Reconciliation key to securing Israel’s past military victories

Israel is alone in the Middle East, secure and largely free from serious external or internal dangers. The death and destruction engulfing its traditional enemies is profound, with the old enmities of religion, ethnicity, and region on the ascendency. In historical terms, this is uncommon and unexpected. Even Joshua, an associate of Moses and his successor, did not enjoy such a prolonged string of victories. These more recent victories in and of themselves are of Talmudic and biblical proportions. The wars of 1947-49 (Independence), 1956 (Suez), 1967 (Six Days), 1973 (Yon Kippur), 1982 (Lebanon), 2006 (Lebanon), represented existential threats at the very existence of Israel. Palestinians were directly involved in these wars but the idea of their own separate state did not dominate and saw little advancement. For most of the involved Arab states, other issues were at play and there was little prolonged concern for the Palestinians. They became a rhetorical point of agreement, not a shared objective. The Palestinians, separately and largely on their own, engaged the Israeli authorities directly in the 2008 and 2012 wars in Gaza and the two Intifadas, 1987-1993 and 2000-2005. Even those encounters saw little apparent progress on the emergence of a sovereign state of Palestine and probably derailed the American-led peace process. The emergence of the Palestinian authority represented a useful counterpoint for Israeli policy, which sought to share the blame for their shameful conduct on and over the West Bank. Today as with the external enemies of Israel, the Palestinians do not represent a serious threat, reduced to sporadic individual attacks using weapons from the kitchen. Even its ‘far enemy’ Iran has acquiesced to an agreement, largely over the vociferous objections of the government of Israel, that has fundamentally circumscribed its nuclear weapons program. Israeli objection to the agreement is only understandable in that it alone among the world’s nuclear weapon states understands the ability of a determined country to develop and produce clandestine nuclear weapons. Equally, Israel obtains inordinate and, in foreign policy terms, unnatural support from the United States. It is a brave, if not foolhardy, American politician who does not ritualistically voice frequent and overwhelming support. Other western countries, including Canada, may offer slight criticisms of certain Israeli policies, especially its ongoing settlement policies in the West Bank and its use of force there. But Canada and other such countries remain firm and consistent supporters of the state of Israel “as the only democratic state in the Middle East.” Today, Israel stands above all of its enemies. There are even bilateral treaties and understandings with some of its former enemies (it has even settled its dispute with Turkey) that suggest the wars of the past will not be repeated in the near or even distant future. But in all of this nothing stays the same. In pre-diaspora times the Israelites sowed many of the seeds that led to their future disasters. Today, the very success of the state of Israel contains the seeds of future disasters. Nowhere is this more evident than in the ongoing premiership of Benjamin Netanyahu and his almost pathological desire to remain in power. The historical coalitions of early Israeli history were dominated by people of the broad centre of Israeli politics. Today they are increasingly dominated by the politics of the extreme right which find easy comparison with the extremes of Islam. There is a significant number of people who maintain an ongoing and robust criticism of Prime Minister Netanyahu governments. For many there is a justifiable fear that unless there is some measure of compromise and reconciliation on regional issues, especially with the Palestinians, the military victories of the recent past will not be secured. Equally and more troublesome are the growing fissures between the Netanyahu government and the Israeli Armed Forces. There have been such fissures in the past but today they are more overt and in some measure border on mutinous conduct. The approximate cause are the occasional violent attacks on Israelis by young Palestinians. There is no centralized element to these attacks, which represent the deep frustrations of a generation that is without hope. There are also attacks by Israeli extremists on Palestinians adding to a witches' brew of deep antagonisms. The Israeli military is central to these conflicts. The recent appointment of one of the most extreme right wing political leaders in Israel, Avigdor Lieberman, as defence minister, has crystalized the fears of many Israelis both inside and outside of the armed forces. On the memorial day of the Holocaust, the deputy chief of staff of the Israeli army, General Ya’ir Golan, wearing his uniform, spoke “If there is something that frightens me about the memories of the Holocaust, it is knowledge of the awful processes which happened in Europe in general, and in Germany in particular, 70, 80, 90 years ago, and finding traces of them here in our midst, today in 2016.” In today’s Israel, speaking as he did in such terms, Golan’s military career is probably over. His comments, when combined with the recent plan by more than two hundred retired leaders in Israel's military, police, and Mossad and Shin Bet security services to end the occupation of the West Bank, reflects deep and fundamental concerns with Netanyahu's policies and actions. One can only hope, however, that such truth spoken not to power but to a society on its most sacred day of public ceremony, occasions deep reflection and a course correction in the policies of Israel. Gar Pardy is retired from the Canadian foreign service and recently published Afterwords From a Foreign Service Odyssey.

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Reconciliation key to securing Israel’s past military victories

The growing fissures between the Netanyahu government and the Israeli armed forces are a sign of trouble to come.

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