Israel, Strategic Culture and the Conflict with Hamas

Adaptation and Military Effectiveness

Niccolò Petrelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367787172
• eBook ISBN: 9781351709316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the impact of 'strategic culture' on Israeli military operations against Hamas between 1987 and 2014.

It has often been argued that Israeli policies and military operations against Hamas have proven tactically effective, but strategically disastrous, allowing the Islamic Resistance Movement to grow from a small spin-off of the Muslim Brotherhood into a powerful military and political actor in the Palestinian arena. This book argues, contrary to this opinion, that Israel was effective in its struggle against the Islamic Resistance Movement between 1987 and 2014, as the Jewish state ultimately managed to deny the majority of Hamas ' strategic aims and to preserve a position of relative strength. By relying on a synthesis of primary sources, interviews, memoirs, scholarly and professional military studies and information gathered from the media, the study delivers a careful and comprehensive analysis of the conflict. It provides an historical outline of the development of the Israeli 'strategic culture' and analyzes its impact on the process of military adaptation during the First Intifada, the Oslo Peace Process, the al-Aqsa Intifada and the Gaza wars. Finally, the book illuminates how the Israeli strategic culture moulded a distinctive 'way of war' that, though marked by successes and failures, ultimately proved effective against Hamas.

This book will be of much interest to students of strategic studies, Middle Eastern politics, counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism and security studies in general.

1 Introduction

Do socially-persisting beliefs and habits concerning security and military affairs influence the ability to adapt during conflict? Do they contribute to the emergence of distinctive “ways of war”? How do they, in turn, affect military effectiveness?

This book attempts to answer to these questions by studying the conflict between Israel and Hamas from the 1987 intifada to the last Gaza war in 2014. It provides an account of the historical development of the Israeli “strategic culture,” it analyzes how strategic culture impacted on the process of military adaptation in the period between 1987 and 2014, shaping a distinctive Israeli “way of war” and, finally, it assesses the effectiveness of the Jewish state in countering the threat posed by the Islamic Resistance Movement.

“Military effectiveness” is a generic term of reference for any aggregate measure of how well a military organization applies fighting power with the resources available at a given point in time.¹ It is generally considered the output of a successful process of adaptation to the tactical, operational, and strategic challenges that conflict presents, being inextricably linked to the ability to properly understand and rapidly overcome them.² A fully effective military is one that is able to modify organizational structures, improve equipment, amend techniques, tactical and operational configurations, not to mention review consolidated strategic beliefs, in order to become more proficient in the application of fighting power.³ Military effectiveness can be generated in many ways. In fact, governments, military and intelligence organizations hardly have the ability to adapt at all levels of war simultaneously and increased attempts to enhance adaptation at one level may entail diminishing it at others. In turn, patterns of military adaptation are significantly influenced by a country’s core set of beliefs about security and the use of force.

Military adaptation and effectiveness matters much in the current strategic environment. As many studies have shown, the concept of “victory,” as traditionally understood, appears increasingly inadequate as a criterion for assessing the performance of military organizations in combat, making room for more contextual and process-oriented concepts such as adaptation and military effectiveness.⁴

Analytical puzzles and gaps of knowledge

In the last years, the topic of Israeli military operations against Hamas has received increasing attention in scholarly and professional military literature although, in comparison with research on other aspects of Israeli military affairs, it still remains under-researched. The prevailing conclusion drawn by the scholarly literature has been that, in aggregate terms, Israel was not militarily effective, allowing the Islamic Resistance Movement to grow from a small spinoff of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza into a large and powerful paramilitary organization and political actor in the Palestinian arena. More specifically, according to this view, Israel displayed considerable ability to adapt to tactical challenges, while decreasing effectiveness has characterized the Israeli operational and strategic performances. This account is problematic from several points of view.

First of all, it does not result from a comprehensive in-depth study of the conflict between Israel and Hamas from its inception and for this reason remains, to a certain extent, impressionistic. In-depth analyses have been conducted only on the Gaza wars after the Israeli disengagement. Conversely, analyses of the Israeli military operations between 1987 and 2005 had a far more general focus, were not specifically centered on Hamas and, for the most part, aimed at discussing Israeli counterinsurgency during the two Palestinian uprisings (1987 and 2000) or at examining Israeli counter-terrorism against the background of the Oslo peace accords. The literature on the 1987 intifada has almost completely neglected Hamas; very little is known about Israeli military operations against the Islamic Resistance Movement and their military effectiveness. Similar gaps remain with regard to the years of the Oslo peace process; these concern, in particular, the Israeli strategic re-conceptualization of the threat posed by Palestinian radical Islamic organizations and its impact on the conduct of counterterrorism operations. The al-Aqsa Intifada has received considerable attention by scholars and analysts but, again, analysis of the Israeli strategy and military effectiveness vis-à-vis Hamas has remained in the background.

Second, the prevailing interpretation results from analyses that are either unbalanced or insufficiently related to the context. The study of Israeli military operations in the period under scrutiny has, for the most part, borne a distinctly tactical focus while devoting much less attention to the operational and strategic dimensions of the conflict. Moreover, it has not been based on explicitly outlined and adequately contextual evaluative criteria. Between 1987 and 2014 Israel faced four different forms of threats from Hamas: a prevalently non-violent insurgency; a low-intensity terrorist campaign, a full-blown terrorism-driven insurgency and a form of interstate low-intensity conflict. Two kinds of asymmetries have therefore characterized the conflict.⁵ The first concerns the very nature of the actors: a confrontation between a state and a non-state opponent necessarily presupposes an asymmetry in the legal and political status of the belligerents. The second is related to warfare, tactics and methods of operations: so-called “conventional” operations by regular armed forces were confronted through “unconventional” methods by people in arms (but not always in uniform).⁶ The evaluative criteria adopted in scholarly studies have not always been sufficiently clear and broad to encompass both of them.

Third, the literature has not explained why the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), though structurally and technologically analogous to many western armies, as well as the expression of a society under many respects culturally akin to the West, has in the conduct of military operations against the Islamic Resistance Movement persistently neglected features commonly considered of paramount importance in “war among the people,” such as, for instance, the need to influence the relevant civilian populations through a combination of coercive and persuasive tools.⁷

Much remains therefore to be scrutinized: To what extent was Israel able to adapt at the operational and strategic level? Why did it neglect the non-military aspects of the conflict, failing to integrate military operations within a broader overarching framework encompassing diplomatic, informational and economic tools of state power? Finally, to what extent was Israel effective in aggregate terms in fighting Hamas?

Conceptual framework

In his major study of military innovation, Stephen Peter Rosen demonstrated that military organizations, rather than their civilian leaders, play a key role in choosing how they should organize for and conduct war.⁸ Rosen’s findings have been confirmed by successive scholarly works, which also demonstrated that the influence of military organizations over national military strategy is even likely to increase in wartime, due to their monopoly on expertise.⁹ This seems to suggest that, when analyzing issues such as military adaptation, an analytical focus on the organizational culture of the armed forces is most appropriate.

Such an approach, however, is hardly applicable to the present study for two reasons. First, military expertise in Israel is expropriated from the narrow professional domain of practitioners because the IDF is predominantly a conscripts’ army, and retains permeable boundaries with civil society.¹⁰ Second, due to the Yishuv’s (the Jewish community in the Palestine mandate) peculiar pattern of political development, Israeli culture was shaped much more by political behavior than by social customs.¹¹ These two factors suggest that focusing analysis solely on the organizational culture of the armed forces could lead to overlook key variables, as the sources of Israeli beliefs on security and the use of force are to be found in Israeli society at large, rather than exclusively in the armed forces. For this reason, this research adopts the broader analytical framework of strategic culture to examine the Israeli strategy, operations and tactics between 1987 and 2014.¹²

“Cultural” approaches to strategic studies have existed in various forms for hundreds of years. The argument that culture, broadly conceived to include shared beliefs and social institutions, influences in many respects military activity and war is grounded in classic theoretical and historical works, including the writings of Thucydides, Sun Tzu and von Clausewitz.¹³ On the other hand, the existence of “ways of war,” that is of specific modalities of waging warfare peculiar to nationally or culturally distinct communities was present already in classic writings on strategy. The theme was resumed in modern times, among others, by Jacques Antoine Hyppolite de Guibert in his Essai Général de Tactique.¹⁴ Formally, however, it was in the 1932 that the concept of national “ways of war” was articulated by Basil H. Liddell Hart.¹⁵

Although in the following years the historical literature came to pay increasing attention to the influence of cultural factors on foreign relations and military activity within national communities,¹⁶ after Liddell Hart scholarly attention on national ways of war temporarily declined, resurfacing only in 1973 i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Israeli strategic culture
• 3 Unforeseen threats: the Intifada, 1987–1992
• 4 The revolution that never was: counter-terrorism in the Oslo years, 1993–1999
• 5 Erase and rewind: the al-Aqsa Intifada, 2000–2005
• 6 The never-ending war: Gaza 2007–2014
• 7 Conclusions: culture, adaptation and military effectiveness
• Index