An end to occupations - Haaretz

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Thu., January 31, 2008 Shvat 24, 5768

Israel Time: 21:37 (EST+7)

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An end to occupations

By Amir Oren

Tags: Gaza Strip

The conquest of the Gaza Strip is about to end, aside from ongoing battles between Khan Yunis and Rafah. At midnight between Friday and Saturday the chief of staff convenes a meeting of, among others, the GOC Southern Command, the director of Military Intelligence and operational officers. The chief of staff demands that the armed militants in Gaza be informed that they have to surrender to the Israel Defense Forces. "Anyone who doesn't show up will be shot." His order is unequivocal: "Anyone seen in the streets with a rifle must be given an immediate trial and executed."

It is hard to imagine Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi uttering such words of folly or the generals remaining silent in the face of such a flagrantly illegal order. In the Israel of 2008, with a nosy press and a constant fear of commissions of inquiry, it is unreasonable to think that a chief of staff and his officers will get themselves into this kind of trouble. They are no more ethical than their predecessors, but they are more apprehensive of being exposed and punished.

The quotations above are taken from the log of the bureau of Moshe Dayan, the chief of staff during the 1956 Sinai War. His period in office was marked by blanket secrecy, rigid censorship and the enthusiastic cooperation of the press. Commissions of inquiry operated in total secrecy. The usual wording of the operational orders issued at that time would be considered repulsive today: "Decision to execute small-scale reprisal in the form of two-three small ambushes with goal of killing six to eight Jordanian soldiers."

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Israel has changed, the IDF was forced to change in its wake, and these are positive developments. The army is subordinate to the government, which is subordinate to the Knesset, which is subordinate to society. If the army high command is insensitive to changes, it will quickly find that it has lost the support - which is crucial in a democracy - for the draft, for volunteering for service in particularly dangerous units and for the officer corps, for reserve duty and for budgets. The freedom of action enjoyed by Dayan in the 1950s, by Yitzhak Rabin in the 1960s and by Rafael Eitan in the 1970s and 1980s is not the lot of Gabi Ashkenazi or of his predecessor, Dan Halutz.

Reports of casualties on the front have an immediate paralyzing effect, for both the public and the army. An officer who fought in the Second Lebanon War said this week that in the battle for Bint Jbail, the IDF had a costly but important achievement: The Golani Brigade lost eight soldiers, but the Hezbollah special forces unit it fought against lost 80 of 500 men, or 15 percent of its fighters. In previous wars that would have been considered a praiseworthy victory. This time the gloom intensified.

The Winograd Committee, which is examining the management of the Second Lebanon War, will miss the mark if it takes into consideration, as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wants it to, the events that have occurred - actually or ostensibly - since the publication of its interim report. The inevitable response of the institutions under review is that all the faults cited in the report have already been corrected. Even if at times there is something to this claim, it is not enough to avert personnel dismissals. Halutz, at whose initiative the Second Lebanon War is being investigated, did not get the opportunity to stick around in order to be in charge of the repair job.

Strongest of the lot

Despite the exceptional circumstances that preceded Ashkenazi's appointment, the status of the post of chief of staff has not diminished in the defense establishment. This week one of the generals noted that in disputes between the top figures in the security realm - the head of the Mossad espionage agency, the chief of the Shin Bet security service, and even the prime minister and the defense minister - the chief of staff is still the strongest of the lot, because no one will dare to make a decision that contradicts his opinion. If Ashkenazi objects to a large-scale operation in Gaza, no one will force it on him, particularly when officers close to him maintain that a comprehensive, purposeful operation will leave Israel in Rafah not for weeks or even months, but for two years.

The IDF's big problem is the demographic, legal, media and political constellation within which it operates. When the IDF ignores this constellation, it can expect failure. When it tries to decipher it and act accordingly, it turns out that it was mistakenly prepared for the previous war - and once again it fails.

What should Halutz have understood from the developments in Israeli society in the two past decades, covering the Lebanon war, the intifada, the Scud missile attacks in 1991, the Oslo process, the withdrawal from Lebanon, and finally Palestinian terrorism and the evacuation of settlements from Gaza? Even if no government said so explicitly, it was reasonable to reach the conclusion he arrived at: no more occupations. In planning the coming operations, there should be no needless letting of blood. There is no point in shedding blood to seize control of territory from which Israel will in any event quickly withdraw. And if it does not withdraw, the result will be terrorist and guerrilla attacks, movements organized by mothers and conscientious objectors, and heightened ferment over inequality in the draft and in call-ups for reserve duty.

The General Staff of 2006 was right in its hindsight and wrong in understanding fickle public opinion. In Operation "Grapes of Wrath," in 1996, nearly 700 Katyusha rockets were fired - but they landed only in the Galilee and in the security zone in southern Lebanon. Ten years later, without the security zone and with the shelling of Haifa, Tiberias, Safed and Carmiel, the public changed its mind about a ground operation in Lebanon.

Guessing game

IDF officers are envious of their American counterparts: They have documents of "national strategy" that are issued by the president, and "security strategy" published by the secretary of defense as a basis for "military strategy," which is drawn up by the joint chiefs. In Israel, the army puts up with the blunders of the governments, which do not tell the army about their intentions. The army has to guess. On Wednesday of this week a senior officer in the General Staff promised that a new "implementation concept" will soon be completed, which will place the IDF's combat doctrine and its operational plans in the proper context. The previous conception, which was formulated in April 2004, was scrapped. What this means is that its progenitors - the defense minister at the time, Shaul Mofaz, chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon and his deputy, Gabi Ashkenazi - were as mistaken as Halutz, who took part in its formulation as commander of the air force and is considered responsible for the failure in its implementation as chief of staff.

It was not Halutz but the General Staff led by Ya'alon that extolled "airspace as a dimension that enables dominance in abilities of collection [of intelligence], destruction, command and control, and movement of forces." The adversary will feel "helpless and growing intolerable loss." Those who are now talking again about the "land maneuver" - meaning a campaign of armored and mechanized divisions in enemy territory saturated with missiles, explosive devices and dense urban fortifications - forget the IDF soldiers killed in armored personnel carriers in Gaza, the political considerations that prevented a land maneuver involving Joseph's Tomb in Nablus, and the short shelf life of a territorial achievement in Lebanon. Since the IDF again withdrew from Lebanon, Iran has been making up the shortage in Hezbollah's stocks of rockets, sometimes with newer models, as the Egyptian army did, thanks to Soviet generosity, after the Sinai War and the Six-Day War.

All four of these officers - Mofaz and Ya'alon, Halutz and Ashkenazi, the chiefs of staff of the past decade - consider Syria the primary confrontation state. Above all else, the IDF is being built for war against Syria. The enhancement of the IDF's firing means, particularly in the form of precision systems and air superiority, is intended to enable the destruction of targets in high output and at a relatively low price, certainly in comparison with the large number of casualties in the tank battles of the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War. It was not Halutz who issued the guideline: "Priority [should be given] to clear and decisive means: strategic and tactical intelligence, air force and navy, precision weapons systems, command and control systems." Priority, that is, at the expense of other elements, including armor, infantry that will be of lesser quality, and training of brigades and divisions.

As chief of staff, Mofaz gave the IDF a target of "no surrender but victory on points" in a limited confrontation, should it occur in the course of an all-out war against Arab states. In a confrontation of this kind there is no victory in the traditional sense, but only a cumulative achievement in terms of security for the population, a minor blow in terms of mobilization of the reserves, forbearance and a reduction of violence and terrorism. The main concern about the domestic front was not the distress of the population, but a possible disruption of combat capability in the form of attacks on air force bases and infrastructure targets.

Israel's relative advantages in technology and quality manpower were given preference over the old-fashioned reliance on the reserves. If Israel is seeking a knockout blow, in order to avert the economic paralysis caused by mobilization of the reserves, then it should be realized that calling up the reserves is a burden and a constraint which the decision-makers assume, more than it is an asset - other than in terms of blocking an invasion that constitutes an existential threat.

In 2004 the need to update the combat conception was explained by citing the diminishing freedom of maneuver on land. Its manifestations, as asserted by the General Staff of Ya'alon, Ashkenazi and Halutz, were "changes in the armies of the adversary, mainly in the form of the strengthening of commando forces, antitank weapons and the like, which make it doubtful whether it is worthwhile to vanquish them by means of an approach of territorial conquest and the destruction of the enemy." The spread of urban areas will also limit maneuverability on land, and the hardening of the defenses in the arenas of confrontation, the General Staff wrote in a creative moment, will test "the mass of the drill in relation to the thickness of the wall."

In Lebanon the drill did not encounter any sort of wall. Even as it drilled in the air, Israel was stung by a thousand pins. Surprisingly, while everyone is asking why the war ended too late, some General Staff officers believe it ended too soon. Another week or 10 days, they say, and the special forces the IDF sent deep into Lebanon would have made mincemeat of Hezbollah, struck at the organization's senior leadership and captured the members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. They will just have to wait for next time.

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1.	YES, THERE IS AN OCCUPATION OF JEWISH LANDS BY ARABS.	14:48	\|	Tom	25/01/08

2.	Oren was the first to write about the "Greek Island".And last one	14:59	\|	Absolute Sweden	25/01/08

3.	History revisionism	20:11	\|	Gili	25/01/08

4.	Call me later. I`m occupied right now.	20:56	\|	Gideon Reader	25/01/08

5.	Defeatist Nonsense	04:53	\|	Joseph	27/01/08

6.	territory from which Israel will in any event quickly withdraw	09:27	\|	Burned Liberal	27/01/08

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