Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel's Security and Foreign Policy (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel’s Security and Foreign Policy Ralph Hitchens Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel’s Security and Foreign Policy. By Zeev Maoz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. ISBN 0-472-11540-5. Maps. Tables. Figures. Glossary. Notes. References. Indexes. Pp. xii, 713. $45.00. Let's get the criticism out of the way. Israeli scholar Zeev Maoz has written a landmark book about Israel's "forever war" against the Arabs and Palestinians. But it's also a "forever book"—he could have done it in half the number of pages, with the excess profitably spun off into monographs and articles. Maoz's thesis is succinctly captured in a bumper sticker I saw recently: "War isn't working." The simplified story line of the Arab-Israeli conflict is that Israel was the heroic underdog from the 1948 War of Independence through the dramatic success of the 1967 Six Day War, after which things began to go south: the seemingly pointless War of Attrition, the nasty surprise of the Yom Kippur War, the invasion of Lebanon that dragged on for an incredible eighteen years, while festering in the background was the rising tide of unrest in the occupied territories. Maoz, however, takes us all the way back to demonstrate that while the War of Independence might have been a "just war," it was the only one to which Israelis can point. In subsequent decades, he argues, Israel consistently relied on military force as the principal instrument of foreign policy—fumbling, time and again, genuine diplomatic opportunities to resolve crises and build stable relationships with its neighbors. From the outset Israel's political leadership and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) settled on the "limited use of military force" as the best way to deal with their apparently intractable Arab neighbors. Reasonable, you might think, until Maoz explains that what they really meant was "unlimited use of limited military force"—an ongoing policy of military reprisals directed at the neighboring states from which cross-border terrorist activity was launched. This was intended to confront Arab governments [End Page 585] with unpalatable choices: if they were unwilling to restrain Palestinian guerrillas and other terrorists operating from their territory, IDF reprisals would escalate to unacceptable proportions and war would be the only option. This, of course, played into the hands of the IDF with its carefully nurtured "escalation dominance" posture while allowing Israel to avoid being identified as the aggressor. The Sinai war of 1956 (in collusion with Britain and France) was undeniably aggressive, but the notion that Israel is to blame for the 1967 and 1973 wars appears harder to swallow. Maoz methodically deconstructs through each case, summarizing the consensus scholarly viewpoints before presenting his own analysis of policy alternatives. Well-documented and sometimes deeply laced with counterfactual reasoning, these lead the reader to conclude that during the past five decades Israel's troubles have overwhelmingly been of its own making. Maoz supports his case in part by recourse to databases he has compiled, detailing every instance of conflict in Israel's history, no matter how insignificant: cross-border terrorist attacks and IDF reprisal raids, small and large. He's the very model of the modern political scientist, wielding just enough quantitative data to disabuse his readers of their preconceptions without overwhelming them. He also proves himself a competent narrative historian, refreshingly free of the academic jargon within which all too many in his discipline take refuge. (Furthermore, he's a former paratroop officer, no ivory-tower academic.) The architects of the "unlimited use of limited military force" strategy are the usual suspects, starting with David Ben-Gurion and continuing through a succession of defense ministers and IDF chiefs of staff. In recent decades, Maoz notes, an astonishingly high percentage of the latter came out of the paratroops or commando units, where they made their bones in cross-border reprisal operations. Interestingly, Ben-Gurion himself in his twilight years began to have second thoughts about the policy he set in motion. Maoz describes a famous incident immediately preceding the Six Day War, in which IDF Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin...