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11 The Structure and Process of National Security and Foreign Policy in Israel
- University of Michigan Press
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11 The Structure and Process of National Security and Foreign Policy in Israel 1. introduction This study has identi‹ed a number of serious problems of a continuing and persistent nature in the ways Israel designed and carried out its security and foreign policy. These problems are recurrent over time and across policy areas. In each of the preceding chapters I attempted to account for the underlying causes of the policy problems I identi‹ed. I examined different explanations that have appeared in the analytical and historical literature and evaluated their plausibility. In quite a few cases I offered alternatives to prevailing explanations of Israeli policies and behaviors. In some cases my explanations were the only ones offered simply because there have been few or no systematic studies of such issues as Israeli clandestine interventions in intra-Arab affairs and Israel’s peace diplomacy. As I stated in chapter 1, the explanations were neither simple nor elegant. In many cases I argued that the actual policies were due to a multitude of factors and processes and could not be explained by one or even a few overarching causes. Nevertheless, throughout the book I have argued repeatedly that policy -making in Israel has always been and continues to be dominated by a centralized, self-serving, and self-perpetuating security community. The structure of this community and the way it affects policy, relative to other 499 bodies in the Israeli political and bureaucratic system, seems to be an overriding factor that has affected Israel’s policies over time and across issues. In this chapter I explore the linkages between the structure of the Israeli foreign and security community and policy outcomes. I argue that the ways in which the Israeli security community is organized account for its de‹cient behavior in a wide array of policy areas. Moreover, the lack of proper oversight on this community accounts for the continuous policy failures and for the fact that there have been so many self-perpetuating follies over the years. Clearly, structure is not everything. Nor is it completely deterministic in terms of its effects on policy. When making public policy, people, their ideas, and their personalities matter. The interpersonal relationships among people have a major impact on policy-making and policy implementation . Opportunities and challenges in the nation’s external environment and the state’s basic attributes de‹ne to a large extent the parameters within which the state operates. Internal political, economic, and social processes that operate parallel to the formal and informal policy networks have an important bearing on the process and outcome of the policy. All these factors may vary from one issue to another, from one point in time to another, and from one policy problem to another. The structure of the security and foreign policy communities is but a ‹lter through which external and internal inputs are converted into perceptions of problems that need to be resolved and into solutions that are available for their resolution (Brecher 1972, 117–33). But it is a very effective ‹lter nevertheless, and therefore it deserves close attention. A signi‹cant number of studies on Israeli security and foreign policy have analyzed the external and internal settings of Israel’s foreign and security doctrine. However, there is relatively little analysis of the structures within such policies are made. Brecher’s (1972) monumental work is perhaps the single most important study of the structure of Israel’s foreign policy setting. It does pay considerable attention to the analysis of the military establishment, but its focus is on the foreign policy system. As we will see, one of the key problems of Israel’s policy-making architecture is that its foreign policy system was always weak and subordinate to the security community. International and foreign policy considerations were, for the most part, secondary to security considerations and military objectives. Several studies that focus on civil-military relations (e.g., Perlmutter 1969; Ben Meir 1995; S. Cohen 2000, 2003; Levy 2003) note the problematic nature of these relationships. But their discussion of the 500 DEFENDING THE HOLY LAND [3.91.8.23] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:02 GMT) structural aspects of these relations is very general and not directly tied to fundamental policy issues. The structure of the foreign and security system concerns the institutions that are engaged in making policy and the web of relationship among them. Clearly, the number of such institutions is vast and the relationships among all these institutions...