The Iron Dome anti-missile system has saved a lot of lives. It has also allowed Israel to avoid dealing with the underlying problems facing the country.
Picture walking down the street and a fellow pulls out a gun and aims it directly at you. He fires but just as the bullet leaves the gun, someone opens a car door where the bullet lodges. The shooter is apprehended and charges are being prepared. You demand that the fellow be charged with attempted murder: it was obvious that he acted in a premeditated manner and intentionally fired the gun towards your person. The DA tells you that you got away without a scratch; the most he is willing to charge is illegal discharge of a weapon. These types of questions show up throughout the ancient Talmud: intention versus outcome. A guy throws a rock to kill A but A ducks and he kills B whom the thrower did not know was even there. What is his punishment from a rabbinical court?
When one looks at the Iran attack as well as this week’s Hezbollah action, in both cases the bad guys sent in excess of 300 projectiles towards Israel. While they tried to peddle a story that they only directed their missiles, rockets, and drones toward military targets, the reality is that many of the incoming weapons were heading towards civilian areas. Over our neighborhood in Jerusalem we witnessed large explosions of interceptor rockets taking out incoming Iranian weapons. What Hezbollah sent into Israel this week also included many unguided munitions that would have exploded in civilian areas had they not been taken out by Iron Dome or other anti-missile platforms. Last week, Hezbollah rockets destroyed several homes in the emptied Golan town of Katzrin. If people had been there, they would be dead.
On the one hand, Iron Dome saves lives. One would be hard-pressed to perform a complete analysis of outcomes with and without Iron Dome to know how many people could have been injured or killed if Israel did not have this anti-projectile system partially funded—like the Arrow 4 interceptor—by the US government. So, Iron Dome is a life saver and other countries are looking to purchase batteries for their own protection. But there is a darker side to Iron Dome. Through its use, successive Israeli governments have simply ignored the basic threats the nation faces from multiple bad actors.
Iron Dome found its first use knocking off rockets from Gaza. Israelis in the south of the country had suffered for years from katyushas and other indiscriminate rocket fire from Gaza. Iron Dome’s radar and computer calculate projectile trajectory, and if something is heading towards a populated area, it fires one or more interceptor missiles (at around $50k each). Let’s imagine that there was no Iron Dome. In the old days, when Grad or other rockets were fired at Israeli cities, citizens were trained to seek cover from the first second of hearing an air raid siren. One waited for the rocket explosion and the all clear signal to go back to normal life. If hundreds of Israelis were God forbid being killed by Gazan or Hezbollah rocket fire, the state of Israel would have had no choice but to remove the threat. Iron Dome made its first interception of a rocket in 2011. So for the twelve years between that event and 10/7, Israel simply lived on borrowed time. Rather than suffer huge casualties from rocket fire and wipe out Hamas, Israel swatted away dangerous projectiles and pushed off dealing with the Gazan menace. If Israelis in 2012 had become fed up with burying a couple dozen fellow countrymen every week from rocket impacts, Gaza might already be the Singapore of the Middle East—in Israeli hands. Just by comparison, every SCUD fired between Iran and Iraq had an average of 500 casualties.
And this is the problem with the anti-missile technology: it causes Israel to simply avoid the root problem of its enemies all around. The Iranians wanted to kill a couple hundred Israelis when they sent their air armada this way. That only one Bedouin girl was injured was a colossal failure for the mullahs. But it also meant that Israel’s hands were tied in wiping out Iran’s oil production and nuclear installations. The relatively free hand granted by the Biden administration to deal with Gaza came at the price of 1,200 dead and 250 kidnapped. If 10/7 had led to five deaths, Israel would not have just received its 500th air delivery of US weaponry (not including the 100 ships doing the same). When there are mass casualties, Israel acts and is allowed by Western nudnikim to act. When the deaths and injuries are relatively few, Israel is told to cool it. Hezbollah definitely wanted to kill a lot of Jews this week. Had they, maybe Beirut would already be a parking lot. That they did not—thank God—means that Hezbollah lives to keep fighting as Israel cannot give a response to what Nasrallah planned to do versus the actual results of killing chickens instead of people.
I am truly grateful to God when attacks from whomever do not lead to casualties. The Iron Dome and other systems are modern marvels in their ability to identify, lock on and destroy incoming projectiles. A laser-based system is in development but apparently is not yet ready for primetime. But one has to recognize that by putting umbrellas over our heads we are not dealing with the root problems. If Israel unleashed everything it has on Hezbollah and Hamas, there would be no more rockets because there would be no one left to fire them. But since the casualties are in trickles (the injured girl in Iran attack, and one dead sailor and two injured from Iron Dome interceptor debris this week), there is no impetus or world green light to take care of the problems once and for all.
We have all had home projects that offer two solutions: a quick fix that will hold for a little while or a total repair job that will take time, be expensive, and be unpleasant. Israel has gone for the high-tech quick fix of knocking down rockets instead of the strategic move of wiping out the ones sending them.
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