Has force worked for Israel?
Jul 3rd, 2009 by MESH
Israel America Academic Exchange (IAAE) is a new organization that sponsors educational missions to Israel for American scholars in the fields of political science, international relations, international law, international economic development, modern history, and Middle East studies. By special arrangement, participants in the inaugural mission (June 22-29) have been invited to guest-post their impressions and assessments. Bruce Jentleson is professor of public policy and political science at Duke University. He is also a member of MESH.
From Bruce Jentleson
Central to our discussions was the debate over force and diplomacy as Israeli strategies, so I’ll focus on that for this post.
Is it the case that the lessons of the last 10-15 years are that force has worked, both as compellence and deterrence, and diplomacy has not? This was the dominant argument we heard from Israeli speakers. While the speaker selection was short of representative, I know from other interactions and reading that this perspective has become more prevalent. It also is a view our American group debated among ourselves.
Four main parts to the argument:
- The Gaza war was intended to impose substantial costs on Hamas and to deter further attacks on Israel. It achieved both; e.g., attacks from Gaza are down since the war.
- The same regarding Hezbollah and the 2006 Lebanon war: Look at the northern front and how quiet Hezbollah has been, and how weakened the recent elections showed it to be in Lebanese politics.
- Oslo didn’t work; Camp David 2000 was another instance of the Palestinians never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity; unilateral withdrawals, both Barak in Lebanon and Sharon in Gaza, gave land but didn’t bring pace; plus the recent stories swirling about Olmert ostensibly offering even concessions on Jerusalem. Arafat was an essentialist; his successors may have more will but lack capacity; Hamas is ideological.
- The status quo is not great for Israel, but it’s tolerable. Risk aversion, both security and politics, says keep relying on military power. Be sufficiently willing to negotiate to check off that box for the United States and the international community but not much more. Don’t antagonize the political coalition on which your power (read Netanyahu’s) depends.
An alternative analysis:
- Gaza: The evidence is more mixed and uncertain than claimed. On the one hand we were told of how few rockets had been launched, on the other of how there’d been a recent uptick. At minimum, six months is hardly enough of an empirical base on which to attribute durable deterrence success. The criteria for durability is not some out-there notion of the long-term, but it also can’t be so short term as to need to be “serviced” again with anything close to a comparable operation in the next year or two. Moreover, gains made need to be part of a net assessment that also takes into account costs incurred and gains made by the other side. One can see a strategic logic for Hamas by which the price it paid had value as (a) diversionary war, detracting attention from problems of its governance and re-igniting the enemy on which to increase its appeal (so lowering a negative source and increasing a positive one), and (b) playing into Israeli politics in ways that strengthen the Right, which in turn makes for strained relations w/the United States. The net assessment may still come out positive, but less dichotomously.
- 2006 Lebanon War: We do have three years of data, and it is a fact that the northern border has been quieter than in many years. That goes in the plus column, as does the demonstrated capacity to impose costs. But in the negative column: the Israeli military’s failure to prevail in this nonconventional warfare as a deterrence-weakening message; the failure to bring captured soldiers home alive; the political disarray that helped doom the Olmert government; and the further loss of international legitimacy as an instrumental and not just normative matter. Moreover, the causal link to Hezbollah’s June 2009 election performance is questionable. Hezbollah came out of the war strengthened. But it then overplayed its hand by unleashing its militias into Lebanese politics in 2007-08. Then as intervening variables in the run-up to the election, Saudi money for the coalition and, I’d at least postulate, the Obama effect made it more politically legitimate to at least not be anti-American.
- Lessons of Oslo, other diplomacy: George Kennan made the distinction between flaws of execution and flaws in the concept. The former means that the policy could have worked but was done poorly; the latter that it was inherently flawed. Oslo, et al., did have elements of the latter, but also plenty of the former, and on all sides (United States, Israel, Palestinians, others). It didn’t work—but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have worked. What would have happened if Rabin was not assassinated, given his domestic credibility and that he was having at least a degree of success in dealing with Arafat? And if the 1996 election, which Netanyahu won by less than 1 percent amidst the spoilers who got going on both sides, had come out differently? If the Clinton administration had been less accommodating and firmer against both sides playing both sides of the street? In the end, Arafat was the major problem, a Gromyko-like Mr. Nyet. He was never going to be a Mandela, but the essentialist analysis is too straight-line and dismissive of decision points and interactive dynamics along the way. As to Hamas, while it’s shown plenty of essentialism, it’s not clear that even this is fixed; see, e.g., the analysis of Khaled Meshal’s recent speech by Brig. Gen. (ret) Shlomo Brom.
- Deteriorating status quo: The domestic opportunity costs to Israel from the status quo were more graphic to me than ever before. See the economic analysis by Professor Dan Ben-David, Tel Aviv University and head of the Taub Center for Social Policy Research. Walk around and see and feel the rising societal power of the ultra-Orthodox, abetted by continuation of the Palestinian conflict both directly through the political utility of the enemy and indirectly as a distraction from the nation focusing on the threats to its balance of secularism and Jewish identity.
- Shifting regional strategic dynamics? While much is too soon to tell, there are signs that the strategic dynamics in the region may be shifting. Anti-fundamentalism is pushing back on many fronts in the Arab and Muslim worlds. The U.S.-Syria relationship has some traction. Perhaps Iran will come out of the current crisis more flexible. The Saudis and Arab League may be ready to make their peace initiative more than a piece of paper. Don’t know for sure, but the alignment of forces may potentially be more favorable than in a long time.
- Palestinians as a credible peace partner and viable state: This may not be the world’s hardest case for state-building, but it’s up there. Among the many challenges their leadership faces is better synching their maximalist positions on terms of a peace and their more limited capacities as yet to function as a viable state. This is tricky politically as well as in substantive policy terms. It likely will require various roles for various third parties. Plenty of work to be done here: the PA-Hamas talks being run by Egypt, security forces, the economy, lawlessness, spoilers. Not to be underestimated.
I’m still not ready to bet the next mortgage payment (non-subprime) on peace and security in the Middle East. But nothing we saw or heard has been sufficient to counter the Churchillian sense of a peace process still being the worst strategy except for all the others.
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3 Responses to “Has force worked for Israel?”
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I would like to present an Israeli position that does not quite tally with the Israeli argument outlined in Bruce Jentleson’s post.
Briefly, the Israeli argument presented by Bruce is that force has worked (see Gaza and Lebanon), while diplomacy has not (see Oslo), and that the status quo, while not perfect, is tolerable. My argument is that force indeed has worked, but the status quo is intolerable for Israel. Israel must use force not to prolong the status quo but to create the essential preconditions to undo the status quo and bring the occupation to an end. Time is not on Israel’s side either in terms of demographic trends in the occupied territories (not so in Israel proper) or in terms of Israel’s international legitimacy, which is being seriously undermined by the continued occupation. The Zionist enterprise from the very outset sought: a) to build the state of the Jewish people; and b) to have that state become a legitimate member of the family of nations. If Israel allows the status quo to continue indefinitely, it might end up forfeiting both of these historical objectives.
Israel must withdraw from the occupied territories through an agreement with the Palestinians, and possibly even without one if that can be achieved through a more coordinated form of unilateralism than the last effort in Gaza. But no agreement with the Palestinians, nor any form of stability in the wake of a unilateral act of sorts, will hold unless Israel can create an effective deterrence. Indeed, deterrence is the only alternative to occupation. The fact that it may have to be “maintained” or “serviced” every now and then does not make deterrence and compellence any less of an effective means of stabilizing Israel’s borders.
Frequently scholars and pundits alike argue that force does not work. Unfortunately, in the real world it does. The great menaces of the 20th century would never have been banished from the stage had it not been for the enormous use of force against them.
If we look through Israel’s history from 1948, through the border wars of the 1950s, culminating in the Suez war, then 1967 and 1973 and the war in Lebanon in 1982 (which, in the end, brought Arafat on his knees to Oslo), one discerns two distinct lessons. Generally, force has worked for Israel and brought the Arabs slowly but surely to come to terms with Israel. But Israel generally has not and should not rely solely on force. Israel’s power is not a club with which to bludgeon the Arabs into submission. Using it in that way would be immoral, foolhardy and unworkable. Israel’s power is an instrument to ensure a form of lasting peaceful co-existence with its neighbors, based on historical compromise (Egypt and Jordan are good examples). Indeed, the justice of the Zionist cause in the eyes of its founding fathers, most Israelis, and the international community rests on Israel’s acceptance of compromise with the Palestinians too—that is, partition or, as it is phrased today, “two states for two peoples.”
As for the specific cases of Lebanon and Gaza, I disagree with Bruce’s analysis of both. In Gaza, it is difficult to gauge how long the present lull may last. But I have no doubt that it was induced by the operation in Gaza. Hamas is a political organization of rational operators and not just terrorists. They need the support of the people of Gaza, who have had enough of war for the meantime. If there are some signs of Khalid Mash’al being somewhat less essentialist, I would argue that they stem from the war in Gaza too. The war shocked Hamas. They expected nothing even remotely similar, not in terms of the technology, the force employed or the boots on the ground. And I see no evidence to support the ascription to Hamas of some sophisticated use of the war to maneuver Israel to the right. The war was not their choice, nor their plan. At the time, they claimed Ehud Barak was playing domestic Israeli politics to save himself—i.e., they thought the war was serving Labor, not the Right. In short, the strained relations between Israel and the United States have little or nothing to do with Hamas, but rather reflect differences between Obama and Netanyahu.
In Lebanon, the deterrent effect of the 2006 war, as Bruce agrees, is more obvious. But he then goes on to mention in the “negative column” Israel’s military failures in the war as a deterrence-weakening message. In fact, three years after the war, deterrence seems to be working and the failures seem far less serious than portrayed at the time, primarily by a rather hysterical and sensationalist Israeli media, both print and electronic, that served Hezbollah a public relations victory on a silver platter. (This is not 20/20 hindsight; I wrote so in an article at the time.) The damage inflicted on Hezbollah and its infrastructure in South Beirut and South Lebanon still weighs heavily on the organization and severely limits its freedom of action not only vis-à-vis other Lebanese communities hostile to Hezbollah, but amongst the Shiites in the south too.
True, Hezbollah has more and better rockets now than before the war. In that respect, they are more powerful than they were in 2006. But deterrence is not about preventing rearmament. It is about preventing the use of the new materiel. Preventing the rearmament was UNIFIL’s job (together with the government of Lebanon) as outlined in UNSC resolution 1701. That was never implemented, and no one in Israel ever believed it would be. But that elemental flaw in 1701 only serves to reinforce the Israeli reliance on its own power, deterrence and compellence, rather than on the UN or other international forces.
As for the elections in Lebanon, Hezbollah’s poorer-than-expected showing had precious little to do with the war in 2006 or Vice President Joe Biden’s visit. The elections in Lebanon had more to do with the confessional politics and long-term demographic shifts in Lebanon than with the war of three years ago, the recent visit by Biden, or any “Obama effect.” Many Westerners (and many Israelis) give themselves more credit than they deserve for the movements and machinations of local politics in the Middle East. In Middle Eastern politics, primary credit should be given to the locals in the crafting of their own political fortunes.
Asher Susser is director of external affairs and senior research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University.
After reading the compelling post by Bruce Jentleson and comment by Asher Susser, I couldn’t resist the urge to make a few observations about what their discussion means, in my view, for Washington.
There is no doubt that force and diplomacy both work, but they work best when they are tied together as part of an integrated strategy. Bruce, however, described an internal Israeli debate that sees force and diplomacy as wholly separate tracks. This kind of dichotomous thinking arises when the political debate becomes so detached from realities on the ground that it can no longer shape military strategy. There are domestic Israeli factors that give rise to this polarization. But it is also indicative of a deficient American diplomacy. It is the job of the United States to provide—to borrow a term from the peace-processing world—a “political horizon” that will shape effective strategies of our allies.
If I interpret Asher correctly, he doubts whether a two-state solution is within our grasp in the near future. I don’t want to put words in Asher’s mouth, however, so let me take responsibility for the assertion myself: the impediments to a two-state solution are currently too great to assume that within the next four years we can achieve a lasting agreement between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Consequently, we should be thinking in terms of shaping the conflict—diplomatically and militarily—rather than solving it. The goal of our diplomacy should be to create the conditions that will permit the next generation of leaders to conduct a meaningful process that might result in a signing ceremony on the White House lawn.
Oslo and Camp David II illustrate the dangers of aiming too high too fast. Such efforts force the protagonists down roads that they are not capable of traversing. The cost of failure is incalculable.
U.S. diplomatic strategy must, instead, be focused on the primary impediments to a two-state solution. These are currently five in number. Listed by order of severity they are: the regional influence of Iran (and its facilitators, Syria and Qatar); Hamas; Hezbollah; Fatah disarray; and the Israeli settlement movement. As the fate of the Israeli settlers in Gaza showed, the last obstacle is the easiest of the five to overcome. Unfortunately, Washington is currently fixated on the settlements, which, it has apparently convinced itself, will significantly help it address the other four.
Surrogates of the Obama administration dismiss this criticism with an arsenal of familiar answers: the peace process will broker a Sunni-Israeli alliance against Iran; it will detach Damascus from Tehran; it will remove the pretext for Hezbollah’s weapons; and it will strengthen Abbas against Hamas. In short, the peace process is one of our most effective strategic weapons for undermining our enemies. These sound plausible, but they are based on a solipsistic understanding of the Middle East.
These arguments suffer equally from Eurocentrism and Jewcentricity. Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah are primarily concerned with the balance of power within their own societies. The Americans and the Israelis are not the most important actors on their stage. Changes in the balance of power with Israel do not have nearly as great an impact on that stage as advocates of the peace process claim. I can only reiterate what Asher wrote: “Many Westerners (and many Israelis) give themselves more credit than they deserve for the movements and machinations of local politics.”
Linkage does work, however, in the other direction. Victory of the reformists in Tehran would benefit the two-state solution greatly. Countering the Iranian regime and its malign influence, therefore, should be the target of our flagship diplomatic efforts.
To return to the original debate, as outlined by Bruce: at least some of the Israelis who are saying “diplomacy doesn’t work” are expressing the view that “the international community’s agenda for Israel is out of touch with the real threats and processes on the ground.” The international community sees the storm clouds that Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah generate, and it responds by saying, “We need another Madrid conference.”
The amount of bureaucratic man-hours that such a project will eat up, the high-level attention that it will absorb, the political capital that it will expend, the expectations that it will generate—all of these factors and more amount to a whopping opportunity cost. It is easy to ignore this cost when the alternative is depicted as “Peace Process vs. War.” The real alternative to the peace process, however, is not war but a different diplomatic process altogether.
Bruce argued (without quoting Churchill) that it’s “better to jaw-jaw than to war-war.” He’s right, of course. But that begs the question: What are we jaw-jawing about?
Michael Doran is a member of MESH.
I appreciate Asher Susser’s response. Indeed his talk at the opening dinner of our trip was among the most insightful we heard. It was with his views in mind, as well as some others, that I posed the argument that force works and diplomacy doesn’t as “dominant” in the current Israeli strategic and political discourse, but not unitarily held. The points Asher makes in his post laying out an alternative view are helpful in this regard.
My argument was not as portrayed—that force doesn’t work—rather that it has come to have more limited and conditioned utility than in the past. The prevalence of asymmetric warfare and the heavily political objectives for which force tends to be used (ultra-Clausewitzian, if you like) have been making for a greater gap between the possession of superior military capabilities and the capacity to achieve strategic objectives through the use of military power. Nor is this just for Israel: e.g., the contrast for the United States between the 1991 Persian Gulf war and the 2003 Iraq war; and Ethiopia’s failed 2006-08 military intervention in Somalia. Asher’s emphasis on how well force worked for Israel in its wars up to 1973 is more consistent with this point than challenging of it.
Deterrence arguably has been more central to Israeli strategy than it has been for any other country at least since the end of the Cold War. To be sure, it continues to have value as a standing posture and for certain objectives. Yet amidst changes in the nature of threats, the greater relevance of asymmetric warfare, the varying bases for calculations of credibility by various audiences, and other factors, deterrence requisites are harder to meet. That’s where net assessments of cases like Lebanon 2006 and Gaza 2008-09 are crucial for policy implications going forward.
The “real world” Asher refers to requires assessing both the scope and the limits of military power. It’s not force or diplomacy; both sides of that formulation are inadequate. It’s striking a balance that’s key. On that I think we agree.
Bruce Jentleson is a member of MESH.