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No substitute for strategy
By DANIEL DORON

Despite its brilliant tactical victories, Israel has never truly won a war against the Arabs. In fact, Israel has habitually snatched diplomatic defeats out of the jaws of military victory.

In part this was due to the lack of an overall strategy, as none of Israel's leaders defined goals for war or the means to achieve them, or to consistently pursue them.

A similar fate may befall our present war against terrorism. Despite some great tactical achievements, Israel is not winning this war because it is failing – yet again – to articulate a winning strategy. Israel, with its powerful fighting forces, finds itself at the mercy of even relatively small groups such as Hizbullah, allowing them to seize the initiative and to dictate the terms of engagement. Even against Palestinian terrorism, Israel acts mostly in a haphazard manner, and from a defensive position.

The lack of a determined and cohesive military strategy that would seriously damage terrorist organizations by eliminating most of their leadership in one fell swoop (rather than in dribs and drabs – as in the case of Ahmed Yassin and others – inviting continual condemnations and reaction) is hardly surprising. Lack of concerted action, acting only in response to near catastrophes is the typical modus operandi of all Israeli governments in all spheres of their activity.

More than in most countries, most of the energies of Israeli politicians are devoted to jostling for power and for the considerable spoils offered by an extremely centralized, government-controlled economy. Little energy remains for what is supposed to be the business of government – the provision of security and other public good.

In the case of the military, the problem is confounded not only by the innate difficulties of all huge bureaucratic organizations to quickly adapt to changing circumstances but also by a no-win ethos. Like other institutions, the IDF was subjected to a high degree of politicization stemming back to its Hagana days. Many army leaders, like many in the elite generally, are left of center. They have embraced the utopian assumptions of the peace camp. Many Israeli generals are convinced that terrorism cannot be vanquished by force. They do not bother to explain, to themselves or to others, what is the justification for the enormous outlays Israel spends on its military if it cannot solve military problems, or how their ideological position squares with the many instances where terrorist groups – from the 11th-century Assassins to the armed bands of the 1936-9 Great Arab Revolt – were totally vanquished by military force alone.

ISRAEL'S FAILURE to curb terrorism is what makes an exhausted Israeli public grasp at any straw offered by its confused leadership, which believes that a defensive tactic, a wall, is a solution to terrorism.

Walls have been and will continue to be breached. So while a wall may significantly reduce the number of terrorist incidents, it cannot prevent – as its supporters readily admit – all terrorist attacks. Worse, it cannot ensure against mega-attacks causing enormous damage and many casualties. Thus strategically, the security fence has very limited usefulness. More disturbingly, it may come at great cost and some unforeseeable consequences, and it might actually reduce Israel's ability to fight terrorism effectively.

For the wall to function, it must not only be expensively constructed with sophisticated monitoring devices, but it must also be maintained, even defended, by mobile quick-response units – again, a costly proposition. Perhaps instead of investing heavily in a wall, it would be cheaper and more effective to construct a light fence and invest the savings in more mobile response units, probably achieving better results. A temporary fence would also reduce the objections raised against the wall that can be seen as a precursor of a permanent border.

Walls have a tendency to produce a Maginot Line mentality. The Bar-Lev Line was first conceived as a series of outposts meant to serve as trip wires along the Suez Canal, alerting mobile units to repel an Egyptian crossing. Heavy Egyptian shelling forced the Israelis to turn them into heavily fortified strongholds whose protection required the creation of a line and a defensive strategy, which soon overshadowed the concept of mobile defense. This was an important factor in the disastrous beginning of the Yom Kippur War.

But the greatest drawback is that the wall punishes the innocent along with the guilty. This is counterproductive. The wall will exacerbate the miserable conditions upon which terrorist organizations thrive. It will assign the Palestinian Arab population to the mercy of a corrupt irredentist leadership that has already proven its ability to transform the desperation it creates into terrorist acts against Israel.

Extolling unilateral withdrawal and the separation wall, the writer A. B. Yehoshua explained, "From the moment we withdraw, I don't want to know their names. I do not want any personal relations with them I am not going to perpetrate war crimes for their own sake, but I will use all my force against them (if they attack us)."

Apparently even this great liberal does not understand that you cannot lock terrorism behind a wall, threaten brutal responses, and expect quiet. Peace will only come when a new Palestinian leadership, emerging from a civil society, will replace the criminal Palestinian Authority and its terrorist leadership imposed by Oslo. Only then will the Palestinians be able to make some concessions for peace the way Israel is ready to do.

Meanwhile, Israel's failure to systematically eliminate terrorism by destroying its organizations and its leadership is, paradoxically, a major obstacle to peace. It causes unnecessary massive loss of life and suffering, not only for Israelis but for the Palestinian Arabs too.

The writer is president of The Israel Center for Social and Economic Progress, an independent pro-market policy think tank. www.icsep.org.il

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1080108197295