The Mediterranean Sea, Israel’s only open border, also borders Israel’s enemies to the north and the Gaza Strip to the south, thereby linking it to enemy states. Thus, Israel’s control of this naval arena would enable it to project military strength from the sea, and afford it the capability to embark on landing operations of various types. “The shores of the State of Israel, the naval interface with each of our enemies, require us to expand our naval strength to the point of being able to land forces from the...
Although the State of Israel has always been threatened from the sea, preparing for the threat was not an important priority for the state’s leaders, as reflected by the resources that were allocated to the navy. However, once long range missiles appeared in the naval arena (in the 1960s), it became clear that the navy’s vessels and the air force’s planes were not capable of coping with this challenge.
Over a decade has passed since the eruption of the second intifada, a grueling period for Israel with the long, sustained, and intensive series of terrorist attacks launched by terrorist organizations against civilians and soldiers of the State of Israel. Most difficult were the suicide attacks, generally carried out in urban centers and causing large numbers of casualties – dead and wounded – among the civilian population. Predictably, therefore, the terrorism phenomenon became a dominant issue on Israel’s national and popular...
The much-publicized conflict between the Minister of Defense and the outgoing IDF Chief of Staff, as well as the drama surrounding the appointment of the new Chief of Staff, diverted public attention from the critical question of the state of the IDF today compared to its state four years ago, when Gabi Ashkenazi assumed Israel’s highest military post. Five points are particularly noteworthy.
The book includes seventeen analytical essays written by INSS and outside researchers. Focus is on Israel’s potential, at times at variance with US administration efforts, to navigate current and prospective national security challenges. The ongoing challenges represented by the Palestinian issue and Iran’s nuclear and regional ambitions are well documented, as are implications of internal Israeli politics, Arabs in Israel, international terrorism, trends in Egypt and Lebanon, and other regional developments.
The recent campaigns in Lebanon and Gaza compelled Israel to conduct a serious self-examination and take a wide ranging look at the strategic developments of the past decade. In this period, which began with the second intifada and ended with Operation Cast Lead, Israel found itself facing qualitatively different threats from those it had faced in the first fifty years of its existence. The threat began to change with the awareness on the part of Israel’s enemies that they were unable to achieve significant gains against Israel...
For years Israel has been subject to extortion by terrorist organizations holding Israeli soldiers and civilians hostage, with their release conditional on the release of hundreds of imprisoned members of these organizations. If there was a realistic chance of releasing its citizens by force, Israel chose that route; lacking that option, Israel consistently paid a steep price for the release of its captives. This policy was formulated over decades, starting in the late 1960s. Consequently, terrorist organizations, depending on their...
From mid 2005 suicide terrorism from Judea and Samaria stopped being a significant component of the IDF’s war on Palestinian terrorism, thus marking the end of a long, demanding process that began with the Israeli government’s decision to launch Operation Defensive Shield and have the IDF operate in Palestinian cities. It is difficult to determine precisely when the process concluded, but around the middle of 2005 the number of suicide attacks from Judea and Samaria dropped to a very low level, and since then this general...
The Middle East has recently operated under the not implausible fear that a regional war is about to break out. Therefore, Israel is closely following any sign of growing closeness among the members of the radical axis, a relationship that peaked with the Damascus summit in February 2010 and the transfer of – or at least what seemed like the intention to transfer – “balance destabilizing” weapons to Hizbollah. It is therefore important to understand the extent to which the axis – Iran, Syria, Hizbollah, and Palestinian...
Among military thinkers it is axiomatic that the purpose of utilizing military force is to realize a political end. Clausewitz wrote that the goal of war is to impose one’s political will on the enemy, and for Liddell Hart the goal is “a better state of peace.” Indeed, according to American military doctrine the finish line of a military campaign is reached when the president no longer needs military tools in order to realize national goals. From the national-strategic end state defined by the president, the...
Inside the crowded geo-strategic box that is Israel’s domain, the western sector is the only open border and is thus both the Achilles’ heel of Israel enemies and a great opportunity for the IDF. At the same time, technological improvements on the enemy’s side and its growing arsenal of a wide range of rockets and missiles are a severe threat to Israel in every land battle. In the sea domain the navy enjoys many advantages: it is a constant presence in the arena, it is difficult to track, its activity is possible in...
The Czech philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) claimed that as we are thinking creatures amassing life experiences, assisted by language and descriptive capabilities and endowed with the ability to judge, draw conclusions, and make decisions, and as we are constantly in search of truths, from time to time there occur conceptual developments in our understanding of reality, followed by linguistic developments. Husserl, who preceded the era in which post-modernism has assumed intellectual hegemony, also claimed that “to live...
