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Analysis ‘With Russian Presence in Syria, Israel Air Force Has to Be Very Precise’

Amos Harel — Fri, 21 Sep 2018 20:40:54 +0000

Brig. Gen. Uri Oron, head of the Israeli Air Force Intelligence, talks to Haaretz about the fast-changing situation in the north, the new reality in Syria and how Israel maintains its aerial superiority.

Israeli Army Spokesperson’s Unit

When Brig. General Uri Oron spoke with Haaretz earlier this week, nobody could have foretold events, though Syria and especially the Russian aerial presence there were central to the conversation with the Israel Air Force’s head of intelligence.

Asked when he started the job, Oron answered, “With Putin.” Which means the summer of 2015, shortly after which the Russian president sent two squadrons to Syria. Back then Syrian President Bashar Assad seemed headed for defeat, but the Russian jets would later sway the civil war in Syria in his regime’s favor.

The Russian return to the region, two and a half decades after they had been perhaps present in spirit but missing in action because of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, changed the rules of the game on Israel’s northern front. In contrast to some of the earlier forecasts, published here too, Russia did not severely constrain action by the IAF. They did, however, demand that Israel not imperil Russian planes in the area, or its people on the ground. Russia and Israel consolidated an agreement to minimize friction, under which Israel would provide early warning to the Russian air force about its attacks in Syria, and in general would avoid flying near, let alone bombing near, Russian interests.

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When Moscow felt that Israel was nearing its line in the sand, it protested publicly, for instance in March 2017, February 2018 and just now, when the Syrian aerial defense shot down a Russian Ilyushin plane without meaning to, following an Israeli air raid in northwest Syria.

“Russia’s aerial involvement in Syria decided the war in Assad’s favor, categorically,” Oron told Haaretz. “In the summer of 2015 everyone was sure that ISIS was about to roll over Damascus too. The Russians’ arrival in Syria was one of the strongest things to shape reality in the area in recent years, together with the superpowers’ nuclear agreement with Iran. Does the Russian presence constrain the IAF’s activity? It challenges us. We have to be very precise. [But] that doesn’t mean that the IAF only flies in Israeli skies.”

According to statistics the Israeli army provided on the eve of Rosh Hashana, the IAF has attacked Syria more than 200 times since the beginning of 2017. There were dozens of attacks during the preceding five years (during which the civil war went on). At first Israel’s moves focused on preventing advanced weapons, mainly guided ones, from being smuggled through Syria to Hezbollah.

In the last 18 months this effort has expanded: Now a significant part of it is invested in curbing Iran’s attempt to establish itself in Syria. The military outposts of the Revolutionary Guards have been attacked, as have weapons systems, and the bases of Shi’ite militias financed by Tehran. What the army calls “the battle between the wars” has become the key mission of the IAF, as the main executor of the policy in recent years.

“This is a struggle over hegemony,” says Oron. “Iran isn’t monolithic. It isn’t that the entire Iranian public supports it, or even the whole system. But they do aspire to establish military abilities to enable themselves to establish a sort of hegemony in Syria, not an attempt to make Syria Shi’ite. It is a huge challenge and we are trying to prevent this process. It isn’t our mission to ensure that no Iranian flags fly over any Syrian settlement.”

The IAF is an effective tool in this struggle, Oron explains, and it is the job of IAF intel to analyze and describe the fight: Bottlenecks, points of influence. “The first months were different,” he says. “For the first time, we met Iranian forces in Syria.”

The first incident happened on February 10, 2018, when the IAF downed an armed Iranian drone that had penetrated Israeli airspace, and then, in reaction, bombed the Syrian air base called T-4, by the city of Homs. Syria’s air defense in turn shot down an Israeli F-16 that had participated in the assault, over Israeli soil. The pilot and navigator ejected and were hurt.

Oron dismisses the notion that the drone had been a planned Iranian-Syrian ambush, explaining, “The battle is a complex one in a non-sterile environment. The reality has changed. He [the Assad regime] is trying to confront us face-to-face. The Iranians, too, are trying to give Syria aerial defense systems and drones. We cannot accept harm to our freedom of movement. I have been saying for two years now: Look what’s happening in Yemen. Houthi rebels are doing much the same: Receiving and using weapons that originate in Iran.”

Four different elements are operating on Israel’s northern front, Oron says: Russia, Iran, the Assad regime and Hezbollah, at varying levels of coordination and sometime with discrepancies in their interests.

ALAA AL-FAQIR/Reuters

“The dynamics are changing. I have to assume constant change and describe it in real time. What I saw in May I won’t see in December,” Oron says. And the major change in recent months is the regime regaining sovereignty over broader swaths of Syria. “In south Syria, the story is over,” Oron says. “The regime is back.”

Israel’s last major confrontation with Iran happened on May 10. The Revolutionary Guards shot missiles from Syrian territory at the Israeli side of the Golan border, in retaliation for attacks on Iranian fighters and Shi’ite militias beforehand. Most of the Iranian missiles landed in Syrian territory and four were intercepted by the Iron Dome system. Israel reacted with a massive attack on Iranian targets and Syrian anti-aircraft batteries.

Oron says that the map of Iranian presence in Syria constantly changes.

It isn’t that the Iranians are devoting less effort to their establishment, but on May 10 Israel demonstrated grit and ability, Oron says, and the neighborhood noticed. “But we never thought that this one action would lead to regional peace. Our situation is better than in May, but the attacks didn’t end Iran’s wish to establish itself in Syria.”

Iran has also been placing ground-to-ground missiles in Syria and recently in Iraq as well, and Israel is within their range. Oron confirms that Israel keeps a constant watch on Iran’s abilities, and Iraq has to stay in sight too. “A year ago we weren’t watching Iraq at all,” he says.

Israeli Army Spokesperson’s Unit

“The Iranians will try to bring more measures into Syria that could influence Israel from there. They understand the power of high-trajectory missiles,” he adds, referring not just to missiles but also to rockets. “We also see Iranian involvement in missile production sites in Syria and Lebanon.”

Much of the Israeli effort devoted to thwarting arms smuggling and damaging production sites targeted Hezbollah’s project to integrate navigation systems into its arsenal of rockets. Oron suspects the organization hasn’t reached the maximal level of accuracy: “They aren’t where they’d like to be.”

Kibbutz kid

Oron, 51, is the son of former Meretz chairman Haim Oron. He grew up on Kibbutz Lahav in the Negev. His younger brother is also in the IAF. This, Oron’s first interview, was given ahead of his retirement from active service in October.

Drafted in 1986, Oron was a combat pilot for years, among other things commanding an F-16 squadron during the Second Lebanon War, and commanding the air force base in Hatzor.

“I fully believe that the success of the air force depends on its ability to operate as a relevant, effective aerial power, which relies on accurate intelligence,” Oron says. “We have to bring intelligence that enables us to overcome the enemy, to understand the rival system at the closest level. We can do it. We brought intelligence that will enable resolution. There are not a few places where I say: It works. The purpose is to cause accurate damage without major collateral damage. You see around us, in recent years, various attitudes towards using aerial force. I don’t want to judge others. It isn’t only a matter of the IAF intelligence but also of army intelligence. We cooperate day by day, minute by minute. It wasn’t like that in the past.”

The pace of events and their consequences require the IAF intelligence to have a grasp of strategic significance as well, Oron explains. “These are complex systems,” he says, and the IAF can’t just be tapped to bomb things. “Our unique quality is, after all, the ability to translate this information into precise information to bomb targets.”

From his personal perspective too, the world is different now, he says. As a young pilot 25 years ago he was taught how to attack missile launchers based on intelligence that would pinpoint the location; the pilots would locate where the enemy was managing its fire, say a missile battery, and they’d take it out. “The final processing was in my head,” he says. “Today a critical component can be hidden inside a container or a house. I have to bring the pilot accurate intel. The good news is we’re managing to do it,” Oron says, thanks to a combination of visual and cyber information, and other sources.

Can the IAF maintain its aerial superiority? It can, says Oron.

“The number of antiaircraft missiles shot at us in Syria in the May attack – we hadn’t seen a thing like that since the Yom Kippur War,” he says. The IAF counted 170 of them. “But I think we are managing to maintain our freedom of action and aerial superiority, to take action when and where necessary. Our challenge is to develop combat systems that change at the same pace as the software system on your cellphone.” True, it will be harder and take more effort, he admits.

He keeps a copy of the reprinted list of targets the IAF gave its pilots at the start if the Six-Day War, which destroyed most of Egypt’s and Syria’s fighter jets on the ground. Noting that the intelligence available today is more detailed and accurate, espionage remains the same now as then – deciphering what the enemy is up to. “They worked on it for 11 years. They started the day after the [1956] Sinai campaign.”

In the summer four years ago, at the height of Operation Protective Edge, Meretz head MK Haim Oron talked with Haaretz. Both his sons and other family members were participating in the mission; his grandson Zamri, Uri’s nephew, who was in an elite military engineering unit, was badly wounded. “I reject and am outraged by the idea that left-wingers need to declare loyalty [to the state],” Haim Oron told Haaretz correspondent Gidi Weitz. “I absolutely refuse to allow anyone to put me in that position. I refuse to be a party to the horrific manipulation … [and] to hold up a ‘Let the IDF win’ banner.”

Tomer Applebaum

Once when he was addressing the Knesset plenum, Haim Oron said in the interview, and he spoke heatedly about the code of purity of arms, he got heckled, he thinks by Miri Regev (today the culture minister), who shouted that he was stabbing the soldiers in the back. “It’s insulting that I need some kind of character reference in the form of a fighting son or grandson,” he said.

Uri Oron says the family context is there in the background for him: “I can’t say it isn’t. When my family and people dear to me are attacked and sullied, it’s less gratifying. But the separation of powers with us is very clear. My father deals with it by himself, well. People who know what his boys do keep things in proportion. I never took it to rage and anger. I think it would make my father angry, to stand on the dais and be accused of treachery – I assume it’s not pleasant.”

Do they talk about values in warfare in the house? They do, says Oron, like in a lot of homes in Israel. “The dialogue at home was always very businesslike. Even when I had to explain, I explained the same things at home and to officers. I am talking about two aspects of values: decision-making processes and faith in commanders. When you trust both, you can take action.”

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UN agency fuels Palestinian attacks against Israel

David May - Fox News — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 23:46:52 +0000

Palestinians in Gaza said they planned to try to cross the border into Israel Tuesday for a new round of protests to mark the 51^st anniversary of the Six-Day War, when Israel was attacked by Arab armies and took control of Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula. Israel completed its withdrawal from Sinai in 1982 and returned the area to Egypt, and withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

The promised Palestinian action Tuesday follows seven weeks of protests backed by Hamas, the terrorist group that seized control of Gaza in 2007 from the Palestinian Authority.

Hamas and the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad have launched dozens of rockets, mortar shells and kites carrying firebombs over the Gaza security fence in recent weeks. Israeli troops have killed over 100 Palestinians and injured thousands who tried to breach the fence.

Two Hamas terrorists attempted to breach the border fence with an axe Monday and Israeli forces shot one dead. One Hamas mortar shell landed in the yard of an Israeli kindergarten last week, shortly before the preschoolers were set to arrive. The attacks on Israel from Gaza are part of Hamas’ relentless campaign to destroy the Jewish state.

But while Hamas poses the most immediate threat to Israeli security, promoting stability and peace also depends on dealing with organizations such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which professes good intentions yet creates the conditions in which Hamas can thrive.

The Trump administration has been sharply critical of UNRWA, the U.N.’s special refugee agency devoted to Palestinians, and chose to withhold $300 million of the annual U.S. contribution to the agency.

UNRWA must stop hiring terrorists, stop letting its facilities be used by terrorists, stop glorifying martyrdom, stop erasing Israel from maps, and stop encouraging Palestinians to hold onto a right of return that actually undermines a potential two-state solution.

After the extensive violence in Gaza in the past few weeks, some influential Europeans are also speaking out, including Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis of Switzerland, UNRWA’s eighth-largest donor.

“By supporting UNRWA, we are keeping the conflict alive,” Cassis said. “It provides ammunition to continue the conflict,” he explained, by fueling “unrealistic” hopes that all Palestinian refugees will someday live in what is now Israel.

The foreign minister has a point. In April and May, tens of thousands of Palestinians gathered in Gaza for the Great Return March, an intermittently violent attempt to overrun the border with Israel. While Hamas deserves most of the blame, we should not ignore the role played by UNRWA.

The marchers were not interested in a two-state solution or in preventing the U.S.’s embassy move to Jerusalem. What they want is to reclaim physically every square inch of Israel – not just lands Israel took in 1967 – that UNRWA has taught them is theirs.

On the final day of the march, organizers falsely claimed that Israeli soldiers were fleeing, even as they were reinforcing their positions, while Hamas officials lied about the border fence being breached.

Hamas led Palestinians to charge into a military zone, risking death and injury. UNRWA never literally encouraged Gazans to storm the border – as Hamas and march organizers did – yet its indoctrination motivated them to march to their deaths.

The Palestinian dream of a mass return to Israel is just that: a dream. Israel will never consent to an influx of millions of aggrieved Palestinians.

Nonetheless, UNRWA’s mandate directs it to worsen this tension by preserving the Palestinians’ refugee status, rather than resettling them in neighboring countries – the preferred approach of the U.N.’s primary refugee agency, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Furthermore, UNRWA treats Palestinians as refugees even if they are living in Palestinian-controlled lands. It also incentivizes them to live in UNRWA camps rather than becoming self-sufficient. Thus, refugee camps pepper the landscape in Gaza and the West Bank, the territories that would constitute a Palestinian state under any likely peace agreement.

Maintaining these refugee camps undermines the prospect of a two-state solution by offering Palestinians false hope that they will return to Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem, and encourages Palestinians to hold out for their maximalist demands. It also justifies Israeli fears that the Palestinians would not be content with a return to the 1967 borders that existed before the Six- Day War.

Further impairing prospects for peace, UNRWA extends refugee status to those who claim to be descendants of the original Palestinian refugees from 1948. From an initial refugee population of around 700,000, according to UNRWA, the current number of Palestinians receiving UNRWA aid has ballooned to 5.4 million.

In fact, Foreign Minister Cassis noted: “The word refugee in this case no longer corresponds to the meaning we attach to it.” Palestinian refugees in Jordan, which he visited, are “third-generation families” with Jordanian passports, living in cities called refugee camps.

Bringing all these Palestinians to Israel would make Jews a minority in the world’s only Jewish state. It would dramatically increase the prospect of future conflict reminiscent of the wars of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Rwanda.

Education, a major component of UNRWA’s aid program for Gaza, has become a means of encouraging Palestinian obduracy. UNRWA textbooks, schools, and teachers entrench maximalist Palestinian demands, including the right of return to land that has been part of Israel since the Jewish state gained independence from Britain in 1948.

IMPACT-Se, an organization that monitors and evaluates school textbooks across the Middle East, produced a damning report on the Palestinian Authority textbooks used by UNRWA in Gaza. Last year’s report found that the Palestinian Authority curriculum promotes a Palestinian right of return, martyrdom, violence, demonization of Israel and religious bigotry.

Anti-Israel and anti-Jewish indoctrination of Palestinian children begins very early in both UNRWA and non-UNRWA schools. As Fox News reported this week: “A shocking video recently surfaced that allegedly shows a play at a preschool in the Gaza Strip where children dressed up as commandoes and performed a mock hostage-taking and execution of an Israeli soldier.”

The Fox News story links to the chilling video, which is clearly designed to produce a new generation of Palestinian terrorists.

UNRWA has a lot of work to do in order to justify the restoration of U.S. funding, which amounted to approximately a quarter of the agency’s budget.

Until then, UNRWA will be aiding and abetting the Palestinians’ march towards national disaster.

David May is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/06/05/un-agency-fuels-palestinian-attacks-against-israel.html

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Israel squares off for showdown with Iran in Syria

Farah Najjar — Mon, 12 Feb 2018 17:36:41 +0000

Israel has viewed Iran’s growing footprint in neighbouring Syria with alarm [File: Omar Sanadiki/Reuters]

A surge in Israeli-Syrian cross-border incidents has turned into the “biggest” confrontation between the two countries in decades, and confronted Russia with a new dilemma: how to preserve its ties with both sides.

The tit-for-tat attacks, which started on Saturday and continued until the following day, have been accompanied by a war of words, with Benjamin Netanyahu warning that Israel would continue to strike against any aggression.

“We dealt severe blows to the Iranian and Syrian forces,” Netanyahu said, referring to Iranian bases present inside Syria.

The toughest Israeli aerial assault on Syrian and Iranian bases was reportedly in response to Syrian forces shooting down an Israeli fighter jet on Saturday, and claims that an Iranian drone entered Israeli airspace.

The attacks, which killed at least six Syrian troops and allied militia members, targeted areas near the Syrian capital Damascus, with Israel warning about increased Iranian involvement along its borders with Syria and Lebanon.

A statement by the pro-government military alliance in Syria had said that the drones were being used against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group fighters.

But Israel’s chief military spokesperson said Israel held Iran directly accountable for the incident.

On Saturday, Netanyahu told Russian President Vladimir Putin by phone of Israel’s intention to counter Iran’s actions, while Putin urged the Israeli leader to avoid any steps that could escalate tension.

Russia, a strategic ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has maintained close relations with Netanyahu, who has been blaming Iranian paramilitary units in Syria of breaching its sovereignty by carrying out over-the-border attacks over the last six years.

The frequency of the Israeli raids has intensified since 2012, when Iranian paramilitary fighters entered Syria following the start of the Syrian civil war. Israel has never publicly admitted to such attacks, which vary from rocket fires to air raids.

Experts believe that the latest development had forced Israel into admitting that it had launched attacks due to the shooting down of its F-16 fighter jet – the first time Israel lost an aircraft to enemy fire.

“This was a major loss and defeat for Israel and I don’t think that this is something the [Israeli] regime could cover up,” Mohammad Marandi, an academic at the University of Tehran, told Al Jazeera.

“The Israelis are using Iran as a scapegoat … to be able to carry out attacks on regional countries and justify the continued subjugation of the Palestinian people.”

Iran‘s presence in Syria has officially been aimed at combating ISIL, al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Marandi says Israel is supporting these groups on its borders.

‘Weakening its neighbours’

Both Israel and Syria are constantly at brink of war ever since Israel occupied a part of the strategic Golan Heights that it seized and later annexed following the 1967 Six Day War.

The move played a role in Israel’s decision to refrain from getting involved in the Syrian conflict.

Its occasional attacks against Syrian targets have been to stop what it describes as the delivery of advanced weaponry to the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, whose fighters are present in southern Lebanon.

Marandi says the issue is not Iran and its influence. Rather, it is Israel’s attempt at weakening the Syrian
government, which along with Iran, is attempting to push out al-Qaeda from the country.

In 2016, former Mossad director Efraim Halevy revealed to Al Jazeera that Israel maintained “tactical” relations with al-Nusra Front – al-Qaeda’s former affiliate in Syria.

“It’s always useful […] to deal with your enemies in a humane way,” Halevy said, revealing that Israel used to treat wounded fighters from al-Nusra Front.

He also said that he would not support the treatment of wounded Hezbollah fighters because Hezbollah had targeted Israel.

When asked if a war between Hezbollah and Israel is now imminent, Marandi said that it would not be in Israel’s favour.

However, others believe that Russia – an ally of Syria, Iran, and Israel – is the only party that can limit the possibility of an upcoming regional war.

Following the latest attacks, Israel protested against Iran’s presence and growing power in Syria.

“At the beginning, Israel and the US did not object to its [Iran] presence in Syria because back then, the opposition had the upper hand and the Syrian regime was on brink of defeat,” Omar Kouch, a Syrian political analyst, told Al Jazeera.

“Up until 2016, when Russia intervened, the balance of power shifted in favour of the Syrian regime,” Kouch explained.

“Israel did not want the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government. Its issue is not with the regime; its issue is with Iran, which threatens its security,” he said.

“This is why several Israeli attacks in 2016, 2017, and today in 2018, were carried out.”

According to Kouch, Iran knew that attacks such as these would occurr.

“Iran and Syria were prepared and several rockets of various kinds were fired,” he said.

On Saturday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said that his country was ready to defend the region and warned that “increasing terrorism … bombing neighbouring countries” will not achieve Israel’s objectives.

But a full-frontal war is unlikely at this time, Kouch believes, as Russia is trying to maintain its alliance with Iran and Israel simultaneously.

“These two equations [Iran’s influence in the region and Israel’s security concerns] are very difficult to balance – both projects are colonialist projects that are hugely conflicted,” he said.

“And the presence of the many players make such frictions inevitable.”

Last month, Netanyahu met Putin in Moscow to discuss Israeli concerns over Iran’s presence in Syria.

“I will discuss with President Putin Iran’s relentless efforts to establish a military presence in Syria, which we strongly oppose and are also taking action against,” Netanyahu had said.

Ofer Zalzberg, an Israeli analyst with the International Crisis Group, said that Israel will inspect the drone from Saturday’s incident and will try to “demonstrate that it was indeed Iranian, in spite of Tehran’s denials”.

Zalzberg also agreed that Russia’s alliance with both parties could thwart a potential escalation and perhaps meet each parties’ demands.

“If anyone can broker a reality in which Israel succeeds in its endeavor to stop Iranian bases from being permanently set up in Syria, and Iran succeeds in keeping Damascus a cooperative partner – it is Russia,” he said.

The ongoing border violence is unlikely to stop, experts Al Jazeera spoke to predicted, a face that places civilian lives continuously at risk.

“Ultimately, the only losers here are the Syrian people and the Syrian revolution,” said Kouch.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA NEWS

Source: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/02/israel-squares-showdown-iran-syria-180212121132930.html

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