The Sword And The Olive

by van Creveld, Martin

  The negotiations did succeed, but the conflict did not come to an end. Whether because the Israelis refused to continue working toward a final agreement, which would have entailed more withdrawals, or because the Palestinians did not meet their obligations under the agreement by gathering illegal arms and ending incitement of violence against Israel, the peace process stalled. Disappointed with Mr. Netanyahu’s inability to make progress, Israeli voters ousted him in favor of Ehud Barak, but even the latter’s offer to surrender 96 percent of the occupied territories and establish a Palestinian state did not persuade Mr. Arafat to make peace under conditions that Israel felt it could accept. In particular, most Israelis considered the Palestinian demand that Israel grant the refugees who had fled the country during the 1948 War the “right of return” as tantamount to the destruction of their state. As it was probably meant to be.

  In September 2000, the Second Palestinian Intifada, or Uprising, got under way. It was much more violent than the Intifada of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Hundreds of Israelis died. The Israel Defense Force responded by using force on a scale that only a few years earlier would have made its commanders shake their heads in disbelief. As these lines are being written, the conflict is still raging and, indeed, intensifying. Israeli forces have entered and are conducting operations in many of the towns surrendered to the Palestinians under the 1993 Oslo Agreement; whomever carries weapons and refuses to surrender, they simply kill. The Palestinians continue to wreak havoc in Israel. By the use of suicide bombers, the most hateful tactic of all, they are killing men, women, and children indiscriminately and further stoking the fire.

  It is impossible to say where it will all end. Soldiers are so afraid of lightly armed terrorists that they try to pursue them in sixty-ton tanks. Others prefer spending time in prison rather than serving in the territories and becoming involved in what they see as atrocities; still others, instead of keeping a stiff upper lip, openly weep over their dead comrades’ graves. The media runneth over with signs of Israeli weakness. Visiting Tel Aviv and noting the thousands who besiege foreign embassies in order to look into the possibility of emigrating—although, so far, few have actually taken that step—an observer might be forgiven for thinking that Israel is coming to the end of its tether.

  As this book explains in considerable detail, such an impression would have some truth to it. But this weakness is only part of the story, and to believe in it entirely would be misleading and, therefore, as dangerous as dangerous can be. Not far behind the impotent weeping and wailing and the shameful lack of courage, a powerful combination of rage and despair is gathering force. The following figures illustrate the trend as nothing else can. In the summer of 2000, before the start of the current Uprising, only 7 or 8 percent of Israelis felt that it would be necessary to repeat the events of 1948 and expel the Palestinians into Jordan in order to secure Israel’s future. By February 2002 the number had risen to 33 percent, and in April of the same year it stood at 44 percent. Desperate times will lead to desperate measures. Should the present hostilities continue to escalate, the time when Israelis will unite behind a leader who will do anything for their safety cannot be far off.

  That leader may well be Ariel Sharon. In the past, he has often said that Israel’s policy of propping up the Hashemite regime in Jordan was a mistake and that Jordan, which according to him has a Palestinian majority even now, is the true Palestinian state, the inference being that the Palestinians should go there. A few weeks ago, when a journalist asked him whether he was contemplating ethnic cleansing, he said he did not think in such terms. Those who believe him are welcome to their illusions. Sharon’s entire career shows that he is the last man to charge ahead without a plan. Though it is impossible to be sure, his intention in allowing the conflict to escalate may well be to create the conditions for doing what, in the past, he has often hinted he wanted done. The fact that he does not seem to have a plan makes it all the more likely that he does.

  Should Sharon judge that the time for implementing his plan has come, then may God help the Palestinians. As hard as it may be for some to believe, the IDF has essentially been wearing kid gloves. To expel the Palestinians will require only a few brigades, and second-rate ones at that; meanwhile, the bulk of the Israeli forces, armed and equipped as never before, will deploy on Israel’s borders to deal with possible attempts at intervention by the neighboring Arab states. Should such intervention be attempted, the main role in repelling them will be played by the Israeli Air Force. It too is armed and equipped as never before. In 1982, the last time the Israeli Air Force engaged in large-scale operations, it destroyed all the Syrian antiaircraft defenses in Lebanon and shot down about a hundred Syrian aircraft with hardly any losses. Syrian commanders of armored divisions charged with taking the Golan Heights or Egyptians preparing to drive a unit across 150 miles of open desert might do well to recall Isaiah 5:26-30 (author’s translation):And He will lift up a sign ... and shall hiss unto them from the end of the earth; and, lo, they shall come with speed swiftly. None of them shall be weary nor stumble; none shall slumber or sleep. Neither shall the girdle of their loins be loosed, nor shall the latchet of their shoes break. Whose arrows are sharp, and all their bows bent for shooting; their horses’ hoofs shall be counted like flint, and their wheels like a tempest; their roaring shall be like a lion, and they shall roar like young lions; yea, they shall roar, and pounce upon the prey, and devour it and belch, and no one shall deliver it.

  What is it to be? Are the two sides going to withdraw from the brink of the abyss and agree on some kind of compromise? Or will the conflict escalate, leading Israel to rise and smite its enemies? Outsiders, however good or bad their intentions, cannot answer this question; it is up to the Palestinians and the Israelis themselves. The former should finally forget about doing away with Israel, even if they euphemistically call that goal “the right of return.” The latter should finally forget about retaining much of the Territories that were occupied in 1967. Whatever the answer, it is clear that the IDF is going to play a critical role in events to come. It is for those who seek to understand that powerful force—its origins, growth, mentality, modus operandi, and capabilities—that this book is intended.

  MARTIN VAN CREVELD

  Mevasseret Zion, Israel

  April 17, 2002

  Israel’s fifty-fourth Independence Day

  INTRODUCTION

  EVER SINCE IT OFFICIALLY emerged out of the prestate Hagana during Israel’s War of Independence in 1947-1949, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has become one of the world’s leading armed forces. Time and again it has captured global headlines by fighting, and usually winning, wars against Israel’s Arab neighbors. Time and again it has come up with innovative concepts, beginning with the conscription of women (the only time in history this has been done) and more recently with the development of new weapons systems such as active tank armor and remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs), unveiled for the first time during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Even as these lines are written, and regardless of the ongoing peace process, the IDF remains the ultimate guarantor of the country’s existence and a critical component in the balance of power in one of the world’s strategically most important regions.

  This book will trace the history of the IDF from its origins—the organizations known as Bar Giora and Ha-shomer, which date to the time when Palestine was part of the Ottoman empire—to the present day. It lies in the nature of things that the greatest attention will be devoted to military questions, that is, war and preparations for war; yet as far as space permits, political, economic, social, and cultural issues must also be considered. The longtime forces that shaped the IDF will be examined, but so will the outstanding and often highly colorful leaders who were responsible for making the day-to-day decisions. Analysis will combine with narrative, the general with the specific. Only in this way, and by taking as comprehensive a point of view as possible, can one hope to do justice to the subject as a whole.

  W
ith these objectives in mind, the volume falls into three main parts. Part I will take us from the beginnings past World War I, past the time when Hagana was founded during the period of British rule as a self-defense organization, past the establishment in 1941 of PALMACH as the first full-time fighting force, past the start of the underground struggle against the British in 1944-1947, and all the way through Israel’s War of Independence, which lasted from November 1947 to January 1949. Part II will trace the IDF’s growth from the War of Independence to the 1973 Arab-Israeli War inclusive, the period when it fought its most celebrated campaigns and also turned itself from a popular militia equipped with infantry weapons into one of the world’s most modern and most powerful armed forces. Part III will examine the slow but steady decline of the IDF from the end of the October War to the present day, a period characterized above all by the introduction of high technology (including, according to foreign reports, nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles) on the one hand and the increasing shift from interstate war to antiguerrilla and antiterrorist operations on the other.

  For the reader who is not an Israeli and does not know Hebrew, a word concerning the sources used in writing this volume may be in order. Partly for understandable security reasons, partly because of the eastern European political tradition of which they were the carriers, Israel’s leaders have traditionally made it rather hard to gather information on defense in general and the IDF in particular. During recent years the situation has tended to improve: Parts of both the state archives and those of the IDF itself are now open through to the period of the 1956 Suez Campaign, as are various prestate archives. Still, the extent of the change should not be exaggerated. Especially compared to what we have come to expect of Western democracies with their various freedom of information acts, much—including much that is critically important to the Israeli state’s existence—remains inaccessible to the public.

  In trying to close the gap I have drawn on the enormous body of material represented by the secondary literature, the press (both the general one and that which is published by the IDF itself), memoirs, diaries, and interviews. In doing so I have not been wary of footnoting the volume very heavily; the reason being that, since so much is censored, I wanted to make sure that I could point out my sources for each fact cited. Also, I wanted to give the reader at least an idea concerning the enormous body of material that is available, and that, in previous full-length, English-language accounts of the subject written by either foreigners or Israelis, for the most part has remained either untouched or unmentioned.

  MARTIN VAN CREVELD

  Jerusalem, Israel

  THE SWORD AND THE OLIVE

  What is good? You ask. To be brave is good.

  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Thus Spake Zarathustra

  I

  THE SURGE, 1907-1949

  AT THE BEGINNING of the period covered by this part, the first Jewish self-defense groups, consisting of a few dozen loosely organized, inexperienced, and ill-armed men and women in the northern part of Erets Yisrael (Land of Israel), had just been founded. By the time it ended there already existed a regular, state-owned, Jewish armed force with almost 100,000 men and women under arms. It included, besides a dozen ground combat brigades, at least embryonic air and naval arms as well as a general staff, a logistic service, an intelligence service, a communications service, a technical service, and even a “psychological research service” employing 62 people.1 These forces, as well as the rudimentary military industries by which they were supported, had to be constructed under exceptionally difficult circumstances. On the one hand the work had to be carried out against the background of constant skirmishes with the local Palestinian population; on the other, much of it had to take place underground and in the teeth first of the Ottomans who ruled the country and then of the British mandatory authorities.

  “Battle-Worthy Guards”: Ha-shomer members dressed up as Arabs, ca. 1910.

  CHAPTER 1

  “BATTLE-WORTHY GUARDS”

  AT THE BEGINNING of the twentieth century, Palestine—even the country’s borders had yet to be defined, let alone marked on the ground—was merely a remote and neglected province of the Ottoman empire. Neither in the towns nor in the countryside were there any wheeled vehicles. The former had alleyways with steps and narrow turns designed for pedestrians and donkeys; the latter did not have any metalled roads at all. For example, when Napoleon campaigned in Palestine in 1798-1799 the state of the roads prohibited him from taking his siege artillery along; having been shipped from Alexandria to Acre, it was intercepted by the British navy and lost. When the British philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore visited the country half a century later he discovered that his carriage was useless and that the only way to get the heavy metal parts of a windmill he was building to Jerusalem was on the backs of mules.

  The very first wheeled vehicle, appropriately nicknamed “Pharaoh’s chariot,” was introduced in 1869. Even so, at the end of the century the journey from Jaffa to Chadera—a little more than forty miles—took nine hours to accomplish by cart.1 The journey by horse-drawn carriage to Jerusalem, though similar in length, took even longer. Normally people would leave during the early afternoon. Nighttime being too dangerous for travel, they would spend the night in a caravansary at Shaar Ha-gai (The Gate to the Valley) some thirty miles away. They would start again in the morning and arrive around noon after having driven up and down the mountain tracks.2 Even after a railroad between the two towns was built in 1892 the trip still took four to six hours. There were stretches where the train, winding its way along the mountain track, could be overtaken by a galloping horse.

  Owing to the absence of paved roads, as late as 1913 there was only a single motorcar in the entire country.3 Telecommunications, too, were few and far between. Influenced by the Muslim priesthood or Ulema, the Ottomans had been notoriously slow to adopt the art of printing, and it was only in 1727, almost three centuries after Gutenberg, that the first press was established at Constantinople.4 The first telegraph line linking Constantinople with Beirut and from there via Haifa to Jaffa was inaugurated in 1865; a year later it was extended to Jerusalem.5 Which other towns were hooked up is not known, but in 1919 the British operated a network that included, besides the above, Ramla, Afula, Hebron, Gaza, Tul Karem, Acre, Nazaret, and Tiberias.6 As for telephones, in 1914 there were none—this at a time when a well-developed country such as Germany or England already had tens of thousands.

  This area of approximately 10,000 square miles between the Jordan and the Mediterranean was populated by perhaps 55,000 Jews7 and up to 600,000 Arabs (mostly Muslims, but including a Christian community amounting to perhaps 10 percent of the total) and Druze.8 Politically speaking the country was considered part of Greater Syria and also included what was later to become known as Transjordan. Governed from Damascus, from north to south, it was divided into the three regions (sanjaks ) of Acre, Nablus, and Jerusalem. However, in practice the poor infrastructure only enabled the government to assert itself inside the towns where police forces were stationed. In some of these towns the presence of foreign consuls also helped protect their countrymen, if not against robbers then at any rate against the authorities.

  Outside the towns, all of which were walled and closed at night, the countryside was largely left to its own devices. Much of it was dominated by a number of clans, that is, very extended families (the number of members often ran into the thousands) with a loose social structure and a recognized, though normally largely ritual, sheik, elder, or chief. Each clan was named after some long-deceased sheik and lived on its own territory, which might be measured in hundreds of square miles. Each one skirmished with the rest, raided neighboring farms, and, by demanding protection money, rendered the roads unsafe. For example, the village of Abu Gosh west of Jerusalem, now a place where motorists stop for a meal, used to be a notorious robbers’ den. Until the 1870s, when things started slowly improving, clans even engaged each other in regular battles in which several
hundreds of warriors on each side sometimes took part. Except at harvesttime, when it called a truce and sent its heavily guarded officials in to collect taxes, the government rarely interfered.9

  During the 1880s the “old” Jewish population began to be joined by newcomers who made their way out after the pogroms that followed the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881; twenty years later they were joined by another wave, in turn driven out by the pogroms that shook Russia’s Jewish community after the country’s defeat in the war against Japan.10 The total number of immigrants may have been around 40,000, though it is estimated that only half of them stayed. Forming part of the great Jewish emigration movement that was leaving eastern Europe during those years, many belonged to the poorest classes. Others were members of the intelligentsia, a Russian term referring to people who were generally well educated (e.g., professionals) but not property-owning. Having alienated their families by attending non-Jewish high schools and even university, upon graduation many also found themselves rejected by their gentile environment, which refused to accept them on equal terms. As in all emigration movements aiming to settle in underdeveloped countries, males predominated. Almost all who arrived in Palestine were young and unmarried, a fact by no means insignificant in determining the kinds of lives that they took up and the ideals they entertained.

  Whereas less than 20 percent of the Arab population was urban, more than 80 percent of the Jews, both old and new, lived in the towns. The most prominent was Jerusalem, half its population (50,000 total) being Jewish. Others were Safed, Tiberias, Haifa, Jaffa, and Tel Aviv (the latter a purely Jewish town that was founded in 1909 and grew very rapidly). The remaining 20 percent or so of Jews, however, went out to the countryside. The land on which they settled was mostly waste, such as the malaria-bearing swampland in the Valley of Esdraelon and around the settlement of Chadera in the center of the Sharon Plain. It had been purchased, often from absentee landlords, first by the Parisian Rothschilds, who donated large sums of money for the purpose, and later by the Jewish Colonization Association, the first bank founded by the Zionists. Settlements such as Rosh Pina (the earliest of the lot), Sejera, Yavniel, Merchavia, Tel Adashim, Rechovot, Rishon Le-tsion, Nes Tsiona, Gedera, and others came into being (see Map 1.1); most only numbered a few dozen inhabitants although the largest, Petach Tikva, already had 700 in 1897. It was in these settlements that a “security” problem first arose between Jews and Arabs (see Map 6.1).