Israel’s Oct. 7 counterpunch

Expect Israel to ratchet its campaign against Iran up another notch after Tuesday night’s barrage, with what knowledgeable officials say will be a military strike. But Israel hopes to avoid an all-out confrontation — and it appears to be working with the United States to craft a set of sanctions on Iran, focusing on the energy sector, rather than launching its own big barrage of missiles against Tehran.

Israel, in sum, has recovered the military primacy it lost when Hamas fighters surged across the Gaza border on Oct. 7 and ravaged Israeli civilians. Hamas has been tamed militarily. Hezbollah is reeling from the targeted killing of its leader, Hasan Nasrallah, and most of its top military commanders. And Iran’s retaliatory barrage appears to have been absorbed by Israel without major losses.

“The Iranian attack was a massive failure,” said one U.S. official briefed on Tuesday’s intelligence reports. “Iran once again threw all it had — nearly 200 of its vaunted and once-feared ballistic missiles, and what’s left over [are] remnants of missile parts all over the Middle East.”

Looking at the arc of this war, we can see that Israel has taken on Iran’s network of proxies in Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen — and so far, it has been able to withstand Tehran’s modest efforts to counterattack. Critics have recoiled from the violence of Israel’s campaign, and international condemnation brings a long-term cost for Israel that will be hard to calculate. But for Israelis themselves, the escalating campaign against Iran’s network seems to have brought a rebirth of the nation’s defiant self-confidence.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s story shows a similar trajectory. He has gone from deep unpopularity — loathed by many Israelis after the trauma of Oct. 7 — to wartime triumph. The Biden administration, after trying and failing to curb Netanyahu and impose a cease-fire with Hamas and Hezbollah, is now helping its ally combat Iran’s onslaught, with U.S. destroyers joining in the defense against the Iranian missiles.

An Israeli official described the military situation this way Tuesday night: “If we can’t deter our enemies, we can’t survive in this neighborhood. Oct. 7 shattered this deterrence, and we saw the proxies attack, one by one, because they thought they could get away with it.

“That view of Israeli vulnerability has now been reversed,” the official said.

Israel’s Hezbollah campaign, though devastatingly effective, resulted from a series of unanticipated tactical opportunities, according to knowledgeable sources. Israel had secretly sabotaged Hezbollah’s crisis communications network of pagers and walkie-talkies in preparation for an eventual all-out war with Hezbollah. That sabotage plan was hastily executed last month because Israeli intelligence saw signs that Hezbollah was checking the pager systems and might discover the hidden explosives, the sources said. It was a case of “use it or lose it.”

Having started the attack, Israel continued to seize opportunities afforded by Hezbollah’s disorientation, taking out senior commanders, missile launchers and other munitions. As the campaign escalated last week, Israel learned that Nasrallah might be moving his headquarters from Beirut’s southern suburbs, which it had meticulously mapped. Once again, it was a use-it-or-lose-it dilemma.

Israel had considered striking at Nasrallah on Oct. 11, days after the attack, as an immediate reprisal. But Israel pulled back then — in part because of U.S. pressure, but more so because of fears among top Israeli leaders that the traumatized country wouldn’t be able to absorb retaliatory volleys of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Hezbollah rockets. A strike against Nasrallah was considered several other times over the past year, the sources said, but was rejected each time.

Israel took its fateful decision last Wednesday night, before Netanyahu was about to leave Israel for New York to address the U.N. General Assembly. At that very moment, the Biden administration was floating a 21-day cease-fire plan for Lebanon, with senior White House officials implying to journalists that the truce would have Israeli support. How wrong they were.

This round of the decades-old conflict goes to Israel. But if there’s one certainty about the Middle East, it’s that even with Israeli deterrence restored, more dreadful fighting lies ahead.