Zeev Maoz is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis. He is the former head of the Graduate School of Government and Policy and of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, as well as the former academic director of the M.A. Program at the Israeli Defense Forces' National Defense College.

DEFENDING THE HOLY LAND

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

Contents

Chapter One

Conceptions, Approaches, Paradoxes

1. INTRODUCTION

On May 12, 1948, a group of nine men and one woman met in Tel Aviv to decide on the establishment of a new state. Around them, a ferocious civil war had been going on for the past six months. The British mandate was to expire in two days. The ten members of the Provisional State Council of the Jewish Agency faced a tough dilemma. The United Nations (UN) resolution of November 29, 1947, decreed that Palestine was to be partitioned into a Palestinian state and a Jewish state. The Arabs and the Palestinians had rejected this resolution, threatening to invade Palestine if the Jews declared their own state. The Palestinians-aided by irregular forces from various Arab states-had been fighting the Jews since late 1947. As long as the British forces were in Palestine, there was a semblance of a government. Now that they were about to leave, it seemed necessary to somehow fill this vacuum.

The inclination of the Jewish leaders was to proclaim the formation of the Jewish state. But that would bring about an invasion by the armies of the Arab states. On the table for consideration was an American proposal to delay the declaration of independence, accept an armistice, and allow for a mediation process by the international community in an effort to find a mutually acceptable solution to the Palestine problem. The representatives of the security organs of the Yishuv-the prestate institutions-presented a bleak assessment of the coming war. They expected at least three and as many as seven Arab states to send armies into Palestine. The Jewish population, numbering some 650,000 people, was being mobilized. By May 1948, the newly established army of the Jewish organizations amounted to some 80,000 recruits (Ostfeld 1994, 54). However, they were poorly equipped and required considerable training before they could be sent to the front. The military commanders anticipated as many as 120,000 Arab soldiers equipped with armor, airplanes, and artillery to participate in the invasion of Palestine (Ostfeld 1994, 23-24). The military commanders estimated the chance of survival of the Jewish state as even at best (Sharef 1959, 83-84; Shlaim 2000, 33).

With the support of six members against four opposed, the Provisional Council decided to proclaim a Jewish state and call it the state of Israel. The Provisional Council would henceforth become the provisional government of Israel, until such time that elections could determine the permanent government.

As David Ben-Gurion, the interim prime minister, had anticipated, on May 14, 1948, a combined invasion of a Jordanian and Egyptian army started. The Syrian and the Lebanese armies engaged in a token effort but did not stage a major attack on the Jewish state. Other states sent volunteers, but the combined strength of the Arab armies and the irregular forces fighting the Jewish state was far less than anticipated. The balance of forces in terms of military personnel was in favor of the Israeli army (Golani 2002, 158-68). Initially the Jews had far less advanced military equipment than the Arab armies, but this changed quickly when Israel signed a weapons deal with Czechoslovakia. Other weapons deals through private sources also enabled the new state to tilt the balance of hardware in its favor (Ilan 1996, 181-200). After nearly seven months of fighting (interrupted by two UN-decreed truces), Israel defeated decisively all the Arab states, crushed the Palestinian resistance, and signed a series of armistice agreements with all of its Arab neighbors.

The War of Independence exacted a heavy toll on the Jewish state. A total of sixty-five hundred soldiers and civilians died in the war, 1 percent of the entire Jewish population. The economy of the new state was in extremely bad shape, having been totally mobilized for the war effort. While the war was raging, thousands of Jewish refugees were flowing into the country. They needed food, homes, work, language training, and other social benefits. But the end of the war brought a great deal of hope and optimism to the new state. Many Israelis believed that the armistice agreements would soon be converted into peace treaties that would stabilize and legitimize the new state's boundaries (Segev 1984; Yaniv 1995, 37-38; 1987a, 38). Ben-Gurion thought otherwise. He believed that the Arab rejection of Israel was fundamental and irrevocable. They were defeated in the first round, but there would be other rounds of warfare. Next time, the Arabs would be better prepared, better equipped, and-with the memory of the humiliating 1948 defeat in their minds-possibly better motivated. Israel had to be ready to fight again (Ben-Gurion 1969, 480-92).

Ben-Gurion was right about the need to fight again, but he probably did not expect his prophecy to be fulfilled to such an overwhelming extent. Over the fifty-five-year period between 1948 and 2004, Israel fought 6 interstate wars, fought 2 (some say three) civil wars, and engaged in over 144 dyadic militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) that involved the threat, the display, or the use of military force against another state. Israel is by far the most conflict-prone state in modern history. It has averaged nearly 4 MIDs every year. It has fought an interstate war every nine years. Israel appears on top of the list of the most intense international rivalries in the last two-hundred-year period (Maoz 2004a).

Fifty-five years after its independence and after peace treaties with two of its most bitter enemies, Israel still lives by its sword. One out of ten Israelis in the age group of fifteen to forty-nine wears an army uniform on a daily basis. One out of every eight dollars that Israelis produce goes to defense every year. As this book goes to press, Israel continues to fight a bitter civil war with the Palestinians, the end of which is nowhere to be seen.

One could claim-indeed, many already have-that a fundamentally hostile environment, one that has yet to accept the Jewish state into the community of nations, imposed on Israel the need to become the "Sparta of modern times." However, some of the factual realities behind Israel's policies do not add up to a picture in which Israel plays the victim's role. For example, Israel signed a peace treaty with its most powerful enemy, Egypt, in 1979. This treaty seems stable even twenty-five years later. Yet, the size and scope of Israel's Defense Forces (IDF), the continued high defense spending, and its proclivity to use excessive force have not declined. They did not decline even after another peace treaty was signed with Jordan in 1994. Israel continues to maintain and-quite probably-continues to expand its nuclear capability, clinging to the policy of "nuclear ambiguity." Israeli and foreign strategists repeatedly claim that Israel is quantitatively and qualitatively superior to any combination of enemies in the region (e.g., Cordesman 2004, 2002; Gordon 2003). Yet, Israel keeps building and exercising its military power on a regular basis. The frequent use of massive air power and armored force in an attempt to quash the Palestinian uprising during the last four years is a vivid example of Israel's proclivity to amass and use excessive military force despite diminishing threats. It also suggests how futile this policy may be.

Is Israel forced to live by its sword, or does it want to live that way? Is the militarization of Israeli society a fact imposed by its hostile environment? Or is it a device by which its elite mobilizes the society to confront the domestic challenges that Israeli society has faced since its inception? Have Israel's military strategy and diplomacy responded to the challenge of survival in a highly complex, often hostile, and always challenging international environment? Or have these strategies been determined by internal considerations, structures, and people driven by personal and collective ambitions and drives?

Those who are looking for a single and elegant explanation and for clear answers to these questions would do best to turn to another book. I do not intend to provide direct answers to these questions, although some ideas could be gleaned from this study. Instead of trying to explain what made Israel the Sparta of modern times, I examine the goals its leaders set for the country's foreign and security policy. I investigate whether and to what extent the policies Israel has pursued over the years helped accomplish these goals. And-most important-I evaluate the central policies and strategies that Israel has applied over time and explain how they came about and why they succeeded or failed.

The observations offered by the present study about Israel's security and foreign policy are neither simple nor elegant. Many of them are quite controversial. This book is primarily an attempt to evaluate these policies, by asking a simple set of questions that connect goals to policy and policies to outcomes. Specifically, I examine the following questions:

1. What were the-explicit and hidden-goals of decision makers in key foreign and security matters?

2. How were the policies selected by decision makers supposed to accomplish these goals?

3. Were these goals accomplished?

4. If they were, how was the policy related to the outcomes?

5. If these goals were not accomplished, why not?

6. Did various policies have side effects, that is, outcomes that were not intended or were not foreseen by the policymakers?

7. If so, to what extent were these side effects in accordance with, or in contradiction to, the broader goals of Israel's security, foreign, and domestic policy?

In the present chapter I outline the goals of the study, its scope, its structure and approach, and the key themes that emerge in the coming chapters. Before going into these matters, however, we must outline the fundamental building blocks of Israel's security and foreign policy. In the next section I present the basic assumptions underlying Israel's security and foreign policy since 1948. On the basis of these assumptions I present the principal tenets of Israel's security conception and the derivative foreign policy. I emphasize the notion of a derivative foreign policy because-as I will document in the following chapters-Israel's foreign policy has always been a servant of Israel's security policy.

The third section provides a brief overview of the scholarship on Israel's security and foreign policy. This overview is necessarily general and superficial. It is intended only as a broad outline of various strands of thought in the study of Israeli history and security matters. Much of this literature will be used extensively in the chapters that follow. In the fourth section I discuss the theoretical and methodological principles that guide this study. The fifth section lays out the structure of this study and the key themes it invokes.

2. THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF ISRAEL'S NATIONAL SECURITY POLICY

The foundations of Israel's national security conceptions were laid down by David Ben-Gurion in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. Many Israeli strategists view these doctrinal foundations to be valid at present as well (Ben Israel 2001, 269-71; Tal 2000, vi). Ben-Gurion's ideas not only are widely accepted among the members of the Israeli security community but are widely shared by the Israeli public (Arian 1995, 65-66, 173-86, 254-71). I present these principal ideas and discuss them very briefly here. In subsequent chapters I reexamine many of these ideas in a more critical fashion.

Israel's security policy is based on a set of assumptions about Israel's regional and international environment. These assumptions define the basic threat perception that Israel is said to have experienced over the years.

1. The Arab world is fundamentally hostile toward Israel. It would attempt to destroy the Jewish state given the right chance. The Arabs-Palestinians, Egyptians, Syrians, or even more remote peoples such as the Algerians, Libyans, or Iraqis-have never accepted the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine. They might accept it as a (possibly temporary) fact, but they have never internalized the fact that Jews have the right to a national homeland in the Middle East. Therefore, the Arabs harbor a permanent and powerful motivation to annihilate the Jewish state. The only thing that prevents them from doing so is their awareness of the futility of this mission and/or their awareness that the price of such an attempt would be exorbitant. The implication is that Israel is destined to live for a long time under an existential threat. In the short term (the short term being the foreseeable future) its policies and actions can only affect the Arab cost-benefit calculus; they cannot affect Arab motivation. In the long run this motivation may change, but this is not certain, and the long run may be very long indeed.

2. Fundamental asymmetries exist between Israel and the Arab world. No matter how widely or how narrowly we define the boundaries of the Arab world, Israel faces enemies that are much more populous, have vastly larger territory, possess more natural resources, and are better networked with the outside world than is the Jewish state. Even if these resources are not spent directly on the mission of destroying Israel, the pool of resources at the disposal of Arab leaders creates a threat of vast magnitude.

3. The international community is an unreliable ally. Israel is dependent on the outside world to survive economically and militarily. As an advanced society, it also requires ties with the outside-mostly Western-world for cultural, educational, and social purposes. Israel is also dependent on the world because, up to the early 1990s, most of the Jewish population resided outside of Israel. Its spiritual, social, and economic ties to the Jewish community are an essential component of the Israeli national identity. Israel is also dependent on the outside world for weapons. At the same time, Israel cannot rely on the outside world to ensure its survival and defense. Ultimately, Israeli men and women will have to risk their lives to defend their country. Nobody else will do it for them. Moreover, both the experience of the Holocaust and the short history of the prestate and state periods suggest that the international community is an unreliable source of political and military support. It is at times of dire need that the international community-even Israel's closest friends and allies-has consistently disappointed Israel. Israel can ultimately rely only on itself to ensure its survival, not on the pledges of others, no matter how well intentioned they may be. The concept of "a people that dwells alone" is a clear expression of this perception of international isolation.

4. Israel's geography is a major constraint on its ability to fight. The map of Israel (see maps 1.1 and 1.2) shows how small Israel is in relation to its neighbors and how narrow the country's "waist" has been in the area immediately north and east of Tel Aviv-especially before the occupation of the territories during the Six Day War. This implies that an attack by one or more Arab states could split the country into several slices almost instantly. Moreover, Israel's population centers are within the range of light arms fire and certainly artillery fire of its enemy. A jet plane taking off from Syria, Jordan, and even Egypt can reach Israel's population centers in a matter of minutes. The Israeli civilian and military airfields are within the range of tactical Syrian missiles and a short flight from Egyptian bases in the Sinai and from Jordanian air bases. In the era of complex maneuvering jet fighters, Israel's planes do not have even enough room to circle around over Israeli airspace in order to practice or land in their bases. For Israel, losing territory means risking its very survival.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from DEFENDING THE HOLY LANDby Zeev Maoz Copyright © 2006 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
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