“Fortress Israel:
The Inside Story of the
Military Elite Who Run the Country — and Why They
Can’t Make Peace”
by Patrick Tyler
By Daniel Byman,
Daniel Byman
Oct 06, 2012 05:43 PM EDT
The Washington Post
More than 60 years after its founding, the state that David Ben Gurion and other Israeli founding fathers built still does not know peace. Longtime enemies such as Egypt have laid down their arms, but Syria remains defiant, and in Lebanon, Hezbollah wages an on-again, off-again, low-level war. Most troubling, Israel rules uneasily over the West Bank and is in a state of near war with Hamas-led Gaza. The lack of resolution to the Palestinian problem is increasingly making Israel an international pariah.
Patrick Tyler, an eminent journalist who has reported for The Washington Post and the New York Times, offers a provocative explanation for Israel’s constant insecurity: Its leaders, particularly its security elite, are unable and unwilling to turn their guns into ploughshares. In the end, however, the argument of “Fortress Israel” does not survive close scrutiny, and the book, as its subtitle suggests, simplifies Israeli politics and the difficult security dilemmas the country faces.
(FSG) - ‘Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country--and Why They Can't Make Peace’ by Patrick Tyler
Israel’s military class is far more conflicted than Tyler’s thesis suggests — a point often made clear by the various stories that compose the book. Ben Gurion pushed for war before 1956, but after that he was content with a U.N. monitoring presence in Sinai and did not want another crisis with Egypt. Israeli military intelligence director Aharon Yariv was hawkish in calling for war against Egypt in 1967 but also was one of “the first high-ranking officers among the military elite to propose negotiations with any Palestinian group that was willing to forswear violence.” Yitzhak Rabin, the architect of the “force, might, and beatings” policy to put down the first intifada, was later assassinated because he sought to lead Israel to peace.
Today, leaders such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak reportedly favor a preemptive strike on Iran, but former senior generals and intelligence personnel, the security elite whom Tyler decries as warmongers, strongly and publicly denounce this.
The Israeli public is often a passive bystander in “Fortress Israel,” but in reality the nation’s often-ferocious domestic politics drive its security decision-making. Years of war and terrorism have made ordinary Israelis, not just their leaders, wary of relaxing their guard, in turn making it hard for those leaders to make concessions or to refrain from using force. Palestinian paramilitary attacks in the 1950s frightened Israelis and convinced them that Arab states were constantly plotting the new state’s destruction — an exaggeration, but hardly a crazy one given the violence and the rhetoric of the time. Fifty years later, the staggering violence of the second intifada soured a generation of Israelis and destroyed the pro-peace left, leaving Israel a very different place than it was in the 1990s, when peace seemed around the corner.
Tyler does not address the obvious counterargument that diplomacy often would have failed, even had Israeli leaders consistently embraced it. He notes that “Ben-Gurion’s militarism and Arab nationalism were feeding off each other” but doesn’t take the next step and explore whether that cycle could have been broken on the Arab side. Arab politicians led populaces whose opinion of Israel ranged from hatred to loathing, making it difficult for them to cut a deal (or, as former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat can attest, making the price too high).
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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