Watching the IDF (catch all)

[Merv Benson]

Israel is not going to be able to get a hearts and minds campaign going among the Palestinians. They are a people whose minds have been poisoned on a combination of religious bigotry and ethnic hatred, fortified by a real estate worshipping death cult mentality. This makes the classic counterinsurgency strategy unavailable. Israel has responded by attempting to isolate rather than work with the Palestinians in recent years.

Prospects for an agreement are remote because the Palestinians have nothing to offer the Israelis. The Palestinian Authority can't offer peace for land, becuase it can't deliver peace. It cannot or will not control those who want to explode around Israelis.

While the Israeli economy has suffered from the conflict, the Palestinian's economy has cratered into a true begger status where its "goverment" is scrambing to find donors to pay its police. That is not too surprising when hate and victimization appear to be their main commerce. One reason why this status exist if the 50 plus years of dependency on charity from the UN and others, which has subsidized their war against Israel. Without the subsidies they would have been forced to create a real economy with real jobs instead of haveing a fourth of the male population employed by the "security forces." Can you imagine the size of the US military and police force of a fourth of our population was so employed?

[Jones_RE]

1) I believe classic counterinsurgency doctrine does apply in the case of Israel. Although its particulars are endlessly mutable, war itself is universal. However, Israel suffers from a terrible case of strategic "cogntive dissonance" regarding Palestinian statehood which prevents it from successfully employing classic doctrine.

One of the essential requirements of classic counterinsurgency doctrine is that the local people be treated with respect, and their interests generally enhanced. Because one of Israel's strategic goals has been (and may still be) the settlement of land formerly occupied by Arab Palestinians by Israelis, this essential requirement cannot be complied with. Palestinians know that no matter how nice an Israeli may seem, ultimately their home is subject to demolition at any time. This fundamental opposition sets up a source of conflict that cannot be defused. Israel would seem to want land more than peace, although this may be realigning.

2) That depends on what you mean by "working." If a constant level of uncomfortable international bad press, continuing low level terrorist attacks and reprisals, with an expensive drain on military age manpower and money is working (keep in mind Israel maintains one of the better economies in its area) then yes. However, this strategy is unlikely to lead to peaceful coexistence or decisive conquest. Personally, I think it's essentially face saving by politicians who don't have the guts to fight or the will to enter real negotiations - they fight just hard enough to maintain the status quo ante.

3) Israel's mistake is in treating the exercise of military force as a coercive tool. Not that it cannot serve as such, but rather it has manifestly failed to coerce very many Palestinians of late. A quid pro quo approach to violence does not defeat your enemy in a small war - it merely helps your enemy's recruiting drives.

Tel Aviv ought to privately determine exactly which end state they are willing to live with as regards the Palestinian people (and the various armed and unarmed factions) and then make a measured judgment as to exactly what role force is to play in achieving that state. It seems most unlikely that any military would recommend the use of ### for tat retaliatory strikes as the best long term way to curb any insurgent or conventional force.

[Mike in Hilo]

Classic counterinsurgency and Israel: This is a case of the hypothetical. Either the Israelis have decided it cannot work, or they have decided they'd rather do things on the cheap. Whether Thompson's "hold" phase with its separation of the populace from the insurgents through controls which may include mass confinement, or Trinquier's urban surveillance through block leaders, etc., the classical approach requires effective occupation. The Israelis have evidently decided they do not wish to be hampered with the responsibilities of occupation and so, since "Oslo," have left the major population concentrations to languish in an anarchic state (reserving the right, to be sure, to re-enter these areas in force from time to time, or to engage in targeted neutralizations). In the Israeli case, neither the classic approach nor what they are doing appear to be recipes for success.

[Tom Odom]

Israel is not going to be able to get a hearts and minds campaign going among the Palestinians. They are a people whose minds have been poisoned on a combination of religious bigotry and ethnic hatred, fortified by a real estate worshipping death cult mentality. This makes the classic counterinsurgency strategy unavailable. Israel has responded by attempting to isolate rather than work with the Palestinians in recent years.

Prospects for an agreement are remote because the Palestinians have nothing to offer the Israelis. The Palestinian Authority can't offer peace for land, becuase it can't deliver peace. It cannot or will not control those who want to explode around Israelis.

While the Israeli economy has suffered from the conflict, the Palestinian's economy has cratered into a true begger status where its "goverment" is scrambing to find donors to pay its police. That is not too surprising when hate and victimization appear to be their main commerce. One reason why this status exist if the 50 plus years of dependency on charity from the UN and others, which has subsidized their war against Israel. Without the subsidies they would have been forced to create a real economy with real jobs instead of haveing a fourth of the male population employed by the "security forces." Can you imagine the size of the US military and police force of a fourth of our population was so employed?

Merv,

The bigots live on both sides of the equation. Every argument you make applies to the Israelis as well as the Palestinians. The Israelis have ALWAYS worked to isolate and undermine the Palestinians; their long term stance--and it is still used--is that there are no "palestininans". The Palestinian dependence on UN funds for instance could be rewritten to state Israeli dependence on US funds. As for ethnic hatred, try living in Israel and then decide who hates whom. My take after decades of study and being on the ground, is neither side wears white hats; in many ways they deserve each other.

Tom

[Merv Benson]

I think there are some major differences. I would first note that the million or so Palestinians who live in Israel as oppose to the territories, rarely explode and kill Israelis. The Israelis target people who are hostile threats while the Palestinians target non combatants. That they cannot tell the difference suggest that they are blinded by their bigotry and strike out at "the other." indiscriminately. The Hamas death cult is clearly an organization of bigots. When faced with that kind of hostility it would not be surprising that the Israelis would hold them in low regard, just as we held the Japanese and Germans in low regard during World War II, but it cannot be argued that we were on the same moral plane with our enemies.