Airstrikes in Syria prompt questions about ambiguity
Does the Israeli public deserve more information regarding what the IDF may or may not be doing in its name?
Mitch Ginsburg is the former Times of Israel military correspondent.
Israel has grown comfortable, if not enamored, with its ambiguity. Not the famous policy ad-libbed by Shimon Peres in an April 1963 meeting with US President John F. Kennedy in which he said that “Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East,” but rather the ambiguity surrounding Israel’s covert intelligence operations and its new cloak-and-dagger air force.
In response to allegations that Israel had struck a weapons convoy and storage depot within Syria on Sunday, all parties in Israel smiled out a “we-don’t-comment-on-foreign-reports” response.
For the defense establishment, there are many upsides to the policy. Israel’s enemies, at least those mildly inclined toward paranoia, begin to feel that every bomb that blows up in the Middle East was planted by the long arm of the Mossad. The thinking is: if they are hounded by fear, their ability, and willingness, to focus on terror diminishes.
In the honor-bound Middle East, it also allows room for deniability, obviating the ostensible imperative for a response.
This was the case, for instance, in September 2007 when Israel allegedly bombed Syria’s plutonium nuclear reactor in Deir a-Zur, and in 2008, when Hezbollah’s military chief, Imad Mughniyeh, was knocked off in downtown Damascus.
The Israeli public and the politicians often seem to relish this shadowy game. Back in May 2002, during a 5 p.m. news program, the host cut short an interview with Foreign Minister Shimon Peres to announce that Jihad Jibril, son of the PFLP-GC terror chief Ahmed Jibril, had been killed in a blast in Lebanon. Lord knows, there are plenty of people who might have had an interest in killing Jibril. But when the interviewer turned to Peres for comment, asking whether Israel was involved, Peres smiled coyly and said in his deep bass voice, “Baruch Dayan Haemet” – the traditional words of condolence in Hebrew, meaning blessed is the judge of the truth.
Most everyone shared in his mirth.
But in Syria today, at least from the Syrian perspective, the ambiguity seems to have run its course. President Bashar Assad’s fully controlled state media, SANA, reported the strike Sunday afternoon and pointed a firm finger of blame at Israel. So, too, did Hezbollah’s media operations.
Should it be running its course in Israel, too? War planes striking Lebanon or Syria or Sudan are classic acts of war – not cloak-and-dagger assassinations – and the question is whether the Israeli public, certainly amid a national election campaign, ought to know precisely why they are being waged.
It is worth noting, in this context, that the Syrian regime was stripped of most of its chemical weapons in the past year. There is ample reason to believe that Assad was able to hold on to some of his strategic weapons – ones he will surely need if he is eventually forced from Damascus into the Alawite enclaves. Were he to pass some of those weapons on to Hezbollah, either for safekeeping or in return for the crucial role the Shiite terror organization has played in securing his hold on power, most Israelis would surely support an air strike, no matter the cost, rather than see the organization that brought the world the travesty of suicide bombing arm itself with a weapon of mass destruction.
But is that also true of the Fateh-110? In May 2013, the New York Times revealed that earlier that month Israel struck a shipment of Iranian-made Fateh-110 surface-to-surface rockets near Damascus International Airport. These rockets carry a heavy warhead, have a range of up to 300 kilometers and are more accurate than most of Hezbollah’s weapons. They represent a serious threat. But Hezbollah already possesses an arsenal of Fateh-110s, albeit less advanced ones perhaps, and during the Second Lebanon War, the IDF was able to take out the vast majority of Hezbollah’s advanced rockets on the first night of combat. Should Israelis have been given the full picture? How would they have felt if they had been fully informed?
What about surface-to-sea missiles? Are Israel’s ships not capable of defending against these missiles? If an Israeli air attack were to lead Assad to launch several dozen Scud-D rockets at downtown Tel Aviv — he could say they were aimed at the army’s Kirya headquarters in the center of the city — would the public still regard it as having been worthwhile?
Or how about the SA-17 — an advanced surface-to-air missile that Israel most likely is capable of thwarting, albeit with more difficulty and risk to the air force?
In March, when seeking to advance its case against the regime in Iran, the IDF and the government laid bare a wealth of information about the Klos-C arms ship. Not only was the bounty, seized off the coast of Sudan, put on display for the world to see in the port city of Eilat – the prime minister himself flew down to preside over the ceremony – but the army also provided reporters with an unusually detailed look into the incongruous route the ship took, from Iran to Iraq and then toward Sudan, and the ways it tried to disguise its true cargo of rockets, mortars and munitions.
Surely, there are times when the protection of a crucial intelligence source requires that certain information be shrouded. And by no means is it being suggested that the strikes in Syria and Lebanon were politically motivated – which this writer does not believe was the case. But with the war in Syria nowhere near over, the Middle East ever more volatile and Israelis once again voting for its political leadership, it might be time for the public to stop basking in the glow of ambiguity and start asking some questions.
