Defending Israel : A Controversial Plan Toward Peace

Rating:
Summary: Can good fences make viable neighbors?
Review: 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 a secure Israel will be able to redeploy its human and economic resources to resume the economic growth that was interrupted by the Palestinian uprisings.

There are at least two arguments against this approach, and van Creveld considers them both. Some have argued that it would amount to a reverse "ethnic cleansing" of Jews from the West Bank. This is a difficult argument for a non-Israeli to comprehend, since all the Jews on the West Bank moved there after the 1967 war to occupy land owned by Arabs. Many have already left. The other involves water. Van Creveld is, in my opinion, unduly optimistic on this point. Water from the West Bank's "Mountain Aquifer" and from the Jordan River (to which a Palestinian state would also have a claim) provides about a third of Israel's consumption. Foregoing this would significantly hamper agriculture (which currently uses more than half of all Israeli water resources) and, as he notes, would require building expensive and strategically vulnerable desalinization plants. It can be done, and it may have to be done, but it will require a major cultural shift from the notoriously profligate use of water by the Israelis.

For all who have been wondering what an end state in the Middle East might look like, that is, one that did not leave the place a radioactive desert even hotter than the one there now, van Creveld offers a message of hope. It will certainly not satisfy the fanatics on either side, but that is probably a good test of its justice if not its feasibility.

Rating:
Summary: A Military analysis
Review: 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


Rating:
Summary: Dubious recommendations
Review: Van Creveld does point out the problems Israel faces: terror, conventional attacks, and possible long-term hostility and threats no matter what it does. And he has a solution: reduce the threat of terror by getting out of the land that was under Arab occupation in 1966.

Unfortunately, the argument for doing this is unconvincing. And there are some strong arguments for doing something else. One is that ethnically cleansing the West Bank of its Jews is already a serious abrogation of human rights. Another is that it may well encourage Arab terror even more if the interim result of it is to gain general acceptance of Arab rights to steal Jewish land. I was not impressed by the author's grasp of such problems. Van Creveld may be correct that a fence separating the Jews and Arabs is a good idea. But there is no good reason to put even the heavily Jewish portions of the West Bank on the Arab side of the fence even when these areas are adjacent to the 1966 Israeli border.