Did Israel strike back at Iraq in the Gulf War?

No. Between 18 January and 25 February 1991, Iraq fired 39 Scud ballistic missiles at Israeli cities, mostly at Tel Aviv and Haifa, while Israel was not a participant in the Gulf War, had not attacked Iraq, and was not part of the coalition fighting it. Israel did not fire back once. For six weeks Israeli families slept in sealed rooms wearing gas masks, because Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons on Iranian troops and on the Kurds of Halabja three years earlier and was widely expected to use them again. Around 74 Israelis died as a result of the attacks, most from heart attacks and from suffocation caused by incorrectly fitted gas masks, and roughly 4,000 buildings were damaged. The state whose founding doctrine is that Jews defend themselves absorbed thirty-nine missiles on its cities and held its fire, at the request of Washington, so that the Arab members of the coalition against Saddam would not walk out.

Why Iraq fired at a country it was not fighting

Saddam Hussein’s purpose was explicitly political, not military. The coalition assembled to expel Iraq from Kuwait in 1990 included Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Saddam calculated that if he could provoke an Israeli military response, those Arab governments would find it politically impossible to remain in a coalition fighting alongside Israel, and the alliance would fracture. The Scuds were not aimed at Israeli military targets in any meaningful sense; they were inaccurate weapons fired at population centres to bait a reply.

This is the fact that should be quoted whenever Israel is described as reflexively aggressive: an Arab state fired ballistic missiles at Israeli civilians for the express purpose of drawing Israel into a war it had no part in, and Israel understood the trap and refused it.

The pressure, and what it cost

The American request was extraordinary in what it asked of a sovereign state. President George H. W. Bush and his administration pressed Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to hold back, and backed the request with the deployment of US Patriot missile batteries to Israel, the first American combat units ever stationed there. The Israeli Air Force had prepared strike options against western Iraq’s launch sites and did not fly them. Israeli commanders and much of the public regarded the decision as a humiliation, and it was argued over inside the cabinet for the entire duration of the war.

It also cost Israel something durable. A state’s deterrence rests on the certainty that attacking it is expensive, and the winter of 1991 taught every hostile actor in the region that Israeli retaliation could, under sufficient American pressure, be switched off. That lesson was studied closely by the people who later built rocket arsenals in Gaza and Lebanon.

The objection: restraint bought by a superpower is not virtue

The strongest argument against reading 1991 as evidence of Israeli restraint is that Israel did not choose peace, it obeyed its patron: Washington asked, Washington paid in Patriot batteries and aid, and a client state complied. That version has a surface logic and it collapses on the record. Israel had, and used, every means of resisting American pressure it wanted to on other files in exactly this period, from settlement construction to the loan-guarantee fight of 1991 to 1992, which Shamir pursued to the point of open confrontation with Bush and Secretary of State James Baker. When Israel judged an American demand wrong, it said so and paid the price. In January 1991 the government judged that keeping the coalition against Saddam intact served Israel and the region more than a strike on empty desert launch sites would, and it accepted the cost of being seen not to answer. That is a decision, not obedience, and it is the same calculation Israel refused to make in 1981 when it destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor over unanimous international objection, an act that removed Saddam’s nuclear option years before he fired anything at Tel Aviv.

What the episode actually proves

Two things, and they are worth stating plainly because neither survives in the popular account of Israeli behaviour.

First, Israel is capable of absorbing sustained attacks on its cities without retaliating, when it judges that restraint serves a larger purpose. It did so for six weeks under ballistic missile fire, with its population in gas masks.

Second, restraint bought nothing. Nobody credits 1991 to Israel today. It appears in no argument about Israeli proportionality, in no discussion of whether Israel exercises the force available to it. The country that took thirty-nine missiles without answering is still described as the region’s aggressor by people who have never heard that it happened, which is the most reliable indicator available that the charge was never a response to Israeli conduct in the first place.

Related pages

Who attacked first in the Israel-Iran war? · Who attacked first in the Yom Kippur War? · Israel and the United Nations · The double standard · Iran and its proxies

Sources

• US Department of Defense, Conduct of the Persian Gulf War: Final Report to Congress (April 1992), on the Scud campaign and the coalition response.
• Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, contemporaneous statements and casualty records for the 1991 Scud attacks.
• Contemporary reporting, January to February 1991, on the Patriot deployments and the Israeli decision not to retaliate.
• Human Rights Watch, Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds (1993), on the chemical weapons record that made the gas-mask fear reasonable.