🇵🇸 🇮🇱 🇮🇷 Waiting for war in Haifa | Gidon Ben-Zvi

👤 Gidon Ben-Zvi contributes to The Algemeiner, The Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, CiF Watch and blogs at Jerusalem State of Mind.

🔶️ "Israelis sitting in front of their television screens can’t help but notice that the Home Front Command’s list of areas where red alert alarms are going off is increasing daily. And with Hezbollah’s theater of operations expanding, Israel is effectively shrinking. As a result, residents of Haifa—Israel’s third largest city, with a population of close to 300,000—believe that it’s only a matter of time before they are ordered to evacuate their homes."

🔶️ "Haifa is now next in line to be attacked by Hezbollah. It lives a life in limbo. We continue to work. Our children go to school. But the red alerts are multiplying. My cousin in the northern coastal city of Nahariya—about a 30-minute drive from Haifa—now regularly hears bombs overhead, forcing her and her family to run to their home’s safe room. My wife and her workplace colleagues in Acre—25 minutes by car from where we live—are constantly hearing sirens. Virtually every afternoon, my kids come home from school with updates about another classmate whose father has been called up for a second tour of reserve duty, this time in the north."

🔶️ "We have entered a period of threat and waiting. What the people of the north are experiencing today is not unlike the hamtanah the “Waiting Period” before the 1967 Six-Day War. During the three weeks of the hamtanah, Arab nations were poised to annihilate Israel. Jerusalem mobilized the IDF reserves. In this tension-filled time, Israeli morale plummeted, catalyzing a political crisis that led to the formation of Israel’s first unity government."

🔶️ "Based on Hezbollah’s modus operandi, anything short of a rapid reestablishment of the preemption doctrine could well lead to Israel having to abandon the Galilee and other parts of the north. At this rate, people will soon be talking about a Kfar Saba envelope in addition to the one around Gaza. It would be a damned shame to have to leave it all behind."

https://www.jns.org/waiting-for-war-in-haifa/