On Tuesday, January 15, 2019, Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi assumed his position as the 22nd IDF Chief of Staff. From political and security perspectives, his tenure begins in a stormy, unstable period, when the IDF’s strategic and operational environment continues to be marked by vast uncertainty. An analysis at INSS points to the ten principal challenges that the incoming Chief of Staff will have to confront almost immediately. These challenges reflect the unique nature of the period and the complexity of the role of the IDF Chief of...
The Israel Air Force attack in Syria on December 25, 2018 showed that Israel is trying to keep to its strategy of offensive action – the “campaign between wars” – that has been implemented successfully in the northern arena since early 2013. The attack did indeed show that Israel maintains its operational attack capability and that it can execute a focused attack of this sort even at present, while dealing with immediate risks of escalation. However, after six years, a combination of factors suggests that this mode of action in the...
Maj. Gen. Eyal Zamir will be appointed deputy chief of staff of the IDF. This was confirmed by Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Benjamin Netanyahu, following the recommendation of Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, who will be the next chief of staff. The deputy chief of staff is in the shadow of the chief of staff, but nevertheless fills an important job in the IDF General Staff and will generally be one of the leading candidates for chief of staff in the next round. This article discusses the role of the deputy chief of staff, and...
The Six Day War, which broke out on the morning of June 5, 1967, was a formative event that changed the face of the State of Israel and, to a large extent, the entire Middle East. Prior to the war, Israel had been under existential threat and in six days, the Israel Defense Forces succeeded in removing the threat by achieving a decisive military victory and positioning Israel as a significant force in the region. This victory was accompanied by new complexities, and fifty years after the war, some of its implications still remain as...
The Soldiers’ Talk and the Movement for Greater Israel were both born during the period following the Six Day War. Even when examined in their early stages of development, both illustrate the different viewpoints of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that have existed from then until today. In order to support this claim, this essay compares the characteristics of the discourse represented by these two opposing pillars, which originated during the shock of the 1967 victory. This is done by analyzing texts that appeared immediately...
More than just another war, the Six Day War was a major turning point in Israeli history. This essay does not discuss the war’s significance or its particular implications, such as the internal debate in Israel over the political, ideological, and strategic importance of the territories, alternative models of a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians, or the ideological activism that developed within the religious Zionist movement after 1967. Rather, it will look at a number of turning points that occurred in the...
Prior to the Six Day War, the intelligence assessments shifted drastically. The basic approach initially claimed that Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser would not dare to act against Israel while his army was involved in the fighting in Yemen. The assessment then claimed that the Egyptian army was deployed in Sinai for defense and deterrence. The final assessment was that Nasser was prepared for a confrontation with Israel. This essay describes the strategic assessments of the Military Intelligence Directorate before the outbreak...
The Six Day War, the War of Attrition, and the Yom Kippur War led to a new understanding of deterrence and its place in Israel’s defense policy. Deterrence has been one of the main components in Israel’s defense policy since its independence. The nascent state emerged from the War of Independence understanding that it was only the first stage in the Arab world’s attempts to destroy it. The humiliating defeat of the Arab coalition in the War of Independence and the Arab countries’ recognition of a clear asymmetry between them and...
In 2004, Moshe Ya’alon, then chief of the IDF General Staff, commented that “the processes of force buildup and operation are interconnected, both in day-to-day activity and in preparing the response necessary for the long term. The IDF must address the difficulties inherent in the need to develop multidimensional capabilities, in view of the multiple scenarios that it must be prepared for at any given moment (fighting on a number of fronts, a limited confrontation, the threat of high-trajectory fire, non-conventional threats, cyber...
The Six Day War ended with a resounding military defeat for the Arab states. Indeed, in Israel’s War of Independence, the Arab armies failed in their efforts to stop the creation of the State of Israel, which at the end of the war held a larger area than it had been allotted by the UN Partition Plan. However, the Arab armies at that time were weak, and the lack of agreement among the Arab countries, which were ruled by the old regimes, prevented effective cooperation between them. In the 1956 Sinai Campaign, the Egyptian army was...
The period immediately prior to the Six Day War was marked by anxiety over the State of Israel’s ability to survive a war in which it was attacked by the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian militaries, assisted by reinforcements from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and possibly Libya, Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. There was a sense of an existential threat to the state, whose narrowest point at the Tulkarm-Netanya line was not more than 14 kilometers wide, and as a result the Israeli leadership attempted repeatedly to avoid the war by...
The Six Day War created a new reality in the Middle East, particularly in the Israeli-Palestinian arena. Already in the years before the war, there were defined Palestinian organizational frameworks, foremost among them Fatah and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). However, it was the military, territorial, and political outcome of the war and its complex and long term implications for relations between the Arab states and Israel that shaped the conditions for the growth of the Palestinian national movement. The strength...
