’Israel’s enemies have put the entire civilian population on the frontline’ - Week’s End - Israel News

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  • ’Israel’s enemies have put the entire civilian population on the frontline’

    Haaretz Daily Newspaper

    http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/week-s-end/israel-s-enemies-have-put-the-entire-civilian-population-on-the-frontline.p

    In practical terms, this means that in the event of a war with Hezbollah, the metropolitan Tel Aviv region “will come under a massive missile barrage. Hezbollah has at its disposal about 5,000 warheads, weighing between 300 and 800 kilograms each. In my estimation, the first days will be extremely difficult. I am preparing for a scenario in which more than a thousand missiles and rockets a day are fired at the civilian rear.”

    Israel is not looking for this confrontation, Eisenberg says. “That kind of war will not be worthwhile for the other side,” he says. “Israel is capable of inflicting serious damage on its enemies on a scale of hundreds of percent more than they are capable of inflicting on us,” with the use of the far more destructive and precise munitions in the Israel Air Force’s possession. “The adversary will have to choose if he wants to see heaps of rubble when he comes out of the bunker at the end of the war. The problem is that, in the end, both sides will emerge bruised from the event, though we can rehabilitate faster.”

    The new frontline

    A year and a half ago, at the height of the public debate over the necessity of an attack on Iran, then-Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Army Radio that “in no scenario will there be even 500 civilian casualties” following a missile war. Even though the collective public memory is that Barak was referring to the number of Israelis who would be killed, he was actually talking about killed and wounded together, and drawing on estimates of operations research in the defense establishment. “We are examining whether to reevaluate this,” Eisenberg admits. “The threat is changing before our eyes. In the next war, for the first time, we might have more civilians killed on the home front than soldiers on the combat front.” (In fact, this was already the case in the second intifada, because of the Palestinian suicide bombings against the civilian population in Israel. )

    To some degree, the HFC says, this will amount to "breaking the state’s pact with the citizen - who always knew he was in the rear, and suddenly will find himself on a second front. We will not be able to sustain the war with military means alone. We have to do much in the way of ensuring steadfastness, the ability of people to stand firm for the long haul. I prefer not to engage in frightening people, but in training and drills that provide civilians with knowledge, instill confidence and generate the ability to cope with the challenge.

    “In the south of the country,” he continues, “people have learned how to cope with the rocket threat from Gaza. I don’t say they have learned how to live with it, heaven forbid - it’s not sane to live with missiles. But they are able to cope in moments of crisis. If a war breaks out, it can be ended with fewer than the hundreds of dead being talked about in the scenarios, given the right behavior by the civilian population. Obedience to instructions in the past, in previous confrontations, saved many lives. Today, after missiles were fired at Tel Aviv during Operation Pillar of Defense last November, I think that people in the center of the country grasp just how concrete the threat is.”