Israel, Silently Cleaning Up Threats

"Just before midnight on September 5, 2007, four F-15s and four F-16s took off from Israeli Air Force bases, including Ramat David, southeast of Haifa. After flying north along the Mediterranean Coast, the planes turned east and followed the Syrian-Turkish border, to avoid detection by radar. Using standard electronic scrambling tools, the Israelis blinded Syria’s air-defense system. In Tel Aviv, in a room of the underground I.A.F. command-and-control center known as “the pit,” Olmert, Barak, Livni, and senior security officials followed the planes by radar. The room would serve as a bunker for Olmert in the event that the strike sparked a war; the Israelis had also prepared a military contingency plan."

"General Shkedi tracked the pilots by audio in an adjacent room. Sometime between 12:40 and 12:53 A.M., the pilots uttered the computer-generated code word of the day, “Arizona,” indicating that seventeen tons of explosives had been dropped on their target. 'There was a sense of elation,” one participant recalled. “The reactor was destroyed and we did not lose a pilot'."

"The next day, the Syrian Arab News Agency announced that Israeli planes had entered Syrian airspace but had been repelled: 'Air-defense units confronted them and forced them to leave after they dropped some ammunition in deserted areas without causing any human or material damage'."
"The Israelis say that not a single Syrian air-defense missile was launched. At least ten, and perhaps as many as three dozen, workers were killed in the strike."
David Makovsky, The New Yorker

Target: North Korean missiles Photo Credit: Reuters/Channel 2 News

"This morning (Saturday March 19, 2017), Arab media outlets reported that Israel conducted yesterday’s airstrike in Syria in order to prevent North Korean missiles from reaching Hezbollah. As reported yesterday by JOL, an anti-aircraft missile was shot at Israel in response to the airstrike, which was intercepted by the IDF’s Arrow System."
"According to a report on the Arab news website Rai al-Youm, political groups and reliable Jordanian sources believe that there is a connection between recent Israeli military and intelligence operations along Israel’s borders with Syria and Lebanon and between leaked information claiming that Hezbollah has obtained extremely technologically advanced missiles from North Korea."
Jerusalemonline.com

Following last night events between the IDF and Syria, Syria continues to threaten Israel. Jerusalemonline.com

North Korea threatens, bellows its hatred of the United States, South Korea and Japan, triumphantly tests its ballistic missiles and nuclear devices, each time chortling how technologically advanced they have become, joyously pronouncing its intention to obliterate its enemies, continually startling its neighbours by faster,  higher flights of missiles over Japanese territories and occasionally attacking its neighbour South Korea at sea. The North has succeeded in even making its sponsor, China, extremely nervous about the intentions of Kim Jong-Un.

Yet apart from returning rhetoric and constant urging of restraint -- not of the declarations and showmanship of North Korea and its tyrannical little leader -- but of the world power that glowers menacingly at the very suggestion that Kim's intentions to attack the American Pacific coast, or its Guam protectorate -- nothing has worked to persuade Kim to cease and desist. No attacks of any kind have been launched pre-emptively against North Korea by threatened South Korea, Japan or the United States. But another country entirely has taken to the skies to launch attacks that concern North Korea's export of weapons and technology.

North Korea is regarded as a world-class outlier, a rogue nation led by a sinister little murderer who regards himself as entitled to be recognized as a world power. For a small country with a meagre GDP highly dependent on a neighbour to provide its energy needs and disposable income, it rankles at its international stature, deprived of the acknowledgement of its true status, that of a powerful nation capable of disrupting the equilibrium of pretenders-to-power like Japan and the U.S.

North Korea has no love of Israel. It has trained and armed the PLO, Hamas and Hezbollah and its specialized tunnel technology is held in high esteem by Iran to protect its secretive nuclear facilities against any conceivable attacks. The sophisticated tunnels constructed by Hamas in particular owe much to North Korean expertise enabling the terrorist group operatives to clamber into Israel undetected at times. North Korea and Iranian nuclear scientists have a vital bond; the former entertaining the latter during bomb tests.

Shipments from North Korea of high-tech munitions and missile technology along with conventional arms and chemical weaponry have been intercepted by Israel en route from North Korea to Syria where they are often directed onward to stock Hezbollah's weapons caches. Two North Korean arms shipments for the Syrian agency for chemical weapons, according to a UN report that appeared on Reuters, were intercepted by unnamed governments.

North Korea views Israel as a tough enemy it would hugely appreciate being put out of commission entirely; not surprising it is in league with other dedicated enemies of the Jewish state resolved to destroy its presence. Thirteen years ago a Mossad agent entered North Korea on a purloined Canadian passport and soon afterward a huge explosion took place killing at least a dozen Syrian nuclear scientists when a North Korean freight train conveying nuclear material was destroyed.

Having his plans thwarted by a tiny nuisance state that his friends view with as much hostility as he does himself places Israel in a very special club of nations that North Korea's Kim would prefer to see destroyed for the hindrance they provide to his aspirations. During the Yom Kippur War in 1973 North Korea sent its fighter pilots in Soviet MiG fighters to scramble in dogfights over Egypt with the Israeli air force.

That at this juncture in the sanctions program weighting North Korea's censure by the United Nations Security Council its chief source of income, arms, are being interrupted is particularly irksome. As for Israel, that North Korea is arming Iran in particular, the country that paid for the Syrian nuclear reactor, and which has been benefiting from the North's missile and nuclear technology hasn't endeared Kim to Israel. The prospect of Kim selling ready-to-go nuclear bombs does not much please Israel.

Should the U.S. continue with its verbal belligerence while refraining from taking concrete steps to disarm North Korea, it will continue to ship arms to Syria, to Hezbollah, and potentially nuclear bombs to Iran to enable the Islamic Republic to make good on its threats to obliterate the 'Zionist entity'. Failing U.S. action to ensure world stability, how feasible is it for a tiny nation to once again engage in risky action to protect itself from an existential threat?