Although not even George W. Bush, after 9/11, managed to include preemptive attack as a third legal ground for using force – along with legitimate defence and the explicit mandate of the UN Security Council – many actors continue to insist on using this argument to strike their enemies at will. An argument that amounts to the denial of international law, replaced by the law of the jungle. And that is what the Government of Benjamin Netanyahu has just done, arguing that Hezbollah was preparing an imminent attack against Israeli civilian and military targets. Thus, without even resorting to its legitimate right to defence and without asking the aforementioned Council to adopt any measure to stop this militia, the Israeli military machine has launched an air attack, using a hundred planes, to try to destroy the maximum possible number of launchers, rockets and missiles supposedly ready to attack Israel.
Pending further details of what happened, what can be deduced immediately is that, as was to be expected, the Israeli action has only succeeded in destroying some launchers and some of the more than 100,000 devices of all kinds with which the Lebanese Shiite militia has been arming itself, with obvious Iranian support; but without diminishing its potential and without being able to prevent its fighters from immediately being able to launch some 340 of them against eleven military objectives of its enemy – as many as those that Iran used last April, in its response to the blow received at its consulate in Damascus a few days earlier. It is true, in any case, that the Israeli anti-aircraft system seems to have succeeded in intercepting the great majority of them.
It is of little use at this point to try to determine precisely who was originally responsible for lighting a fuse that has already caused loud explosions. Israel has violated Lebanese sovereignty countless times, including its invasion and occupation in 1978 (Litani operation), and the attempts to eliminate Hezbollah, including the head-on clash that occurred in the summer of 2006. The Shiite militia, created in 1982, has also carried out armed actions, both occasional ground incursions and rocket and missile launches, on countless occasions, also violating international law. In this tragic game of action and reaction, in which both actors have so far tried not to cross the threshold that could lead to a larger conflict, tension has only increased since last October, with an almost daily exchange of blows that, in a context in which Iran must necessarily be included – at the head of the various regional pawns it has managed to activate, from the Yemeni group Ansar Allah to various militias located in Syria and Iraq – has not yet led to a direct confrontation between ground units.
Beyond the arguments that each side uses – while Israel maintains that it was seeking to thwart the attack, Hezbollah claims that its latest salvo is a response to the assassination of Fuad Shukr, second in command – it is clear that every day we are closer to the outbreak of a large-scale regional conflict, if only because the war dynamics are beyond the control of the actors involved. Netanyahu’s irresponsible attitude – betting on prolonging and aggravating the confrontation with his neighbors, even though it is doomed to failure and goes against the interests of his own country – is probably the main factor that places us before the prospect that, once negotiations to achieve at least a temporary cessation of hostilities in Gaza have failed, Iran will finally choose to respond to the assassination of Ismail Haniya, leader of Hamas, eliminated in Tehran on July 31.
In that case, what happened on Sunday on the Israeli-Lebanese front will be identified as the prelude to a generalised outbreak, which rationally no one should wish for, in which both Iran and its loyalists will rush to use all the means at their disposal to, in a first phase, try to saturate the Israeli anti-aircraft systems, with the addition of drones that have so often demonstrated their ability to bypass these defences. Sequentially or simultaneously, it is to be expected that ground incursions will also take place, trying to generate a climate of panic among the population and to capture prisoners, together with air actions of increasing complexity in enemy territory.
Those who attack Israel will likely seek to saturate its anti-aircraft defenses and force its armed forces to deal with several hot fronts at the same time, knowing that its geographic, demographic and military limitations make it very difficult for it to withstand a prolonged conflict. For its part, it is also possible to assume that Israel will try to advance its defenses, entering enemy territory with ground units (especially in Lebanon and the Golan Heights), to prevent as far as possible its own territory from becoming a battlefield.
Meanwhile, the massacre in Gaza continues under the watchful (and permissive) eye of Washington.
