Former Israeli Chief of Staff Discusses 1993 Planned Air Campaign Against Hezbollah and Regional Powers

Raful Eitan, who had founded a small right-wing party called Tsomet, went further. He called the attacks “an act of war’ and said we should “respond in kind.” We did move troops and tanks to the border. But my view, which Rabin shared, was that a major ground operation would risk miring ourselves more deeply without fundamentally improving the situation. Hizbollah was the kind of nonconventional enemy | had in mind when Id taken stock of Israel’s changing security imperatives on becoming chief of staff. It was a small force, entrenched and well armed, increasingly supported by Iran and Syria. Its tactics rested on quick-hit attacks on our soldiers in south Lebanon. Far from fearing military retaliation, Hizbollah knew that short of a 1982-scale war — and maybe even then — it would survive. It also didn’t care whether Lebanese civilians died in the crossfire. In fact, like the PLO fighters who had controlled the area before 1982, Hizbollah deliberately fired into Israel from civilian areas. Neither Rabin nor I had abandoned the idea of a large-scale military operation at some point, particularly if the cross-border rocket fire didn’t subside, which for a while it did. But we were determined that, if and when we did decide to strike, we would avoid anything on the scale of the 1982 war. It would have to be with a clear, finite and achievable goal. That point finally arrived in the summer of 1993. In addition to renewed Katyusha strikes, there was a series of deadly Hizbollah attacks in the first two weeks of July inside the security zone. Each used what was becoming the tactic of choice: a remotely detonated bomb by the side of the road on which our military vehicles were travelling, followed by an ambush of soldiers who survived the blast. Six Israelis had been killed in all, making it the largest monthly toll in three years. When I went to see Rabin with our plan for a military response, I recognized the risks. It would be the largest military operation in Lebanon since the war. But I believed we could limit civilian casualties, and that it was the only approach that might lead to a significant reduction in the missile attacks on northern Israel. I began with the assumption that, left to its own devices, Hizbollah would have no incentive to stop firing. Since the two Arab governments with the potential to rein in the attacks — Lebanon’s and above all Syria’s — were showing no interest in doing so, we had to find a way to hold them to account. The operation I proposed was intended to send a message to Beirut and Damascus. It would not be a ground invasion as in 1982. Most of the attacks would be from the air, in two stages. The first would target Hizbollah, both in southern Lebanon and in the Bekaa Valley further north, near the border with 251 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028099