What will replace the Ya’alon doctrine?
As defense minister, Moshe Ya’alon presented a comprehensive, conservative policy for Israel’s security. What will Liberman bring?
Judah Ari Gross is The Times of Israel's religions and Diaspora affairs correspondent.
With his resignation on Friday, former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon leaves behind a security mechanism driven toward one goal: not peace, but quiet.
A pragmatist, Ya’alon saw little possibility for improvement in Israel’s security situation, only the looming threat of full-blown conflict. Therefore, maintaining the status quo became his primary occupation.
“Quiet above all else” served as Ya’alon’s mantra since he took over the position of defense minister from Ehud Barak in 2013.
His announcement Thursday of a new plan to improve West Bank checkpoints, which aims to minimize the friction at the flashpoint crossings, is the latest extension of that doctrine.
But with the hawkish Avigdor Liberman poised take over the Defense Ministry, it remains unclear if that policy of calm and containment will continue or if Israel’s security forces will adopt the more aggressive stance the Yisrael Beytenu party leader has been calling for over the years.
Despite his frequent public criticism of Ya’alon’s strategies, it’s not quite as clear what Liberman’s policy would be as defense minister. Nor is it clear how much power Netanyahu is actually prepared to hand over to him.
During Ya’alon’s tenure, the quiet he so desired was broken twice, in 2014 with a war in Gaza and in late 2015 to early 2016 with a wave of terror attacks that rocked both the West Bank and Israel proper.
Domestically, the once almost daily attacks by Palestinians against Israeli citizens, security forces and visiting tourists have dwindled, for which Ya’alon took credit in his resignation speech at Defense Ministry headquarters on Friday morning.
Though Israel’s borders are surrounded by powderkegs, the former defense minister’s policies and the army’s execution of those policies have kept matches away from them. On Israel’s tensest borders — Gaza, Lebanon, Syria — active restraint has been the name of the game.
“I tell soldiers not to make rude gestures to the other side,” an officer on Israel’s border with Lebanon said. “[The Israeli soldier] makes a rude gesture and then the other side makes a rude gesture. So then the soldier yells something so the guy on the other side throws a rock at the border fence so then the soldier shoots at the other side and then it gets out of control.”
Rapid escalation to all-out war is the fear in areas bordering Lebanon, Syria and Gaza, so under Ya’alon only those actions deemed to “threaten Israeli sovereignty” earned IDF return fire. And since 2014 Israeli airstrikes in retaliation to Gaza rocket fire have only rarely resulted in casualties.
For this policy of restraint, Liberman, and others on the right, frequently condemned Ya’alon and the Netanyahu government for being feckless and weak in response to Hamas aggression. But this strategy of containment following the 2014 war has undoubtedly brought about the calmest period on the Gaza border in the 11 years since Israel disengaged from the coastal enclave, though future conflict is still seen as inevitable.
After Hezbollah fired an anti-tank missile at an IDF jeep in January 2015, killing two soldiers, MK Liberman called for a “disproportionate” response to the attack. But by staying out of another conflict with the Shiite terror group, Israel was spared casualties, while Hezbollah continued to lose members in its war in Syria. (According to some analysts’ estimates, about 1,200 Hezbollah fighters have died in the civil war — far more than have been killed in all of the conflicts with Israel.)
But Ya’alon’s policy comes with a downside. By stressing temporary quiet, but not lasting peace, the policy has yielded little if any progress toward a resolution with the citizens of Gaza nor has it done anything to actually prevent — and not just delay — a war with Hezbollah, which is believed to have a stockpile of well over 100,000 missiles and rockets.
Which Liberman will we get?
Unlike Ya’alon, who wrote a book (“The Long Short Path”) detailing his overall perspective on security, the presumed defense minister-to-be has written no such comprehensive doctrine. Liberman’s 2004 book, “My truth,” deals less with concrete security strategy and more with his Palestinian peace plan — which he has since altered — and with the abstract concepts of loyalty and identity in Israeli society.
And with an almost nonexistent army career, there is precious little fact-based evidence for what a Liberman Defense Ministry will look like.
His security-related comments have run the gamut from expressing disdain and outright aggression toward the “fifth column” of Arab citizens of Israel to calling for economic assistance to help the residents of Gaza.
His opinions on defense matters have also been known to change, and sometimes quickly.
Over the course of the 51-day 2014 Gaza war, Liberman’s proposal for what to do with the Strip jumped from advocating a full Israeli reoccupation of the enclave to entertaining the prospect of having the United Nations take responsibility for it.
Ya’alon, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has a thoroughly conservative, cynical — but consistent — view of the possibility (bordering on impossibility) of peace with the Palestinians, according to Middle East analyst Natan Sachs of the Brookings Institution.
Liberman, on the other hand, is “ostensibly less right-wing on the Palestinian issue — sometimes,” Sachs wrote in an analysis.
He is theoretically supportive of a two-state solution. Yet the Yisrael Beytenu leader’s vision of a Palestinian state includes the Arab cities and towns in northern Israel as he views their residents as inherently untrustworthy, putting him farther to the right than the former defense minister, who “has consistently shown an honorable stance in the face of attacks on democratic norms,” according to Sachs.
Will Liberman actually “cut off the heads” of disloyal Arab Israeli citizens, as he proposed last March?
Or once he gains military control over the Gaza Strip, will he “open a TV station, radio station and website in the Strip to tell the [Gaza] population the truth about Hamas,” as he said in April?
Liberman’s proposals and statements over the years may not contradict one another, but they hardly present a comprehensive defense strategy.
The Ya’alon doctrine was simple: maintain the quiet.
The Liberman doctrine, if it exists, remains a mystery.
