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$Title{Israel
Chapter 5A.   National Security}
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$Author{Richard F. Nyrop}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{israel
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$Date{1979}
$Log{}
Title:       Israel
Book:        Israel, A Country Study
Author:      Richard F. Nyrop
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1979

Chapter 5A.   National Security

     In few countries of the world do matters of national security play as
pervasive a role in society as in Israel. In 1978 over 11 percent of the total
population (well over half of all Jewish males between the ages of eighteen
and fifty-four and a significant number of Jewish females) were members of the
Israel Defense Forces (IDF-commonly known in Israel as Zahal, the Hebrew
acronym for Zvah Haganah Le Israel) either as regular soldiers or reservists.
Many thousands more worked in defense industries. Year after year, defense is
the largest component of a government budget that places one of the largest
tax burdens on its citizens of any nation in the world.

     The prominence given national security by Israeli society stems from the
Israeli perceived massive security threat posed by its Arab neighbors. Having
founded the State of Israel in the wake of the Holocaust (see Glossary), in
which Diaspora Jews were defenseless against an enemy bent on their
destruction, Israeli Jews were determined and willing to devote considerable
resources to defend their young nation. By 1978 most outside observers agreed
that the IDF was stronger than ever and clearly superior to the armies of its
Arab enemies. Unlike the years after the Six-Day War of June 1967, however,
Israelis did not display an overconfidence in their defense capability. The
surprise Arab offensive in October 1973 renewed Israel's fears of defeat at
the hands of its Arab enemies, fears that lingered five years later.

     Many observers in the mid-1970s referred to Israel as a democratic
garrison state. Indeed, in many respects Israel resembled an armed camp; and a
wide range of government policies, particularly in foreign affairs, was
greatly influenced by security considerations as advised by IDF commanders.
Unlike many garrison states, however, Israel's armed forces did not play a
direct role in politics, and there was little prospect of the IDF's
abandoning its tradition of strict subordination to civilian authority.

     Nevertheless national security policy was a major component of civilian
politics; and in mid-1978 a nationwide debate was centered on the question of
Israeli concessions in the occupied territories, with a growing minority of
society urging the government to consider concessions in an effort to renew
the stalled peace negotiations with Egypt. A grass-roots movement, composed
originally of a group of reserve IDF officers, had recently appeared to
express to the government the widely held opinion that "Peace Now" was
preferable to continued Jewish settlement in the occupied territories.
Military observers agreed that with the growing sophistication and deadliness
of modern armaments in the Middle East arena, the alternative to peace with
Israel's neighbors was the spectre of increasingly costly wars in an ongoing
conflict, which, during its first thirty years, had cost some 13,000 Israeli
lives.

Security: A Persistent National Concern

Historical Background

     Ancient Jewish military tradition is deeply rooted in biblical history
and begins with Abraham who led an ad hoc military force. Joshua, who
conquered Canaan, is an early hero; and David, who captured Jerusalem, is
regarded by Israeli Jews as their greatest king and warrior. Solomon organized
and maintained the first standing Jewish army (see Ancient Israel, ch. 1).

     Little in the way of military tradition arose out of the nearly 2,000
years of the Diaspora (see Glossary). In fact, the lack of military prowess in
the Diaspora Jewish communities was commonly viewed as a cause of their
hardships and became a major motivation for building a strong defense
establishment within Israel. With the Russian pogroms of the 1880s, Jews began
settling in the area of Palestine and, determined to end the centuries of
persecution, created self-defense units called Shorim, or Guardsmen, to
protect the early settlements (see table B, Preface). In 1909 the Shorim were
formally organized throughout the area of Jewish settlement in Palestine and
renamed the Hashomer, or the Watchmen. Although few in numbers (the Hashomer
numbered fewer than 100 at its peak), these armed militias became extremely
important to Israeli military tradition, establishing a precedent of armed
self-defense of the Zionist movement, which during the War of Independence
in 1948 would flower into the IDF. Many members of Hashomer joined the Jewish
Legion, which fought with the British against Imperial Germany during World
War I.

     Increasing tensions between the Arab and growing Jewish communities of
Palestine brought the need to expand the Yishuv's (see Glossary) efforts at
self-defense (see Events in Palestine: 1908-39, ch. 1). In 1920, after serious
Arab disturbances in Jerusalem and in northern Palestine, the Hashomer was
disbanded and replaced by the Haganah (see Glossary), which was intended to be
a larger and more wide-ranging organization for the defense of all Palestinian
Jewry. By 1948, when it was disbanded so that the IDF would be the sole
Israeli military organization, the Haganah was a force of some 30,000.

     The Haganah, originally financed through the Zionist General Federation
of Labor (Histadrut HaOvdim Haklalit, known as Histadrut-see Glossary) and
later through the Jewish Agency (see Glossary), operated clandestinely under
the British Mandate, which declared the bearing of unauthorized arms by
Palestinian Jews to be illegal. Arms and ammunition were smuggled into the
country, and training was conducted in secret. In addition to guarding
settlements, the Haganah manufactured arms, built a series of roads and
stockades throughout Palestine to facilitate defense, and organized and
defended groups of Jewish immigrants during periods of the Mandate when
immigration was illegal or restricted.

     Arab attacks on Jewish communities in 1921 and 1929 found the Haganah ill
equipped and ineffective: over 100 Jews were killed in 1929 alone. When
renewed Arab rioting broke out in Jaffa (Yafo) in 1936 and soon spread
throughout Palestine, the Mandate authorities, realizing that they could not
defend every Jewish settlement, authorized the creation of the Jewish
Settlement Police, also known as notrim, who were trained, armed, and paid
by the British. In 1938 a British intelligence officer, Captain Orde Charles
Wingate, organized three counterguerrilla units, called special night squads,
manned by British and Jewish personnel. As both of these organizations
contained a large number of Haganah members, their formation greatly
increased the assets of the Haganah while providing a legal basis for much of
their activities. Although the Arab Revolt, as the nearly continuous
disturbances from 1936 to 1939 have come to be called, cost the lives of
nearly 600 Jews and over 5,000 Arabs, Israeli observers have pointed out
that Jewish casualties would have been far greater were it not for the
increasing effectiveness of these paramilitary units.

     During the Arab Revolt, the Haganah's policy of havlagah, or
self-restraint, under which retaliation against the Arab community at large
was strictly forbidden, was not aggressive enough for some. These dissidents,
under the leadership of Vladamir (Zeev) Jabotinski and later Menachem Begin,
established the National Military Organization (Irgun Zvai Leumi, known as
Irgun and by the acronym ETZEL) in 1937. Initially the Irgun waged a
campaign of terror, sabotage, and reprisal against the Arabs. After the
British government issued a White Paper in May 1939 extending the Mandate for
ten years and placing limits on Jewish immigration, however, Irgun turned its
terrorist activities against the British troops in Palestine in an all-out
struggle against the Mandate Authority.

     With the outbreak of World War II, Irgun leaders settled on a policy of
cooperation with the British in the war effort; but a hard core within the
organization opposed the policy and accordingly split off from the larger
body. This group, led by Avraham Stern, formed the Fighters for the Freedom of
Israel (Lohamei Herut Israel-Lehi), known as the Stern Gang. The Stern Gang
specialized in the assassination of British and other officials. At their
peaks, the Irgun contained some 4,000 men and the Stern Gang 200 to 300,
though participants were considerably fewer. Defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945
witnessed a resumption of anti-British activities by both Haganah and Irgun in
pursuance of their common ultimate goal, the establishment of a national home
and the creation of a sovereign Jewish state.

     During World War II some 32,000 Palestinian Jews, both men and women,
volunteered for the British army, and in 1944 some 5,000 of these were formed
into the Jewish Brigade, which fought successfully in Italy in 1945. With so
many of its members serving abroad, the ranks of the Haganah were depleted,
and in 1941 its leaders decided to raise a mobile force-the Palmach-of some
3,000 fulltime soldiers, whose mission was to defend the Yishuv. Trained with
the aid of the British, the Palmach was the first fulltime standing Jewish
army in over 2,000 years and is considered to be the direct forerunner to the
IDF. For many years the vast majority of IDF officers were veterans of either
the Palmach or the Jewish Brigade.

     When Israel achieved its independence on May 15, 1948, the Haganah became
the de facto Israeli army. On that day, the country was invaded by the regular
forces of Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria. Eleven days later, Israel's
provisional government issued an order that provided the legal framework for
the country's armed forces. The order established the official name Zvah
Haganah Le Israel and outlawed the existence of any other military force
within Israel.

     The dissident Irgun and Stern Gang were reluctant to disband. Fighting
between Irgun and regular military forces broke out on June 20 when the supply
ship Altalena arrived at Tel Aviv with 900 men and a load of arms and
ammunition for the Irgun. A round of ammunition set fire to the ship, and many
members of the Irgun were arrested; both organizations disbanded shortly
thereafter. A more delicate problem was to disband the Palmach, which had
become an elite military unit within the Haganah with strong political ties to
the socialist-oriented kibbutzim (see Glossary). It was only through the skill
and determination of David BenGurion, Israel's first prime minister and
minister of defense, who was determined to see the IDF develop into a single,
professional, and nonpolitical national armed force, that the Palmach was
peacefully abolished and integrated into the IDF in November 1948.

     Though the Haganah was estimated to have only 30,000 men at the time of
independence, the ranks of the IDF swelled rapidly to some 100,000 at the
height of the War of Independence. Nearly all able-bodied men, plus many
women, were recruited, and thousands of foreign volunteers, mostly veterans of
World War II, came to the aid of Israel. The newly independent state rapidly
mobilized to meet the Arab invaders; by July 1948 the Israelis had set up
an air force, a navy, and a tank battalion. Weapons and ammunition were
procured abroad, primarily from Czechoslovakia. Three B-17 bombers were bought
in the United States through black market channels, and shortly after one of
them bombed Cairo in July 1948, the Israelis were able to establish air
supremacy. Subsequent victories came in rapid succession on all three fronts,
and the Arab states negotiated armistice agreements as they had
fought-separately. Egypt was the first to sign (February 1949), followed by
Lebanon (March), Jordan (April), and finally Syria (July). Iraq simply
withdrew its forces without signing an agreement. As a result of the war,
Israel considerably expanded its territory within the United Nations (UN)
partition of Palestine at the expense of its Arab neighbors (see fig. 5, ch.
1). Victory came at the cost over 6,000 Israeli lives, however, which
represented nearly 1 percent of the population.

     After the armistice, wartime recruits were rapidly demobilized, and
the hastily raised IDF, still lacking a permanent institutional basis,
experienced mass resignations from its war-weary officer corps. This
underscored the basic manpower problem of a small population coupled with the
need to raise rapidly a sizeable army during a wartime emergency. After
studying the Swiss reservist system, Yigael Yadin (in mid-1978 the deputy
prime minister) proposed a three-tiered solution based on a small standing
officer corps, universal conscription, and a large pool of well-trained
reservists that could be rapidly mobilized. This system was implemented in
1949 as the Defense Service Law, which provided the IDF with the legal basis
to fulfill its manpower needs and remained in 1978 one of the country's most
important and far-reaching laws (see Manpower and Training, this ch.).

     In early 1955 Egypt began sponsoring raids launched by fedayeen (Arab
commandos or guerrillas) from the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, and Jordan
into Israel. As the number and seriousness of these raids increased, Israel
began launching reprisal raids against Arab villages in Gaza and the West
Bank of Jordan. These retaliatory measures, which cost the lives of Arab
civilians and did little if anything to discourage the fedayeen, became
increasingly controversial both within Israel and abroad. Shortly thereafter
Israeli reprisal raids became directed against military targets, frontier
strongholds, police fortresses, and army camps.

     In addition to these incidents, which at times became confrontations
between regular Israeli and Arab military forces, other developments
contributed to the generally escalating tensions between Egypt and Israel and
convinced Israeli military officials that Egypt was preparing for renewed war.
The first was the so-called Czech arms deal of 1955, when Czechoslovakia
supplied Egypt with a vast amount of arms, including fighter aircraft, tanks
and other armored vehicles, destroyers, and submarines. Secondly, the
deployment of Egyptian troops in the Sinai along the Israeli border increased
dramatically in 1956. In July Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal; shortly
thereafter the Strait of Tiran, at the southern tip of the Sinai, was
blockaded to Israeli shipping (see fig. 1).

     Fearing these signs of an imminent Egyptian invasion, Israel rapidly
mobilized its reserves, and on October 29, under the leadership of Major
General Moshe Dayan, the IDF launched a preemptive attack into the Sinai.
Israeli advances on the ground were rapid and, supported by aircover, they
had routed the Egyptian forces and effectively controlled the entire
peninsula by November 2. With Israeli troops on the east bank of the Suez
Canal, British and French troops landed at Port Said and demanded withdrawal
of both sides from the Canal. The UN met in an emergency session and
demanded that the British and French leave the Suez, which they did in
December 1956, and that Israel withdraw to the armistice line of 1949, which
it did somewhat reluctantly in March 1957 after a United Nations Emergency
Force (UNEF) had been stationed in the Gaza Strip and at Sharm ash
Shaykh on the Strait of Tiran.

     Israel's victory in the 1956 War (known in Israel as the Sinai Campaign)
thus afforded it a modicum of increased security by the virtue of the UN
presence. Far more important, however, as pointed out by Edward Luttwak and
Dan Horowitz in their portrait of the IDF, was that it gave Israel and the
world a renewed confidence in Israel as a military power and as a viable
nation, even though surrounded by enemies. Though many Israeli hawks felt
that the military victory was nullified by the UN demand to withdraw from
the Sinai, Israel had achieved, at least, significant psychological gains
at a cost of fewer than 170 lives.

     The decade after the 1956 War was the most tranquil period in the
nation's history. The Egyptian armistice line remained quiet, and there were
few incidents at the Jordanian line until 1965, when Egyptian-sponsored
guerrilla raids by Al Fatah (see Glossary) first appeared. Although beginning
in 1960 there were repeated guerrilla activities and shellings of Israeli
settlements from the Golan Heights of Syria, these incidents remained
localized until 1964.

     Underlying tensions, however, did not abate; by the early 1960s both
sides considered a third round of warfare to be inevitable. An ominous arms
race developed. Egypt and Syria were supplied with Soviet aid and military
hardware, and Israel, which suddenly found European powers-the Federal
Republic of Germany (West Germany), Great Britain, and especially France-to
be willing suppliers of modern armaments (see Foreign Contacts, this ch.).
Jordan continued to receive military arms from Great Britain and the United
States.

     Mounting tensions were exhibited in 1964 when, after Israel had nearly
completed a massive irrigation project that involved diverting water from the
Jordan River into the Negev Desert, Syria began a similar project near the
river's headwaters that would have virtually dried the riverbed at the Israeli
site. Israel launched air and artillery attacks at the Syrian site, and the
Syrian project was abandoned. Guerrilla incursions from Syria and Jordan
steadily mounted, as did the intensity of Israeli reprisal raids.

     By April 1967 increased Syrian shelling of Israeli border villages was
met by an Israeli fighter attack during which six Syrian MiGs were shot down.
Syria feared that an all-out attack from Israel was imminent, and Egypt, with
whom it had recently signed a mutual defense treaty, began an extensive
military buildup in early May. On May 18 Egypt's President Gamal Abdul Nasser
demanded the withdrawal of UN forces from Gaza and the Sinai, and Secretary
General U Thant promptly acceded and removed the UNEF. Four days later Nasser
announced a blockade of Israeli shipping at the Strait of Tiran, an action
that Israel had publically maintained since the 1956 War would be tantamount
to a declaration of war. Jordan and Iraq rapidly oined Syria in its military
alliance with Egypt.

     On May 30 mounting public opinion led to the appointment of Dayan as
minister of defense. Levi Eshkol, who had been both prime minister and
minister of defense since Ben-Gurion's resignation in 1963, retained the
prime minister's position. Dayan immediately made a series of public
declarations that war could be avoided, while secretly planning a massive
preemptive strike against the Arab enemy. On the morning of June 5 Israel
launched a devastating attack on Arab air power, destroying some 300 Egyptian,
fifty Syrian, and twenty Jordanian aircraft, mostly on the ground. This
action, which virtually eliminated the Arab air forces, was immediately
followed by ground invasions into the Sinai and the Gaza Strip, Jordan,
and finally Syria. Arab ground forces, lacking air support, were routed
on all three fronts; by the time the UN-imposed cease-fire took effect in
the evening of June 11, the IDF had seized the entire Sinai Peninsula to the
east bank of the Suez Canal; the West Bank of Jordan, including East
Jerusalem; and the Golan Heights of Syria. Unlike the aftermath of the
1956 War, however, the IDF did not withdraw from the areas it occupied in
1967.

     Israel was ecstatic with its swift and stunning victory, which had
been achieved at a relatively low cost of some 700 lives. The IDF had
proven itself superior to the far larger forces of the combined Arab
armies; but more important, it now occupied the territory that had
harbored immediate security threats to Israel since 1948. For the first
time since independence, the Israeli heartland along the Mediterranean
Sea was out of enemy artillery range. The exploits of the six-day war
soon became legend, and the commanders who led it became national heros.

     Although control of the occupied territories greatly improved Israel's
security from a geographical standpoint, it also created new problems. Most
important, the roughly 1 million Arabs within the territories provided
potential cover and support for infiltration and sabotage by Arab
guerrillas. From shortly after the six-day war until 1970, a steady stream
of men and weapons were sent into the West Bank by a number of guerrilla
groups, in particular the Al Fatah; incidents of sabotage and clashes
with Israeli security forces were commonplace. In the spring of 1970, the
guerrilla strategy reverted to shelling Israeli towns from across the
Jordanian and Lebanese borders. International terrorism, aimed at bringing
world attention to the grievances of Palestinian Arabs against Israel,
also appeared after the six-day war (see Sources of Security Threats, this
ch.).

     Hostilities on the Egyptian front were far more serious. The decimated
Egyptian army was rapidly resupplied with advanced Soviet weapons, and the
Soviet presence at the Suez Canal increased dramatically. In October 1967
the Israeli destroyer and flagship Elat was sunk by a missile fired from an
Egyptian ship docked in Port Said; Israel retaliated with the destruction
of Egyptian oil refineries at Suez. A year later shelling began along the
canal, and a new round of fighting, commonly known as the War of Attrition,
commenced. For nearly two years, until a new cease-fire was imposed on August
7, 1970, Egypt (with growing and direct support from the Soviet Union) threw
an increasingly heavy barrage of artillery and missiles at fortified Israeli
positions along the east bank of the Suez, while Israel stood its ground and
flew a series of fighter-bomber raids deep into the Egyptian heartland. This
deadly but inconclusive conflict culminated on July 30, 1970, when Israeli
and Soviet fighters met head on in a dogfight near the Suez Canal. Although
Israeli pilots reportedly shot down four MiGs and lost none of their own,
this direct confrontation with a nuclear superpower was a frightening
development and was instrumental in bringing about the cease-fire.

     Although activity aimed against Israel by Palestinian guerrillas
continued throughout the early 1970s, Israel felt relatively secure vis-a-vis
its Arab neighbors after the War of Attrition. Its military intelligence was
convinced that Syria would launch a war only in concert with Egypt and that
Egypt would go to war only if it were convinced that its air power were
superior to Israel's. This theory, which became so institutionalized into
Israeli military thinking as to be dubbed "the concept," contributed to the
country's general sense of security. Defense expenditures declined markedly
from 1970 levels, the annual reserve call-up was reduced from sixty to
thirty days, and in 1973 the length of conscription was reduced from
thirty-six to thirty-three months.

     The October 1973 War (known in Israel as the Yom Kippur War and in the
Arab world as the Ramadan War) developed rapidly, and the coordinated
Egyptian-Syrian offensive caught Israel by surprise. On September 28
Palestinian guerrillas detained an Austrian train carrying Soviet Jews en
route to Israel, and subsequent Egyptian and Syrian military deployments were
hence interpreted by Israel as defensive actions in anticipation of Israeli
reprisals. For a week, Israel postponed the mobilization of its troops; not
until the morning of Yom Kippur (October 6), some six hours before the Arab
offensive, were Israeli officials convinced that war was imminent; a
mobilization of the reserves was then ordered.

     In the early days of the war, the IDF suffered heavy losses as Egyptian
forces crossed the Suez and overran Israeli strongholds, while Syrians marched
deep into the Golan Heights. The Israeli counteroffensive was launched first
against the Syrian front, and only when the Syrians had been pushed back well
east of the 1967 cease-fire line (by October 15) was attention turned to the
Egyptian front. In ten days of fighting, the Egyptian army was pushed back
across the canal, and the IDF made deep incursions into Egypt. On October 24,
with Israeli soldiers about a kilometer from the main Cairo-Ismailia highway
and the Soviet Union threatening direct military intervention, a UN cease-fire
was imposed.

     After several months of negotiations, during which sporadic fighting
continued, a disengagement agreement was reached in January 1974, whereby the
IDF withdrew across the canal, and Israeli and Egyptian troops were separated
in the Sinai by a UNEF-manned buffer zone. A similar agreement was signed with
Syria on May 31, 1974 whereby Israel withdrew to the 1967 cease-fire line in
the Golan Heights, and a United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF)
occupied a buffer zone between Israeli and Syrian forces (see Appendix C). On
September 4, 1975, after further negotiations, a new agreement was signed
between Egypt and Israel that widened the buffer zone and secured a further
Israeli withdrawal to the east of the strategic Gidi and Mitla passes.

     Israel's military victory in 1973 came with a heavy price of over 2,400
lives and an estimated US $5 billion in equipment. Over US $1 billion of this
was airlifted by the United States during the war as it became apparent that
Israel's ammunition stores were dangerously low. This, and the threatened
Soviet intervention, raised more clearly than ever the specter of the
Arab-Israeli conflict escalating rapidly into a confrontation between the
superpowers. The October 1973 War also cost Israel its self-confidence in its
military superiority over its Arab enemy. A special government commission,
headed by Chief Justice Shimon Agranat, president of the Israeli Supreme
Court, was appointed to investigate why Israel had been caught by surprise
and why so much had gone wrong during the war itself. The commission's
report, completed in January 1975, was highly critical of the performance of
the IDF on several levels, including intelligence gathering, discipline
within the ranks, and the mobilization of reserves. The euphoria of the
post-1967 era faded.