A question of when, not if

For those Israelis who think that they live in Berkeley and those Americans who think that the primary problem in the region is Palestinian rights, a news item:

The defense establishment announced earlier in the day that the atomic, biological, and chemical protection kits recently collected from the public will be upgraded and redistributed.

The decision to redistribute the kits was made by the Defense Ministry, in view of the recent ground-to-ground missile threats made evident against Israel and in an attempt to boost home front readiness against a possible chemical attack emanating from Iran or Syria. — YNet

Syria has a large number of missiles which can reach any part of Israel and which have chemical and possibly biological warheads. In the past few days there have been reports that Syria has called up reserves and concentrated troops near the borders with Lebanon and Israel.

With all the noise that is made about the pointless negotiations with Fatah, one tends to forget that Israel faces enemies armed to the teeth in Syria and southern Lebanon, a vicious Hamas in Gaza, and a soon-to-be nuclear Iran pulling the strings and aiming her own missiles.

This situation is highly unstable, and we are not moving in a direction of reducing instability — indeed, since the fundamental issue is that Israel’s enemies do not accept her existence, nothing other than deterrence based on a perception of superior military strength (or great power intervention) can prevent war.

Unfortunately, as Barry Rubin pointed out in the previous post, the Arabs have consistently underestimated Israel and continue to do so.

So it is probably not a question of ‘if’, but rather ‘when’.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 2:15 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “A question of when, not if”

  1. Shalom Freedman says:
    April 3, 2008 at 12:44 am

    The estimates for a coming war are not pretty. There seems no way it can take place without substantial casualties, both military and civilian. What Israel must do , as I understand it, is project a posture of absolute determination to retaliate in a massively disproportional way to any attack on its its population, territory, resources.