[Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is from Michael Totten’s just-released book The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel. The excerpt is from chapter eight and picks up with Totten’s description of the 2006 July War between Israel and Hezbollah.]
As we approached the city of Kiryat Shmona, I braced for hell. It seemed to be Hezbollah’s target of choice. It was so close to the border–less than two miles away–that there was no time to warn civilians to head to the bomb shelters when incoming rockets were detected on radar. They often exploded at the same instant the air-raid sirens turned on, and sometimes even before. Storms of incoming rockets moved through the north like malevolent weather….
Noah [Pollak] and I heard air-raid sirens wailing even out in the countryside as we closed in on the city. Israeli civil defense instructed everyone to pull over and get out of and away from their cars when they heard the sirens. A nearby explosion could startle drivers and cause them to crash. That wasn’t all. Katyusha shrapnel punctured vehicles as though they were made of paper, and direct hits to gas tanks instantly turned cars and trucks into fireballs.
When we finally reached the city, it looked surprisingly okay from the main road. Although we drove fast through the streets and the non-functioning traffic signals, I saw no fires, no smoke, and no serious damage. It was a good day to drive through.
I unfolded our map and looked for the turnoff to Kibbutz Misgav Am. Military historian Michael Oren, author of Six Days of War and spokesman for the IDF Northern Command, waited for us there. It wasn’t clear which road we should take, so after we passed Kiryat Shmona, we pulled off to the side of the road and asked directions from two officers in an idle police car.
I stepped out into the road and nearly jumped out of my skin as I heard and felt a loud BOOM from just on the other side of a nearby hill.
“Outgoing,” Noah said to put me at ease. I laughed and said “Of course,” although to me at the time there was no such thing as of course. Noah had visited the border just a few days before and was much more comfortable in that environment. I hadn’t yet learned to distinguish the sounds of incoming and outgoing.
The officers told us how to get to Kibbutz Misgav Am, which was near a military base on the border. They didn’t ask us who we were, what we were doing, or why on earth we wanted to go there. War creates a crazily “libertarian” environment where, as was said in the time of the Roman Empire, the law falls silent.
Once we knew where we were going, Noah and I drove through an increasingly dodgy-looking environment where tents, tanks, and heavy artillery pieces were set up in fields burned away by incoming fire.
We turned left past Kiryat Shmona and drove up the steep hill toward the base. Thick smoke boiled off the top of a ridge. Israel was on fire. I did not want to be there…
What Israelis call the Second Lebanon War, and what Lebanese call the July War, created hundreds of thousands of refugees on each side of the border. That’s where proportion ended. Israel had a real army and a real air force and was able to inflict severe damage on its enemies. Hezbollah, meanwhile, was only strong enough to inflict light damage and a relatively small number of casualties.
The so-called Party of God could sabotage Lebanon and terrorize Israel, but Hassan Nasrallah’s “martyrs” could not repel or even slow an invading army. They could only harass that army and kill a minuscule percentage of its soldiers…
What happened in Israel and Lebanon in July and August of 2006 was a radical break from the past. Arab armies couldn’t invade Israel without being quickly repelled or demolished. Even terrifying waves of suicide bombers could be beaten back with separation barriers and human intelligence. But Hezbollah was able to fire barrages of rockets throughout the conflict all the way up to the cease-fire.
The IDF defeated three armies in six days in 1967 but couldn’t even slow the rocket war down in a month. Israeli intelligence agents at the Ministry of Defense told me they feared missile war was replacing terrorist war. It seems they were right.
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