Is an Israel in crisis weaker? Tensions rise on Lebanon border.

On a sunny winter day last December, Israel’s most powerful military commanders, both current and former, gathered at a swanky Tel Aviv beachfront hotel to discuss the weightiest security matters facing the Jewish state.

Addressing the conference held by the army’s in-house intelligence think tank, the research division chief,  Brig. Gen. Amit Saar, was, overall, optimistic as he laid out the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) outlook for the coming year.

“Israel is perceived in the region … as a strong and stable player, with high economic and scientific capabilities,” Brigadier General Saar said.

His survey included the challenges facing Iran, unrest in the West Bank, and relative stability in Gaza. A distant fourth concern was Israel’s northern neighbor, Lebanon, and the threat posed by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement.

“Lebanon is a country in a deep crisis, and this creates deep tension for Hezbollah. Today [Hezbollah] is the sovereign in Lebanon, but it has the best tickets on the Titanic,” he said, alluding to Lebanon’s cratering currency, lack of medicine and electricity, and overall political chaos.

Fast forward eight months.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which took power in late December, has thrown Israel into unprecedented turmoil with its push to overhaul the country’s judicial system.

Many of the former senior officials present at the December conference have become highly public dissidents, warning of the damage to national security wrought by the government’s agenda and even supporting the refusal by thousands of military reservists to serve under a budding illiberal regime.

By every metric the Israeli economy has suffered, while scientists, doctors, and tech entrepreneurs either prepare emigration plans or march in the streets alongside hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens.

Israel is no longer as strong or as stable as it was mere months ago, and its border with Lebanon has become the scene of growing tensions and Hezbollah provocations that many fear could escalate into open conflict.

Indeed, Israeli military intelligence recently updated its assessment, putting the chances of an Israel-Hezbollah war at their highest since 2006, when the two foes fought a 34-day campaign.

“Hezbollah sees the internal situation in Israel and views it as weakness,” says one Israeli security official.

Last week, after parliament passed the first of the governing coalition’s judicial overhaul bills, spurring mass protests, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah described it as “the worst day in the history of the Zionist entity.”

“Israel has embarked on a path, God willing, of collapse, fragmentation, and doom,” he crowed.

Border provocations

For over a year, but especially in recent months, Hezbollah has become more aggressive, openly establishing border posts and deploying its forces on the frontier, and either actively or tacitly launching a series of exceptional attacks.

In March, a Hezbollah militant managed to cross the border, travel 50 miles deep into the heart of Israel, and lay an advanced explosive device by a highway. The ensuing blast only wounded one passing Israeli motorist; the militant, attempting to flee back into Lebanon, was killed by Israeli commandos as he tried to detonate a suicide vest.

“If the explosion had hit a bus of soldiers on the highway and 10 people were killed, this wouldn’t have ended with nothing,” says Brig. Gen. Assaf Orion, a retired IDF officer now at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, referring to Israel’s muted retaliation to the attack.

In April, amid tensions at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, Hezbollah allowed local Palestinian groups to fire more than 30 rockets at Israel – the heaviest barrage from Lebanon since 2006. Israeli jets struck agricultural fields in response.

In late May, Hezbollah militants crossed the international boundary into Israeli-held territory near the Golan Heights, and set up two tents, precipitating a stand-off that international mediators are still working to resolve. In a bid to mitigate the crisis, the IDF refrained from making the incursion public for several weeks.

More recently, near-daily provocations have taken place, with Hezbollah operatives attempting to sabotage the border fence and even firing an anti-tank missile at a disputed Israeli village that straddles the frontier.

Nevertheless, says the security official, Israeli intelligence’s official assessment is that Mr. Nasrallah still does not want war but is using the increased friction on the border to erode Israeli deterrence and strengthen Hezbollah’s standing as Lebanon’s “true protector.”

Israeli officials assess the strategy as risky, but surmise that the Hezbollah leader may be gambling that any flare-up can be contained to a few days of fighting, similar to the many clashes between Israel and Gaza-based militants in recent years.

“You know how something like this starts, but you don’t know how it ends,” warns the security official. “But both sides don’t have an interest in a total war.”

Brigadier-General Orion is more pessimistic, saying no matter the intentions of either side, the confrontations increase the chances of miscalculation.

“We’re treading on a very narrow ledge with no guardrails, even if Netanyahu himself is very careful and both sides don’t want it,” he says. “The tactical level [on the ground] will dictate what happens. … It could be a matter of inches.”

Does Hezbollah want war?

There are those in Israel, however, who offer an even more dire assessment, arguing that far from being simple muscle-flexing over a border dispute, Hezbollah’s recent behavior indicates a genuine desire for war – no matter the likely devastating cost to both itself and Lebanon.

“Hezbollah views Israel as the platform through which it can accelerate its … takeover of Lebanon,” says Major Tal Beeri, a former Israeli intelligence officer and research director at the Alma Research and Education Center in northern Israel.

“Hezbollah knows it will take heavy losses, they’re not idiots. But at the end of the war it will be the strongest actor in Lebanon with all of the others weakened. … Just look at how since the 2006 war it has become stronger, increasing its military capabilities and political standing,” Major Beeri adds.

In his view, Mr. Nasrallah has been genuinely surprised at the lack of a sharper Israeli response, including possible war.

The reason for Israel’s restraint (so far), analysts argue, is the knowledge that Hezbollah has amassed a vast arsenal, including precision missiles capable of hitting key Israeli infrastructure and institutions. Israel estimates that in the opening stages of any renewed conflict, Hezbollah will have the ability to fire 4,000 rockets and missiles at Israel daily, compared with the 100 per day it managed in 2006.

Whatever Mr. Nasrallah’s current intent, Israel, for its part, has since 2006 been extensively training and preparing for a conflict with Hezbollah – including the launch of a major air and ground offensive against Lebanon if war breaks out. Security analysts maintain it would be, by some measures, the most destructive Arab-Israeli war since 1973.

Would conflict bring unity?

Amid these growing tensions on the Lebanon border and continued domestic unrest – including inside the military – Israeli officials have pushed back rhetorically against the proposition that Israel has been weakened. They argue that in any future conflict, the country and military would remain united.

“Regarding Nasrallah’s threats from his bunker, we are not impressed,” Mr. Netanyahu said at the weekly cabinet meeting Sunday. “At the crucial moment, he will find us standing together, shoulder to shoulder. Even Nasrallah knows that it is worth neither his while, nor Lebanon’s, to put us to the test.”

A statement released after a meeting the next day between the prime minister and his top security chiefs, purposefully delayed for days until after the parliamentary vote last week, was left deliberately vague as to the government’s intentions.

What damage the reservists’ protest has inflicted on Israeli capabilities is also unclear, as the military tries to publicly downplay the scale of the no-shows and personally convince reservists to resume their service. The impact may only become apparent in the coming weeks as the thousands of combat pilots, intelligence specialists, special forces commandos, and others refuse to report for duty.

“At this point in time, the IDF is operationally ready,” the top military spokesman said last week in an unprecedented statement. “If reservists do not show up for reserve duty in the long term – there will be damage to the military’s readiness.”

In a deeply divided society, if a security crisis were to materialize, it could either help mend what has been broken over the past seven months or simply exacerbate tensions and push Israel over the brink.

“A security escalation is the best way to break apart the protest movement, and [Netanyahu] does have a legitimate reason” to respond to Hezbollah's actions, said one leader of the IDF reservist protest group last month.

“Some [reservists] will report for duty, some won’t. And [the government] will simply continue legislating” its judicial overhaul.