The divine victory of Hezbollah 2006 -

Abstract

The Arab-Israeli conflict has seen the use of different military strategies to address the struggle. Whereas Israel’s military strategy in much of the conflict was based on hard balancing of power, in the sense of constructing a classical army, the Arabs’ military strategy was subject to modification. In the early stage of the conflict, the military strategy of the Arabs was essentially a hard balancing strategy, soon to turn into an asymmetric balancing of power, with the rise of Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), HAMAS, and Hezbollah. The asymmetric balancing of power proved to be the most effective strategy in addressing the superiority of the Israeli army in military affairs. In this regard, Hezbollah was the most successful in the use of asymmetric balancing of power as a military strategy. The Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon after 18 years of occupation was the demonstration of the success of this military strategy; on the other hand, it was also the failure of the Israeli army in using hard balancing of power as a military strategy to destroy an asymmetric adversary. The basic reason behind Hezbollah’s success was the constant development of its military strategy, which takes into account the deep knowledge of the Israeli army and society. The July war of 2006 was the most recent round of conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. On July 12, 2006 Hezbollah launched “Operation Truthful Promise” to abduct Israeli soldiers, in order to exchange them for Lebanese prisoners. Israel’s response was a 34 day war. In this war, Israel’s military strategy was based again on hard balancing of power, but with a special focus on air power using Effects Based Operations (EBO) as a concept of operation, which calls for the use of physical and-or psychological effects to produce a cognitive perception of defeat in the side of the enemy. In fact, Israel viewed the new military strategy as an innovative way to address threats coming from an asymmetric