Israeli Strategy-Making: Another Battle Lost…

Today, even the most cursory glance at the discussion fora of numerous quality papers, so-called, is enough to reveal that a) being a quality paper doesn’t mean having readers of the same, a similar or, indeed, any quality at all (but they reveal that 24/7/365),  and b) it’s Israel-bashing season and people love it.  (Doubtless, parts of the blogosphere are already following up with foam at the mouth.) While I don’t want any part of the bashing and have been able to hold my tears so far, it is obvious that the killing of at least 10 pro-Palestine “activists” constitutes Israel’s third major foreign security policy f*ck-up within 5 months.

With the fallout of the January 19 assassination of a high-ranking  Hamas member in Dubai having not yet blown over (whether Mossad actually killed Mahmoud al-Mabhouh makes little difference, even if anyone had any doubts in their mind) and US-Israel relations still tense after a major flare-up over settlements last March, the government in Jerusalem has given the country it is supposed to serve a PR disaster of the first order that makes the Dubai incident look like a minor lapse by comparison and is likely to deal a fatal blow to one of Israel’s longest-standing alliances, namely, that with Turkey.

When al-Mabhouh was found dead in his hotel room in January, no-one seriously disputed the fact that the man was a dangerous terrorist wanted not just by the Israelis but by Jordanian and other security services as well. The damage done to Israel’s image — bad enough already — was severe, but manageable and Mossad as an institution took much of the heat. Similar things had happened in the past and, at least, Mossad had assassinated the right guy (unlike the 1973 killing of a Moroccan waiter who had been mistaken for Black September mastermind Ali Hassan Salameh in Lillehammer, Norway).

This morning’s shooting by Israeli naval special forces of 10+ activists (all or most of them Turks) aboard a vessel sailing in international waters under a Turkish flag  is a different affair altogether.

The whole “Freedom Flotilla”-scheme was set up by pro-Palestine/anti-Israel human rights groups, some of which demonstrably have ties with Hamas and other extremist organizations, as a propaganda coup. As is so often the case in conflicts of this kind, which are lost or won to a much greater degree on the pages of newspapers and the television screen than on the battlefield and in which legitimacy matters far more than firepower, the scheme — once under way — would have succeeded no matter what Israel decided to do about it. (Both Hamas and, even more interestingly, Israeli officials had said as much in advance.) But, thanks to Israel’s (over)reaction it succeeded more brilliantly than anyone would have thought possible 24 hours ago. For Israel, this is another major battle lost. For the Palestinian nationalist cause, it’s a major success that comes at little cost that is conveniently borne by its naive Western proxies — which, in turn, makes it even more of a success in terms of PR, which are really the only terms of strategic significance here.

However, the Shayetet 13 commandos who boarded the Mavi Marmara and other ships under cover of darkness and encountered fierce resistance are not to be blamed for what happened. According to IDF sources who spoke to Ha’aretz (hardly a right-wing or pro-occupation media outlet) this afternoon and a host of other reports, activists armed with metal rods, knifes, axes and other make-shift weapons attacked the soldiers as soon as they boarded the ferry. (Some of the images seen in this video make these accounts seem entirely credible, despite commentary to the contrary. In another version of the same video, activists attacking the soldiers can also be seen wearing gas masks, which were obviously brought along for no other purpose.) That the crowds apparently threw some soldiers of the upper deck and managed to seize a number of sidearms and use them against the commandos testifies to the vehemence of their onslaught.

So does the fact that the special forces troops opened fire at all. After all, we’re not talking about your local law enforcement agency. Shayetet 13 is the Israeli equivalent of the U.S. Navy SEALs and one of the most highly trained and professional special forces units in the IDF, and, probably, in the world. Professionalism is the elite special forces’ creed and it’s reasonable to assume that it correlates negatively with the inappropriate and excessive use of force. (By the way, here’s an official video of Maj. Gen. Eliezer Marom briefing his troops in preparation for the operation.) If these soldiers are told not to fire their weapons — it appears that some were armed only with back-up sidearms, in case all non-lethal means should prove futile — except in situations that are clearly life-threatening, they don’t. There is no doubt in my mind that they were acting in self-defense when they opened fire. So don’t blame them for what they did — you would have done the same. In this sense, the commandos’ actions were reasonable and appropriate. However, the operation as a whole clearly wasn’t. So the real question is, who put these people in that kind of situation and why?

My suspicion is that in trying to answer that question by means of careful analysis, one would soon bang into the root causes of so many of Israel’s more recent defeats and frustrations: Flawed assumptions about both the enemy and the nature of the conflict, and a deeply flawed strategy-making process. It’s not just that the political leadership and the Navy seem to have underestimated the determination of the activists to break through the Israeli blockade and the amount of resistance they would put up. The problem goes much deeper.

For all the tactical and operational excellence you have in the IDF (albeit alongside growing incompetence, frustration and other inevitable side-effects of being charged with the altogether unpleasant task of controlling a hostile population for an extended period of time) and in spite of the high level of professional military expertise often present in Israeli governments (or perhaps because of it?), the Israeli political-military apparatus has an abysmal record when it comes to making sound strategy, i.e. sensibly matching means to ends in search of desired political effects.

As Ha’aretz’ Aluf Ben has stated earlier today, the consequences of putting the commandos on the ship were hardly unforeseeable, even if the actual amount and quality of resistance might have come as a surprise. Neither were the political-strategic repercussions of killing seemingly peaceful “human rights workers”. The political leadership apparently told the Navy to take over the ships using the minimum amount of force necessary to do so. That’s exactly what the Navy did. Only in terms of political effect, the minimum amount (that needed for force protection) was far too much in this instance and the government should have been well aware of this in advance.

The point is that the negative objective of avoiding exactly this outcome should have been at least as strong as (or stronger than) the positive objective of stopping the ships. Thinking this through very clearly and considering alternative courses of action that were less likely to militate against the paramount negative objective would have been the no. 1 priority for the political leadership before authorizing the raid. In this sense, the incident is not just an excellent example of a minor (from a military point of view) operational development with a profound and almost instantaneous impact on the strategic level (which echos what I have written about Afghanistan last week), but also a(nother) notable and avoidable example of bad Israeli strategy that kills the wrong people, antagonizes allies and hurts what is left of Israel’s public image.

Overall, this new blunder reinforces a view I have held for some time: That only a fundamental overhaul of the strategy-making process can now save Israel from permanently becoming her own worst enemy. If radical change is not embraced, a dysfunctional process of strategy formulation will just keep on producing suboptimal results of the kind we have seen so often in recent years. And you can’t keep loosing battles forever, even if they’re more virtual than actual. Not without losing the war, anyway.

I might follow up on that later.

Advertisement