Defending Israel: A Controversial Plan Toward Peace

Defending Israel is an excellent book written by the world-renowned military historian, Martin Van Creveld. This book can best be described as an essay on how Israel can best protect its borders now and in the future. In it, he asserts that wars of today have shifted away from conventional style warfare towards guerilla war (including the use of terrorism). By abandoning the Occupied Territories and building a wall around Israel's borders (like the wall going around the West Bank today), Martin Van Creveld states that this is the best way to deal with current and future threats to Israel's security. In addition, Van Creveld offers thought provoking ideas about the nature of Israel's security from the burgeoning private security industry to ideas as to whether strategic weapons (e.g. "nukes" - assuming that Israel has them) should be placed on mobile platforms like ships. No doubt this has a strong impact on Israeli politics, for it is what Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has been doing before he succumbed to a stroke some time ago. Whether his successor, Olmert, can carry on with this strategy remains to be seen. Nevertheless it is a most amazing book that has left a big, lasting impact on Israeli and Middle East politics overall.

Guerillas, so long as they do not lose, win. This observation by Henry Kissinger--quoted by van Creveld in the same chapter where he recommends the wall--forms the backbone of the book: How does a small country with no strategic depth succeed where Kissinger and the United States failed? For the United States, loss in Vietnam was traumatic but not fatal. For Israel, with its tiny population, religious and cultural distinctiveness from its Arab antagonists, and only the width of the Jordan rather than breadth of the Pacific Ocean to withdraw behind, any loss could represent a mortal threat. It is not a risk that Israel is willing to take. Van Creveld proposes a solution brilliant in its simplicity and creativity. If Israel cannot win an "evolved form of insurgency," as Marine Colonel T. X. Hammes described what is often known as "fourth generation warfare," (or as van Creveld calls it, "non-trinitarian war") the solution is to convert the struggle back to something Israel can win. This approach may be contrasted with Israel's current strategy, which is to use conventional forces to try to win an unconventional war. Van Creveld is proposing to first convert the struggle to a conventional one, then win--or what is much more likely, deter--it. Building on the framework he established in The Transformation of War, van Creveld goes to some lengths to explain why Israel is unlikely to prevail in its struggle with the Palestinians by using its military forces to suppress the Intifada. Although the arguments are complex, they all come back to an observation by Joe Galloway (the reporter who was with Hal Moore at Ia Drang) that when conventional troops kill a guerilla, they create two more to take his or her place. If you throw in the higher birth rate of the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza, you see that Israel is fast running up against the dismal laws of arithmetic. If one rules out rounding up all remaining Arabs and marching them across the Jordan or into the Sinai--such ethnic cleansing possibly achievable in 1967 but mere right-wing fantasy today--the solution is two fold. First separate the warring parties. This means withdrawing virtually all the settlements from the West Bank and absolutely all of them from Gaza and building a wall "so high a bird can't fly over it." This produces two well-defined geographical entities with fairly short borders (much shorter than current Israeli plans for the security fence.) It would also remove the 120 or so settlements, which now require more force to protect than Israel used to defeat Egypt in the 1967 war. Then exploit Israel's universally recognized superiorities in maneuver warfare and advanced technology to deter or speedily interdict and defeat any attack, which would now have to be conventional, from any Arab state including the new Palestinian one. At some point in the future, when both parties desire it, the wall can be torn down. In the meantime, van Creveld predicts that

of defensible borders. Israel has fought 5 major wars, each one to secure its borders. 1948 was to create a country. 1956 was to stop the infiltration and prempt Egypt's growing army. 1967 was fought out of desperation, but led to the creation of a `Greater Israel'. 1973 was a defensive conflict, that almost proved a disaster. 1982 was fought to stop the shelling of the Galilee by a proto-Palestinian state in Lebanon. The recent pseudo-conflicts of the First(1989-1992) and primarily the second Intifada(2000-present) have created new border issues, resulting in the construction of the security fence. Creveld fresh from his studies of the IDF and Dayan now uses his analysis in this fresh and insightful book to explain the question of defensible borders and how they relate to Israel today. In 1948 any military tactician could see the borders `given' to Israel by the U.N and rejected by the Arab leadership, were indefensible. The Arab state controlled the high ground, Israel the coastal plain. Israel was roughly 9 miles wide, meaning the country could be cut in half in a days fighting. But today, as Creveld points out, Israel has the best military in the Middle East, and perhaps the best in the world. Israel's inventiveness have led to her developing of the Merkava tank and other weapons that could easily clean up the armies of her neighbors. Beyond Israel's army are the peace treaties that at least on paper guarantee Israeli security against a renewal of the 1967 situation, the situation that caused the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza. Today the threat is terror. And terror, unlike the Germans, can actually be stopped by maginot line style defenses, listening posts, and other technology based infrastructure. This book argues passionately, and intelligently that Israel's military solution should be a withdrawal to a line somewhere near the green line, that can be easily defended and yet leaves the majority of palistinians outside Israel, to fend for their own destiny. This book does not ask hard questions, such as what to do with the 250,000 Israelis living in villages on the West Bank, but it does give a military solution. An excellent, well thought out, non-emotional approach, this will be enjoyable reading for any student of the middle east conflict and anyone wanting to understand one path to peace. Seth J. Frantzman