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

1 The Israeli Security Puzzle: Conceptions, Approaches, Paradoxes

1 The Israeli Security Puzzle Conceptions, Approaches, Paradoxes 1. introduction On May 12, 1948, a group of nine men and one woman met in Tel Aviv to decide on the establishment of a new state. Around them, a ferocious civil war had been going on for the past six months. The British mandate was to expire in two days. The ten members of the Provisional State Council of the Jewish Agency faced a tough dilemma. The United Nations (UN) resolution of November 29, 1947, decreed that Palestine was to be partitioned into a Palestinian state and a Jewish state. The Arabs and the Palestinians had rejected this resolution, threatening to invade Palestine if the Jews declared their own state. The Palestinians— aided by irregular forces from various Arab states—had been ‹ghting the Jews since late 1947. As long as the British forces were in Palestine, there was a semblance of a government. Now that they were about to leave, it seemed necessary to somehow ‹ll this vacuum. The inclination of the Jewish leaders was to proclaim the formation of the Jewish state. But that would bring about an invasion by the armies of the Arab states. On the table for consideration was an American proposal to delay the declaration of independence, accept an armistice, and allow for a mediation process by the international community in an effort to ‹nd a mutually acceptable solution to the Palestine problem. The representatives of the security organs of the Yishuv—the prestate institutions —presented a bleak assessment of the coming war. They expected at 3 least three and as many as seven Arab states to send armies into Palestine. The Jewish population, numbering some 650,000 people, was being mobilized. By May 1948, the newly established army of the Jewish organizations amounted to some 80,000 recruits (Ostfeld 1994, 54). However, they were poorly equipped and required considerable training before they could be sent to the front. The military commanders anticipated as many as 120,000 Arab soldiers equipped with armor, airplanes, and artillery to participate in the invasion of Palestine (Ostfeld 1994, 23–24). The military commanders estimated the chance of survival of the Jewish state as even at best (Sharef 1959, 83–84; Shlaim 2000, 33). With the support of six members against four opposed, the Provisional Council decided to proclaim a Jewish state and call it the state of Israel. The Provisional Council would henceforth become the provisional government of Israel, until such time that elections could determine the permanent government. As David Ben-Gurion, the interim prime minister, had anticipated, on May 14, 1948, a combined invasion of a Jordanian and Egyptian army started. The Syrian and the Lebanese armies engaged in a token effort but did not stage a major attack on the Jewish state. Other states sent volunteers , but the combined strength of the Arab armies and the irregular forces ‹ghting the Jewish state was far less than anticipated. The balance of forces in terms of military personnel was in favor of the Israeli army (Golani 2002, 158–68). Initially the Jews had far less advanced military equipment than the Arab armies, but this changed quickly when Israel signed a weapons deal with Czechoslovakia. Other weapons deals through private sources also enabled the new state to tilt the balance of hardware in its favor (Ilan 1996, 181–200). After nearly seven months of ‹ghting (interrupted by two UN-decreed truces), Israel defeated decisively all the Arab states, crushed the Palestinian resistance, and signed a series of armistice agreements with all of its Arab neighbors. The War of Independence exacted a heavy toll on the Jewish state. A total of sixty-‹ve hundred soldiers and civilians died in the war, 1 percent of the entire Jewish population. The economy of the new state was in extremely bad shape, having been totally mobilized for the war effort. While the war was raging, thousands of Jewish refugees were ›owing into the country. They needed food, homes, work, language training, and other social bene‹ts. But the end of the war brought a great deal of hope and optimism to the new state. Many Israelis believed that the armistice agreements would soon be converted into peace treaties that would stabilize and legitimize the new state’s boundaries (Segev 1984; Yaniv 1995, 4 DEFENDING THE HOLY LAND 37–38; 1987a, 38). Ben-Gurion thought otherwise. He believed that the Arab...