Routledge Handbook on Israeli Security

Stuart A. Cohen, Aharon Klieman, Stuart A. Cohen, Aharon Klieman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138217300
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351676373
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Routledge Handbook on Israeli Security provides an authoritative survey of both the historical roots of Israel's national security concerns and their principal contemporary expressions. Following an introduction setting out its central themes, the Handbook comprises 27 independent chapters, all written by experts in their fields, several of whom possess first-hand diplomatic and/or military experience at senior levels. An especially noteworthy feature of this volume is the space allotted to analyses of the impact of security challenges not just on Israel's diplomatic and military postures (nuclear as well as conventional) but also on its cultural life and societal behavior.

Specifically, it aims to fulfill three principal needs.

• The first is to illustrate the dynamic nature of Israel's security concerns and the ways in which they have evolved in response to changes in the country's diplomatic and geo-strategic environment, changes that have been further fueled by technological, economic and demographic transformations;
• Second, the book aims to examine how the evolving character of Israel's security challenges has generated multiple – and sometimes conflicting – interpretations of the very concept of "security", resulting in a series of dialogues both within Israeli society and between Israelis and their friends and allies abroad;
• Finally, it also discusses how areas of private and public life elsewhere considered inherently "civilian" and unrelated to security, such as artistic and cultural institutions, nevertheless do mirror the broader legal, economic and cultural consequences of this Israeli preoccupation with national security.

This comprehensive and up-to-date collection of studies provides an authoritative and interdisciplinary guide to both the dynamism of Israel's security dilemmas and to their multiple impacts on Israeli society. In addition to its insights and appeal for all people and countries forced to address the security issue in today's world, this Handbook is a valuable resource for upper-level undergraduates and researchers with an interest in the Middle East and Israeli politics, international relations and security studies.

Part I

The Israeli security prism

1
Free or fearful?

Zionism’s responses to Jewish insecurity

Uriel Abulof

“All things are mortal but the Jew,” remarked Mark Twain, “all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”¹ For many Jews this is a rhetorical question, evincing the everlasting bond between the one God and His Chosen People.² Still, the people might never have attained certainty in absolute faith, living since time immemorial with equally lingering doubt and deep insecurities. Consider Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. Explaining Jewish life on the brink of oblivion and the verge of modernization, Tevye, the rooftop Jewish fiddler, tells us that it was “Tradition” (emphasis in the original) that helped the Jewish people to “keep their balance” while living on the edge, facing constant dangers posed by their largely non-Jewish surroundings.³ He may well be right. Bereft of their ancient homeland and lacking sovereignty, Jews in the Diaspora had turned their religious faith and practice into a “portable homeland” (as Heinrich Heine denoted of the Torah). Religion was the mainstay of Jewish identity and a source of solace in the light of ever-present dangers. This traditional, ethno-religious existence has endured for millennia despite numerous perils. At the dawn of modernity, the secure identity served as an existential bolster in European ghettos, Moroccan mellahs and in Russia’s Pale of Settlement.

Tradition faced acute challenges, however. The modern winds of change – industrialization, urbanization, secularization and emancipation – threatened to throw Tevye’s fellow fiddlers off the rooftop. While some held fast for dear life, seeking security in staying closer to God, other Jewish fiddlers fell to the ground. The fallen fiddler found it much harder to “know who he is, and what God expects him to do.” With tradition undermined, that precious sense of Jewish security was shaken. Those who survived the fall started to use their frail feet, a task both exhilarating and exhausting, for it quickly became apparent that while in theory many new options opened up, in practice many doors remained shut. Moreover, and as many fallen fiddlers began to realize, the ground beneath their feet was far from secure, triggering fear and anxiety, which called for new, modern solutions.

This is the backdrop to the rise of Zionism. At this profound level, asking about Zionist responses to the Jewish insecurity misses the mark: Zionism itself was a response to Jewish insecurity. Indeed, for most Zionists, it was the response, the only viable one. The fallen fiddlers, Zionism argues, should walk to Zion to renew their sovereignty: only then – and there – will they find the coveted security, which will be still better then lodging on the rooftop. This time around, Jews will take matters into their own hands, and feet.

Still, as I propose below, while on important measures Zionism has been a remarkable success – ameliorating age-old Jewish insecurities – on others, it has been an abysmal failure. Zionism, which promised the ultimate solution to Jewish insecurity, turned out to be its late modern incarnation. Instead of assuring its citizens of their collective existence, Israel has added another dimension to Jewish fears and anxiety – dreading the possible demise of the Jewish State. Furthermore, for its opponents, Zionism not only failed to deliver a cure, but also turned out to be a poison, aggravating the insecurities of Jews and non-Jews alike – posing acute threats to both.

How has Zionism responded to the insecurity that it has bred? On a rather obvious plane, Zionists have labored hard to boost material security by building a strong army and economy. On a deeper, mental and moral plane – which is my main concern here – Zionism has submitted two responses. First, Zionists have tried to legitimate the Jewish state by endowing it with right and purpose in the eyes of Jews and non-Jews alike. However, mounting difficulties on the path to legitimacy have encouraged many Zionists to turn increasingly to another, bleaker response: delegitimization and fearmongering.

Thus, paradoxically, Zionists leaders have underscored the very Jewish insecurity that Zionism sought to resolve, even if it has objectively subsided. To draw again on the metaphor above, the first Zionist response urged the free fiddler to use his feet to walk towards the horizon – the meeting of the factual is and the moral ought. The second response, however, cultivated a fearful fiddler, who should run to take again shelter on the rooftop, near God, or fall further to a bottomless pit, believing that “no matter what, the whole world is against us” (often enough, the rooftop and the pit have gone together). Basking in the abyss to conceal the failure of pursing the horizon, I conclude, undermines Zionism and the prospects of the Jewish people. Still, it is not too late to change course.

The ever-dying people: identity and polity in peril

In 1948, the year the Jewish State was born, philosopher Simon Rawidowicz (1869–1957) succinctly captured Jewish insecurity in his treatise on the “ever-dying people”:

The world has many images of Israel, but Israel has only one image of itself: that of an expiring people, forever on the verge of ceasing to be … He who studies Jewish history will readily discover there was hardly a generation in the Diaspora period that did not consider itself the final link in Israel’s chain. Each always saw before it the abyss ready to swallow it up … Each generation grieved not only for itself but also for the great past that was going to disappear, as well as for the future of unborn generations who would never see the light of day.⁴

Importantly, for Rawidowicz, the Jewish fear for the future does not concern merely aspects of Jewish existence – the people’s demographics, their beliefs, economic well-being and so on – but also concerns the very existence of the people. Indeed, few peoples and states have faced more mortal dangers than the Jewish people, whose experience of such threats stretches from the biblical narrative of slavery in Egypt to the extermination camps of the Holocaust. In the newborn Jewish State, too, Jewish insecurity has abided. Israel is much smaller – geographically and demographically – and strategically more vulnerable than its current and potential rivals, many of whom not only refuse to recognize Israel’s existence but also explicitly call for its destruction.

Moreover, Rawidowicz effectively discerns two types of (in)security. One is explicit: fear for the people’s survival; another is implicit: confidence about the people’s identity. Every generation fearfully considered “itself the final link,” but was nonetheless sure of being such a “link in Israel’s chain.” The link to the past was robust, the future prospects bleak. Rawidowicz thus helps us distinguish between two key objects of existential, collective (in)security: identity and polity. We may feel unsure about who we are, about the collectivity we belong to (e.g., are we Libyans, is there even such a thing?). We may also sense that the physical–political survival of that collectivity is at stake (e.g., will Libya still exist, say, 20 years from now?).

In ethnonational politics, the identity/polity distinction resonates wide and deep. Collective identities involve a spatiotemporal sense of sameness, and ethnic identities engender this sense through the societal imaginary of an “extended family”: the individual identifies with historical “forefathers” and with contemporary “brethren.” Ethnic identity-security thus transpires through historical continuity and societal unity; its demise, through acute challenges to both. The past provides an ethnic identity with an anchor. Arguably, the deeper it is cast, the stronger the ethnic identification.

Facing the past, the community beholds its identity; facing the future, its polity. Some nations, the Jews included, consider their future physical–political existence perilous. Their “body politic” presents the community with a shattered prospect of their future, the awaiting “abyss without.” This physical–political abyss may be as deep as the total annihilation of the community, or so shallow as to suggest the peaceful replacement of one type of ethnonational polity with another (e.g., from ethnic sovereignty to consociational democracy). It is important to differentiate between these two depths and to track the intermediate possibilities. But it is equally crucial to understand that members of small nations often perceive a linkage between their physical–political existence and the latter’s various expressions.

How do people cope with such deep insecurities – about their identity, polity, or both? Mainstream (realist) security studies provide a partial answer. Reading security as the safety of the state vis-à-vis external threats, the way to boost security is plain: power. The more power you have, the safer you are. For the most part, this is “hard power,” that is, tangible assets, typically military and economic, which can bolster the state’s ability to defend itself against its enemies. Zionism has aptly applied such realist security measures. They matter far less, however, when it comes to identity insecurity and, as we shall see, may even fall short when it comes to insecurity about the survival of the people and their polity.

Can anything else be done about such fear?

Here again Rawidowicz comes to our aid. He tellingly titled his essay “The ever-dying people” to indicate the paradox of Jewish existence: this most fearful people is also one of the most abiding. Rawidowicz considered the two phenomena linked:

I am often tempted to think that this fear of cessation was fundamentally a kind of protective individual and collective emotion. Jewry has indulged so much in the fear of its end that its constant vision of the end helped it to overcome every crisis … as if its incessant preparation for the end made this very end absolutely impossible.⁵

But Rawidowicz’s suggestion that the Jewish people is effectively immortal (albeit fearful) was mostly retrospective. Could this paradox persist throughout modernity? Decades before Rawidowicz, historian Simon Dubnow (although sharing the former’s view of the past) was doubtful.⁶ Indeed, looking forward, Dubnow thought modernity presented unparalleled dangers. Liberating Jews, for the first time in millennia, to pursue alternatives modes of existence, individually and collectively, rocked modernity to the core their sense of self:

emancipation liberates the Jew from both his bondage and his Judaism at one and the same time. It seems as if the dreaded end of Israel has come; limb after limb is swept into the stream and swallowed up in the abyss of the Gentile world.⁷

What’s to be done? For Dubnow, the answer was clear: “‘Autonomism’ – existence that is self-determined and the striving for inner national freedom – this is the name of the law, this is the revealed secret of the survival of the people of Israel.”⁸ The key for Jewish survival, Dubnow argues, is not fear but freedom, but freedom (also) means you can opt out of the Jewish peoplehood.

Of course, adherence to Jewish identity need not mean subscribing to Zionism. Modernity undermined the ethno-religious Jewish security, thereby opening the gate to the rise of the ethno-national option, namely Zionism, but it also allowed other political alternatives. Indeed, as I try to visually illustrate below, within the “Jewish Ethnosphere” (Figure 1.1), Zionism’s ethno-national call was contested by ideas and movements both in Palestine (e.g., bi-nationalism, inclusive ethnic democracy) and in the Diaspora (e.g., Autonomism, Territorialism, equality). Some challenges have gone beyond, or below, ethno-politics, either rejecting Jewish ethnicity (e.g., Canaanism, Assimilation) or distancing Jewish ethnicity from modern politics (ultra-Orthodox). Today, as indicated by different sizes of the distinct polities, Zionism in Palestine and equality in the Diaspora are the main loci of modern Jewish ethno-politics.

Figure 1.1 The Jewish “Ethnosphere”

Copyright: Uriel Abulof.

In what follows, I examine Zionism’s double insecurities – about identity and polity – wavering between fear and freedom.

Identity insecurity: Jewishness and Israeli-ness in modernity

Secularization propelled many Jews to explore non-religious affiliations and, in politics, the modern displacement of sovereignty from God to “the people” undermined Judaism as legitimating communal politics.⁹ For many Jews, faith and religious law (Halacha) no longer sustained their quest for everlasting meaning. Identity insecurity mounted as Jews increasingly doubted whether ethno-religious existence was suitable for the new era. Could one remain Jewish while exercising the growing, new freedoms to eschew religious practice? Disagreement ran deep and long, threatening to split the people.

Much depended on the modern distinction between Judaism (Jewish religion) and Jewishness (Jewish ethnicity), which were effectively coextensive before modernity. While obviously connected, Judaism and Jewishness are not the same, especially on the moral plane. The viability of modern Jewish identity and peoplehood draws on the Jews’ willingness and ability to identify as part of an ethnic “extended family” without subscribing to its religious core – to remain within the Jewish ethnosphere without, for example, observing Shabbat.¹⁰

For a time, Jewish identity appeared to be on the brink of existential fission. In the US before the mass immigration from Eastern Europe, as well as in central and Western Europe, many Jews chose to demonstrate patriotism to the state that had granted them emancipation by shedding all ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part I The Israeli security prism
• Part II Debating security
• Part III Framing security policy
• Part IV Pursuing security
• Part V Augmenting security: costs and benefits
• Index