Israeli Statecraft

National Security Challenges and Responses

Yehezkel Dror

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781136706370
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

This book offers a systematic examination, analysis and evaluation of Israeli national security statecraft in terms of challenges and responses.

Providing an in-depth analysis of Israeli statecraft challenges and responses, this interdisciplinary book integrates social science and security studies with public policy approaches within a long-term historical perspective on the Arab-Israeli conflict. These scholarly approaches are synthesized with extensive personal knowledge of the author based on involvement in Israeli political-security policy making. This book makes use of conceptualizations of statecraft such as 'fuzzy gambling' and interventions with critical mass in ultra-dynamic historical processes to help clarify Israel's main statecraft successes and failures, alongside the wider theoretical apparatuses these concepts represent. While focused on Israel, these theoretical frameworks have important implications for the academic study of statecraft and statecraft praxis worldwide.

This book will be of much interest to both statecraft practitioners and to students of Israeli politics and security, the Middle Eastern conflict, strategic studies and IR/security studies in general.

1 Introduction

The term “statecraft” has many meanings, some complementary to one another and some quite different and even contradictory (Ping 2005: 13–22). In this book it is used in the sense of coherent, long-term, and broadband political-security paradigms, assessments, frames of appreciation, orientations, stances, and principles, dealing with issues of much importance to national security (Rothkopf 2006; Jordan et al. 2009), whether explicit or implicit in actual state behavior.

One could also use the terms “grand-strategy” or “high politics” (Doran 2008), which overlap with the concept of statecraft. The latter better fits the subject of this book, while the term “grand-strategy” is often used primarily in reference to military issues and is also applied to business and other non-national security domains. Furthermore, much of the “practical” literature on crafting grand-strategy is more misleading than helpful,¹ all the more so if applied to the level of statecraft.

There is no lack of books dealing with historical instances of statecraft, whether using that term or grand strategy (Creel 1970; Luttwak 1979, 2009; Parker 2000). Many books propose statecraft for various countries (Thatcher 2003; Ross 2008). However, there exist only fragments of a general theory of statecraft that can conceptualize and explain the variety of actual statecraft behaviors and serve as a basis for analyzing, evaluating, and improving statecraft.

Contemporary statecraft in most countries, including Israel, clearly illustrates the power of dead ideas (Miller 2009) and the tyranny of the status quo (Friedman and Friedman 1984). It is enough to examine contemporary statecraft in action, to apply Hew Strachan’s (2005) “The Lost Meaning of Strategy” to statecraft as a whole. His dictum that “the real danger for Western democracies is the failure to develop coherent strategy” (cited in Ricks 2007: 320) largely fits significant parts of statecraft realities, including that of Israel.

Many publications deal with the theory of strategy and can in part be applied to statecraft (Ayson 2004; Brooks 2008; Gray 1999; Luttwak 2002; Schelling 1981; Yarger 2008; Zarate and Sokolski 2009). Also relevant is some general literature on strategy crafting not focusing on security affairs (Cummings and Wilson 2003; Dewar 2002). Attempts to provide conceptual foundations for strategy (Foster 1992) provide elements for a statecraft theory. However, most of the literature suffers from serious weaknesses, including the following:

1. Uncertainty, which faces all statecraft, is inadequately and often wrongly handled. And the core nature of statecraft as “fuzzy gambling,” because of hard uncertainty, as explained later, often with high stakes, is ignored or mistreated despite being fully recognized by Machiavelli and known intuitively by perceptive statespersons, such as Julius Caesar, who said ālea iacta est (“The die has been cast”) upon crossing the Rubicon.

2. Statecraft attempts to impact on the future by intervening in historical processes; therefore, its quality depends on understanding such processes and on achieving a critical intervention mass that can change the direction of dynamics by having a momentum of its own. This is often ignored in theoretical treatments of statecraft and in its practice.

3. The critical importance of creativity in improving the quality of statecraft and the conditions that facilitate or hinder its availability are far from being adequately addressed.

4. Systematic approaches to upgrading statecraft elites, statecraft cultures, and statecraft institutions are underdeveloped. Thus, the development of statecraft professionals is a widely ignored subject.

Statecraft is often of profound importance in influencing the fate of nations. Therefore, efforts to develop statecraft theory are required. This book tries to make a contribution to meeting this need by taking up the case of the statecraft of Israel. This book can be read from four mutually reinforcing perspectives, as:

1. A monographic analysis and evaluation of Israeli statecraft with the help of statecraft-theoretical concepts and frames.

2. A case study contributing empirical and theoretical elements to inductively construct a general theory of statecraft.

3. An attempt to develop a proto-model of a complex statecraft issue, namely the Arab-Israeli conflict, using it to evaluate both actual statecraft and innovative statecraft options.

4. A prescriptive approach to crafting improved statecraft paradigms for Israel, as a reality test of theoretic insights and analysis, as a contribution to public policy theory, and as an illustration of the applied uses of statecraft theory.

This text has multiple groundings: the vast literature on Israeli statecraft; the empirical and theoretical literature from a range of social science disciplines, especially international relations and security studies, in combination with public policy studies, and including prescriptive methodologies (Dror 2008a); elements from the study of history, cognitive sciences, the philosophy of values, and the philosophy of action; and the personal knowledge of the author derived from anthropological participant observation (Rhodes et al. 2007) of statecraft elites, culture, formation, and implementation, mainly in Israel but also in a number of other countries.

Controlled experiments cannot be carried out on statecraft, simulations being of very questionable validity because of lack of similarity with reality. Historical material provides relevant material, but only a limited understanding of contemporary and future-directed statecraft. And, the realities of the hot corridors of power often escape historical records and studies from the outside. As strongly argued and demonstrated by Charles Hill (2010), some novels and drama can provide important understandings, but are not yet available on Israeli statecraft. Therefore, a kind of anthropological approach to studying statecraft is essential, preferably by persons with a theoretical background, enabling them to process facts in ways relevant to theory construction, as fully illustrated by Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War and, in a different context, by the classical diaries of Richard Crossman (1977). Such “local knowledge” is also very helpful in applying historical study methods, such as reenactment as proposed by Collingwood (Dray 1995: 32–66). If such persons also influence statecraft-in-the-making, this provides a kind of “experimentation,” adding to the importance of derived insights (Kissinger 1979, 1982, 1999).

In Israel there is very little movement of professionals between academia and statecraft elite, in contrast to US practices. The author is one of the few exceptions. Therefore, this book is in part based on personal observation which provides insights not otherwise available.

The book is not and cannot be “sterile.” No human being can take a “view from nowhere” (Nagel 1986). However, I try to be clinical in treating the subject, taking into account contested histories (Caplan 2009), or at least referring to them.

This book has a number of characteristics: It focuses on the core issue of Israeli statecraft – the Arab–Israeli conflict. It also mentions some other statecraft behavior that is of critical importance to Israel, such as influencing the US to close its doors to Jewish emigrants from the Soviet Union so as to bring about their immigration to Israel. But the Arab–Israeli conflict is the axle around which Israeli statecraft swivels and lies at the center of this book.

Economic statecraft, however important (Baldwin 1985; Drezner 1999; Hufbauer et al. 2009), is not taken up, nor are many aspects of diplomatic relations, technological assistance aid, and so on.

The book does not go into secondary policies and operational details, however interesting. Thus, while the statecraft dealing with the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and with peace negotiations, is considered closely, its specifics are not discussed. Rather, a broad canvas is presented in low resolution, so as to provide a comprehensive view with the “dots” combined into main patterns.

Subjects on which inadequate unclassified information is available are mentioned and discussed only as much as reliably possible, which often is very little, despite their importance. These include Israeli unconventional capabilities, intelligence, security research and development, military exports and imports, and diplomatic secret channels. Let me add that the majority of books published on these and similar subjects (e.g. A. Cohen 1999; Glenn et al. 2009; Cohen A. 2010) must be regarded with much skepticism.

The book does not discuss pre-state political-security policies of the state-in-the-making, however interesting. These will be referred to only if significant for later statecraft analysis. This is justified because establishment of the state constituted a sharp break from the proto-statecraft of the pre-state period. The famous episode of the disbanding of the Palmach, the main pre-state fighting force, by Ben-Gurion signifies the start of what can properly be called Israeli statecraft, with some often dysfunctional carryovers, such as in statecraft culture, which will be discussed.

Jewish Exile modalities of action toward the often hostile environments are not discussed. It is enough to mention the lack of significant hard power of Jewish communities before the establishment of the state to demonstrate the radical difference of Israeli statecraft from Exile endeavor.

The main text focuses on what is important for understanding Israeli contemporary statecraft, with an outlook to the future. Significant historical episodes are examined as background and explanation for continuing characteristics, without adding up to a history of Israeli statecraft. Therefore, it is assumed that readers know at least in outline the history of the Arab–Israeli conflict. Nonetheless, Chapter 6 takes a look at the main turning points in the history of Israeli statecraft.

Israeli statecraft, like that of other countries, is heterogeneous, full of contradictions and disagreements, the more important of which will be explored. But there is also a hard core of characteristics which are, in the main, widely shared by the statecraft elite. A few introductory comments on them will provide an initial frame for understanding Israeli statecraft challenges and responses as explored in the text.

Israeli statecraft is characterized by high ambitions, due to Zionist ideology, some Jewish fundamentalism, and past heroic successes. There is a tendency to believe that strongly held ideals can be realized despite the stubborn facts of reality. This is also the case in other countries, for instance the US, with policies such as “manifest destiny” and democratization (Hietala 2003; T. Wittes 2008; Pfaff 2010). However, in Israel, idealism and trust in its destiny are exceptionally pronounced and impact strongly on critical statecraft issues, such as settlement policies. But this is changing with ongoing learning of the limits imposed by reality.

Israeli statecraft suffers at the same time from “reality-fixation,” regarding some important features of reality as immutable, while in fact these are dynamic and also susceptible to influence by Israeli statecraft. This was and, in part, continues to be the case in respect to the Israeli perception of Arab attitudes toward Israel.

The underlying ideological nature of Israeli politics combined with a fragmented party system and a coalition regime embedded in partly volatile public opinion makes “linkage politics” (Rosenau 1969) of special and often paramount importance, with domestic politics often dominating important parts of statecraft. This applies to secondary issues, such as the release of dangerous terrorists in order to receive the bodies of killed Israeli soldiers. But it shapes critical statecraft issues, such as settlement and peace policies.

The need to stabilize Israel’s existence in the “Domain of Islam” requires radical interventions in deep historic processes to redirect their trajectory. “Deep historic processes” are below the level of visible surface phenomena but largely shape them. In the apt terminology of Fernand Braudel (1982), the distinction is between “bubbles” floating on the waves and deep streams. Thus, voting behavior is a surface phenomenon, however important in the short run, in contrast to cultural transformations, which shape voting behavior in the long run. This necessitates an intervention massive enough to “bend” history. Israeli statecraft has in part been very successful in doing so. However, changing rather rigid features of the Arab-Israeli conflict requires a statecraft paradigm which meets the large scale (Schulman 1980) critical mass requirement of bringing about a phase jump of historic processes. Israeli statecraft in the main does not think in such terms. It is mainly reactive and specific issue directed, often narrowly so. This is a main cause of serious failures, as will be discussed in Chapter 11.

The problem of critical mass is closely related to the inadequacy of statecraft resources which Israel can mobilize domestically. Israel is quite a small country. However well its economy develops, the domestic basis cannot meet the requirements posed by major statecraft challenges. Therefore, Israel depends on resources provided by other powers, including economic, diplomatic, and military. The Diaspora supplies important resources as far as it can, but this is very far from enough. This makes the special relationship with the US and some support by a range of powers of existential importance for Israel. Israeli statecraft has been very successful in gaining such support. But this asset also creates dependence, imposing pressures and limitations on Israeli statecraft, which in part contradict widely held Israeli values, Israeli conceptions of its security needs, and the dictates of domestic democratic politics.

Interventions in history assume that the future is not fully determined by the past but can in part be influenced by human action, including deliberate attempts to “weave the future,” as Plato formulated it in The Statesman, and at least some capacity to cope with fortuna, as discussed by Machiavelli in many of his writings, such as Chapter 25 of The Prince (Knauer 1997). To do so successfully, so that desired impacts outweigh undesirable ones, requires adequate understanding of historical process and their drivers. The appropriate mode of reasoning is conjectural, taking the form of future-directed “what-if” virtual history (Ferguson 2000) thought experiments (Sorensen 1998), that is “moves in mind” (Gobet et al. 2004), like a chess player who tries out in his mind various possible moves and countermoves before deciding what move to make, but much more complicated because of multiple dimensions, scarcity of stable patterns of behavior, and pervasive uncertainty. Statecraft conjectural thinking explores possible or likely impacts of alternative options on the future, with the help of various outlook approaches, while trying to avoid wrong learning from the past. But such thinking tends to be very error-prone and even at its best is inherently limited.

This problem is shared by statecraft everywhere, but is especially vexing for Israeli statecraft, for three main reasons: (1) The Middle East is one of the most volatile geopolitical regions; (2) serious errors of statecraft may cause much damage to Israel and, in some circumstances, endanger its very existence; and (3) important parts of Israeli statecraft suffer from what I call “intelligent simplicity” resulting in a good measure of pragmatic straightforwardness which produces impressive successes but which is inadequate for coping with ultra-change (change in the patterns of change itself) and hard uncertainty (including on the qualitative features of alternative futures).

The necessity to take into account long-term time horizons in statecraft conflicts with the need to consider present-day issues that often dominates statecraft. This is all the more the case with Israeli statecraft, because of periodic overload by current events. In addition, the inherent difficulties of major statecraft challenges facing Israel and sharp differences of opinion on how to cope with some of them cause a lot of lack of initiative and dithering, especially on the settlement policy and the peace process.

Uncertainty increases with the length of time taken into account, all the more so given the inherent instability of the Greater Middle East in its global context. This limits the time horizons of statecraft even at its best. But this contradicts the Israeli need for long-term statecraft because of the minimum time needed to stabilize its standing in the Greater Middle East, which under the most optimistic assumptions will take at least till the middle of the twenty-first century and probably longer. All the more so, Israeli statecraft involves a lot of “fuzzy gambling” with high stakes (Dror 2002: 151–7), imposing heavily on emotional and cognitive capacities.

Tragically, the stakes of unavoidable Israeli statecraft gambles are high, with the future thriving and being of Israel at stake. This makes top quality statecraft much more essential for Israel than nearly all other states. It is enough to create a thought experiment comparing the worst that could happen to the United States with the worst-case scenario for Israel to realize this fact.

The Israeli statecraft elite and the public at large recognize the need for high-quality statecraft. This recognition is further reinforced by the memory of the Holocaust, making the sense of the possibility of destruction, however extremely unlikely, into a main feature of Israeli statecraft culture and a living danger in the minds of the statecraft elite. This brings us to Israeli statecraft culture.

The concept of “strategic culture” is well known in literature (Gray 1999: 129–52; Sondhaus 2006; Johnson et al. 2009), but I expand it into “statecraft culture.” For the purpose of this book, there is no need to go into the discourse on various conceptions of “culture.” It is sufficient to understand statecraft culture as including subjective worlds, worldviews, basic ideologies and values, concepts, main patterns of thinking and feeling, accepted principles, and pertinent emotions.

Statecraft culture is always a composite of divergent elements, all the more so in Israel, but some generalizations on Israeli statecraft culture can be validly made, to be elaborated and illustrated throughout the book.

Assuring the security of Israel and the Jewish People as a whole is an existential imperative for Israeli statecraft, at whatever cost to Israel and others. Threats receive more attention than opportunities. The military exerts much influence on statecraft thinking. Israel’s trust in the world coming to its rescue is low. Statecraft thinking is highly intelligent, but fragmented, improvisatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Authors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Israel’s uniqueness
• 3. Value compass
• 4. Israel’s arena
• 5. Mega-trends
• 6. Turning points
• 7. Contingencies and responses
• 8. Fateful fuzzy gamble
• 9. Conflict morphology
• 10. Conflict system dynamics proto-model
• 11. Statecraft responses
• 12. Intermezzo
• 13. “Israeli embassy in Riyadh” peace paradigm
• 14. “Jekyll and Hyde” conflict violence paradigm
• 15. “Dwelling in the world” global paradigm
• 16. Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index