Hezbollah’s attempted attack this past Sunday reveals a terror group going downhill.
It’s hard for people to believe that CNN was once a serious news organization. Today, their news stenographers wait for their instructions from the White House and then tell the news as they have been told to tell it. They have willingly become leftwing hacks, and some of their more famous personalities would not know the truth if it came up and bit them on the behind. But it was not always so. Back in the 1990s, CNN produced a twenty-four episode series on the Cold War. Since they were CNN, they could get Fidel Castro, Henry Kissinger, Mikhail Gorbachev and other world players to give their recollections of one of the most fraught periods in human history. In one episode on the Cuban Missile Crisis, they told the story of Soviet colonel, Oleg Penkovsky.
Penkovsky provided critical information to the US about Soviet nuclear missiles. His contribution to US intelligence at the time was enormous and his codename “Hero” by the CIA was deserved. He was eventually caught, tried, and killed by Soviet authorities. One of the many prizes he provided the CIA and MI6 was the instruction manual for the type of rockets Kruschev had placed in Cuba. The key piece of information was the time required to fill the rockets with liquid fuel prior to launch. This time would be the key to how long the Americans would have between the identification of fueling and actual launch towards the eastern seaboard.
I was reminded of this affair on Sunday when somebody asked me for a favor. There is an older man who prays at our synagogue. A doctor by training, you would not notice anything particularly interesting about him. But he has a very special story. When he was 7, he witnessed a Nazi officer kill his father as the latter stepped foot out of a Polish synagogue at the height of World War II. The doctor himself spent time in concentration camps before the war ended. He eventually moved to the US and later in life to Israel. He has a number of grandchildren fighting in the IDF; that number is almost equal to the number of fingers on both hands. One boy is an F-16 pilot. He once confided in me, “If someone had told me when I was at Theresienstadt that my grandson would be flying a fighter plane to protect the Jewish people, I wouldn’t have believed a word of it.”
On Sunday, he came over and asked what was going on in the north. I do my best not to look at the news until after morning prayers, as once I get started I just go from news website to website. But I could not refuse him so I opened the news to see that Israel had decimated hundreds or possibly thousands of Hezbollah rockets that had been prepared for fire on Tel Aviv and various security targets in the Tel Aviv area. His grandson was in one of the 100 Israeli planes that over the course of 15 minutes pulverized Hezbollah launch positions. I thought about Penkovsky and the likelihood that Hezbollah needed some time to get their rockets up and ready—and during that window, Israel struck aggressively.
The preemptive strike was not a complete success, though it appears that most rockets and missiles were destroyed prior to their launch. Over 300 projectiles did come over the border. Many were intercepted by Israel’s various anti-missile systems. Some fell in open areas, and at least one famously hit a chicken coop. The internet has had a field day with Hezbollah’s war on the chickens. Unfortunately, one Israeli sailor was killed by part of an Iron Dome interceptor that hit his ship off of the Israeli coast. While many see miracles and an incredible outcome, for the family of the soldier, their world ended Sunay. It is like the ending of All Quiet on the Western Front. The hero of the tale falls on the supposedly “quiet” day, which while generally true does not take into account the specific loss of the young man who narrates the story.
What interests me with Hezbollah and its chief chicken hunter, Hassan Nasrallah, is that they have been reduced to lying to the Lebanese people and themselves. One cannot describe the absolute fear that Hezbollah put into the hearts of Israelis. When Israel fled south Lebanon in 2000, it did so in part because soldiers were terrified to serve there. IEDs, cross-border attacks, ambushes—Hezbollah was a terror powerhouse. Over time, it has assembled over 100,000 missiles and UAV and is still considered a powerful force. But something has changed. When one of their missiles fell on a Druze soccer field and killed 12 children, Nasrallah lied. While Israel could show the trajectory of the rocket and parts identifying it as Iranian, the Hezbollah head said that it was an Israeli rocket that had killed the children. He continued to lie in his recent speech when he claimed that there had been no successful preemptive strike and that all targets in the Tel Aviv area had been hit. No projectiles made it as far south as Tel Aviv, and even those fired into the north of the country did not cause significant damage to the targeted army base. Nasrallah has come to habituate himself to lie to the Lebanese people who see their country being destroyed for Iran’s benefit.
I wish that I could say that Nasrallah’s need to fib was a sign that his organization was on its way out. It still has hundreds of thousands of highly trained fighters, endless missiles, tunnels far more sophisticated than those in Gaza, and supplies from Iran. It may not be on its way out, but it is slipping. Israel has killed at least 430 of its fighters without setting foot in Lebanon. It routinely attacks cars and motorcycles, with deadly results for Hezbollah officers and fighters. The latest revenge stunt was reduced to a futile attack due to Israel’s using a small window of opportunity during rocket preparation. Hezbollah is not dead. But it is losing a step. Israel will continue to attack and the Lebanese will continue to hate what the terror group is doing to their country. Hezbollah is being squeezed. Hopefully, it will be squeezed right out of existence.
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