Can Israeli deterrence succeed where God’s failed?
A flare up on the Gaza border shows that Israel’s enemies aren’t afraid to challenge it, calling into question a time-tested defense strategy
Mitch Ginsburg is the former Times of Israel military correspondent.
This past summer, Israel fought a 50-day campaign against Hamas largely in the name of deterrence, attempting to purchase, through force and spilled blood, a prolonged period of tranquility.
But with Gaza in Hamas’s hands, south Lebanon under Hezbollah control, the Syrian Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula very much under the medieval jurisdiction of al-Qaeda and its affiliates – and with many of the terror groups competing against one another – the power of deterrence, one of the three pillars of Israel’s security doctrine, has come under assault.
It is still unclear, amid renewed tensions along the Gaza border, whether Israel’s prompt response Wednesday to sniper fire from Gaza, killing a Hamas regional surveillance operative in the southern Gaza Strip shortly after shots from the area severely wounded an Israeli soldier from the Bedouin Reconnaissance Battalion, can preserve the cherished and often slippery attainment of the past summer’s war – deterrence. And it is also far from certain whether deterrence, in the age of asymmetric warfare, deserves still to be considered alongside decisive victory and advance warning as part of the three-pronged defense strategy of Israel.
In truth, there have been problems with deterrence theory from the outset. Even God failed at first. “But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die,” Eve said, relaying God’s warnings to the serpent in Genesis 3.
Three verses later, God’s deterrence strategy, backed up with an explicit threat, collapsed, as Eve, and then Adam, tasted of the forbidden fruit.
Not only were God’s “red lines crossed,” Maj. Gen. Yossi Baidatz, the head of the IDF’s Command and Staff College, wrote in a recent research paper published in “Eshtonot,” an army journal of strategic affairs, but the entire strategy was called into question, prompting the Almighty to change tacks to “active prevention.”
“So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life,” the chapter concludes.
Today, the notion of effective deterrence has again come under significant strain. But one way of bolstering the beleaguered notion is through clarity.
In this Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon has excelled. A former dairy farmer, Ya’alon is nothing if not plainspoken. In politics and diplomacy – see under: Kerry – this can be hobbling to one’s career. As the minister in charge of the Israeli army, though, this clear consistency, in the form of red lines and foreseeable reactions to unprovoked strikes from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere, has served as an anchor in the midst of swirling regional uncertainty.
A lack of clarity, Professor Dima Adamsky and Baidatz, a former head of research in military intelligence, wrote, is what likely led to the outbreak of the Second Lebanon War – because while it was demonstratively true that Israel sought to avoid a conflict in the north during the peak years of the Second Intifada, it was, by the summer of 2006, quite ready to respond to provocation with extreme force. “Conversely, the concept of deterrence during that period, for political reasons, too, did not project that threat in a clear way.”
The signals, Baidatz and Adamsky wrote, were too faint, “eroding the reputation of the Israeli response.”
For the time being, the voluble and explicit warnings to Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria have proven effective. Both Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah chief and strategic ally to Assad, and other international actors, including Russia, have come to expect, and apparently accept, an alleged Israeli response to each known attempt to transport advanced arms from Syria to the hands of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
And yet, deterrence itself, as a tool that enables long periods of quiet amid a resolutely militant Middle East – a cornerstone of Ya’alon’s concept of survival in the region – is not sufficient, in Gaza and elsewhere, according to Baidatz and Adamsky.
“The experience of recent years provides further backing to the assertion that ‘campaigns whose logic is deterrence,’ even if at their end a period of quiet is created, do not solve the fundamental problems with the enemy, but rather seemingly enable the management of continuous violence,” the two wrote.
“This delusion may cause a contentedness among the leaders and spare them the need to construct a strategy.”
The Times of Israel Community.