(Editor's note: A high level officer in the Israel Defense Forces explains why Israel's entire approach to Palestinian Arab terror is misguided and why military victory is both achievable and necessary if the state is to survive.)

The protagonists of the political process with the PLO made a fundamental error when they decided that since the Palestinian Arabs do not possess tank divisions, terror does not threaten Israel's existence and requires only a response appropriate to a "limited conflict." What this view fails to recognize is that terror is a form of war, and one that seeks to achieve a decisive outcome by using alternative tactics. It should be clear by now that Palestinian Arab terror has wrought immense cumulative damage to Israel's social, economic, and political life, and that the government's response to terror has been woefully inadequate.

The first senior officer in the Israel Defense Forces officially to concede that terror threatens the existence of Israel was Major General Amos Gilad. In a June 2000 interview in the Israel Defense Forces journal Bamahane, Gilad said that terror "in the scope and depth of its damage has become a strategic threat..." If this is indeed the case, then continued adherence to the doctrine of "limited conflict" is mistaken, for that doctrine was never intended as an answer to mortal threats.

Perhaps the most disturbing effect of treating terror as a limited, low intensity conflict is the emergence of a generation pessimistic regarding its ability to win. This is sometimes followed by a loss of faith in the justice of Israel's cause, self-reproach in response to what our enemies are doing to us, a loss of sensitivity to human life, and the blurring of the demand upon the state to discharge its most basic duty of protecting the lives of its citizens. All of these are apparent in the evaluations of so-called "experts" who contend that terror cannot be overcome -- which means there is no choice but to reconcile oneself to terror as a permanent way of life, a more or less "natural phenomenon."

The permanent humiliation suffered by the terror victim becomes the prevailing mood, engendering more humiliation, until, at the end of the process, not a single value remains for which it is worth endangering one's life. The way is then open to a loss of belief in the imperative of living in this particular location. This is the precise mindset which the terrorist seeks to instill in the victims of terror. Thus in this respect, too, terror threatens the life of the State of Israel.

While comparisons are often drawn with the experience of other countries with terror, Israel's situation is different in two major respects. One difference is the location of terrorist operations in relation to the critical assets of the state and the other is the declared objective of the terrorists.

The 1996 Israel Defense Forces publication Tatzpit was devoted to "Low Intensity Conflict." Together with its follow-up, "Fighting on the Lebanese Front as a Conflict between Unequal Forces," it figured importantly in the formulation of Israel's "Limited Conflict" guidelines issued in 2001. The Tatzpit issue included a number of articles and sample doctrinal guidelines, collected and translated from foreign armies which had confronted low-intensity fighting. But none of the settings presented as reference models for the IDF bear any similarity to the setting in Israel. For example, an article entitled "Principles of Combating Uprisings," based on the British experience, contains no references to the British response to organizations which every other week explode buses full of passengers in the center of London, leading to the total disruption of everyday life -- the reality experienced by the State of Israel. The articles focus on uprisings in Indo-China, Malaya, Algeria, Cuba, and Northern Ireland.

The Western response to a strike on its population centers can be learned from the American reaction to 9/11, with its military operation directed at the heart of Afghanistan as the sender of terror.

The Israeli case is fundamentally different, given the proximity of the instigators of terror to Israel's population centers and infrastructure, as opposed to the oceans that separated the national infrastructures of France, Britain, and the United States from the fronts at which their soldiers fought. There is a world of difference between the protracted combat against guerilla forces in Vietnam or Algeria, the kind conducted by thousands of American and French soldiers while life in Washington and Paris went on as usual, and the urban terror in Israel which occasionally paralyzes entire population centers and causes immense damage to the economy and to morale. Yet these very different situations form the basis for Israel's adoption of the limited conflict doctrine.

Something about the Western response to a strike on its population centers can be learned from the American reaction to 9/11, with its military operation directed at the heart of Afghanistan as the sender of terror. In this case, the doctrine of limited conflict was cast aside, as the "strong" side under attack undertook to summarily

April 2004               - 3 -               Outpost