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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: Palestine Liberation Organisation

Diminishing the Heathens

18 Fri May 2018

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on Diminishing the Heathens

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Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha, Ahmed Yassin, al Kibar, Ali Hassan Salameh, Aman, Amichay Ayalon, Atef Bseiso, Avigdor Ben-Gal, Avraham Shalom, Barak Ben-Zur, Black September, Eliyahu Cohen, fedayeen, FLLF, Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners, IDF, Israel, Israeli Defence Forces, Isser Harel, Joint War Room, Kav 300, Meir Dagan, milchemet mitzvah, milchemet reshut, Mivtza Za'am Ha'el, Moshe Yaalon, Mossad, Muhammad Suleimani, Nazi, Operation Atlas, Osirak, Otto Skorzeny, Palestine Liberation Organisation, PLO, R Shila, Rafael Eitan, Rise and Kill First, Ronen Bergman, Sayeret Matkal, Shin Bet, shudder under the wing, Simon Wiesenthal, Torat Cohanim, Vayikra, Wolfgang Lotz, Yedioth Ahronoth, Yuval Diskin, Zikit, Zvi Zamir

Ronen Bergman

Bergman, Ronen. Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations. New York: Random House, 2018. 784 pp.

“If a man comes to kill you, rise early and kill him first,” said the Talmudist Shila of Kefar Tamarta. This spirit has suffused Israeli security policy even since its pre-independence days, argues Ronen Bergman in his latest book that has conveniently – and appropriately – borrowed the amora’s words for its title – Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations. In an impressive survey of assassinations from the days of the Bar Giora brigades through the Hashomer, Haganah, Irgun, Lehi, and eventually the modern apparatus of state – Mossad, Shin Bet, AMAN, and the Israeli Defence Forces along with the various special operations units associated with it, Bergman argues that the tactical brilliance and spectacular successes of Israel’s security forces has obscured its strategic failure to bring peace to the country. If decades of targeted assassinations have not worked, is it perhaps time for Israel to look to other methods?

Rise and Kill First has admirably steered clear of two pitfalls that ensnare books like this – the first is to get side-tracked into a brief history of the Israeli conflict with the Arabs, and the second is to slip into either a jingoistic, chest-thumping defence of whatever Israel has done or an ingratiating, Muharram-esque mea culpa for the country’s “misdeeds.” Bergman, the senior political and military analyst for Israel’s largest daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, has remained a critical yet understanding observer of Israeli security politics over a vagarious century and presented a fair and balanced analysis by any standards.

It is tempting to delve into some of the dozens of missions discussed in Rise and Kill First, the stunning successes, the indomitable courage, the mind-boggling oversights, and the fatigued callousness. Indeed, the book reads like a thriller and is hard to put down despite its heft. What is important, however, is the framework of Israeli security thinking – its assumptions, its resources, and its goals – that Bergman creates for the reader. Naturally, this framework evolves from the pre-state days to through that of the fledgling Jewish republic to the contemporary system challenged as much by religious terror as Arab nationalism.

Although Bergman’s story starts in the first decade of the 20th century, he spends a scant few pages on Zionist activities during the Mandate period. That period is better covered in Bruce Hoffman’s Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel but Bergman distills a picture of monstrous Arab hatred for the Jews. Operation Atlas, for example, was a joint Nazi-Arab mission to parachute near Tel Aviv and poison the city’s water supply to kill all the Jews. Later, during the War of Independence, the Secretary General of the Arab League, Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha, declared before invading Israel, “This will be a war of great destruction and slaughter that will be remembered like the massacres carried out by the Mongols and the Crusaders.” Bergman only briefly alludes to this extreme malevolence with which Arabs held Jews but this dimension is elaborated upon in Klaus Gensicke’s Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten and David Motadel’s Islam and Nazi Germany’s War.

From the outset, it was clear that Jews could expect no quarter from the Arabs. This informed Israeli policy towards its neighbours in the early decades after independence: it did not see itself as committed to the borders laid out in United Nations Resolution 181 in November 1947 because it was evident that the Arabs did not accept the partition plan either. Israel’s security agencies were pushed to the limit in performing traditional roles of intelligence gathering on its Arab neighbours and preventing marauding attacks by wandering fedayeen. David Ben Gurion was also pressed by recalcitrant Jews belonging to the Irgun and Lehi unsure of living in a socialistic Israel. One of the ironclad principles Israeli agencies have followed until this day, without exception, was forged in this climate – we don’t kill Jews, Isser Harel, the first director of Shin Bet (Sherut ha-Bitahon haKlali – General Security Service) and later of Mossad (HaMossad leModi’in uleTafkidim Meyuhadim – Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations), declared with finality.

The Mossad, established in 1949, set for itself the role of protecting Jews not just in Israel but all over the world. This may seem like a trivial detail or hubristic overreach to most but as the only Jewish state in the world, so soon after the Shoah, the First Generation decided to take upon themselves the defence of Jewish civilisation. With dozens of Christian and Muslim states whose narratives and interactions form the mainstream, the notion of a civilisational state may seem quaint to many but it held vital importance to the early Israelis.

The early targets of Israel’s “negative treatment,” as the professional lingo goes, were former Nazi scientists continuing their wartime research on advanced weapons for new, Arab masters. Nazis in hiding were also a matter of importance but it was clearly understood that these were symbolic and emotional targets rather than threats to Israel’s security. As a result, the hunt for Nazis petered out and the Mossad, ever pragmatic, was willing to recruit one former Nazi – Otto Skorzeny – to acquire a vital and recurring source of inside information about Egypt’s missile programme; in exchange, Israel promised not to come after him for his crimes during World War II and even attempted – unsuccessfully – to get him off Simon Wiesenthal’s list of most wanted Nazi war criminals.

Like any good thing, Israel was established on the highest moral principles and its security agencies were no different. Revenge is not a Jewish trait and is explicitly forbidden in Vayikra 19:18. Indeed, as Bergman notes about Natan Rotberg, an innovative bomb-maker in the Shayetet 13 (naval commando force), he did not act with hatred in his heart. “You need to know how to forgive,” Rotberg had told the author in an interview in 2015. This principle finds its way also into the legal opinion of the military advocate general written many years later that sets the parameters of an assassination operation as one in which harm is imminent and is not for revenge or punishment for a past act. The IDF’s Human Resources Directorate has even consulted with philosophers in academia to define the scope of some of their policies. Admittedly, like all things human and corruptible, these noble principles and well-intentioned guidelines have not strictly been followed over the years, especially in the heat of battle.

One of Israel’s early methods of assassination, parcel bombs, such as the ones used to eliminate the head of Egyptian intelligence, Col Mustafa Hafez, and Salah Mustafa, the Egyptian military attaché in Jordan stirred up some debate. Although this method presented the least danger for operatives, particularly in hostile territories, it also left to chance the success of the mission – parcels could be intercepted; someone else could open it; the target might only be injured or maimed and killed. Agents refrained from sending parcel bombs to their targets except in the most necessary of conditions; despite the risks and uncertainty involved, the method had quite a high success rate particularly in Gaza. Nevertheless, Mossad and its sister organisations moved away from using parcel bombs as soon as technology allowed them something more accurate and certain.

Bergman’s work also reveals how little counter-terrorism cooperation Israel has received from Europe and the United States. Although Washington entered into an information sharing agreement with Jerusalem after the Suez Crisis in 1956 and began selling military equipment and extending aid after the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli intelligence always found their Western counterparts unresponsive to security alerts and generally dismissive of Jewish concerns. For its part, Israel, too, hesitated to operate in friendly countries without the permission of the local authorities: Jerusalem had decided that it might need European help in other arenas and it was not worth antagonising them.

That all changed after the massacre of the Israeli Olympians in Munich in 1972. German security was criminally negligent and incompetent from the beginning to end and the result was the death of 11 Israelis. Then prime minister Golda Meir rescinded her orders to Mossad not to operate in Europe, though they have always been cautious about doing so. Interestingly, former Mossad chief Zvi Zamir reaffirmed Rotberg’s view in a February 2006 interview to the Israeli daily Haaretz that Mivtza Za’am Ha’el was not motivated by revenge but by the desire to ensure that such a tragedy never repeats itself.

The United States outdid the sluggish Europeans by maintaining close relations to the Palestinian movement through Ali Hassan Salameh, the chief of operations for Black September – the group that had carried out the Munich massacre. Langley frequently helped move Salameh around, tipped him off about Israeli surveillance, and even paid for his honeymoon (to Hawaii and Disneyland). Similar courtesies were extended to Atef Bseiso, the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) head of intelligence; both were eventually dispatched by Israel.

When Israeli intelligence did manage to carry out a successful execution, Western nations severely criticised the Jewish state if the operation was carried out on their soil, for even the slightest collateral damage, and a general appeal to abjure from violence. It was blatant hypocrisy but became more apparent when all condemnation fell silent after the attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001. Israel, long used to being counter-terrorism’s Cassandra, suddenly found itself in large crowds and asked to train foreign services in their methods.

Israeli security agencies have obviously evolved over the years to counter new threats and take into account the latest technologies. One periodisation that Rise and Kill First offers divides the history of independent Israel into four eras. The first was an era of material weakness of the Jewish state and largely inter-state conflict with its neighbours. Even the fedayeen terrorism was strongly controlled by the security services of neighbouring Arab states and dropped off as Israel hit back directly at them.

The Six-Day War marks the beginning of the second period, when Palestinians realised that their dream of creating an Arab state in the remaining 23 percent of Mandatory Palestine – the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan had been created with 77 percent in April 1921 – could not be achieved by relying on Arab strength of arms. Despite its inferiority in numbers, the Jewish state had repeatedly prevailed over Arab armies and irregulars time and again. The second period marks the mushrooming of terrorist groups and an exponential expansion in the scope and range of their activities. Although state support had lessened, it had not vanished entirely. Furthermore, as with any organisation, there had been some institutionalisation of knowledge and a new generation of terrorists had learned from the mistakes of their predecessors. The new profile characteristically led to a greater diversity of targets that were not all strictly restricted to the boundaries of Israel. International airlines were hijacked on routes that carried a greater number of Jews and Israelis were targeted for assassination.

After the initial surprise had worn off, Israeli intelligence quickly adapted and struck harder with the help of in-house special teams such as Caesarea and the military’s commando forces like the Sayeret Matkal, the Shayetet 13, and Shaldag to reach far beyond the Greater Levant and strike terrorist leaders. However, Palestinian groups had developed elaborate funding networks and become better armed over the years that Israel was forced to use increasingly greater force against terrorist targets. Collateral damage and brutality correspondingly increased on both sides and the war in Lebanon saw a particularly dark chapter in the history of Israeli targetted assassinations.

Until Lebanon, Israel’s covert operations had taken exceptional care to avoid collateral damage. Missions were scrubbed repeatedly over the sudden appearance of family and were never planned in crowded public areas. This is not to say that there were no unintended casualties but great efforts were taken to keep them to a minimum. Even Meir Dagan’s innovative methods with the Zikit squads of rooting out terrorists in Gaza in the early 1970s did not ratchet up a civilian body count.

Ariel Sharon had sold Israel’s political leaders a bill of goods on Lebanon and Israel’s increasing frustration at the lack of (mis)anticipated success in the conflict caused the IDF to hit harder. Additionally, Israel’s allies in Lebanon, the Maronite Catholic Phalange led by Pierre Gemayel, were savage barbarians who had their own scores to settle with the Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims. On several occasions, Mossad had refused to work with them and some officers had even resigned in protest but the exigencies of war had a momentum of their own. The brutality between the Christians and Muslims dragged the IDF in and after particularly brutal attack in Nahariya in 1979, IDF Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan ordered the setting up of the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners.

The FLLF operated without the constraints restricting Israeli intelligence. In other words, no heed was given to collateral damage and hundreds of civilians were killed in operations that targetted PLO assets. To conceal Israel’s role, the group set itself up as another of a dozen terrorist groups and even claimed credit for (but never carried out) attacks on Israeli targets and allies. By all standards of international law, Israel’s FLLF indulged in terrorism. IDF General Avigdor Ben-Gal insists that a key difference between the FLLF and Arab terrorist groups, however little consolation it may be to its victims, was that the former ultimately targetted the PLO rather than sow terror with indiscriminate acts of violence. Regardless, many Israelis have come to see Lebanon as Israel’s Vietnam in that the alliance with an unsavoury local outfit propagated a moral contagion among Israeli security agencies as well.

The third era came with the First Intifada in 1987. Decades of failed promises and corruption had eroded the authority of Palestinian leaders on the street. The uprising was sparked off as a spontaneous groundswell after a minor incident – an IDF truck accidentally crashed into a car killing four Palestinians – became a symbol of Israeli callousness towards Palestinian lives. The entirety of Israel’s security services were unprepared and at a loss as to how to deal with the riots and every use of force was projected to the world as state brutality against unarmed civilians in a reversal of the David and Goliath story. The fact of the matter, however, is that much of the deaths during the Intifada were due to intra-Palestinian settling of scores.

Hamas’ introduction of suicide bombing in 1994 again shocked Israel. The very willingness of the suicide bomber to die changed the equation and made the fear of Israeli counter-terrorism less effective in that the terrorists were already prepared to die.

Bergman’s research reveals that Israeli intelligence was not outdone merely by the terrorists’ tactics and technological acquisitions (mainly from Iran and Syria) in the turbulent period between the outbreak of the First Intifada and the end of the Second Intifada in 2005 but were intellectually in the wrong place to understand the evolving threat from their neighbourhood. The head of Shin Bet, Amichay Ayalon, for example, was initially quite pleased with the enervation of the PLO and the rise of Hamas in the early 1990s. In a surprising misreading from a sabra, Bergman relays that Ayalon believed that the Islamism of Hamas was preferable to the nationalism of the PLO. Similarly, the Israelis could not process Hamas co-founder Ahmed Yassin’s quiet admission to Barak Ben-Zur, head of AMAN’s terrorism branch, that “[t]here will never be peace. We will take what you give but we will never give up our armed struggle.” It took much blood to be spilled before Israeli intelligence gained its bearings again.

Early failures against the Intifada had begun a revolution inside the Israeli security establishment. The agencies were relying more and more on modern technology to identify relevant data and collate it in a manner meaningful to operatives on the ground. Israel was among the first countries to track terrorists using their mobile phones and also the first to introduce drones in targetted killings. Computers had also been brought in during the leadership of Ayalon to look for patterns and put everything together. Moshe Yaalon, when made chief of the IDF’s Central Command, together with the head of Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, created a Joint War Room where information from all sources would be pooled to be analysed. The JWR quickly bore fruit and the intelligence agencies were able to interdict terror operations into Israel. Combined with a high-tech border security fence, access to Israel became much harder for would-be terrorists.

Bergman’s periodisation fits snugly with political and technological developments readers would already be aware of. The unique contribution of Rise and Kill First is the psychological and emotional cost of a grinding war of attrition and its effects on jus in bello. Israeli intelligence had strict guidelines regarding the rules of engagement but the more numerous and bloody terrorist attacks became, the more lax Israeli commandos seemed to be about the rules in return. “Shudder under the wing” was the phrase one commander used to describe how his pilots were supposed to feel about bombing a terrorist target.

Interestingly, the Israeli public at large would not have any of this callous attitude. Errors in Israeli counter-terrorism brought sharp cries from common Israelis, demanding that their government maintain a civility in its response to terrorism. The outrage over extra-judicial killings by the Shin Bet in the Parashat Kav 300 in 1984 nearly toppled a government and ended the career of Avraham Shalom, then head of Shin Bet. Yet while insisting on high moral standards from its armed forces, Israelis were equally unforgiving on their leaders for allowing terrorism to continue unabated. The terms were clear – kill those terrorists without mercy but do so in keeping with civil and moral standards; do not become them.

Perhaps the most surprising revelation in Rise and Kill First is the enormous number of mistakes Israel’s intelligence services made in their operations that either failed to kill their prey, allowed him to escape, caused unmanageable collateral damage, or simply was a mess from beginning to end. This is certainly not the Mossad of legend, and Bergman’s telling of the story pulls the most feared and admired intelligence service in the world back down into the realm of ordinary mortals.

There is a scene in the 2005 movie, The Constant Gardener, in which an Amnesty International activist, Tessa Quayle, says to the resident MI-6 agent in Kenya, “I thought you spies knew everything.” Tim Donohue, the agent, replies, “Only God knows everything and He works for the Mossad.”

Bergman’s work suggests that the Mossad, after a few spectacular successes in the early years, settled back and became an organisation of pencil-pushing bureaucrats whose non-performance was protected by secrecy laws. For many years, most of the counter-terrorism workload had been borne by Shin Bet and AMAN (Agaf HaModi’in – Directorate of Military Intelligence) with firepower assistance from the IDF. It was during the prime ministership of Ariel Sharon that Meir Dagan was appointed the head of Mossad to reconvert the “effete” outfit back into one of spies with “daggers between their teeth.”

By the very nature of the conflicts Israel has found itself in, the legends of its intelligence community are mostly from counter-terrorism operations. Bergman reminds us of the few stunning successes they have had in more conventional activities against their neighbours as well. The exploits of Wolfgang Lotz and Eliyahu Cohen are well-known as are the bombing of the nuclear reactors in Iraq (Osirak, 1981) and Syria (Al-Kibar, 2007) but less known are exploits such as the elimination of Egypt’s entire military supreme command hours before the Suez Crisis began or the assassination of Muhammad Suleimani, the National Security Advisor to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, in his house in Tartus. Such missions not only set enemy ambitions back but also paralysed them with fear that Israel was listening in at every moment and they might be the next targets.

Of course, some of Israeli intelligence operations contributed to the Jewish state’s resounding successes in its wars with its Arab neighbours. Just days before the Suez Crisis in 1956, for example, the precursor of AMAN’s (Agaf HaModi’in – Directorate of Military Intelligence) Unit 8200, responsible for signals intelligence, picked up information that placed the entire Egyptian military supreme command on a plane from Damascus to Cairo. On the afternoon of October 28, hours before land operations were to commence, the Israeli Air Force shot down one of the two Ilyushin Il-14s ferrying Egypt’s military leaders and wiped out its senior command. In the capture of Gaza in the subsequent war, Israel uncovered secret files that contained a long list of Palestinian terrorists conducting hit-and-run missions into Israel; over the next year, each of them received a parcel in the mail.

Bergman’s argument that Israel has for long succeeded and brilliantly at the tactical level against her enemies but has not achieved her strategic goals despite a body count that keeps steadily creeping upwards is not a new one. Daniel Byman’s A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism makes a similar point. The author suggests that the only solution is peace negotiations with the Palestinians, and he offers the change in thinking of two fiercely hawkish leaders – Sharon and Dagan – as food for thought in his study. These are not the only warriors turned peacemakers – Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, and several other Israeli prime ministers and leaders who have had a distinguished military record have come to feel the nihilism of conflict without end.

Well-intentioned though this position may be, the operational benefits of wearing down experience through assassinations cannot be denied, and the statements of Yassin and dozens like him cannot be dismissed. How do you fight an enemy that will not stop attacking you until you or he is dead?

Rise and Kill First does not try to judge or solve Israel’s imbroglio with the Arabs. Rather, it seeks to focus on the consequences of Israel’s preferred policy of targetted assassinations. Several times, the figure eliminated was replaced by someone far more capable and worse. Even if this were not the case and terror groups have dissolved owing to Israeli strikes, others have sprung up in its place. Bergman sensitively discusses the psychological toll of such never-ending operations in a book packed with detail for the trivia aficionado and historian as well as ethicist and policy wonk.

Despite being trained as a lawyer – with an M.Phil in international relations and a doctorate in history from Cambridge as well – there is little legal analysis in Rise and Kill First. Rather, Bergman leaves as much of the story as possible to participants because it is also a story of a clash of personalities and philosophies – Menachem Begin’s Biblical nostalgia, Efraim Halevy’s concern for diplomatic fallout, Sharon’s Joshua complex (the Israelite commissioned by G-d to conquer the land of Canaan in a milchemet mitzvah – obligatory war), Dagan the scalpel.

Bergman’s seven years of research and over one thousand interviews conducted shines through in the magisterial Rise and Kill First. This book is an invaluable contribution to several fields of study – security studies, ethics, foreign policy, and the history of Israel. Pace the seriousness and complexity of its topic, Rise and Kill First is a captivating read with even a slight emotional roller coaster of a novel.

Violence is a serious affair in Judaism and not something to be taken up lightly. Over their history, Jews have seldom been in a position to engage in wars and hence their thoughts on jus ad bellum and jus in bello – just war and just conduct in war – have not been highly developed. However, the Talmud lays down several conditions that makes it very difficult to go to war. As Bergman quotes in his opening, the scriptures say of defensive wars to rise and kill first. And of preemptive defensive war, the Sages say (Sotah 44b) to diminish the heathen before he comes and wages war against you.

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That Longest War

17 Sat Jun 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on That Longest War

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A High Price, Charles Orde Wingate, counter-terrorism, Daniel Byman, David Ben-Gurion, Fatah, Hamas, Hezbollah, Israel, Khaled Mashal, Moshe Dayan, Palestine, Palestine Liberation Organisation, PLO, Raed Karmi, Ze'ev Jabotinsky

A High PriceByman, Daniel. A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 496 pp.

Think of Israeli counter-terrorism and you are likely to conjure up an image that rivals any Hollywood blockbuster action film. The tiny Middle Eastern country is admired and looked up to by security professionals the world over from India to the United States for its grit, boldness, and methodical approach to counter-terrorism. Israel’s intelligence elite have maintained and even encouraged this myth for its psychological effect. The reality of this David and Goliath story, however, is closer to A Bridge Too Far than Raid on Entebbe. In his extensive study, A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Counterterrorism, Daniel Byman details the unending challenges, grinding successes, and mixed impact of Israeli counter-terrorism operations on its security and the national psyche.

Byman, a professor at Georgetown University, takes Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum that war is a continuation of politics by other means seriously and looks at the political fallout of Israel’s counter-terrorism strategies rather than a tactical or operational analysis. Israel’s foes have also been varied over the years – some terrorist groups have been disciplined and methodical, others were rag-tag militia; some are state-backed, others independent. Some terrorist groups are militant branches of a larger social movement while others are small radical cells. The Jewish community has faced virtually every type of terrorist that has been imagined.

It is not surprising then, that most counter-terror tactics have also been pioneered in Israel and have been implemented by other law enforcement forces around the world. Although some analysts scoff at Israel’s record, claiming that its methods have not solved the terrorist plague even after decades of conflict and thousands dead, Byman’s research indicates that the world has much to learn from even the imperfect solutions.

A High Price starts in the pre-independence era when the Yishuv were threatened by Arab terrorism in the aftermath of the Balfour Declaration. Byman argues that Israeli counter-terrorism strategy is broadly based on the experience of British administration in Mandatory Palestine. The legacy of one pro-Zionist officer in particular, Charles Orde Wingate, is visible in Israeli security doctrine to this day.

Israeli strategy has essentially three components. One aspect is deterrence: the belief that Israel’s enemies would cease and desist from hostile operations against it out of fear of retribution. Another component is offensive operations: Israel’s small size means that it cannot risk fighting wars on its own soil. Furthermore, fighting on Israeli soil would mean damage to infrastructure and civilian casualties. Therefore, the conflict must be taken to the enemy. The third feature of Israeli security thinking is preemption and speed: like Napoleon Bonaparte preferred, strike first, strike fast, and maintain the element of surprise; keep the enemy off-balance until he capitulates.

Israeli politicians often felt restricted and cornered in their response to Arab violence. Besides national morale, Israeli leaders found it difficult to advocate restraint to people who had just escaped the Holocaust. Their new country was founded specifically on the premise that it would defend Jewish lives at all costs and it was not possible to appear to renege on that promise. Their only hope was to bludgeon their neighbours into inaction.

Ironically, Israeli actions also put Arab leaders in a corner: their retaliatory operations against the Israeli military humiliated the very militaries on which their power depended, and it outraged the Arab people. Arab capitals were very quick to embrace the idea of asymmetric warfare.

For their part, Israeli leaders – military and political alike – understood the Arab hatred towards them. “Can we argue with their intense hatred for us?” Moshe Dayan asked, “before their eyes we are turning the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers lived into our inheritance.” Similar warnings had been uttered by Ze’ev Jabotinsky and other luminaries of Zionism decades before Israel became a reality. The harsh choice was, according to Dayan and these others, “to be prepared and armed, strong and determined, otherwise the sword will fall from our hands and our lives will be obliterated.” As Golda Meir would say later, Israel’s secret weapon against the Arabs was that they had nowhere else to go.

Byman explains how the nature of warfare that Israel faced shifted rapidly from inter-state to non-state agents. This altered the rules of the game dramatically. Suddenly, the media became immensely important and the military could not use indiscriminate force in civilian-populated areas. Terrorists also improved over the years – from the early fedayeen who were essentially unskilled, angry, displaced Palestinians crossing back into Israel to retrieve as much of their belongings as possible to cool and zealous individuals who had received professional training from Arab and Communist armies or other terrorist groups. While Israel was able to deter the Arab states, particularly Egypt and Jordan, from supporting cross-border terrorist raids, non-state actors proved much harder to deter.

Of most value to readers should be the attention A High Price pays to the self-goals Israeli security services have scored in their war on terror. As Washington and its partners are learning now after their invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, military victory does not matter if you lose the battle over public perception. Israel has experienced this bitter lesson first-hand several times and years earlier as its leaders bought into the false dichotomy of physical security and perception. Wingate’s methods gave psychological satisfaction but did not always produce satisfactory results. David Ben-Gurion had realised this even in the 1940s and used it against the British but countries – not just Israel – seem doomed to repeat this error.

Byman argues that the Knesset has often ignored the political consequences of their counter-terrorism. The assassination of terrorist leaders, Raed Karmi for example, have sometimes unleashed cycles of violence that resulted in the loss of several lives. Some operations, such as the attempted assassination of Khaled Mashal in Amman, jeopardised important alliances. The IDF’s success in demolishing a group has usually been only temporary – in some cases, several splinter groups emerge in the place of one or space is made for more radical (Islamist) terrorists.

Israel is also guilty of underestimating the importance of the media and public narrative. Its opponents, be they state on non-state actors, have excelled at manipulating domestic, regional, and international fora, think tanks, and news organisations to portray an image of the conflict that is slanted, incomplete, exaggerated, and, at times, blatantly false. Israeli engagements in Lebanon, for example, were overwhelmingly successful militarily if losses of men and materiel were to be tallied. However, the perception of victory and defiance holds more water than the reality. What have often been successful Israeli operations are sometimes perceived as failures even by Israeli citizens.

Byman also notes that while Israel excels at the tactical and operational levels, a long-term strategy for the region is sorely lacking. Israelis are still debating whether they have temporarily occupied the territory that in the end belonged to Arabs or liberating historic land that really belonged to the Jews. A banal, vacuous, and unconsidered desire for peace is a sufficient strategy only if you are building a graveyard. Many of Israel’s problems arise from predictable long-term consequences of its ad hoc decisions. The invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to root out the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, for example, turned into a gruelling occupation that gave birth to a far more dangerous threat in the Hezbollah. Eventually, it led to the collapse of the very state that Israel was trying to pressure into curtailing the PLO. Similarly, some of Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza, though they may have succeeded in stemming the tide of terrorist attacks, have altered the situation on the ground so much that peace talks have become difficult; both sides claim to a different stunde null as the basis of negotiations.

One of the astute observations in A High Price is that there is a growing expectation in the media and its poorly uninformed subscribers of proportionality in military operations against terrorists. The very nature of deterrence, however, is the threat of disproportionate force against the enemy. While this doctrine may work well against the militaries of Israel’s neighbours, it does less so against terrorists who hide in civilian areas with the expectation that either propriety will spare them or an opportunity for propaganda will present itself.

As Byman contends, with no considered policy in place, day-to-day counter-terrorism is sometimes not conducive towards achieving the broader goal. However, he is also quick to admit that most often, the choice before the IDF or Knesset is between different shades of bad. Israeli security officials have been fully aware of this but see no escape. Collective punishment, for example, was not justified or moral but effective, admitted Dayan. The IDF’s organisational ethos gives commanders tremendous autonomy with the understanding that there could be occasional mistakes. “I prefer initiative and excessive action, even if they’re accompanied by the occasional mistake, over passivity”, Dayan is supposed to have said.

It is also true that the IDF’s harsh measures have the support of the Israeli people. House demolitions, cross-border strikes, targeted assassinations, and the refusal to recognise the PLO have many supporters. Each time there was a terrorist attack or peace talks broke down, the uncompromising Israeli Right gained supporters. Continuing talks under terrorist activity was unacceptable to Israelis for whom the very purpose of talks was to end terrorism. Additionally, the assassination of senior operatives did hurt terrorist groups in that they lost valuable experience in bomb-making, logistics, money laundering, arms acquisition networks, and other aspects of the terrorist’s craft. The number of warm bodies that Hamas or Hezbollah can throw up is not nearly as much a concern as the skills some of these bodies may possess.

Byman walks a fine line between the Israelis and the Palestinians and presents an objective study of Arab terrorism against Israel. He does not shirk from calling out the IDF’s excessive policies even if he admits they may bring immediate gains while at the same time pointing out that there is much that the Palestinians have done to hurt their own cause. The civil war between Fatah and Hamas in 2006 is but one example. It also goes unacknowledged that in the first five years after the Six-Day War, Israeli assistance in terms of fertiliser, irrigation, and farming techniques tripled the agricultural production of the West Bank. Yet although violence diminished, support for violence did not.

It is disconcerting to note that over the years, support for talks has reduced and both Israelis and Palestinians appear more unwilling to compromise, readier to shed blood, and accepting of atrocities against the other. Decades of living in terror has, as many psychologists have suggested, caused a nationwide post-traumatic stress disorder in Israel. This does not bode well for the peacemakers, for their efforts will be viewed with suspicion and the bar of acceptability has inched that much higher.

A High Price is an indispensable read for anyone interested in counter-terrorism and its pitfalls. Furthermore, there can be no no better case study than Israel where citizens have lived experience first as conscripts in the IDF and then as civilians or politicians. A High Price is chronologically packed with events as well as interviews with senior officials that gives readers a view from the cockpit, so to speak. Byman’s ability to present facts and arguments dispassionately is an incredible achievement for a topic that is not known for calm and rational discussion. In the Age of Terror that we live in, I do not see how A High Price is a book that can be skipped.

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A Bad Friend

18 Sat Mar 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on A Bad Friend

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Abraham Isaac Kook, Ahad Ha'am, Albert Einstein, All India Khilafat Committee, Arab, Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg, Benjamin Ze'ev Herzl, CENTO, Central Treaty Organisation, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, HaMossad leModiʿin uleTafkidim Meyuḥadim, Henry Polak, Hermann Kallenbach, Immanuel Olsvanger, INC, India, Indian National Congress, Israel, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jew, Khilafat Movement, MEA, Ministry of External Affairs, Mohandas Gandhi, Mossad, Muslim, Muslim League, Narasimha Rao, Nicolas Blarel, Pakistan, Palestine Liberation Organisation, PL 480, PLO, Public Law 480, RAW, Theodor Herzl, Zalman Shazar

The Evolution of India's Israel PolicyBlarel, Nicolas. The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy: Continuity, Change, and Compromise since 1922. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015. 428 pp.

India’s relations with Israel have fast emerged, since the end of the Cold War, as among the most important for the South Asian nation. A vital source of arms and intelligence, Jerusalem has become Delhi’s third-largest defence vendor within 25 years of establishing full diplomatic relations. Additionally, India relies on Israeli expertise in agriculture, and trade between the two countries, currently hovering around $5 billion, is expected to double as soon as a free trade agreement in the works in finalised. Despite the strategic value of the Indo-Israeli relationship, it has somehow not been a popular subject of study among academics and policy analysts. Public understanding is mostly shaped by media reports that are, by their very nature, shallow and temporal. In these climes, Nicolas Blarel’s The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy: Continutity, Change, and Compromise since 1922 is a much-needed survey and analysis of relations with one of Delhi’s most valued partners.

Although the partnership between the two almost-twin modern republics now appears to be a natural alliance, their history has been rocky, frustrating, and at times even antagonistic. Instead of beginning at the seemingly obvious chronological markers of Indian independence and the creation of Israel, Blarel recounts his tale from the aftermath of the Balfour declaration in 1917 when Indian opinion on a Jewish state first began to form. It is commonly believed that Indian views on Israel were forged by Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru and they remained unchanged until Narasimha Rao established full diplomatic relations in 1992. Blarel challenges this notion on two counts – first, that Gandhi had such a profound influence on the foreign policy of independent India, and second, that India’s Israel policy was so inflexible. In fact, Blarel argues, Gandhi and Nehru showed an evolution in their thinking on Israel, as did the foreign policy of independent India.

Gandhi’s first impulse on the Jewish question was to oppose the partition of Palestine.This was informed more by the domestic politics in India at the time than any proper grappling with the issues plaguing the Jewish community. The late 19th century had seen a sudden surge in pan-Islamic sentiment among Indian Muslims and the British victory over the Ottoman Empire in the First World War and the subsequent uncertainty in the fate of the caliphate agitated them. In an effort to win over the Muslim community from the Muslim League and bring them into the fold of the Indian National Congress, Gandhi supported the All India Khilafat Committee in their protest against the British. The Indian nationalist movement thus exploited Muslim concerns over Palestine to forge a united front between Hindus and Muslims in India.

The Jewish Agency was keen on winning the support of Indian nationalists such as Gandhi and Nehru for they believed it would give a political boost to their aspirations. Furthermore, they had also noticed the impact of Indian Muslim sensibilities on British policies in the Middle East. David Ben Gurion and Chaim Weizmann themselves met with and also sent other important Zionists such as Immanuel Olsvanger to meet with Indian leaders to try and convince them of the justness of Jewish demands in Judea. Gandhi was already somewhat aware of the plight of European Jews through his friendship with Hermann Kallenbach, Henry Polak, and others in South Africa yet the Jewish Agency could not win either Nehru or Gandhi over to their side. The reasons, again, were rooted in Indian domestic politics. First, Gandhi did not wish to alienate Indian Muslims whom he perceived to be sympathetic towards the Arabs.

Second, the Indian leader did not accept the precepts of political Zionism. In a letter to Albert Einstein, Gandhi agreed that he could understand the spiritual desire of the Jewish people to return to Palestine but that did not give them any political rights. The Indian leader saw Zionism as a cultural phenomenon as Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg advocated, or a spiritual quest as Abraham Isaac Kook did, but not a political movement as Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl strategised. This was perhaps largely because Gandhi could not accept the argument for a confessional state in the Middle East and oppose a similar claim in India for Pakistan.

Finally, Gandhi could not come to terms with Zionist methods in pursuing their objectives on two counts – he could not condone the violence of the Irgun Tzvai Leumi and the Lohamei Herut Yisrael and he did not like how the Jewish Agency was willing to work with the British when they should have been opposing imperialism. Here, Gandhi did not seem to notice that Jewish support for Britain was largely for self-preservation from Arab mobs that had taken to attacking Jewish settlements with increasing frequency since the early 1920s.

Germany’s persecution of the Jews during World War II did not change Gandhi’s views on a Jewish state. Though he condemned the atrocities perpetrated against the Jewish people in Europe, he did not think they should dispossess others in Palestine for the faults of Europeans. However, perhaps due to the details of the Holocaust becoming widely known, Gandhi seems to have had a slight change of heart in 1946 that is not popularly known. In an interview with American journalist Louis Fischer, the Indian leader agreed that the Jews had a prior claim to the land in the Fertile Crescent but criticised their reliance on imperial powers to achieve their goals. In another interview that same year, Gandhi again agreed that the Jews had a case for a state but had squandered their good will and support by resorting to terrorist means.

As Blarel points out, Gandhi’s views on Israel did evolve between Khilafat and independence but they did not have too much of an impact on Indian foreign policy. That honour was left to Nehru, whose views were not as similar to his mentor’s as is commonly believed. In principle, Nehru was more supportive of Jewish political aspirations than Gandhi was; he accepted that their immigration into the region had substantially improved standards of living in Palestine and was impressed by Jewish achievements in science, the arts, business, and politics. Like Gandhi, he rejected the religious basis for statehood but rather than define the question in religio-cultural terms, Nehru saw the Palestinian question as a nationalist one rather than a religious one. This gave the Jewish Agency a little more room to manoeuvre but maintained a firm position on the viability of Pakistan.

The Muslim League craftily leveraged the pan-Islamic sentiment of Indian Muslims to pin the Congress into an anti-Zionist corner. They would threaten the British with unrest and the Congress with a fractured nationalist struggle if either sided with the Zionists. This same dynamic carried on post independence as Pakistan tried to build a Muslim coalition around it against India, particularly over Kashmir. In an effort to maintain consistency between its positions on Pakistan and Israel, appease the Muslim community in India, and counter Pakistani propaganda in the Middle East, India slowly slid into the anti-Zionist camp.

These philosophical contortions sometimes meant that India found itself on no one’s side. During the debate in the United Nations over the Mandate, India insisted on a single state in Palestine with two autonomous regions to the frustration of both Arab and Jew! Finally, when the creation of Israel was declared, India waited for two years to extend recognition. However, in an attempt to still be seen as neutral between the two sides, Nehru refused to establish full diplomatic relations with the new state. The Indian prime minister argued that the time was not ripe so soon after the dismemberment of Pakistan from India to vex Indian Muslims by sidling up to the Zionist state. Interestingly, this did not stop him from requesting Israeli assistance in technology and agriculture through the offices of Indian socialists who had maintained good relations with Israeli kibbutzim.

Despite requesting aid from Israel, Nehru and the Congress treated the Jewish state almost like their own untouchable. Israel was allowed to convert a pre-independence office of the Jewish Agency in Bombay into its consulate, though the consul was kept away from any official functions in Delhi. In fact, Delhi reprimanded Tel Aviv and even closed the consulate for six years from 1962-1968 for celebrating Israel’s independence day in a hotel in Delhi. When Israeli president Zalman Shazar requested a halt in India for rest and refuelling on his way to Nepal in March 1966, the Indian government did not allow him to land in Delhi but in Calcutta. Shazar was not even given a five-minute courtesy reception at the airport by either the government of India or of West Bengal.

The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy contends that Delhi was not locked in a Nehruvian mindset on Israel from 1947 until normalisation in 1992 but adapted its policies to suit the circumstances. Blarel argues that Indian policy always reflected realism and was not moralpolitik. India was dependent on the Suez Canal for trade and oil for its economy from the Arab world; the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the Six-Day War in 1967 hurt the Indian economy as the canal was closed for a time during which the cost of Indian exports to Europe and the New World rose between 15 and 35 percent. India hoped that its support of the Palestinian cause would insulate it from economic shocks as well as gain reciprocal support from Arab states for the Indian position on Kashmir and isolate Pakistan in the process.

After Nehru, the evolution of India’s Israel policy was towards greater inflexibility and stridency. As Blarel observes, several things had changed since the end of the Nehru era. Since 1967, Israel had shifted firmly into the American camp and introduced an imperial power into the region; the Palestinian situation became far bleaker after the Six-Day War. In 1975, India co-sponsored a resolution in the United Nations that equated Zionism with racism. In general, much like Indian non-alignment, its Israel policy was veering towards one side.

One major lacuna in The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy is that it does not explain why Israel sought closer ties with India. The reason was obvious before 1948: association with Gandhi, the apostle of non-violence. In the first decade after creation, Israel believed that India’s international influence as the leader of a bloc of newly independent Afro-Asian states would be helpful in gaining recognition from the global community. However, India’s influence waned as its economy failed to grow commensurate to its population and it lost a war against China. In addition to the hostile treatment Israel received in the United Nations as well as bilaterally from India, why did Tel Aviv continue to seek close ties with Delhi?

In fact, Israel’s efforts were commendable – Israel was among the first countries to provide military and medical assistance to India during the Sino-Indian War in 1962, supplying heavy mortars and ammunition. It provided artillery, ammunition, and instructors to India in 1965 during the Second India-Pakistan War, and during the War of Bangladeshi Liberation in 1971, Israel even helped India train the Mukti Bahini. Of course, Delhi did not acknowledge any of this, thanking Tel Aviv only for its medical aid. In 1968, when India established its intelligence service, Research & Analysis Wing, then prime minister Indira Gandhi reached out to Israel’s HaMossad leModiʿin uleTafkidim Meyuḥadim – Mossad – to help train the fledgling service. While Indira Gandhi was whining about US PL 480 food aid being “ship to mouth” in 1966, she had simultaneously rejected Israeli offers of grains to assist India in staving off famine.

While India went to such great lengths to win Arab admiration, it found little to show for its efforts. Most Arab states remained neutral or favoured Pakistan in its wars with India, some even providing arms and ammunition and safe havens for the Pakistani air force from Indian bombardment. When India tried to gain membership to the Organisation of Islamic Countries on the basis of its substantial Muslim population, Pakistan was able to torpedo its application by threatening to walk out of the conference. In an effort to please the Arabs, India had even supported the Arabs in their decision to cut oil production and raise oil prices in 1973.

In the Middle East, India reserved all its moral admonitions for Israel alone. While it criticised Tel Aviv for siding with imperial powers, India did not utter a word of protest when Iraq, Iran, and Turkey joined the Central Treaty Organisation. Delhi’s condemnation of terrorist methods applied only to the Zionists but not the Palestine Liberation Organisation. In fact, India recognised the PLO in 1975, 11 years after its formation and 17 years before it accorded the same status to Israel.

Blarel explains that India found it difficult to change its policy towards Israel not only for strategic and domestic electoral considerations but also because an orthodoxy had materialised in Indian politics and within the Ministry of External Affairs. While strong prime ministers like Nehru and Indira Gandhi could control the MEA, weaker leaders found it more difficult to do so. In that sense, it was a miracle that Rao managed to establish relations with Israel despite ruling over a weak coalition. The strain of recognition was evident from the fact that there was little movement in ties between the two countries for almost a decade thereafter.

The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy is a veritable tour-de-force in an important field that has few scholars. Blarel has assiduously mined the archives, published records, and private collections in India, Israel, and at the United Nations, a task that deserves commendation for the difficulty in doing historical research in India. The result is an magisterial survey and analysis of Indo-Israeli relations over a span of 70 years. The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy is also a wealth of information, containing many nuggets of interesting and sometimes counter-intuitive factoids. For anyone interested in Indian policies towards the Middle East and particularly Israel, this is an unavoidable book.

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