A wise retaliatory strike against Iran - Opinion

• Published date: 17 April 2024
• Author: MARK LAVIE/THE MEDIA LINE
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

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Will Israel send its air force out to flatten as many military and civilian targets as it can, as some members of Israel's War Cabinet favor, or will the response be carefully thought out to achieve the maximum results in the short and longer terms?

In other words, to clean up a well-known saying, will Israel follow its brains or its muscles?

The brains method means a reliance on cyberattacks, which could shut down Iran for weeks or months.

The muscles approach would bring some satisfaction and some chest-thumping, but it would miss other possible positive outcomes:

* Involving the coalition of the US, Britain, France, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia in an extended struggle against Iran

* Using the battle with Iran to leverage a solution to the war in Gaza

* Strengthening Israel's alliance not only with its veteran treaty partners, Egypt and Jordan, but also with its newer ones in the Abraham Accords and potentially Saudi Arabia

Israel is a recognized world power when it comes to cybersecurity. But unlike the national tendency to claim noisy credit for its accomplishments, its cyber achievements are kept under tight censorship wraps. That has become a strategic error, depriving Israel of obvious, public deterrent capabilities.

For now, though, those of us writing from Israel have to attribute what we know to "foreign reports." So please consider what you're reading here as such. I've been playing that "game" for decades.

Iran's cyber-warfare

The most widely publicized cyberattack on Iran attributed to Israel was Stuxnet, back in 2010. It was a "worm" that infected the computers that ran Iran's centrifuges, which enrich uranium to weapons-grade. The attack set back Iran's nuclear weapons production program for months, possibly years. Iran improved its cybersecurity as a result, but that didn't stop the attacks attributed to Israel.

In May 2020, a cyberattack stopped work in Iran's main port at Bandar Abbas, crashing the port's computers and causing huge traffic jams of trucks heading to the port on land and ships at sea waiting to unload.

As recently as last December, a cyberattack shut down almost all of Iran's gas stations, sowing such panic that after Iran's unprecedented missile barrage on Israel, Iranians were seen lining up at gas stations, apparently expecting another such attack.

There are many other incidents, most of which have not been reported anywhere. The conclusion is clear:

If Israel...