Via Friday-Lunch-Club
Oxford Analytica: Excerpts:
"... Israel does not expect anything to come from the talks. While preparations for an attack are going ahead, a number of factors are making them more difficult and complicated than initially anticipated. Israeli military preparations for an assault on Iran are proceeding apace. Following the closing of Turkish airspace to Israeli air force training manoeuvres earlier this year, the Israelis have begun making more use of other countries' airspace for long-range aerial training exercises. They are also training special forces for an attack. Moreover, by choosing Yoav Gallant as the new chief of staff, and Tamir Pardo as the new head of the Mossad, the Israeli government is sending a powerful, if indirect, message. Both men are known as operational field operatives, rather than administrators .........However, both budgets and events elsewhere are affecting their plans. Furthermore, Israeli planners are having to try to balance several timelines simultaneously ..... Israel and the United States are coming closer in their assessments of the pace of Iran's nuclear development. Both now estimate that, depending on how effective future covert operations and sanctions are, it may take 2-3 years before Iran has a testable bomb...
US constraints. Although Washington has stressed that it has operational military plans to deal with the Iranian threat, it remains reluctant to become involved in a new war amid continuing economic challenges and deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a minimum, the Israelis would need silent US backing for any assault. Any assault would, almost inevitably, force Israel to end up fighting a three-front war. Israeli military planners fully anticipate that should Israel attack Iran, their homefront would come under fire from the thousands of rockets now in the possession of Iranian allies Hizbollah and Hamas. .... Israel's entire military posture for decades has been based on the principle that offence is the best form of defence. For that reason, Israel has always focused most of its military purchases on offensive weaponry such as the latest generation of fighter-bombers. However, beginning with the 1991 Gulf war, and especially since the 2006 Lebanese War and the 2008-09 incursion into Gaza, there has been growing public pressure to increase Israel's passive defensive capacity. However, because of the costs, six Israeli villages on the border with Gaza have yet to be equipped with adequate shelters, and there are only enough gas masks for 60% of the population. Many home front services such as fire-fighting units remain woefully under-equipped. In addition, the introduction of new, Israeli-designed Iron Dome anti-rocket missile batteries is being delayed because of costs .... even if all this economic aid had been appropriated, the Israelis would still only have the means to protect a few air bases and not the population as a whole....
Regional security factors. Another potential complication in decision-making on Iran is internal domestic instability in Lebanon and Gaza ... The Israelis fear that Hizbollah could create a series of border incidents, and even another full-scale war, in order to unite the Lebanese public behind it. The Hamas administration in Gaza has recently been under increasing pressure from even more extremist groups to renew rocket and mortar attacks on Israel. There has been an increase in the shelling of Israeli civilian targets in recent weeks........ the balance of various factors means that the Israeli government will likely choose to wait out the next few months in order to follow developments before taking stock of issues such as the state of the Iranian nuclear programme, the impact of covert operations and sanctions, their own defensive preparedness, and the US political climate as the presidential campaign gets underway.
Posted by G, Z, or B at 4:50 PM
Uprooted Palestinian
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