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Introduction
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 1 Introduction In this volume we examine the combat experience of Israel’s ground forces in the Al-Aqsa Intifada that erupted in September 2000. We contend that the case of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in this conflict allows us to explore debates about how the armed forces of industrial democracies wage contemporary war. Our book, however, is not another addition to scholarly works focusing on the broad social and organizational features of these militaries or on the special character of “new wars” (Kaldor 2001). Rather, our analysis is placed at the level of combat, the localized conflict between two or more armed actors. In other words, we explore the constantly changing circumstances of warfare for the actual units and soldiers engaged in current conflicts. A short description of how our research project commenced may clarify the issues we have set out to study. At the beginning of July 2000 we began a project centered on the Israeli army’s combat companies , primarily infantry and armor. The company level in many armed forces is considered the lowest level that is large enough to be powerful but small enough to be intimate (Baum 2005). Our aim was to analyze such issues as the formal and informal social structures of the units, leadership patterns, or relations between experienced soldiers and “newcomers.” Concretely, we thought that an interesting entryway into these issues would be those regular but hitherto unstudied transitions between periods of operational deployment and training. Our reasoning was that in these transitions—kinds of “mini-organizational crises”—the underlying social and organizational dynamics of the units would be most evident. This was a period when Israel had withdrawn from southern Lebanon and when, we assumed, the main operational assignments of the IDF would continue to be policing the territories and implementing the Oslo and subsequent accords. Indeed, many of the troops and commanders we interviewed were worried that they would have no more serious work, since the intense deployment in 2 Rethinking Contemporary Warfare southern Lebanon was over. In all, we expected a relatively calm period of research. Three months after we began the project, the Al-Aqsa Intifada erupted, marking the IDF’s critical transition into a state of prolonged conflict. We consequently found ourselves in the rather “advantageous” position of being able both to chart this intense transition and to accompany the development of the conflict. We quickly decided to continue our research by observing the front-line units within the renewed clashes and the often chaotic situations they experienced. From the social scientific perspective, the Al-Aqsa Intifada provided us a rare opportunity to witness the way military forces are suddenly mobilized and have to shift quickly from routine activities into sudden, often very violent, action. While the move into combat is, of course, crucial for any armed force, it is rather rare to find it documented and analyzed. Moreover, it is often during such transformations that many of the assumptions that troops have about military work are suddenly exposed. Yet many of the phenomena we encountered during this initial period and in the subsequent five years of our project did not fit our and other scholars’ propositions about combat. As we gathered data— interviewed soldiers and officers, observed camps and deployments, or held numerous conversations with commanders—we found ourselves rethinking many of our assumptions and seeking new ways to understand the characteristics and dynamics of contemporary combat. When we tried to make sense of our data, seven sets of issues—paralleling the major parts of this volume—emerged. Each set is related to social scientific discussions about contemporary conflicts and the military. The first set centers on difficulties many troops had in defining what has come to be called the Al-Aqsa Intifada. When interviewing one company commander about three months into the conflict, he said “I don’t know what to call this.” We sensed that this kind of dif- ficulty underlay our need to conceptualize the combination of armed revolt, civilian protest, and violent demonstrations that characterized the uprising. Calling the Al-Aqsa Intifada part of the “new wars” or the combat taking place within it as “low-intensity conflict” was akin to offering labels but not conceptualizing what was happening. What was needed, we felt, was a framework that could encompass the variety of violent practices used by the IDF and armed Palestinians, the ebb and flow of...