Continuity and Change in Israeli Security Policy

Mark A. Heller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136062445
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia militare e marittima

How should Israel respond to the changing external threats that confront it? This paper argues that the country's traditional security concept is obsolete and must be reformulated. How this is achieved depends on developments within the Middle East and on the outcome of current shifts in Israel's politics and society.

Chapter 1

The Traditional Security Concept

The Conceptual Foundation

Israel was born in war, and ever since has lived in a state of war with most of its neighbours, most of the time.¹ It is therefore not surprising that national security has dominated the national agenda in a way that has few parallels elsewhere. Quantitative indicators – defence spending as a proportion of budget or national product, the extent and duration of compulsory military service, spending per individual serviceman – bear out this judgement of national priorities. So, too, do qualitative indicators; as reflective as any is the fact that the defence minister, unlike his counterparts in almost all other democracies, has traditionally played a more prominent and important role in politics and policy-making than any other individual apart from the prime minister. In 22 of Israel's first 50 years of existence, one person held both portfolios.² Security so dominated the Israeli decision-making process that it influenced, and often overwhelmed, almost all other dimensions of foreign policy, and even major elements of domestic economic and social policy.

Given the demands that security has made on the time, attention and resources of Israel over the years, it is perhaps surprising that an authoritative national-security policy has never been clearly articulated. There is no Israeli equivalent of the periodic White Papers or similar posture statements issued by defence ministries or national-security organs in many other countries.³ This does not mean, however, that something approaching a coherent concept did not evolve. The major contours of a national-security concept emerged out of the political–military leadership's interpretation of the strategic environment in which Israel found itself in the late 1940s and early 1950s. These circumstances dictated a posture of military deterrence, which had a defensive strategic purpose, but whose operational content was offensive. This concept has remained more-or-less intact ever since, and from it have flowed the basic structure and doctrine of the IDF, as well as the basic character of civil–military relations.⁴

Israel's security concept rested on a few central assumptions, essentially distillations of the experience of the 1948–49 War of Independence and the interpretation of the immediate post-war geopolitical circumstances.

1) ‘No Choice’

The first assumption was that Israel would continue to live in a hostile environment. Military inferiority had forced its neighbours to accept cease-fires, and even General Armistice Agreements, in 1949, but these were not converted into relations of permanent peace. The reason, at least according to the prevailing understanding in Israel, was irreconcilable Arab hostility to Israel's very existence. Some attributed this attitude to a hatred equivalent to anti-Semitism. More thoughtful Israelis acknowledged the Arab conviction that Israel was a foreign, artificial implantation, doomed like the Crusader Kingdoms eventually to pass from the scene. They also conceded that the Arab refusal to accept Israel as a normal, legitimate feature of the Middle East stemmed from a political and territorial conflict grounded in a deep sense of injustice. ‘Why should the Arabs make peace?’, Ben-Gurion is reported to have asked:

If I were an Arab leader I would never accept the existence of Israel. This is only natural. We took their land. True, God promised it to us, but what does it matter to them? There was anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was it their fault? They only see one thing: we came and took their land. They may forget in a generation or two, but for the time being there is no chance.⁵

But even those who recognised that the rejection of Israel's existence was based on more than unreasoning hatred were no more willing to accommodate the Arab objective of disestablishing the state. As a result, profound Arab hostility was accepted as a given across the spectrum of Israeli politics. This meant that Israel would have to confront the permanent threat of the ‘Next Round’ – another war with one or more Arab armies.⁶ That implied a high and ongoing state of military readiness.

2) Material inferiority

The second assumption was that Israel would have to confront this threat with human and material resources quantitatively inferior to those of its potential adversaries, and with limited territorial depth. This left it vulnerable both to protracted war, because of its limited staying-power, and to surprise attack, because of the lack of space to trade for time. There were three clear implications of this assumption. First, demographic and economic resources had to be increased by reinforcement from outside, as had been the case in 1948–49. Second, Israel had to mobilise its existing resources far more intensively and effectively than did its adversaries. In 1948–49, and often subsequently, this mobilisation effort actually enabled Israel to achieve quantitative parity, or even local superiority, in manpower and firepower. Third, the remaining material gaps had to be overcome by cultivating qualitatively superior military technology, organisation and combat doctrine. In particular, Israel needed to achieve a swift decision on the battlefield. This did not necessarily mean the physical destruction of enemy forces, but it did mean destroying their capacity to sustain combat before outside intervention led to the imposition of a cease-fire. Otherwise, Israel would face the prospect of an early resumption of hostilities, or a static war of attrition along its borders. In short, Israel would rely on the application of offensive force at the tactical and operational levels.

3) No strategic victory through military means

The last major premise was that, however decisive the outcome on the battlefield, Israel would never have either the resources or the international freedom of action to achieve a strategic victory, in the sense of being able to impose its peace terms on a defeated adversary. Since political objectives could not be translated directly into a military idiom, Israel had no political justification for launching a war. Thus, its security policy was essentially defensive in strategic terms. Security policy could serve the political objective of peace only in the sense that entrenched Israeli military superiority could deter Arab adversaries from initiating war and, if deterrence prevailed long enough, compel them eventually to despair of war as an option. As Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin argued 45 years after the War of Independence, ‘the longer Israel is successful in deterring an Arab leader or coalition from being tempted to initiate war, the better become the longer-term prospects for peace’.⁷

Military Structure and Doctrine

These assumptions, and the conclusions drawn from them, had clear implications both for military policy, in the sense of army structure and combat doctrine, and for security policy in the broader sense of national values and priorities. With respect to military policy, they led first to the fundamental decision to build the IDF as a militiatype force or ‘citizens’ army’, rather than as a professional force of long-term or career volunteers. These would form a small, permanent nucleus, with primary responsibility for training and planning. But the bulk of the standing forces would be made up of conscripts (both men and women) recruited for universal compulsory military service. These conscripts, along with the permanent army, would bear the burden of ‘current security’ – routine, day-to-day deployments and counter-terrorism operations – as well as responsibility for tasks requiring a high state of operational readiness, such as intelligence-gathering and air-power. However, the regular army alone could not provide sufficient forces to prosecute a full-scale war, especially if fighting involved more than one Arab army on more than one front. Thus, soldiers (at least the men) were not relieved of their military obligations following their term of compulsory service. Instead, they were subject to annual reserve duty with some operational duties, but primarily (at least in principle) with the aim of maintaining combat proficiency in the event of a major confrontation. And it was mobilised reservists, especially on the ground but even, to some extent, in the other service arms, who would bear the brunt of any major military effort after the first 48–72 hours.

Given the ability of standing Arab forces to shift quickly from defensive to offensive deployments, Israeli military posture placed a premium on early warning. Moreover, its military doctrine was based on a disposition to pre-empt in the face of any indication that an adversary was intending to use force, or even taking steps that enhanced its capacity to do so. (This is what happened in the 1967 Six Day War, and in its longer-term preventive variant it led to the 1956 Sinai Campaign against Egypt and the 1981 strike against Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor.) This disposition to pre-empt stemmed from the fact that a successful Arab first strike might so disrupt or delay the mobilisation of reservists that a counter-offensive would become exceedingly costly, if not impossible, while prolonged mobilisation might cripple the civilian economy.

The need to demobilise reservists also made it imperative to terminate any military confrontation as quickly and decisively as possible. The assumption was that the longer active combat continued, the more political pressure would build on other Arab countries to join the battle. Consequently, Israeli force planning and training stressed offensive capabilities (manoeuvre more than firepower, concentration of force to create local superiority even in conditions of overall inferiority). This was intended to support either pre-emption, or an early counter-offensive to carry the battle into enemy territory. Combat doctrine was geared towards these ends.⁸ So, too, was military procurement, even though importing or indigenously developing advanced equipment implied a heavy financial burden.

The Primacy of Security in Foreign and Domestic Policy

Insofar as national security in the more comprehensive sense is concerned, the basic assumptions and conclusions about Israel's strategic environment produced a widespread consensus on the primacy of security. This drove decisions on most dimensions of foreign policy, as well as many aspects of domestic policy. Of course, geopolitical circumstances alone did not explain everything. Israeli policy-makers were influenced by the habits of thought and action instilled by centuries of Jewish communal life in the Diaspora. At one level, the founders and early leaders of the state viewed Israel as a negation of the Diaspora. Hence, their preference for confident, even militant, ‘self-reliance’ over traditional Jewish communal patterns of passivity, submissiveness and legalism, and the appeasement of more powerful forces or intercession with protectors.⁹ But at another level, there was a tendency to maintain the deep-rooted Diaspora feeling of communal solidarity based on the fundamental distinction between Jews and non-Jews, and the abiding distrust of foreigners and outsiders.¹⁰ Thus, Israel's condition was seen as a continuation of the traditional Jewish condition of isolation and vulnerability in a hostile environment, of which the Holocaust was but the most recent, and most horrific, example. Whatever the objective reality of Israel's circumstances, the sense of insecurity was magnified by this subjective habit of thought, which one observer calls ‘the gevalt syndrome’.¹¹

At the same time, Israel's Jewish vocation dictated a concern for the well-being of Jews, wherever they were. This stemmed not just from the fact that the ‘Ingathering of the Exiles’ was one of the central sustaining themes of Zionism. Resources were occasionally devoted to actions motivated by Jewish historical or contemporaneous concerns, even if they had no direct relevance to security, and even if they might damage Israel's foreign relations. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this was the decision to kidnap Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann from Argentina in 1962 and bring him to trial in Jerusalem. Similarly, the Israeli leadership, especially the earlier generations, retained a measure of commitment to the values which suffused the early-twentieth-century socialism with which most of them were identified. This explained some elements of Israeli foreign policy, such as the decision to cultivate the friendship of newly independent states in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1950s and early 1960s.¹² These values resonated even more strongly in domestic affairs. Here, the notion of creating a new Jewish society, freed of the social and psychological ‘distortions’ of the Diaspora, resulted in social-mobilisation policies, such as the encouragement of youth movements and cooperative and collective enterprises, and egalitarian social norms and economic principles, all in the service of ‘nation-building’.

On the whole, however, factors such as these were subordinated to security considerations. In one particularly notorious instance, the so-called ‘Lavon Affair’ of 1954, the security of the Jewish community in Egypt was compromised by the decision to involve local Jews in a sabotage operation aimed at undermining relations between Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's government and the US. Historian Sasson Sofer argues that the ‘almost obsessive emphasis on combining policy with military action often placed Israeli diplomacy at a disadvantage, and such mundane concepts as international trade, human rights and moral issues were pushed aside’.¹³

Of the foreign-policy themes that stemmed from the primacy of security, two in particular stand out. The first was the determination, notwithstanding the ideology of self-reliance, to secure the support of at least one major power in order to ensure a reliable supply of military technology, if not actual combat support, as well as political cover for the various pre-emptive or retaliatory operations deemed necessary to establish and sustain Israeli deterrence. In fact, Israel had no close ties with any major power until the mid-1950s, though it received political support and materiel from the Soviet Union during the War of Independence. In the mid-1950s, it took advantage of French hostility to Egypt, provoked by Nasser's support for the Algerian independence movement, to forge a quasi-alliance with France that produced cooperation in the 1956 Sinai/Suez War, as well as supplies of military and scientific technology. After the deterioration of Franco-Israeli ties in the mid-1960s, Israel benefited immensely from the special political and military relationship it enjoyed with the US.

The second theme was the ‘periphery’ policy of cultivating security and other ties with non-Arab states bordering the heartland of the Middle East – Turkey, Iran and Ethiopia. The purpose of this policy, beyond general diplomatic benefits or intelligence exchanges, was to distract, intimidate or weaken Arab countries bordering the non-Arabs on the periphery. This aim was also served by providing military support to minorities within Arab countries, such as rebels in southern Sudan or Christians in Lebanon.¹⁴ But the most ambitious example was the close cooperation with Iran under the Shah, which manifested itself most actively in military support for the Iraqi Kurdish opposition. This lasted until 1975, when the Shah decided to improve relations with Iraq and shut down Israeli access to Kurdistan.

With respect to domestic policy, the ‘Ingathering of the Exiles’ may not have been motivated by security considerations, but the absorption of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, especially in the early years of statehood, had the undoubted benefit of enhancing Israel's pool of military manpower. Similarly, population disp...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Traditional Security Concept
• Chapter 2 The Evolution of the Threat after 1967
• Chapter 3 Internal Challenges
• Chapter 4 Adapting Defence Policy
• Chapter 5 Alternative Futures
• Conclusion Towards ‘Limited Internationalism’?
• Notes