‘A Little Bit Pregnant’: Israel and Partial Deterrence
Abstract
This article examines Israel’s capacity for deterrence. Unlike classical deterrence, where the use of force constitutes failure, the differing cost-benefit calculus of irregular enemies means that Israel must occasionally exercise its military power to demonstrate that it retains the will to act when not existentially threatened. While Israel’s ability to deter conventional and nuclear attacks from its state-based neighbours remains strong, the author finds that its capability to deter non-state actors has decreased in recent years. To restore a credible deterrent to irregular foes, Israel must achieve an undeniable victory—a far more difficult task than the insurgent’s simple need to stay alive.
The recent Operation CAST LEAD, Israel’s response to Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza, has once again re-opened the debate regarding the degree to which Israel’s military is still capable of deterring attacks from its enemies. That the Gaza action was at least in part motivated by the desire of Israel’s political and military leadership to recapture its military edge, which many believed had declined as a consequence of the 2006 Israeli war, was evident from the comments of the Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who claimed that the offensive had ‘restored Israel’s deterrence’.1 Livni’s remarks followed less than a year on from the final report into the 2006 Lebanon War. Retired Justice Eliyahu Winograd, author of the Winograd Committee report into the war, made the telling remark that:
Israel initiated a long war, which ended without its clear military victory. A semi-military organization of a few thousand men resisted, for a few weeks, the strongest army in the Middle East, which enjoyed full air superiority and size and technology advantages... This offensive did not result in military gains and was not completed. These facts had far-reaching implications for us, as well as for our enemies, our neighbors, and our friends in the region and around the world.2
The Winograd Commission outlined the shortcomings in the planning and execution of the 2006 war, but for many it also served to highlight the fact that the Israeli military no longer acted as a true deterrent force. This paper argues that Israel faces a requirement to provide a deterrent capability on two levels: classical deterrence against conventional, often existential, threats and deterrence against non-state (and in some cases semi-state) actors. And while it has effectively maintained its conventional deterrence capability, its deterrence against non-existential threats was on the wane well prior to the 2006 war and is unlikely to be restored because of one military operation. The reasons for this decline are numerous, but three in particular are worthy of further examination: the changing nature of the operations that the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) has had to conduct, the adaptability of the enemy, and the loss of information dominance previously enjoyed by Israel.
The Nature of Conventional Deterrence
Entire books have been written about the nature and definition of deterrence (Lawrence Freedman’s Deterrence and Patrick Morgan’s Deterrence Now being two of the best theoretical works on the matter) and this article does not seek to add to theoretical discussions on the subject. Suffice to say that the definition of deterrence itself is a relatively imprecise term, with Morgan seeing it as ‘the use of threats of harm to prevent someone from doing something you do not want him to’, while the Israeli academic Zeev Maoz takes a more absolutist view in describing it as a
policy through which one attempts to scare off a would-be attacker by holding out a drawn sword. It works as long as the sword is not being used. When the sword becomes covered with blood, deterrence is said to have failed.3
These definitions are really a product of the so-called classical deterrence theory involving inter-state conflict, where any offensive action against a country represents a complete failure of deterrence. As Freedman noted, effective deterrence assumes that the threat of force is sufficient to contain the hostile behaviour of others,4 and the failure to do so represents an absolute failure of deterrence. This concept reached its apogee during the Cold War when the mutual possession of nuclear arsenals by the West and the Soviet Union ensured that mutually assured destruction provided decades of inter-state peace, as any failure of deterrence threatened to result in the destruction of the state.
The strategic vulnerability of the state of Israel since its inception has meant that nothing has been closer to the heart of Israel’s national defence strategy than the notion of deterrence. The day after David Ben-Gurion declared the independence of the state of Israel on 14 May 1948, its existence came under threat from an invasion of forces from the Arab League. The fact that Israel faced existential threats from state actors for the first thirty years of its life, combined with its lack of strategic depth, meant that the issue of deterrence has for many years been at the forefront of Israeli strategic planning. During the mid-1960s, then Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin made the concept of deterrence such a key element of Israeli defence planning that it became the most commonly used term in strategic studies jargon.5 Simply put, the state of Israel could not afford to cede ground to an invading force and was thus required to defend itself at its borders. The more that could be done to deter its enemies from contemplating such a move, the more likely it was that the state of Israel would survive.
Deterrence (and particularly conventional deterrence) though, can rarely if ever be permanent because the calculations regarding the utility of using armed force against an opponent are never static. These calculations can alter depending on the political considerations of governments in power, the state of national economies, the preparedness and reputation of military forces (both aggressor and defender) and a range of other factors. While in one sense the fact that Israel had to regularly fight against the same enemies over the space of three decades represents a failure of deterrence, somewhat paradoxically the continual victories reinforced a notion of cumulative deterrence, where the repeated successful applications of force eventually serve as a deterrent effect.6 The peace treaties that Israel signed with Egypt and Jordan came about through a realisation that neither country could defeat Israel militarily; peace offered more benefits than did continued conflict. But reputation is never enough in and of itself to constitute an effective deterrent capability. Given its strategic situation Israel has long known this and was consequently keen to develop an undeclared nuclear weapons capability at the earliest stage. The ‘strategic ambiguity’ that Israel has subsequently practiced has ensured that it has long possessed the ultimate regional deterrent capability, and through its attack against Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 and Syria’s alleged nascent nuclear capability in 2007, it has ensured that it has no regional nuclear competitor.
Even with its undeclared nuclear capability, Israel’s conventional military deterrence was also continually reinforced through its ability to adapt to changing threats. The IDF achieved remarkable success against conventional Arab armies but was also able when required to launch extremely effective operations against non-state actors. The 1976 rescue operation at Entebbe airport became synonymous with the daring and élan of the Israeli military, was testimony to good and flexible planning, and reinforced the notion that when required Israel could plan and execute operations well offshore to protect its citizens. Even after the signing of a peace treaty with Egypt and despite the increased militancy of Palestinian groups on its northern border, Israeli military planners continued to view their deterrence capability largely through a conventional prism, with a focus on technological and materiel superiority. This was a rational way to look at the regional situation, as it had always been states that had posed existential threats to Israel in the past. This thinking appeared vindicated again in 1982 when the IDF was able to expel the PLO from its southern Lebanese bases, forcing its humiliating evacuation from Beirut, and during the operation famously destroying eighty-six Syrian aircraft in one week with no losses of its own.
Deterrence and Non-Existential Threats
But not all security threats are the same, and even though the cumulative effects of military deterrence led some Arab states to the negotiating table, other security threats were emerging. Among these were a restive Palestinian population chafing under Israeli military rule following the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 war, as well as the emergence the nascent Lebanese Shi‘a militia Hizbullah which would eventually fill the void left by the PLO after their departure from south Lebanon. As the threat of land invasion by hostile Arab states receded, former Chief of Staff and future prime minister Yitzhak Rabin threw some light on the new security paradigm that faced Israel by detailing what he considered to be the two types of security threats facing Israel: the existential threat imperilling the existence of the state of Israel and the ‘current security’ threat involving challenges to the daily life of Israelis.7 Implicit in this distinction is a belief that there are degrees of deterrence, because ‘current security’ threats ‘have never been, are not, and never will constitute an existential threat to the State of Israel’.8
Rabin’s view of what essentially represents a hierarchy of threats raises interesting questions about the relativity of Israeli deterrence. Whereas classical deterrence theory deals in absolutes where a failure to deter results in inter-state conflict of significant severity with concomitant casualties and infrastructure damage, the issue of non-state (or semi-state actors in the case of Hamas at least) non-existential threats raises interesting questions. These non-state actors have a different calculus of cost/benefit from states, in many cases needing only to survive an armed conflict as an organisation to succeed. As a consequence they are much harder to deter than state actors, but at the same time they can inflict much less damage than states. If it is accepted that complete deterrence against these groups is virtually impossible, is it possible to place a ‘limit’ on events such as rocket firings before Israel needs to intervene to reassert its deterrence? In democratic societies like Israel, however, the state’s contract with its population means that deterrence against non-existential threats needs to be pursued with the same seriousness as for existential threats.
Israel’s security planners have been faced with the need to provide deterrence against the widest range of possible threats: from potential nuclear threats from Iran, through Syrian conventional forces and possible chemical weapons, to indirect fire and low-level insurgent attacks from the likes of Hizbullah and Hamas. Notwithstanding the current impasse over Iranian nuclear aspirations, Israel’s deterrence against existential threats has been extremely effective for the past thirty years. The same cannot be said for Israel’s deterrence against what Rabin described as ‘current security’ threats. The issue is not whether Israeli deterrence has failed on occasion against these threats, as a deterrent capability can actually be reinforced if, once conflict breaks out, one side achieves a decisive victory. Israel’s string of victories against Arab states is testimony to this, culminating in the 1973 war, when the failure to deter Egyptian forces would nevertheless lead to a long period of peace.
In order to achieve the same degree of deterrence against non-state actors, it is necessary to achieve a similarly decisive victory. But the nature of modern warfare and the security threats that Israel faces makes the definition of a decisive victory a difficult one. It is Israel’s inability to achieve a decisive victory, in either military or political terms, against these forces that has led to a deterioration in Israel’s deterrent capability against non-state actors. The first Palestinian intifada, the unconditional withdrawal in 2000 from southern Lebanon and the 2006 war with Hizbullah have all contributed to a graduated deterioration in Israel’s deterrence capability. The word deterioration is used advisedly, as there is little case to be made for the disappearance of Israeli deterrence. The fact that Israel’s northern border has remained quiet since the 2006 war, and the significant reduction in Hamas rocket attacks since the Gaza operation illustrate that Israel’s military capability still ensures a degree of deterrence. The reasons for its decline are many, but three are worthy of further examination: the stifling of the IDF’s expertise in offensive manoeuvre, the loss of information dominance, and the emergence of adaptive enemies.
The Stifling of Offensive Manoeuvre
Israel’s military reputation was largely forged through a series of hard-fought manoeuvre battles on multiple fronts against superior enemy forces. Such impressive achievements required decisive action on the part of military commanders who needed to re-task units and formations in direct defence of the country, often while under fire. These same characteristics that helped to develop aggressive manoeuvre commanders have to some degree hindered the IDF’s ability to respond effectively to non-manoeuvre warfare. At the same time, the limited opportunities for offensive manoeuvre and the changing nature of the opposition they have faced have constrained their ability to achieve a decisive victory, as static defensive or stability operations rarely provide such clear-cut results.
This became evident during the first intifada (1987–93). What began as a series of disorganised protests by stone-throwing youths against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory turned into a long-term, low intensity conflict that would eventually lead to the signing of the Oslo Accords. This conflict placed strains on the operational capability of the IDF because it was so foreign to that which it had experienced (and trained for) in the past. The IDF was to find that ‘many conscripts were not prepared for the strain of dealing with civilian riots, protestors, and the grinding tensions of hostile populations and guerrilla warfare’. While at the same time many ‘did not want to become ... involved in a struggle that they did not see as a major threat to Israel, or where many did not feel Israel’s position was fully justified’.9
While few if any military forces do well as occupying armies, the Israeli military’s reliance on conscript soldiers and long-term static occupation duties in both the Palestinian territories and southern Lebanon where the enemy was part of the population robbed the IDF of much of the operational vigour that it had prided itself on. This became most evident near the end of the Lebanon occupation when intelligence failures exposed both elite units and senior officers to danger. Events such as the 1997 ambush of Israeli naval commandos that killed eleven sailors, and the 1999 death of the Israeli chief liaison officer Brigadier Erez Gerstein in a roadside bomb attack, showed that the initiative had been ceded to Hizbullah as the IDF eschewed its traditional manoeuvrist approach for one of largely static posts bolstered by its proxy South Lebanese Army militia.
While the IDF’s time in the Palestinian territories had allowed it to build up a degree of professional expertise in low-intensity conflict, by the time that the IDF had to execute a manoeuvre operation in 2006 against Hizbullah, its performance reflected that of a military whose training and execution in this form of operational art had atrophied over the years. An over-reliance on air power and a reduction in training standards for conscript soldiers meant that ground manoeuvre operations were conducted poorly and in an uncoordinated fashion. The promotion of an air force officer to Chief of Staff for the first time, illustrated the dangers inherent in ignoring the need to train for higher-end warfighting in the land environment. The subsequent resignation of Lieutenant General Dan Halutz following criticism in the Winograd Commission confirmed the belief held in some circles that operational planners had lost focus on, and contributed to the decline of, the IDF’s ground warfare capabilities.
The Loss of Information Dominance
An essential part of effective deterrence is the ability to sell the message to would-be opponents that military action against your own forces is ultimately futile. During the 1973 war, long lines of Egyptian prisoners made for dramatic footage and were a psychological boost to Israel’s military deterrent capability. A similar result emerged from the trapped remnants of Yasser Arafat’s PLO being dispersed around the Arab world following their negotiated evacuation from Beirut in 1982. Arab realisation that information operations could be utilised to reduce Israel’s military reputation and national will was slow to emerge, but when it did it was to prove a significant element in modifying Arab views concerning the capability and vulnerability of the IDF with a consequential impact on its ability to deter its potential enemies.
Part of this turnaround occurred quite by accident, as the first intifada captured headlines around the world with its images of Palestinian youths confronting Israeli soldiers in armoured vehicles. The mismatch in capabilities and the relatively high Palestinian death toll engendered widespread international support for the Palestinians and a degree of opposition in Israel at the use of the IDF as an occupying force. By contrast the second intifada with its more centralised direction, use of suicide bombers, and high Israeli civilian death toll came to be seen both within and outside Israel as a genuine security threat to the state.
The emergence of al-Jazeera television in 1996 gave the Arab world a non-state regulated media service that was able to be viewed in most of the Arab world, and provided a high quality service that in many ways served to strengthen Arab identity. Hizbullah also understood the power of media even before the emergence of the Qatar-based al-Jazeera, and often took cameramen on its operations against Israeli or South Lebanese Army forces in southern Lebanon, and broadcast direct footage on its own television station al-Manar, which was first launched in 1991. In terms of countering perceptions of Israeli invincibility this approach meant that:
For the first time since the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948, Arabs and Muslims have seen Israeli soldiers inflicted with deaths and injuries at the hands of Hizbullah’s Islamic Resistance. Hizbullah’s success in turning the picture in the Arab-Muslim society upside down from a widespread feeling of defeat into a victory against Israel has earned al-Manar an enthusiastic following in countries across the region.10
Hizbullah knows its target audience very well and modifies its message accordingly—military resistance to Israel is possible, so the sacrifices made in so doing are worth it. The same media tactics have subsequently been copied elsewhere, most obviously by Sunni Islamist groups in Iraq. As Hizbullah’s senior military commander in the south was to observe, ‘The use of media as a weapon had an effect parallel to a battle.’11 But information warfare is not only about showing images of military successes on the battlefield to prove to the audience the vulnerability of the IDF. It is also about using Israel’s technological superiority against it, by claiming that its military firepower is used indiscriminately against both Arab and international targets. This approach has been aided by Israeli battlefield targeting errors that are used to provide evidence that the Israeli military is careless in its application of fire. The shelling of the Fijian UN compound at Qana in 1996 resulting in over one hundred civilian deaths; the 2006 bombing of a house near Qana that killed twenty-eight members of two families; the July 2006 bombing of a UN observation post at Khiam in southern Lebanon that killed four observers; and the shelling of a UN compound in Gaza in January this year12 have all been used to create an image of a military that cares little about collateral damage. In some, but not all cases Arab fighters have launched rockets in proximity to these targets, but in all cases the IDF’s response has allowed Arab media to construct an effective anti-Israeli narrative to which a broader international audience will be receptive.
Of course, when Israeli military operations are directed towards another country, this loss of information dominance is hard to counteract. In Lebanon, Hizbullah media and other domestic media outlets are able to influence the domestic Lebanese audience, while al-Jazeera is on hand to present Israeli military setbacks to a regional audience further diluting the aura of the IDF. Where Israel is in greater control of the operational environment, it is always keen to control the media message, firstly for its domestic constituency but also through its numerous native English speaking military media personnel to the international audience. Having learned the media lessons from the first intifada as well as its Lebanese experience, Israeli operations against Hamas in Gaza were notable for how tightly the IDF controlled the media in an effort to reduce the ability of a competing message to be conveyed.
An Adaptive Enemy
All military planners understand the need to study the lessons of previous failures and to understand the nature of the enemy in order to exploit weaknesses in his makeup. In the West, intelligence agencies and military centres of excellence are established with the mandate to do exactly that. In the same way, Israel’s enemies have adapted their approach to fighting the IDF and exhibit the lessons they have learned in each subsequent conflict. The Egyptian crossing of the Suez in 1973 on Yom Kippur and their early success against the IDF armoured forces was the first significant example of this. Since the virtual disappearance of inter-state conventional threats, the IDF has been guilty of taking their opponent lightly on occasion and believing that Israel’s technological superiority and supremacy in the air and at sea will be largely uncontested.
The attack on the Israeli Naval Ship (INS) Hanit off the coast of Beirut on 21 July 2006 provides a case in point. While ground forces had inevitably experienced casualties as a consequence of the nature of their conflict environment, Israel’s technological superiority had always ensured that naval and air assets had reigned supreme when supporting IDF operations. The Hizbullah missile strike on the INS Hanit provided a reminder to the IDF that taking its enemies lightly through lack of intelligence and an acceptance of malfunctioning early warning systems13 had deadly consequences. Similarly the downing of an Israeli helicopter by Hizbullah during the war (the first IDF aircraft lost to enemy fire since 1984) provided another example of the ability of enemy forces to combat a high-technology adversary such as Israel.
An advantage well trained militia forces have over conventional forces is their ability to switch between high and low-technology approaches. Hence, while able to fire anti-ship or anti-aircraft missiles to good effect, at the height of the 2006 conflict Hizbullah was able to continue to fire significant numbers of low-technology Katyusha rockets into northern Israel, even after the IDF had destroyed their more potent Iranian-supplied Zilzal rockets. The continued utility of these low-technology weapons is evident from the opinion offered ten years before, during Israel’s ‘Operation ACCOUNTABILITY’ when the Jerusalem Post was moved to observe that ‘Despite all its ... state-of-the-art weapons systems, the IDF’s attempts to stop Hizbullah from firing Katyushas into northern Israel is like a tiger trying to catch a mosquito in his teeth.’14
In the Palestinian case, rock throwers gave way to suicide bombers and, as Israeli security procedures tightened and the separation wall was built the adaptation towards indirect fire weapons took hold as the only viable means of attack. As a consequence, the number of firings on Israel increased from 417 in 2005 to over 3000 in 2008. At the same time, Hamas (like Hizbullah before it) also sought to secure the release of prisoners held by Israel through the kidnapping of Corporal Gilad Shalit in 2006. Operation CAST LEAD has certainly led to a vast reduction in attacks but did not result in the return of Gilad Shalit. The inability to return Shalit to Israel or to entirely guarantee security against low-technology Qassam rockets means that similar low-technology firings are likely to continue to feature as the main weapon in the Palestinian’s arsenal, while they will seek to negotiate a prisoner release before returning Shalit in order to justify their kidnapping.
The Future for Israeli Deterrence - Restoration or Decline?
Despite the disappearance of the Israeli army’s reputation as an invincible fighting force over the last twenty years, it is incorrect to say that Israel’s deterrence capability has disappeared along with it. The IDF retains a significant technological advantage over its regional neighbours, and the fact that it has not faced an existential landbased threat since the 1973 war is testimony to the fact that it still retains a significant military deterrence capability against inter-state threats. Its undeclared possession of nuclear weapons has provided it with the ultimate regional deterrent capability and it has been aggressive in ensuring that it remains the sole regional nuclear power. Iran’s apparent rush to develop a nuclear capability will pose significant challenges for Israel, but the latter’s technological edge and Western support will ensure that its extant nuclear capability remains a major deterrent to rivals.
A much stronger case can be argued that Israeli deterrence against security threats from non-state actors has declined. Moreover, the failure of the IDF to achieve decisive victories during the first intifada and the 2006 war in Lebanon, as well as its unconditional withdrawal from south Lebanon in 2000, has reinforced the sense of the Israeli military’s vulnerability amongst its enemies. The successful prosecution of a limited operation against Hamas in Gaza has demonstrated that the IDF has learned some lessons from its previous operations against security threats, but this operation alone is not sufficient to restore the IDF’s deterrence capability. The level of training and combat experience of, and technology available to Hamas differs markedly to that of Hizbullah, while the topography of coastal Gaza is much less conducive to defence and offers far less cover for rocket firings than southern Lebanon.
This then is the dilemma facing Israeli security planners. Unlike classical deterrence theory where a resort to conflict is an absolute failure of deterrence, the nature of Israel’s security environment dictates that its policy of deterrence ‘requires the periodic reinforcement of that message lest the enemy come to the conclusion that one is no longer capable of maintaining a posture of overwhelming strength or ... the commitment to use that military power when necessary’.15 The difficulty as far as Israel is concerned is that, given the nature of Hamas and Hizbullah, Israel’s deterrence capability can only be truly restored if the use of military force achieves a decisive victory against its enemies, while its opponents may be able to claim success if they survive as an organisation. In practical terms, and based on events in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, this is an eminently easier proposition for Hizbullah and Hamas than Israel’s need to achieve a decisive victory.
Endnotes
1 Kim Sengupta and Donald Macintyre, ‘Israeli cabinet divided over fresh Gaza surge’, The Independent, 13 January 2009, <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israeli-cabinet-div…;
2 ‘Main points presented by the Winograd Committee’, The Jerusalem Post, 30 January 2008, <http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1201523794504&pagename=JPost…;
3 Doron Almog, ‘Cumulative Deterrence and the War on Terrorism’, Parameters, Vol. XXXIV, No. 4, Winter 2004–05, p. 7.
4 Lawrence Freedman, Deterrence, Polity Press, London, 2004, p. 2.
5 Avner Yaniv, ‘Non-conventional weapons and the future of Arab-Israeli deterrence’ in Efraim Karsh (ed), Between War and Peace: Dilemmas of Israeli Security, Frank Cass, London, 1996, p. 137.
6 Freedman, Deterrence, p. 38.
7 Address by Lieutenant General Yitzhak Rabin at the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies Bar Ilan University, 10 June 1991, <http://www.biu.ac.il/Besa/books/25/after.html>
8 Ibid.
9 Anthony Cordesman and Jennifer Moravitz, The Israeli-Palestinian War: Escalating to Nowhere, Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, 2005, pp. 100–01.
10 Ahmad Nizar Hamzeh, In the Path of Hizbullah, Syracuse University Press, New York, 2004, p. 59.
11 Anthony Cordeman, Peace and War: The Arab-Israeli Military Balance Enters the 21st Century, Praeger, London, 2002, p. 416.
12 Taghreed El-Khodary and Isabel Kershner, ‘Israeli Shells Kill 40 at Gaza UN School’, New York Times, 6 January 2009, <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/world/middleeast/07mideast.html>
13 Amos Harel, ‘Probe: IDF ship hit by Hezbollah missile had malfunctioning radar’, Haaretz, 12 September 2008, <http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/785021.html>
14 Hala Jaber, Hezbollah: Born with a Vengeance, Columbia University Press, New York, 1997, p. 178.
15 ‘Israel must show its military strength in order to deter terrorist attacks’, Christian Science Monitor, 20 July 2006.
