As we await developments in the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, the operation that remotely detonated thousands of pagers of pro-Iranian paramilitaries in Lebanon and Syria marks the debut of a novel hybrid military tactic: the combined use of high technology and intelligence for strategic deterrence.Deterrence is about keeping enemies away. In the desert, made of sand, it is the oldest tactic of rival tribes because it allows fierce adversaries to coexist in confined spaces without demarcated boundaries. Globally, during the Cold War, the U.S. and the USSR both relied on nuclear power to enshrine mutual deterrence through the doctrine of "mutual assured destruction," while in the Middle East, Israel since 1967 has relied on clear military superiority against enemy states to persuade them to give up attacking it.
But Israeli deterrence has been gradually weakened: first by the surprise attack suffered by Egypt and Syria in 1973 and then, more significantly, by the inability to put on the defensive over the past 18 years two terrorist organizations, Hamas and Hezbollah, present in force along its borders.This inability first manifested itself starkly in 2006 in Lebanon, when at the end of the conflict with Israel, the pro-Iranian militia pledged to withdraw beyond the Litani River in the south, but then did the exact opposite by strengthening its military presence in front of the Galilee: making a mockery not only of UN Resolution 1701 and the Unifil contingent but also of the Israeli army along the borders.
To the point of placing its own tents straddling the border, in the disputed area of Shebaa, in the summer of 2023, and boasting in recent months that it can strike with missiles and drones every corner of the Jewish state, heedless of retaliation. With the October 7, 2023 attack, Hamas then dealt the hardest blow to Israeli deterrence, demonstrating that it could invade the Western Negev, slaughter civilians and kidnap hundreds of hostages by violating a border that it was considered super-protected and mocking the Jerusalem army.
Israel's difficulty in facing the double challenge of Hamas and Hezbollah has become even more evident since that moment because it is the confrontation between a sovereign state and two terrorist organizations where the former - being also a democracy - has to answer to its public opinion and also to the rules of international law - as is happening before the Hague Court - while Hassan Nasrallah and Yahia Sinwar have no restrictions. Because their only obligation is to follow the directions of Iran, which arms and finances them.Hence the fact that Israeli deterrence has been greatly weakened for the glaring reason that the enemy is no longer one or more states but paramilitary organizations, which evade all rules: they do not care about the protection of civilians, they have no countries to answer to, and they have no international laws to abide by. Both Lebanon for Hezbollah and the Gaza Strip for Hamas are merely territorial platforms to be exploited in any way in order to bleed Israel to achieve Tehran's strategic goal of annihilating "the Zionist entity.
"The fierce Gaza war, with a high Palestinian civilian death toll, is there to testify precisely to the difficulty Israel has in defending itself by resorting to classical military superiority.Hezbollah's remote explosion of pagers is the countermove by which Israel seeks to alter this dynamic because it sees the use of a mixture of intelligence and high technology to exert deterrence against individual enemy combatants in order to weaken the paramilitary organization from within. To personally strike thousands of Hezbollah militiamen in the space of a few hours is to have pulled off the most extensive counterterrorism operation known to date. The purpose of which is not the traditional military defeat of the adversary but its internal implosion, spreading panic and uncertainty.
Especially since for Hezbollah, secrecy about the identity of military personnel and commanders has always been one of its greatest strengths. If, therefore, Hezbollah and Hamas have weakened Israel's deterrence since 2006 by demonstrating that a traditional state is in trouble defending itself with the conventional army from the siege of terrorist groups, now the Jewish state is responding by leveraging a mixture of hi-tech and intelligence to generate a new kind of deterrence: whose targets are no longer states but enemy individuals, and the goal is not to push armies to stop but to convince individuals that they are so vulnerable that they are being pushed to stop fighting.
It is certainly too early to say whether such hi-tech deterrence-many aspects of which remain unknown-will have any effect on Hezbollah and Hamas, but what Yoav Gallant, Israel's defense minister, says about the beginning of a "new phase of the conflict" tells us that the Middle East battlefield is becoming the laboratory for hybrid methods of meeting the terrorist challenge.Just as the cooperation between the United States, Britain, France and Sunni countries to contribute to Israel's anti-aircraft defense during the Iranian attack with hundreds of missiles and drones on the night of April 13-14 attested to the possibility of Western high technology to protect the skies of a single country.
That is why, as was the case during the Cold War, the Middle East proves again to be the laboratory of unprecedented methods of defense against dangers: hybrid deterrence - hi-tech and intelligence - against terrorist organizations, multilateral air shield to stop a rain of drones and missiles. For the European Union, which now has, for the first time, a Defense commissioner, these are important strategic insights into what is happening in the Mediterranean chessboard.
