Israel Facing a New Middle East

In Search of a National Security Strategy

Itai Brun, Itamar Rabinovich

• Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780817920449
• eBook ISBN: 9780817920463
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The turmoil which has been rattling the Middle East in recent years has confronted Israel with fresh challenges and opportunities and requires it to rethink the three levels of its strategy and security policies: National security Strategy (sometimes referred to as Grand Strategy), National Security Policy and National Military Strategy. The book points to the years 1979–1981 as the years of transition from conventional military challenges faced by Israel to the novel challenges of terrorism, missiles and rockets, sub-state guerrilla organizations on its borders and the prospect of nuclear weapons in hostile hands. Some of these challenges have been exacerbated by the unraveling of neighboring Arab states. The book's review of the evolution of Israeli policies through almost seven decades of war and conflicts shows the absence of a full-fledged grand strategy, the structural weakness of national security policy formulation by successive governments at the cabinet level and the dominant role of the IDF. This state of affairs helps explain why and how Israel has responded to the recent turmoil in a piecemeal fashion rather than formulate a comprehensive policy that would enhance its ability to respond to the new challenges and take advantage of the new opportunities.

CHAPTER

1

THE EVOLUTION OF ISRAEL’S NATIONAL SECURITY DOCTRINE

Different nations conceptualize, formulate, and discuss national security policy in different ways. The British government publishes a comprehensive annual report on national security strategy and a strategic defense and security review. The US government publishes periodically three different reports: the president’s “National Security Policy of the USA,” the Pentagon’s “National Defense Strategy,” and the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s “National Military Strategy.” These two examples reflect both the looseness with which such terms as “strategy,” “security,” and “defense” are used and the substantive distinction among the levels of a nation’s strategy or national security policy: 1) national security strategy (sometimes referred to as “grand strategy”), the formulation of the country’s crucial national security interests and challenges and the broad policies pursued to protect them; 2) the government’s translation of this national security strategy into national security policy (sometimes referred to as “national defense policy”); and 3) the implementation of this policy by the military leadership through the buildup and deployment of military force (national military strategy). Needless to say, this process and its products are not merely a top down development, but rather the outcome of ongoing interaction.

Israel is a country preoccupied, not to say obsessed, with national security challenges. It has developed formidable military and defense establishments that have been deployed over the past sixty-eight years in several wars and other military operations but has failed or chose to refrain from a systematic formulation, let alone discussion, of its grand strategy and national security policy. In Israel’s case, the objective difficulty of adapting strategy to an ever-changing reality has been compounded by the weakness or absence of institutions entrusted with these tasks. Israel’s original grand strategy was formulated by its founding father, David Ben Gurion, in his dual capacity as prime minister and minister of defense. The “Security Review” that he presented to his cabinet in October 1953 was, as will be shown below, a remarkable document. It underlay Israel’s national security policy through the Six-Day War in June 1967. The massive changes generated by that war and subsequent developments confronted Israel with new challenges and opportunities and produced a series of changes in Israel’s national security doctrine and practice. Over the years, several initiatives were taken to reformulate Israel’s national security doctrine. Most were not completed. Three of them, the Meridor Commission report and Chief of Staff Halutz’s document in 2006 (both made available to the public), as well as The IDF Strategy, published by the IDF’s chief of general staff Gadi Eizenkot in 2015, will be reviewed and analyzed below. But these reports did not seek to formulate and present a full-fledged grand strategy comparable to Ben Gurion’s 1953 security review. (These documents, it should be noted, were written at different levels. The Halutz and Eizenkot documents deal with the IDF’s operational concept, while the Meridor report had a more ambitious scope.) This may seem odd given the numerous transformations of Israel’s national security environment and policies over time, but those familiar with Israel’s political culture will not be surprised by the fact that, as in other areas, its political and military leaders chose time and again to update the country’s national security policy in a piecemeal way rather than formulate and articulate a comprehensive new policy.

Furthermore, as this study will demonstrate, the three levels of strategy described above have not been applied by Israel’s political and military leadership over the years. Ben Gurion’s grand strategy as formulated in 1953 stands out as a solitary effort. Subsequent leaders took steps that can be placed at the grand strategy level (Yitzhak Rabin in 1992, Shimon Peres in 1995, Ehud Barak in 1999, Ariel Sharon in 2005, and Ehud Olmert in 2008), but such measures did not match the ambitious, comprehensive grand strategy formulated by Ben Gurion. The policy adopted by right-wing leaders after 1967, which sought either to perpetuate the status quo or to achieve a de facto annexation of the West Bank can be described as a grand strategy of sorts in that it has aimed to shape Israel’s destiny by failing to make explicit choices. More recently, the radical right wing, which is currently represented in the government and the security cabinet, has been advocating a proactive agenda to annex the West Bank or at least part of it.

In practice, Israel’s strategy and defense policy has been largely conducted at the level of national security policy, as policies were pursued and decisions made by prime ministers, defense ministers, and the IDF leadership. Moreover, the boundary between national security policy and military strategy has been blurred by the weakness of the national defense strategy level and by the effectiveness of the IDF leadership in planning and advocating for a strategy. The Israeli governmental system has lacked a mechanism at the cabinet level to formulate and implement an effective national security policy. The Ministerial National Security Committee (the security/political cabinet, a relatively new entity) has failed to function as an effective body. The National Security Council has not been empowered by successive prime ministers, and the Ministry of Defense lacks the resources to play this role. The IDF, by contrast, possesses highly qualified personnel, a powerful military intelligence, and an efficient planning division, and has enjoyed popular credibility and prestige, which have turned the IDF as a whole and its chief of staff, in particular, into powerful actors beyond the military and strategic realms. Consequently, the Israeli system has operated over the years on two of the three levels of national strategy, and oftentimes on one, namely the uninstitutionalized interaction between the cabinet level and the IDF. In fact, the most crucial axis has typically been the informal relationship among the prime minister, the minister of defense, and the IDF chief of staff, occasionally supplemented by the heads of the security services.

The first part of this monograph will introduce Israel’s original grand strategy, national security policy, and military strategy. The second part will review and analyze the changes they underwent in the aftermath of June 1967, as well as subsequent developments into the 1990s. The third and most important part will deal with the radical changes in both challenges and responses that led to and are reflected the Second Lebanon War and the three campaigns in Gaza and are addressed in the Meridor, Halutz, and Eizenkot documents. We argue that profound and dramatic as developments in the Middle East in recent years have been, Israel has in fact been coping not so much with novel security challenges but with developments that have reinforced trends whose roots go back to the early 1980s. The fourth part will examine the options available to Israel in the current circumstances and will elaborate on the functioning of the different levels of its strategy.

DAVID BEN GURION’S SECURITY REVIEW

In October 1953, Israel’s prime minister and minister of defense, David Ben Gurion, presented to his cabinet a comprehensive security review, known as “The Military and the State.” The review was prepared during a three-month leave that Ben Gurion took to conduct a thorough study of Israel’s security position. He decided to conduct this study when he became aware of the IDF’s poor state and concerned about its ability to respond to the country’s massive security challenges. Ben Gurion’s study was facilitated by senior officers from the IDF’s General Headquarters (GHQ).

The Israeli leader’s point of departure was that the Arab states defeated in the 1948 war had not accepted their defeat and were determined to complete the task they had failed to accomplish in 1948. Ben Gurion realized that Israel had no prospect of inflicting a decisive military defeat on the Arab states and bringing the conflict to an end through military victory. The Arabs could sustain multiple defeats and needed just one victory to destroy the Jewish state. The demographic disparity and the difference in resources were such that over time the Arabs could acquire the weapon systems and military capacity they had lacked in 1948 (and still lacked in 1953), thus presenting Israel with an insurmountable challenge. But Israel had several advantages that it could maximize. Its small territory denied it strategic depth but gave it the advantage of short internal lines and the ability to move troops swiftly from one front to the other. Israel had better qualified manpower, enjoyed superior ethos and solidarity, and was a single actor, in contrast to the disunited Arab world.

To maximize these advantages, Ben Gurion wanted to expand Israel’s population, increase recruitment to the military, develop an efficient intelligence service, and create an air force that could play a major role in improving Israel’s strategic position vis-à-vis its Arab enemies. Ben Gurion saw national security as an integrated system in which the IDF was part of a larger whole. Israel of the early 1950s was a poor country that could hardly afford to maintain a large army or buy expensive weapons systems—which, in any event, were not easily available. His solution was to keep the IDF as a relatively small force composed of a small standing army reinforced by compulsory national service, and to rely on a sophisticated system of reserves that would be called up in the event of imminent war. A mobilized society, a massive educational effort among the country’s youth, and a limited military budget were some of the elements designated to make the IDF part of a larger national effort rather than an autonomous entity. Israel was during that period “a nation in uniform.” Ben Gurion’s point of departure was pessimistic in that he assumed the Arabs would not come to terms with Israel’s existence and would continue hostilities even after multiple defeats. But he did expect that at the end of the day, after having failed to defeat Israel, their leadership might conclude that they had to accept Israel. In this respect, Ben Gurion accepted the concept if not the term coined by his political rival, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, “the Iron Wall”: the notion that if the Jewish state managed to build an iron wall that the Arabs could not bring down, they would end up accepting it.

From these points of departure came the three foundations of Israel’s national strategy (they were adopted in practice prior to being conceptualized): general deterrence, early warning, and decisive victory. Since Israel could not expect to prevent the Arabs from attacking, it could at least make these wars less frequent. This could be achieved by general deterrence, which in turn depended on decisive victories. In other words, by defeating Arab enemies, Israel would convince them to delay a new attack as long as the effect of the last defeat was still fresh. And given that the Arab states had standing armies and could launch wars quite easily, Israel needed an efficient intelligence system to have sufficient early warning to mobilize the reserves, the main fighting force of the IDF. And once war broke out, since Israel had no strategic depth, it had to shift the war into enemy territory. Given the cost of war to a country relying largely on reserves, wars had to be brought to a swift conclusion by a decisive military victory, which would, at the same time, enhance deterrence. This approach could easily be perceived as offensive, but in essence it was a defensive policy. Israel was interested in minimizing wars, and the offensive strategy adopted once war seemed imminent or inevitable was essentially preventive and defensive.

These principles were supplemented, in Ben Gurion’s view of national security, by three additional elements. The first was the quest for an alliance with a major power. Such an alliance could provide Israel with sophisticated weapons systems and offer protection of Israel’s skies in the event of war. The second was what came to be known as “the Dimona project” or “nuclear ambiguity,” which was to provide Israel with the ultimate guarantee against Arab ambitions to destroy it. Whatever the Dimona project was in reality, the Arab perception that Israel possessed a nuclear weapon provided effective deterrence. A close alliance with France in the mid-1950s provided Israel with weapons systems, aerial defense during the 1956 war, and nuclear technology. Israel’s defense pact with France was supplemented in the 1950s and early 1960s by more limited defense cooperation with West Germany. Ben Gurion was naturally interested in a close political and military relationship with the United States, but Washington was not interested prior to the June 1967 war. President Kennedy agreed in 1962 to provide Israel with Hawk antiaircraft missiles, which were defined as a defensive system. A third element was the effort to overcome Arab hostility by cultivating relations with other minorities in the region and by leapfrogging over the immediate circle of hostile Arab states to develop an “alliance of the periphery” with Turkey, Iran, and Ethiopia, who all shared a hostility to radical Arab nationalism and Soviet policy in the Middle East.

During the 1950s and 1960s the IDF developed the principles of its operational doctrine. In the 1948 war, the IDF’s ground forces were composed primarily of infantry supplemented by mobile elements: jeeps, armored cars, and light tanks. The air force consisted of a small number of diverse airplanes. In line with Ben Gurion’s thinking, the IDF was built as a small regular army supplemented by a large reserve army, and ground maneuver was placed at the center of the operational doctrine. To enable an effective ground maneuver, it was decided to build the IDF as a mobile mechanized army capable of quickly switching from defense to offense, taking advantage of internal lines to win on one front while conducting a defensive war on the other fronts. The construction of the reserve army was inspired by the Swiss example of a reserve army kept at adequate professional levels through annual training and capable of being swiftly mobilized and deployed. But unlike the Swiss system, the Israeli reserve army includes mostly ground forces, while the air force and navy rely on career officers, NCOs, and draftees.

The IDF had sound reasons to allocate a central role to the ground forces and ground maneuver. The main threat to Israel came from the enemy’s ground forces. The common political perception was that the conflict with the Arabs was essentially territorial, and it followed that the territorial dimension on both sides of the border was particularly significant. The strategic-military concept emphasized shifting the war to enemy territory, a result of the lack of strategic depth and the need for a swift and visible victory. These considerations naturally led Israelis to emphasize capturing enemy territory and destroying its forces, and then to the conclusion that the dominant element in obtaining military victory was the ground maneuver. The centrality of ground maneuver in the IDF’s original operational concept was reinforced by its potential to take advantage of the quality of Israeli forces and to minimize the enemy’s quantitative advantage. The IDF leadership saw as optimal a dynamic ground maneuver conducted under rapidly changing conditions, requiring the army at all levels to display initiative, flexibility, coordination, and adaptation to new and unexpected conditions.

THE SINAI CAMPAIGN

When writing his security review in 1953, Ben Gurion was prescient. He predicted war in about three years and pointed to the possible rise of a charismatic Arab leader capable of mobilizing the Arab world in an unprecedented way. Indeed, the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser as the messianic leader of Egypt and the Arab world in 1954 presented Israel with severe challenges. From 1948 until Nasser’s arrival on the scene, the Arab world shared a desire to reverse the consequences of the 1948 war but had no coherent plan to achieve this aim. Nasser’s idea was that the State of Israel could be liquidated only by regular military forces launching a comprehensive war against the Jewish state. But Nasser realized that the Arab armies were not up to the task and that it would take time for them to develop adequate capability.

Nasser’s alliance with the Soviet Union, the massive Czech-Egyptian arms deal of 1955, the wave of terrorism launched by Egypt from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and the closure of the Red Sea to Israeli shipping led the Israeli leadership to adopt the notion of a preemptive war. Israel’s decision to launch the Sinai campaign reflected the ultimate failure of its policy of retaliation. Arab terrorism from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip led to a series of “retaliatory operations” against Jordanian and Egyptian targets, predicated on the assumption that the responsibility for anti-Israeli operations lay with the host government, whether it initiated such operations (Egypt) or failed to prevent them (Jordan). These operations had run their course by 1956. Nasser’s conflict with Great Britain and France created an opportunity for Israeli collaboration with these two declining colonial powers and led to the combined Suez-Sinai War of 1956. While the larger Suez operation was inspired by an outdated reading of the regional and international environments and ended in failure, Israel’s military campaign in Sinai was a great success. Israel’s decisive victory over the Egyptian army in the Sinai reinforced its deterrence and led to a period of relative calm that lasted eleven years.

The IDF’s offensive doctrine was shaped in the decade that followed the Sinai campaign by the lessons of that war. The abstract notions of ground maneuver and shifting the conflict to enemy territory were applied successfully during the Sinai campaign. The war demonstrated that the reserve army could be mobilized and deployed to penetrate enemy territory and destroy forces with limited casualties. The centrality of ground maneuver and the dominance of armored forces were reflected in the composition of the IDF’s senior command, which was made up primarily of senior ground forces officers. This, however, did not preclude development of Israel’s air force. It had been seen from an early stage as a cardinal component of Israel’s military might. The underlying concept was of a standing air force, readily available and flexible, capable of defending the country’s airspace, achieving aerial superiority, and offering tactical support to the ground forces. This was supplemented by the perception that the air force also had a role on the strategic level, primarily in attacking national infrastructure (economic as well as military) deep in enemy territory, thus enhancing deterrence. The Israeli model, as it developed during these years, continues to give the air force a great deal of independence and a direct approach to the political level while it remains subordinated to the General Staff and overall military strategy.

Until the spring of 1967, Nasser acted consistently under the assumption that Arab armies were still not ready for a comprehensive war against Israel. But Nasser’s approach was challenged from two directions. One was the emergence of young Palestinians who had lost faith in the Arab states’ ability and perhaps willingness to defeat Israel. These young Palestinians established the Fatah organization in the late 1950s to launch military and terrorist operations against Israel. The other was the Syrian Baathist doctrine of the “popular war of liberation.” Nasser’s Baathist rivals argued that his strategy amounted to acceptance of Israel and contended that the lesson of Vietnam showed that a strategy of “popular war” modeled after the Vietcong could defeat the might of the IDF. The actions taken by Fatah and the Syrian Baath regime and Israel’s responses produced the crisis of May 1967, which led to the Six-Day War.

THE SIX-DAY WAR

The Six-Day War of June 1967 was a watershed. In May 1967 Israel faced one of the most severe crises in its history. It emerged from that crisis with a spectacular military victory. In the course of six days, it defeated the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian armies and an Iraqi expeditionary force and captured large territories in the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank. In military terms, the Six-Day War displayed an almost perfect implementation of the IDF’s operational doctrine of the late 1950s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Evolution of Israel’s National Security Doctrine
• 2 New Challenges for Israel’s National Security
• 3 Facing Reality: Lebanon and Gaza
• 4 The Arab Spring and the Arab Turmoil: a new Middle eastern Reality
• Source Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Authors
• About the Hoover Institution’s Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order
• Index