The drums of war can be heard
Op-ed: War is likely to break out here next summer, or even before then - and if you think its doubtful, or trust in the security establishments' assessments, think back to what everyone was saying before the Six Day and Yom Kippur Wars.
War is likely to break out here next summer, or even before then – if, that is, you can call an operation such as Protective Edge a war. This is only an estimate, which goes against current intelligence reports, but the military's preparedness and recent statements testify to its likelihood. There is the sense of troops awaiting orders to get going.
This assessment may provoke surprise: War? What are you talking about? When every country around us, every faction, every terror organization is fighting for its life?
But we have a history, albeit a short one, and we would be fools not to learn from it. On the eve of Independence Day in 1967, not a single person in Israel would have told you that the following day, an Egyptian advance would result in the Six Day War. On the contrary: everyone believed that as long as Egypt was embroiled in the conflict in Yemen, they did not have the military capacity to fight the IDF – much less in the Sinai.
On the eve of Yom Kippur, 1973, a few lone voices warned that war was approaching, yet the State of Israel and the IDF were still caught off-guard. The defense minister said just days beforehand that there wouldn't be a war for the next 10 years, and we drank up his words thirstily. Dayan said so. Dayan knows what he's talking about.
One would need to be blind and foolish not to hear the drums of war in the air. They also cried "nonsense" before the Six Day War, and before the Yom Kippur War different policy suggestions were raised and lowered while Israelis boasted of their military and diplomatic victories. And so it is now: We are all heroes, in speeches, threats and warnings. We will pulverize. We will overthrow. We'll show them.
We'll show them? Hezbollah is to our north, Hamas is in the south along with Islamic State in the Sinai, and they are all learning. They know what the power relations are, they know about the Israeli Air Force, about our intelligence and experience on the battlefield, and they are trying to overtake us. To turn limitations into advantages – for example by digging tunnels or Hezbollah's acquisition of rockets that will overcome our defense systems and the various Iron Domes to strike civilian population centers.
The IDF is a victim of its own successes: should an Iron Dome battery miss one rocket, Israelis will "destroy" the operators, who in the blink of an eye will turn from God's deputies into garden weeds.
As in previous instances, we have a working assumption now, too: That Iraq is on its knees, Syria is divided, Hezbollah is running scared (fact – their leader won't emerge from his bunker), Hamas is still licking its wounds after the last operation, and al-Sisi is hunting down Islamic State militants in the Sinai and showing them who's boss.
As for the international community, we've never had it easy with them – but the world is currently preoccupied with its own tragedies and is fed up with the Israeli-Arab conflict.
There are some in Israel telling us that we have a rare opportunity. An opportunity to neutralize – a newly-defined word in the Israeli dictionary – the tens of thousands of rockets and missiles in Hezbollah's possession, and to destroy once and for all (or at least until next time) Hamas' tunnels in Gaza.
With the same opportunity, the children of the knife intifada can be sent back to school and we can show residents in the territories, as well as the Arab countries wallowing in their own blood, who's the real boss around here. We can prove to everyone the meaning behind the words, "By our strength and the might of our hands."
As I said, everything written here is an estimate. If war doesn't break out this summer, everyone benefits. If it does break out, even those perched high above will be recruited into the reserves.
