In strike on Syria, disturbing echoes of 1992

It isn’t every day, amid the turbulence of the Middle East, that the statement of an unnamed senior Israeli security source can leave one slack-jawed, but there is hardly any other way to greet the statement made by a source, to the reliable Dan Williams of Reuters, in the wake of the alleged Israeli strike in the Syrian Golan Heights on Sunday which left 12 combatants dead, including one iconic figure within Hezbollah – Jihad Mughniyeh – and one Iranian general.

The statement is worth reading top to bottom: “We did not expect the outcome in terms of the stature of those killed — certainly not the Iranian general,” the Israeli source said. “We thought we were hitting an enemy field unit that was on its way to carry out an attack on us at the frontier fence. We got the alert, we spotted the vehicle, identified it was an enemy vehicle and took the shot. We saw this as a limited tactical operation.”

In other words: an Israeli source has not only taken credit for the attack, quite explicitly, while the political echelon continues to use the barrier of ambiguity to shield itself from questioning, but also admitted that the IDF did not know the identity of the people it acted to kill in a convoy on enemy soil – a convoy that contained an Iranian general who is said to be the deputy commander of Iran-backed forces in Syria; and a convoy which was hit some seven kilometers from the border, meaning that there was time to track and deter the operatives.

This sounds far too reminiscent of February 1992. Israel had close surveillance on Hezbollah leader Abbas Moussawi, looking to kidnap him. It was clear he would be at a certain spot at a certain time – the scaffolding necessary for the construction of a special op – but when it became clear that the abduction, seen as a means of getting information about the downed Israeli airman Ron Arad, was impossible, the operation swung into assassination mode. Why? Because, as Edmund Hilary said after summiting Everest, it was there.

I asked Maj. Gen. (ret) Uri Saguy about that 1992 operation on Tuesday. Saguy was, at the time, the commander of the Military Intelligence Directorate. His voice turned grave. “We didn’t know that the wife or the child were in the car,” he said. “Innocent people were killed.”

Haste and temptation, in that instance, gnawed away at the original logic of the abduction operation.

At least, though, in 1992, Israel knew for a fact the Moussawi was in the car. In this case, the source seemed to be claiming that, beyond the ignorance of the Iranian general’s presence, the army and the intelligence services also did not know that Jihad Mughniyeh, the son of the mass murderer Imad Mughniyeh and the alleged commander of Hezbollah forces on the Syrian Golan, was present.

Maj. Gen. (res) Yaakov Amidror, himself a former commander of MI’s research division and a former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said he didn’t know if Israel has a history of acting on enemy soil, in complex targeted killings, without sufficient information. He refused to discuss the specifics of the Syria strike, saying emphatically “I just don’t know.”

And neither do we, which raises a rash of questions: Why set red lines, underscoring them every several months, and then act beyond the bounds of your own ground rules? What set the severity of the threat at such a level that it warranted a public assassination, by gun ship, in broad daylight? Did politics play a role in the authorization? What degree of certainty existed during previous strikes, in Syria and Lebanon, that were attributed to Israel? And finally, has Israel, which sees President Assad and Hezbollah as hobbled by the war against the Sunni majority, and Iran as handcuffed by the P5+1 negotiations, overplayed its hand in Syria?

Only time will tell. But the public, as the army pushes armor and rocket defense systems north, deserves clarity, and not from a commission of inquiry many months down the road.