over the area where Soviet-flown MiG-21s were active. Each pair of armed Mirages flew very close to each other to simulate on the radar screen a typical reconnaissance mission by two unarmed Mirages.”

When the MiGs attacked the fake recon planes, several flights of Phantoms and Mirages—flying low over the Sinai, undetected by Soviet radar—would abruptly climb and jump the Russian fighters. The Israeli plan was aided by Russian-speaking Israeli soldiers who monitored Soviet communications.

On the afternoon of Thursday, July 30, the trap was sprung. The Soviets scrambled 24 MiG-21s to pursue the intruders, who pretended to flee for home. “In a few seconds, this masquerade would come to an end; the gloves would come off, and the skies would light up,” recalled Amos Amir, who flew one of the decoy Mirages. 

In an instant, the Soviet hunters became prey. Five MiG-21s were shot down in the aerial melee. One MiG diving to escape was destroyed by a Phantom that launched a Sparrow missile that wasn’t designed to be fired at such a low altitude. Another Israeli crew pursued an MiG from 15,000 to 2,000 feet before destroying it with a heat-seeking Sidewinder missile. The Soviets did manage to get off a shot of their own: an Atoll missile that went up the tailpipe of a Phantom but failed to explode. 

The Israelis were elated. They had won a spectacular battle but ultimately would go on to lose the war. The War of Attrition eventually ended not through Israeli arms, but American diplomacy. Egypt would expel its Soviet allies in 1972, but Moscow would continue to supply Egypt with weapons. Most important, Egyptian anti-aircraft missile batteries would remain emplaced along the Suez Canal. 

“The Israeli narrative, which held up July 30 as a glorious victory, and by implication the entire war, obscured the unsustainable IAF losses that would have forced a cease-fire within a few weeks,” Israeli historian Gideon Remez, co-author of The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973, told me. “The admission that Israel lost the War of Attrition in terms of achieving war aims became mainstream only in the past 15 years or so.” 

Israel today faces a situation that is different and yet strikingly similar. Israel and Russia have an arrangement that falls somewhere between collaboration and armed truce.

The consequences of that loss confronted the Israeli public on October 6, 1973, when Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a massive surprise attack on Yom Kippur. Israeli planes quickly went into action against the Egyptian bridgeheads across the Suez Canal—and were decimated by Egyptian missile batteries. The Israeli Army had chosen not to purchase its own artillery but rather to rely on the “flying artillery” of the Air Force. Deprived of air support, the ground troops barely managed to stave off disaster and defeat the Arab armies, though at heavy cost. The devastating surprise attack of ’73, from which Israel barely escaped, led to massive recriminations throughout Israeli society. Within a year of the war ending, both Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan had resigned. 

Israel today faces a situation that is different and yet strikingly similar. Israel and Russia have an arrangement that falls somewhere between collaboration and armed truce. Russia has stationed jets and S-300 anti-aircraft missiles in Syria as part of the expeditionary force that saved the Assad regime from Islamic rebels. So far, they haven’t fired on Israeli aircraft carrying out strikes against targets in Syria. Indeed, Israel and Russia maintain a military hotline, and Israel notifies Russia before it launches attacks. The result is that Israel gets a relatively free hand in Syria, and Russia maintains good relations with a powerful Middle Eastern nation. 

The problem is that Moscow’s goodwill is conditional and probably unsustainable. Russia’s true ally isn’t Israel, but rather its longtime client Syria, whose port of Tartus is Russia’s only Mediterranean naval base. Russia also has a relationship with Iran, Assad’s other patron state, that includes sales of Russian tanks, submarines, and S-300 missiles.

The limits of Moscow’s patience became clear in 2018, when nervous Syrian gunners accidentally destroyed a Russian aircraft during an Israeli air strike. Moscow blamed Israel and dispatched S-300 batteries to protect Russian bases. “The number of Israeli sorties over Syrian territory has decreased tremendously since the end of 2018,” wrote Israeli scholar Guy Laron in 2019. 

In strictly military terms, Israel’s air force, equipped with American-made F-35 stealth fighters and advanced drones and missiles, could probably destroy Russian air defenses in Syria if they obstructed Israeli operations. But then what? With the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, Russia can only be provoked so far. Moscow could send more troops and missiles to Syria. Or, it could retaliate by supplying advanced arms—particularly anti-aircraft missiles—to Iran, or even Hezbollah. Today, as in 1970, the danger to Israel isn’t so much military defeat, but a long struggle of attrition that would wear down Israeli resources and morale.

Morality demands that Israel support Ukraine against Russian aggression. But Israel also has to ensure that Russia doesn’t perceive Israel as an adversary in the same way that it perceives the United States and NATO. If that were to happen and Russia abandoned its tense truce to become a co-belligerent with Israel’s enemies again, it could trigger a conflict that Israel ultimately cannot win. 

Michael Peck is a defense writer and a contributing writer for Forbes. Find him on Twitter https://twitter.com/Mipeck1.