Soccer Dad: Military pre-occupation

August 23, 2006

Military pre-occupation

Ze'ev Schiff is considered one of Israel's best, if not the best, military correspondent. In general, I agree with that assessment. He often writes excellent non-ideological analyses of the state of Israel's military. However his recent (via memeorandum) ANALYSIS: Policing in Gaza has blunted IDF fighting abilities is marked by his ideology. I realize that it's possible to read the article and its thesis

One of the main conclusions of the war against Hezbollah will be the fact that the fighting abilities of the ground forces deployed by the Israel Defense Forces in Lebanon have been blunted by years of police action in the territories.

as a straight analysis. However there's a real agenda here.

Joshua Micah Marshall at the Talking Points Memo writes

Occupation degrades a fighting force -- a reality the Israelis need to confront right now and we Americans need to come to grips with as well. The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is something Israel really cannot afford now as it becomes more clear that she is in renewed need of a very potent fighting army.
. . .
The occupation has become Israel's weakness, not its strength. True friends of Israel realize this.

Schiff is too skilled to be so blunt, but Marshall has read him correctly. Schiff's analysis wasn't a military analysis, it was a brief against occupation.

Ignored is that ending occupation carries risks, most of which have been realized. Worse, by making "occupation" Israel's cardinal sin, those who agitate for ending it give ammunition to Israel's enemies.

In February and March of 1996 Israel was struck by a series of suicide bombings that killed scores. The bombings were attributed to revenge for Israel's killing of Yihye Ayyash, the so-called "engineer" whose expertise in bomb making had killed many Israelis. (Ayyash's deputy, Mohammed Dief, still lives, protected by the PA.)

Of course, it wasn't revenge that allowed the attacks to occur. It was opportunity. In late 1995 Israel withdrew its forces from Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm, Kalkilya, Bethlehem, and Ramallah. The PA, obligated under Oslo to secure the areas that Israel surrendered, moved in and allowed Hamas to build an infrastucture that could recruit, train and equip suicide bombers. What was important is that Hamas (and its Fatah allies) now had greater means and opportunity to attack Israel. The motive, even without the killing of Ayyash, was already there.

Israel withdrew from Gaza last year and the number of Qassams fired into Israel continued unabated. Israel had ceded its position that gave it an opportunity to disrupt terror operations in Gaza. Now, Hamas was able to continue arming and organizing its terror cells with no fear of interruption.

The pattern, of course, was repeated in Lebanon. Israel withdrew in 2000 and that allowed Iran to upgrade the arms and training of Hezbollah until Hezbollah took advantage of its enhanced capabilities this year.

And if the cost of blaming "occupation" for all of Israel's ills wasn't clear enough, there's a chorus of those who think that Israel should consider surrendering Shebaa Farms/Mount Dov to Lebanon. This would provide a post facto justification for Hezbollah's refusal to disarm and continue killing Israelis even after the withdrawal from Lebanon.

That there's even a discussion of such a possibility shows the extreme damage that so-called friends of Israel do when they focus on "occupation." Israel's enemies seek to destroy it because it exists in an area that it is not supposed to exist; on Muslim land. The sin of "occupation" is what gives a patina of respectability to murderous organizations whose goal is to kill Jews. It's what makes terrorism justified, if not downright fashionable.

But the chimera of ending the occupation in return for peace has entailed another cost. Trent Telenko at Winds of Change wonders if Israel's army has become "hollow."

You would expect to see the following things in a "Hollow" draft-based military.
1) Shortages of reservist training and reservist stocks and equipment. Check "yes" for the IDF.
2) Poor leadership not only at the senior leadership, but all the way down to the battlefield level. Poor leadership that has political cronyism at its heart. The Hezbollah missile strike on the INS Al-Hanit, Ben-David's piece plus multiple posts over on "Yonitheblogger.com" makes that another check "yes" for the IDF.

3) Draft dodging by the political elites and their children. Again, this is another check mark "yes" for the IDF.

My guess is that a reason for this "hollowness" is pretty much the result of an expected "peace dividend." Instead, while Israel was preparing its people for peace and neglecting its miltary; its foes were preparing for war and re-arming.

The cost of not being ready for this war was

The unnecessary casualties Israel would take from such a regional war, in particular among its neglected reserves all of whom plus their relatives are voters, may not be demographically or politicallly sustainable. Israeli political elites fearing this result may be why the Olmert government bailed on the opportunity provided by the Bush Administration to eliminate Hezbollah and possibly widen the conflict to Syria.

Telenko sees a road back for Israel but it will require years of work and the political will to do so.

UPDATE: Cosmic X in Jerusalem seconds my view (more generally) about the ideological nature of Ha'aretz, which he terms Israel's paper of broken record.

Mere Rhetoric questions my belief that occupation hurt the army. He writes

... it does seem at least plausible that fighting incompetent Palestinians left the IDF unprepared to fight the best trained, best armed, and most entrenched Arab foe that Israel ever had to face on the battlefield.

Heh.

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