Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel's Security and Foreign Policy

12 Principal Findings and Lessons

12 Principal Findings and Lessons 1. introduction This study’s purpose was not to document history but rather to evaluate policy. I examined various episodes in Israel’s history—principally the major wars in which it was involved—as well as long-term policy issues—such as the limited use of force, nuclear policy, peace diplomacy, and covert interventions. Several common ‹ndings emerge from this investigation. The following section outlines the most signi‹cant ones. The last section draws some policy recommendations on the basis of these ‹ndings. These ‹ndings and recommendations serve as a basis for the outline of some future scenarios in chapter 14. 2. principal findings 1. Several of the principal assumptions on which Israel’s national security doctrine was built are based on ›awed empirical foundations. Despite the fundamental ›aws in these assumptions the security and foreign policy elite in Israel never revised the basic building blocks of its doctrines. Israel’s security and foreign policy has rested since its inception on the premise that it was under a constant and severe existential threat: that the Arab states and the Palestinians were bent on the destruction of the Jewish state. The perceived severity and magnitude of this threat were due to two fundamental sets of evidence. Arab rhetoric indicated the intent to carry out this threat. It suggested—as Harkabi (1972) points 544 out—the totalism of the Arab aims. The material and human asymmetry between Israel and the Arab world indicated that the Arabs had the potential capabilities for annihilating the state of Israel. This threat perception was shared by Israeli practitioners and by many scholars who studied Israel’s politics and society in general and its security and foreign policy in particular. There is no question that this was and to some extent still is a genuine perception at both the elite and mass levels.1 But what is the validity of these perceptions? Because this book is not about Arab intentions and policies, we cannot go into a detailed analysis of the extent to which Israel’s threat perception matched the actual intentions and policies of the Arab states and of the Palestinians. I did discuss previously, however, three important aspects of Arab intentions and policies. First, the analysis of of‹cial and unof‹cial writings and speeches of Arab leaders, opinion makers, and others suggests very clearly that Arab rhetoric was extremely hostile and still tends to be so. It was and still is considerably anti-Israeli and antiSemitic . So there is more than a grain of truth to the Israeli threat perception . Yet, from the late 1960s on, there has been an increasing trend in Arab rhetoric that suggests a willingness to accept the state of Israel and to live in peace with it. There has also been a growing wave of selfcriticism in parts of the Arab world and among the Palestinians regarding the adverse effects that the Arab-Israeli con›ict has had on the Arab world. This trend, which for the lack of a better term I will label “Arab liberalism,” is more than offset by the growing radicalism among Islamic groups that is both anti-Western and anti-Semitic. But Arab liberalism is a new trend; the link of Arab-Israeli peace to progress and democracy in the Arab world is a new brand of liberalism, one that did not exist before.2 Second, there is a huge gap between the hostility to Israel in Arab rhetoric and the actual efforts invested in ‹ghting it. In fact, for a long time there may well have been an inverse correlation between rhetoric and effort in the Arab-Israeli con›ict: those states and groups that made the most noise did the least action. Moreover, the states that suffered the most casualties in the con›ict were—for the most part—the ‹rst to engage in de facto or de jure peace with Israel. And given the stability of the Egyptian-Israeli and Jordanian-Israeli peace agreements, and even the Syrian-Israeli disengagement agreement in the Golan Height, it is fair to say that the existential threat from the immediate circle of enemies was removed to a considerable degree. Third, at no time—including during the 1948 War of IndepenPrincipal Findings and Lessons 545 dence—did the Arab world invest in the kind of human and material resources that would have been required to carry out a...