Dizzy. In ten days, Israel achieved what was thought impossible: eliminating the entire command of Hezbollah, a militia with tens of thousands of men and 150,000 rockets, massed on its northern border. All without losing a single soldier. This Israeli feat is sure to go down in the military history books, from the bomb pager attack to the strike that rid the world of terrorist leader Hassan Nasrallah. “This is Israeli intelligence at its best, it’s hard to imagine anything better,” said Chuck Freilich, former Israeli national security adviser. “But we’ve seen this movie before, and the problems on the long term are in no way resolved.”
The Jewish State does not in fact have time to savor. The October 7 commemorations will remind an entire country of the terrible reality of the continent on which it finds itself, a Middle East in which the destiny of a nation changes with a handful of missiles or a suicide mission of madmen. Yesterday’s successes create today’s hubris and tomorrow’s disasters. With its choice of military escalation on all fronts – against Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen – the Netanyahu government also chooses the maximum risk for its country, although isolated as rarely on the international scene, due to the tens of thousands of civilian deaths caused by its operations.
Certainly, Iran and its “axis of resistance” are humiliated. Tehran was unable to respond to the assassination of the Hamas leader on its soil at the end of July, nor to prevent the destruction of the headquarters of its most valuable militia. The mullahs take it, fulminate, but remain powerless. For now.
While the Iranian regime has plunged the West into darkness over its nuclear program, it is moving forward and can achieve a breakthrough overnight. Attacks against the Jewish community abroad remain the Iranian trademark: let us not forget the 29 deaths in the attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, a month after the elimination of a leader of the Hezbollah. Finally, the Islamic Republic continues its undermining work to destabilize the Middle East and ensure that this chaos spreads to Israel. Its weapons are arriving in numbers in a West Bank in turmoil and Tehran wants to bring down Jordan from within, after the victory of the Islamists in the legislative elections last month. So many existential challenges for Israel.