In June, 1982, Israel launched the First Lebanon War in response to the assassination attempt against the country’s ambassador to the United Kingdom Shlomo Argov.
It is still premature to determine what Israel’s response will be following the attacks against its diplomatic staff in India and Georgia on Monday but the question of whether it should respond or not is currently hanging in the air.
On the one hand, one of the attacks – in Tbilisi – was thwarted after the bomb was discovered before exploding. In New Delhi, the wife of a diplomat was wounded and evacuated to hospital. Neither of these appear to serve as the required Casus belli needed to initiate a war against Hezbollah, if it was the one behind the attacks.
On the other hand, Israel will have to consider the implication of ignoring the attacks and what that will do to the deterrence it has tried to create vis-à-vis Hezbollah following the Second Lebanon War in 2006.
Since the assassination of Hezbollah’s military commander Imad Mughniyeh in 2008 in Damascus, Israel has known that it was just a matter of time before it would be attacked overseas.
Over the years, a number of attacks have been thwarted – against the embassy in Azerbaijan, the Israeli embassy in Bangkok, against an Israeli airliner in Turkey and against Israeli tourists in the Sinai Peninsula.
In recent years, Hezbollah is believed to have significantly upgraded its overseas infrastructure and has put a particular emphasis on Europe, South America and Southeast Asia.
Hezbollah has an overseas division based in Beirut but it functions more like a sub-unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’s Quds Force, responsible for Iran’s support of terrorist groups around the world.
The head of the Hezbollah unit, which numbers a few dozen operatives, is a veteran member of the guerrilla organization named Talal Hamia who is assisted by his bodyguard Ahmed Faid and Hezbollah’s top bomb maker, Ali Najan al-Din
Hamia, for example, was allegedly involved in the 1992 and 1994 bombings in Buenos Aires that targeted the Israeli Embassy and the AMIA Jewish community center.
Another member of the cell, Majd al-Zakur, is referred to as “the forger” and is responsible for procuring and preparing fake passports, like the Swedish one that appears to have been used by Atris to enter Thailand and whose authenticity is now under scrutiny.
Until the attacks on Monday, a debate had been raging within the Israeli defense establishment what the appropriate response should be to an overseas attack, if and when one took place.
Hezbollah is understood to prefer such an attack – against an embassy, an El Al plane or a consulate – rather than one along the northern border since this would allow it a level of deniability.
Nevertheless, there are some officials within the defense establishment who believe that such an attack needs to be met by a fierce response.
Just last month, IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz warned Hezbollah not to test Israel’s resolve by perpetrating a terror attack against an Israeli target overseas. If Israel does not respond, it could be perceived as a paper tiger.
Other officials believe that Israel should not go to war over any attack and that the country’s reaction would need to depend on the chosen target and of course the outcome, i.e. the number of casualties.
However valuable Mughniyeh was to Hezbollah, the defense establishment believes that there are other motives behind Hezbollah’s desire to attack Israel somewhere overseas.
One of the motives is understood to be part of Iranian efforts to deter the West from launching a military strike against its nuclear facilities by showing the world that its proxy – Hezbollah – can strike anywhere it wants, even as far away as Georgia and India.
This is meant to show the United States, Israel and Europe that retaliation to a strike against Iran will be painful for everyone and will not simply be the launching of rockets and missiles by Hezbollah and Hamas into the Israeli home front.
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