Monday, June 29, 2020

IDF Quandary: Generals Have Become Police Chiefs

Dr. Daniel Pipes has pressed for policy that moves Israel to victory.

Explaining Israel's Timid Security Establishment - Dr. Daniel Pipes 

We who argue for Israel Victory watched with dismay as Qatar's government threatens Israel with ending its financial donations to Gaza, insinuating that Hamas will resume its incendiary balloon attacks. Where, we wonder, are those extraordinary armed forces that defeated three states in six days, pulled off the Entebbe raid, and heisted Iran's nuclear archive?

Israel's security establishment, it turns out, has a Doppelgänger [a double], an uncelebrated, defensive, reticent counterpart that emerged after the 1993 Oslo accords to deal with West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, the one that needed 50 days to end a minor military operation in 2014 and cannot stop burning balloons coming out of Gaza. The classic IDF seeks to win but the Palestinian one just wants calm.

What accounts for its timidity? 

Einat Wilf explains, the IDF encourages Qatari funds going to Gaza because it thinks that this buys it calm: "It will do anything possible to ensure that the funds keep flowing, even if that means that the calm is purchased at the cost of a war that will go on for decades."

Just as police see criminals as incorrigible troublemakers, so wizened Israeli security chiefs view Palestinians as irredeemable adversaries and reject the idea that these adversaries can learn a lesson; can lions reform hyenas? Security types oppose a tough approach because they want to avoid troubles. This outlook may make them sound like leftists, but they are not; long and bitter experience, not misty idealism, explains their reticence.

Israeli security services do not want again to rule directly over the West Bank or Gaza; fearing a collapse of the Palestinian Authority (PA) or Hamas, they treat these deferentially. They see the PA under Mahmoud Abbas, for all its deficiencies, as a useful security partner. True, it incites murder domestically and delegitimizes the State of Israel internationally, but better to endure these aggressions than to punish Abbas, induce his downfall, and re-live the nightmare of walking the streets of Nablus. So, he gets away with literal murder.

A combination of Palestinian military weakness and intense international scrutiny has caused Israel's security establishment to see Palestinians more like criminals than soldiers; dealing with them has morphed the IDF into a police force, with a defensive mentality viewing stability as a goal in itself. Generals do not enter battle with the goal of saving the lives of their soldiers; but police chiefs want the struggle with criminals to break no laws and leave no one harmed. Generals seek victory, police chiefs seek quiet.

Resolution of the Palestinian problem requires an end to the split in Israel's defense establishment and the return to a unitary force dedicated to winning, to convincing the Palestinians that the conflict is over, they lost, and they should abandon their war goals.
[Israel Hayom]
*

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Understanding Jordan

Jordan's king and [Palestinian] queen




Jordan Fears the Palestinians - Dr. Dan Schueftan

The Palestinian national movement is the most dangerous enemy of the Hashemite regime in Jordan


The Palestinians are eyeing not only Jaffa and Haifa, but also Amman [the capital of Jordan]. If an independent Palestinian state is founded in the West Bank, it will first channel its subversion efforts towards Jordan, a majority of whose residents are Palestinian. If and when it succeeds in overthrowing the Hashemite regime and linking up to radical Arab and Iranian elements in the region, it will be easier for the Palestinians to fight Israel more effectively.
    

Whoever thinks that Palestinians will suffice with a small and backward state between Jenin and Jericho is pathologically addicted to self-deception. They are ignorant of one hundred years of Palestinian political culture.
    

The current situation is the most comfortable for Jordan. Israeli control prevents Hamas from taking over the West Bank, and the Israeli buffer in the Jordan Valley prevents uncontrolled contact between the Palestinians and Jordan. The Jordanians have an interest in lasting Israeli control in the Jordan Valley, with or without sovereignty. 
The writer is head of the International Graduate Program in National Security Studies at the University of Haifa. 
(Israel Hayom)
*