Of the three offices used by Israeli prime ministers, most prefer the one in Tel Aviv, in a small but comfortable villa nestling within the IDF’s General Staff compound. This is where the PM gets to deal with the serious stuff: intelligence briefings and greenlighting secret operations.
Few have access to that office and those who do are mainly senior staff, not politicians. The main prime minister’s office in Jerusalem is more hectic but is at least relatively comfortable and there’s at least an extra layer of security to keep out the more troublesome elements.
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Nir Orbach
The office all prime ministers like least is the parliamentary one in the Knesset. It’s rather small and quite bare, with political flunkies and lobbyists always trying to barge in. But the main reason they tend to hate it is that when they need to spend much time there, it’s a sign their government is in trouble and every finger is needed on the voting buttons. (The Knesset office has one redeeming feature — a wide balcony with a spectacular view over Jerusalem, but the Shin Bet bodyguards don’t like it when the PM goes out there.)
Naftali Bennett has had to spend a lot of his first year as prime minister in that office, while his coalition has struggled to pass legislation. And since the summer session began, following the defection of former coalition whip Idit Silman, they no longer have an automatic majority and he needs to be there for days on end, as his coalition crumbles around him.
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Mazen Ghanaim
This week he was about to walk back to the office from the Knesset floor when he stopped to look at an altercation a few metres away between one of his own Yamina MKs, Nir Orbach, and Mazen Ghanayim, a member of Ra’am, the Islamist party in his coalition. Mr Gahanayim had just voted against a government bill to renew the extension of Israeli law to Israeli citizens living in the West Bank.
“The experiment with you has failed, you don’t want to be partners,” shouted Mr Orbach.
“The experiment” is the unprecedented partnership with an Arab-Israeli in coalition. And if it has indeed failed, then the government is doomed.
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Idit Silman
Mr Bennett and the leaders of the other eight parties in the coalition are still putting on brave faces and insisting that the experiment can work. But the basic facts on the ground are that some of the Arab MKs will simply not vote for the West Bank Regulations law and if it doesn’t pass, some of the right-wing MKs will almost certainly abandon the coalition.
Another vote has been scheduled for next Monday, though there doesn’t seem to be any prospect of a majority. Coincidentally, Monday is 13 June, which just happens to be the date last year when the Bennett government was inaugurated. At least it will have reached its first birthday.
Another reason prime ministers hate the Knesset office is that it’s the last one they’re in as prime minister, minutes before another is sworn in to replace them.
War Games
Last week, as the political storms were raging around him, Mr Bennett remarked to his staff that, more than anything, the place he wanted to be was Cyprus. He wasn’t yearning for the beaches of the east Mediterranean island. It was his old army comrades he was missing.
The IDF’s Division 98, its elite airborne unit, spent the last week on manoeuvers in Cyprus. Bennett served in the division for many years in his early twenties as a professional soldier, and then as a reservist into his forties. He had led a team of commandos whose mission was to hunt down missile-launchers behind enemy lines. As an embattled prime minister, all he could do was to follow the exercise from afar.
Exercise Beyond the Horizon was the largest of its kind held by the IDF outside the country’s borders. Elements of Division 98’s five brigades arrived in Cyprus, some landing from the sea, others in helicopters and Hercules tactical transports and some parachuting in. The exercise’s objective was to use the island’s unfamiliar terrain to simulate a full-scale war in which the IDF needed to invade Lebanon to root out Hezbollah fighters.
It underlined how close the relations between Israel and Cyprus, as well as the Cypriots’ sister-nation, Greece, have become in recent years. It also emphasised how Israel’s defence establishment sees the main threats facing the country.
Over the last two months, the media focus has been on the Palestinians, following the wave of terror attacks in Israeli cities and clashes in Jerusalem and Jenin. Last Sunday, the IDF was on high alert during Jerusalem Day, lest Hamas repeat last year’s escalation and launch rockets from Gaza. But that didn’t change the plan to send some of its most important units and squadrons to Cyprus that very day.
For the IDF, the most challenging enemy it can expect to meet on the ground in the foreseeable future remains Hezbollah on its northern border. The war with Iran is still mainly under the radar and is being fought largely by Mossad and a tiny handful of special operations units. And Hamas, while remaining a concern, doesn’t come close to the firepower and sophistication that Iran’s most capable proxy, Hezbollah, has at its disposal.
Most of the month-long Exercise Chariots of Fire, the IDF’s annual “war month” of which the Cyprus deployment was the culmination, was dedicated to various scenarios of a future war with Hezbollah. At the end of a grueling week, as the last of the paratroopers disembarked at Haifa port on their way to a well-earned Shavuot weekend at home, the IDF’s spokesperson unit released exciting footage of commandos landing on Cypriot hillsides, while generals spoke of how the troops had proved adept at dealing with unfamiliar terrain.
But not everyone was so convinced.
“As an exercise, it was great,” said a reserve company commander upon returning with his battalion from Cyprus. “Everything went like clockwork, we had loads of brand-new equipment and the helicopters were waiting for us whenever we needed an airlift. And it was impressive to be doing this with an entire division. But this is still not what a war in Lebanon will be like. We won’t be so well-prepared and there will be many other parts of the IDF there, especially armoured units, which didn’t take part in this exercise and are nowhere near as well-trained as our division.”
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General Yitzhak Brick
The reservist was echoing the warnings of the retired IDF Ombudsman, former General Yitzhak Brick, who has been saying for years that while the IDF’s best units are training well and have the most advanced equipment and weapons at their disposal, many of its reserve echelons are suffering from neglect.
Warnings like these are being heeded more these days as the scenes of a much-lauded Russian army getting bogged down in Ukraine are making senior officers in every army question their own forces’ readiness.
Israel shouldn’t need Ukraine as a wake-up call. It suffered from similar problems – especially the vulnerability of armoured columns to anti-tank teams and the over-extension of logistic convoys – the last time it fought a major war against Hezbollah, in 2006.
But perhaps the next showdown with the militia will not be a military one. Israel’s first Lebanon War began 40 years ago this week. At the time, the IDF was invading Lebanon to eliminate the Palestinian fighters who were shelling Israeli towns in the Galilee.
But unbeknownst to them, a new enemy, a shadowy Shia militia financed by Iran, was already lurking in Lebanon and would prove a much more difficult adversary than the PLO. “Hezbollah is extremely unlikely to go to war with Israel in the foreseeable future,” said a senior Israeli minister this week. “Hassan Nasrallah knows that to do so would invite major destruction on Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure and he is too invested now in internal Lebanese politics to take that risk.”
That’s good news for Israel, but it also reflects the fact that Hezbollah is playing for much higher stakes now. “Nasrallah is no longer Iran’s sub-contractor,” said the minister. “He’s now Iran’s senior advisor on how to take over Lebanon and Syria.”
Hezbollah had a setback last month when it lost some seats in the Lebanese parliamentary election. But it will continue with its grand strategy of gradually taking over Lebanon’s establishment, while it works with Iran on doing the same in Syria.
If they succeed, it will be a far more dangerous situation for Israel than just another war in Lebanon.
