Invasion Of Lebanon Research Articles

The position of the Arab press on the second invasion of Lebanon in 1982

The position of the Arab press on the second invasion of Lebanon in 1982

בין מלחמת "יש ברירה" לרציפות תפיסת הביטחון הישראלית: עיון מחודש בתפיסות שהובילו למלחמת לבנון הראשונה

The Israeli public largely views Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 1982 as an unusual event, a deviation from the path that Israel had followed until then. Unlike other wars, Israel did not fight in the Lebanon War for security purposes, but for the political aims and whims of Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon. Therefore, this war is considered a war of choice, waged by Israel when it was not under an existential threat. The claim that the Lebanon War constitutes an exceptional event in Israeli history is at the heart of this article. In order to determine whether the Lebanon War was indeed a deviation from the “right path” of the State of Israel, we examine it in light of the Israeli security doctrine that had led Israel’s decision-makers until then and that, to some extent, continues to govern them to this day. Using the security doctrine as a guide, we find that this war was not a deviation or an anomaly, but rather an application of Israeli security principles.

اسحاق شاميـر وزيـراً للخارجية 1980 -1982

Abstract This research reviewed the role of Yitzhak Shamir during his tenure as the Israeli foreign minister and the problems he faced as foreign minister, including the Jerusalem law, which he considered a real dilemma for his mission as foreign minister, as he met strong opposition and condemnation from Western countries, and struck the Iraqi nuclear reactor on June 7, 1981, because it constituted a threat On the security of Israel, and in the elections for the 10th Knesset on June 3, 1981, the results were close between the two parties, Labor and Likud, and Yitzhak Shamir retained this position. As for his position on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, he supported the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon and its entry into the Lebanese camps in West Beirut, and he did not object to that in addition. To the massacrـ yaziriniski - Likud Keywords: Yitzhak Shamir, Yezrensky, Likud Party

Narrating Looted and Living Palestinian Archives

After the Palestine Liberation Organization withdrew from Beirut as a result of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the most significant Palestinian film archive, comprising more than 100 documentaries, was nowhere to be found. This article examines Kings and Extras: Digging for a Palestinian Image (dir. Azza El-Hassan, 2004), a documentary that ostensibly chronicles the director’s search for the archive, but ultimately explores Palestinians’ recurrent efforts to narrate and visualize their historical reality in the face of archival appropriation and destruction. As El-Hassan travels between Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and occupied Palestine, her journey becomes a quest for Palestinian freedom dreams, generating its own, living archive, uniquely Palestinian in its unauthorized, stateless, and itinerant form. Engaging Palestinian archival imaginaries alongside decolonial feminist critiques of positivist historiography, I propose “reparative fabulation” as an act of the radical narrative imagination that animates unrealized political potentialities glimpsed in the gaps endemic to violated archives.

Saudi Arabia's rapprochement with Israel: the national security imperatives

The purpose of this article is to examine the evolution of Israel's relations with Saudi Arabia since the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948. The author explains how the major events in the Middle East affected Saudi Arabia's foreign policy orientation. It shows how Saudi Arabia's policy toward Israel was affected by the deterioration in Saudi-Egyptian relations, by its quest for security in the Arabian Gulf region and by its aspiration to hegemony in the Middle East. The author argues that Saudi Arabia's policy toward Israel remained far less hostile than that of the Arab states surrounding Israel. In addition, it argues that it was not until 1973 that Saudi Arabia became seriously involved in the attempt to pressure Israel to withdraw from the territories it occupied in the Six-Day War. The author concludes by showing that neither Saudi Arabia's acquisition of the intelligence-gathering AWACS aircraft, nor Israel's invasion of Lebanon or the massacre of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila had a serious impact on the bilateral relations, and that it was not until the emergence of the Iranian nuclear threat that Saudi Arabia's relations with Israel began to improve.

A Chronicle of Failure Foretold: The UK, Israel and Arms Sales to Argentina in the Era of the Falklands War

ABSTRACTIn spite of fierce British protests, Israel supplied Argentina with arms both during the Falklands war and with greater intensity after the fighting. While the weapons sales were vital for Israel's economy and its arms industry, recently declassified papers suggest that the Begin government viewed the arms supplies to Argentina as a bargaining chip to exert pressure on Britain to halt its own sale of weapons to Israel's Arab adversaries and to end London's arms embargo against the Jewish State. Britain's restrictions on arms sales had long cast a shadow over Anglo-Israeli ties, and Israeli resentment towards Britain was exacerbated by anger over London's strong condemnation of Israel's invasion of Lebanon and its leading involvement in the EEC Venice Declaration of June 1980 which recognized Palestinian self-determination and a role for the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The Israelis also perceived the arms supplies as a means to influence the junta in its treatment of Argentina's Jews. Yet, there was actually a rise in the level of anti-Semitism in Argentina during the period in question. At the same time, Britain's approach in attempting to dissuade its allies from selling arms to Argentina was riddled with inconsistencies and ultimately misconceived.

Lotus Notes

Abstract Lotus was a tri-lingual quarterly brought out by the Afro-Asian Writers' Association. Initially titled Afro-Asian Writings, its inaugural edition was launched from Cairo in March 1968, in Arabic and English, followed by the French. By 1971, the trilingual quarterly acquired the name Lotus. Egypt, the Soviet Union, and the German Democratic Republic funded its production. The Arabic edition was printed in Cairo, and the English and French editions were printed in the German Democratic Republic. The Afro-Asian Writers' Association (AAWA) and its over-arching affiliate, the Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), both had headquarters in Cairo. In 1978, President Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David Accords and the Permanent Bureau in Cairo was deactivated. Lotus moved to Beirut despite the raging Civil War, where it was was granted home and hospitality by the Union of Palestinian Writers. Its offices remained there until the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 when it once again relocated along with the Palestinian Liberation Organization to Tunis. The journal was discontinued in the late 1980s or early 1990s with the dismantling of the Soviet Union. The Permanent Bureau in Cairo was reinstated, but the journal was not as such reactivated. The project outlines a partial biography of a forgotten magazine from a bipolar world and its interrupted historical networks. It considers graphic and textual elements from the margins of the magazine for evidence of its trajectory.

EDITORIAL FOREWORD

This issue centers on two predominant themes: space, boundaries, and belonging from the end of empire to the early nation-state era; and the relationship between political discourse, political praxis, and values. The first section, “Belonging, Boundaries, and Law,” opens with Asher Kaufman's article, “Belonging and Continuity: Israeli Druze and Lebanon, 1982–2000,” on the spatial perceptions and practices of communities in the Middle East under the nation-state. Kaufman observes that only over the past few decades have scholars of the post–World War I order in the region begun to question “the ‘nation-state’ as the natural geographical and political unit of analysis.” Using Druze citizens of Israel before, during, and after Israel's occupation of South Lebanon as his case, he readjusts the lens toward substate, suprastate, and trans-state dynamics. Until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Druze communal and religious networks had spanned the whole of bilād al-shām, but these were radically interrupted by Israel's emergence as a bounded polity whose borders with its neighbors were reputedly sealed. This rupture precipitated the emergence of an Israeli Druze community that, isolated from broader Druze communal life and institutional frames, was expected to be loyal to the new state. Eschewing a national frame, Kaufman reveals how Druze, despite these obstacles, actually maintained “crossborder ties through marriage, licit and illicit trade, and religious practices.” Paradoxically, it was Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and its eighteen-year occupation of the South that allowed for a resumption of pre-1948 spatial practices, though these were complicated by Israeli Druze's multiple and sometimes conflicting allegiances. Such practices, restricted again after the Israeli withdrawal of 2000, continued in limited fashion until the start of the Syrian Civil War, which has propelled Israeli Druze to organize politically in support of Druze in Syria. Observing that the Druze continue to live in state and suprastate spatial scales, Kaufman proposes “using the concept ‘hybrid spatial scale’ as a tool for studying communities such as the Druze that operate on multiple territorial scales.”

Un-learning to see Palestine

Gil Z.Hochberg, Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone, Durham, Duke UP, 2015Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca L. Stein, Digital Militarism: Israel's Occupation in the Social Media Age, Stanford University Press, 2015Sometime during the summer of the First Lebanon War, my father, then a reserve soldier on a short leave, brought home three war souvenirs: a miniature radio-tape, a stray puppy and a huge machete-like knife. These were the only visual evidence of a combat taking place far from sight (at least for those who did not reside near Israel's northern border) and far from today's battlefield in which 'digital natives' post, rather than 'bring home', their military souvenirs, often in the form of a militarised 'selfie' (Kuntsman and Stein 2015, p77). Yet as Visual Occupation, by Gil Hochberg, and Digital Militarism, by Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca L. Stein, demonstrate, seeing does not always already translate into knowing, and knowledge does not always already entail seeing. The question - how is it possible that in spite of the circulation of representations of Israeli military brutality and Palestinian suffering, the situation in fact is deteriorating - becomes even more poignant as one reads these books in tandem. That cameras carried by Israeli soldiers might serve as a conscience-cleansing device while maintaining the very condition that provokes a bad conscience, has been noted previously (Nathansohn 2010). Hochberg's and Kuntsman and Stein's books aim at a different project. The questions that inform their work explore the organisation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict's visual field and the conditions of seeing and knowing that underlie it. Using different (and sometimes overlapping) theoretical trajectories, data and periodisation, they ask what it means when a people fails to appear from the perspective of the coloniser even when the colonisation is palpable and its images are viral.Visual Occupation and Digital Militarism, both published in 2015, offer a comprehensive and complementary study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through its visual arrangements, from artistic (Hochberg) and digital (Kuntsman and Stein) perspectives. Coinciding with (and sometimes overlapping) the conflict's timeline, the books provide a fascinating discussion based on different visual archives, beginning with the Palestinian Nakba and the establishment of the state of Israel. They go on to cover the major milestones such as the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights, the Second Intifada, the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, the colonial regime in the West Bank and the assaults on Gaza from 2008 through 2014.Focusing on the political importance of various artistic interventions, Hochberg explores literature, painting, photography, video and film while reworking the relationship between power and vision and engaging not only with the colonised's failure to appear but also with the coloniser's failure to erase. Through attentive reading of Jewish and Palestinian cultural work, Hochberg demonstrates how empowerment and transformation, which are commonly taken as dependent on seeing and being seen, may equally depend on opacity, blindness and the ability to disappear, thereby disrupting the logic of forensics and testimony. Kuntsman and Stein focus on Israeli archives of social media such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, unearthing the process by which the state as well as Israeli Jewish citizens develop digital literacy and adopt it as a strategic tool in the war over public opinion. Kuntsman and Stein also move beyond the prevailing dichotomous analysis of exposure of the military violence versus its concealment, and demonstrate how various normalising mechanisms such as public secrets and exceptionalism come into play in justifying militarism and colonialism.The books resonate with the same concern that the growing circulation of images of Palestinian suffering, which contributes to its visibility, does not necessarily translate into political change. …

The Radical Crescent: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and the Lebanese Civil War, 1973–1978

ABSTRACTThis analysis examines the efforts by the Palestine Liberation Organisation [PLO] to formalise relations with the United States before and after the October 1973 Arab–Israeli War. It details the public and private attempts by PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat to present the organisation as a legitimate partner for negotiations with Israel. However, the American secretary of state and national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, hindered the PLO’s diplomatic initiatives during the Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford administrations. Kissinger viewed the PLO as an impediment to his efforts to resolve the Arab–Israeli conflict through separate peace agreements, rather than a comprehensive solution. Despite Washington’s objections to the PLO, the organisation had regional and international legitimacy, its stature aided by its political and ideological allies. Yet these ties also contributed to the PLO’s involvement in the Lebanese civil war. Kissinger encouraged Syria’s June 1976 invasion of Lebanon to weaken, if not destroy, the PLO as an independent actor. Although the PLO survived Syria’s intervention, Kissinger’s actions and agreements limited the diplomatic initiatives of the Jimmy Carter Administration.

Reconsidering the Struggle over UNIFIL in Southern Lebanon

After Israel's first invasion of Lebanon in 1978, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 425 (UNSCR 425) establishing the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). The early struggle over the contested meanings and interpretations of UNSCR 425, and the differences of position regarding UNIFIL itself were never fully resolved due to the shifting nature of US policies and objectives in the region and the context of the force's deployment within two distinct, albeit related conflicts: the Lebanese civil war and Arab-Israeli conflict. UNIFIL found itself trapped between the competing demands of sovereignty and resistance, not knowing which war it was there to prevent and which peace it was meant to build. This confusion resurfaced with the passage of UNSCR 1701 following the 2006 war, when UNIFIL's mandate and scope was expanded, but the force continued to be a site of contested narratives and potential future conflicts.

Le traiettorie di Primo Levi

Primo Levi had a passion for languages. This was apparent in his direct involvement in the translations of his books, starting with If this is a man, which I translated with him. He translated Kafka, and was fascinated with the world of askenazi Jews and Yiddish. His testimony of the holocaust remained central through his life, and underlay his growing concern at the emergence of new forms of the extreme right and denial of the extermination camps. He was proud of the state of Israel, but strongly critical of Begin’s invasion of Lebanon.

The Lebanese Hizballah and Israeli Counterterrorism

This article examines Israel's attempts to weaken and defeat the Lebanese Hizballah. It reviews Hizballah's rise after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Hizballah's successful effort to force Israeli forces to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000, the 2006 war, and Israeli attempts to deter Hizballah. The article argues that Israel has largely failed to defeat Hizballah militarily and politically. Israel's experience offers lessons for how terrorist groups learn, the effectiveness of terrorist attrition strategies against casualty-sensitivity states, the difficulties in coercing terrorist groups, and the importance of an information strategy. Finally, Israel's clash with Hizballah indicates the importance of thinking of groups that are large and multi-faceted from a counterinsurgency paradigm.

The moral economy of violence: Israel's first Lebanon War, 1982

The article uses Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 as a case study in the historical and cultural construction of the legitimacy of armed force. The discussion develops the concept of a ‘moral economy of violence’ which suggests that the legitimacy that state leaders and their publics take for granted in the use of military force is dependent on a variety of historically and culturally contingent beliefs and assumptions. In the case of the first Lebanon War, the key components of the Israeli moral economy of violence included faith in the technologically superior means by which the Israeli army conducted itself, a belief in the efficiency of military combat, and a widely held notion of Lebanon as an Oriental version of the lawless Wild West.

Hizbullah: An Organizational and Operational Profile

Founded in 1982 in response to Israel's invasion of Lebanon, Hizbullah 1 (Arabic for “Party of God”) is a radical Shi'a political and terrorist organization. Inspired and supported by Iran, it is c...

History Revisited or Revamped? The Maronite Factor in Israel's 1982 Invasion of Lebanon

In the June of 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon, ostensibly to drive guerrillas of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) based in south Lebanon beyond reach of the Israeli border. Instead, the Isr...

The Algerian Civil War: Washington's new counterinsurgency model

This paper argues that after the failed Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, the United States government has adopted a counterinsurgency model that promotes intra-Muslim civil wars, especially in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. It is obvious that the US is here recycling its experience of fighting wars by proxy in Latin America. In fighting communism, though, the US had the added advantage of dealing with a Western ideology. Islamic political ideology is a product of the global south and is still largely incomprehensible to US political and military leaders. If the US is using Islamist groups to fight other Islamist groups, then we are looking at a type of warfare that is more similar to the Algerian civil war than to Latin American wars. Of course Algeria of the 1990s is not the Middle East of the 21st century. This paper simply argues that the strategy that Algerian generals devised and implemented in the 1990s – namely the creation of Islamist groups to fight Islamist opposition – is now being adopted by the US administration to prosecute its wars in the Middle East. Washington has much to learn from Algeria on ways to fight terrorism (US Undersecretary of State William Burns, cited in James 2002). This is a prescription for intra-Muslim civil war throughout the Middle East. Those involved would be seen as proxies tearing the Muslim world on behalf of Israel and the US (El Alaoui 2007).

Palestine Solidarity, Political Discourse, and the Peace Movement, 1982–1988

Palestine Solidarity, Political Discourse, and the Peace Movement, 1982–1988 Hilton Obenzinger (bio) From the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 through Jesse Jack-son’s second presidential campaign in 1988, the issue of Palestinian rights entered American political discourse in an unprecedented fashion. Arab and Palestinian Americans began to be involved in all aspects of American political life, including electoral politics, while a loose alliance of white New Left activists, African Americans, liberal Jewish groups, churches, and others began to create a consistent pro-Palestinian presence in the peace and anti-intervention movement, despite the fact that it was “arguably the most vilified peace and solidarity effort in the country” (Elbaum 2002, 266). At the same time, several attempts to deepen intercommunal relations between the Arab American and African American communities were launched, and Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition presidential campaigns of [End Page 233] 1984 and 1988 brought the Palestinian issue into the public arena as never before. The task was to crack open the pro-Israel consensus that had dominated political life in the United States since at least 1967. This essay reviews some of the key initiatives that set the stage for deeper American sympathies and political action for Palestinian rights leading up to the first intifada. None of these efforts—as limited as they were—came easily; and in the end, despite major openings in public discourse, the goal of overturning the pro-Israel consensus in national politics ultimately fell short. A historical review of several aspects of this period—the response to the 1982 war, the development of a self-conscious Palestine solidarity movement, and the Jesse Jackson presidential campaigns—will help to understand this mixed assessment. On June 12, 1982, nearly a million people marched in New York City during the Second Special United Nations Session on Disarmament calling for an end to the nuclear arms race, targeting President Reagan’s policies of increased militarization in particular. A week before, Israel had launched its invasion of Lebanon with a number of unannounced goals, one of the most important of which was to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The invasion heightened already existing conflicts within the peace movement. The rally was organized by predominantly white peace groups, many associated with the nuclear freeze movement, which believed that it would be necessary to limit potentially controversial demands of the demonstration to generate a massive turnout. A Third World and Progressive People’s Coalition (TWPPC) formed with leaders from communities of color and leftists to demand representation on the planning committee. Sheila Collins, in her history of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, recounts how TWPPC “also insisted that the march call for an end to US intervention in the third world, a redirecting of the nation’s priorities from military spending to human needs, and an end to racism and other issues of concern to people of color” (1986, 101). As a result, the planning committee became embroiled in bitter fights, with accusations of left sectarianism and racism exchanged among the factions. Notably, however, “This was the first time since the anti–Vietnam War movement that black and other minority activists had made a serious bid to shape the direction of a movement [End Page 234] that white activists saw as ‘theirs,’ and it very nearly exploded” (101). Compromises were made, the leadership committee was broadened, and the program expanded to include a demand for money to be directed from military spending to human needs at home. Anti-interventionist speeches and slogans were to be allowed—except for anything having to do with the invasion of Lebanon. The leadership of the June 12th demonstration refused to link the nuclear threat to the Israeli invasion and the stateless condition of the Palestinians. As Max Elbaum explains, “Activists from the TWPPC as well as others pointed out that conflict in the Middle East was consistently identified as one of the most likely trigger-points for a nuclear war and that Israel’s nuclear capacity was an open secret. . . . But the influence of Zionism among central antinuclear organizers was too great for such points to be allowed a mention from the rally platform” (2002, 266). Those opposed to...

Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (review)

Reviewed by: Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory Tareq Y. Ismael (bio) Ahmad H. Sa’diLila Abu Lughod, eds.Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. 356 pp. ISBN: 978-0-231-13579-5, $75.00. Published in 2007, just antedating the sixtieth anniversary of the Israeli state, this book is a timely and wide-ranging collection of essays concerning the Palestinian catastrophe—Nakba—and subsequent questions of Palestinian identity and existence. The mass-expulsion and the uprooting of 600,000 Palestinians (80 percent) in 1948 left a nation in exile, in continuous statelessness and refugee squalor. Hence, the rules that came to govern the lives of the Palestinian refugees are necessarily different from those of formal state citizens, and equally different are the tools necessary to record the modern history of the Palestinian people. In this book’s treatment of the Palestinian refugees, it juxtaposes the standard (Israeli) narrative of the cataclysmic events of 1948—afterwards the “Western” narrative—with the oral and recorded histories of the Palestinian Diaspora, and hence a direct contrast to the Israeli history of the victors. Ever since the violent beginnings of Israel in 1948, outlets of western media have propagated the Israeli standard narrative of a “return from exile, after millennia, with people with memory of suffering redeemed in . . . their own modern nation-state” (286). This projection of a mythical past onto a contemporary state project, wherein the name of the Palestinians—let alone their tragedy—is expunged from the history, has become the standard narrative that western peoples have internalized as established fact. Hence, over five decades, Israel and its supporters have rejected any moral/ legal culpability for the Palestinian Nakba, weaving this historical blackhole into the national myth of the Israeli state. The displaced Palestinian nation has been, comparably speaking, unable to present a counter-narrative to the Israeli national myth, since much of Palestinian history was contained in the realm of oral memory. Until recent developments in ethno-history and the oral tradition disciplines that depend on such memories, Palestinian oral history has been reflexively dismissed as unreliable when weighed against the presumptive strength [End Page 751] of standard scholarship, particularly where embodied in pro-Israeli sectors in academia and think-tank advocacy. For the last fifty years or so, there has been a spatter of Palestinian voices within the historical/academic mainstream (e.g., the late Edward Said), but it has had little impact upon the intellectual and moral centers of the western world—particularly when, as Ben Gurion put it, the formation of the Israeli state was “Western Civilization’s gesture of repentance for the Holocaust” (298), a sentiment that now describes the western (especially American) orientation towards Israel and its inconvenient Palestinian victims. Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu Lughod’s Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory is “neither a collection of personal reflections and testimonials nor is it a history proper; . . . it is a sustained examination of . . . the Palestinian social and cultural memory” (6–7) whose foundation is the resilient recording of the events before and after Nakba. The Nakba is the historical watershed in Palestinian collective memory, similar to, and no less morally severe, than the Jewish Diaspora. While the Nakba, for the Palestinians, marks the abrupt dispossession of national life and uprooting from national place, much like the Jewish Diaspora, it ushered in subsequent suffering for the Palestinian people, such as the 1967 war, the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the destruction of Palestinian life and property in refugee camps, the massacres in Sabra and Shatillah, and more recently the Israeli economic blockade of 1.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. The avowed goal of the book, according to the editors, is “to examine this painful site—Nakba—of memory in light of the larger comparative literature on memory, history and trauma” (4). A discerning reader of this book will notice its subtle perspective on the inseparability of memory, self, place, and identity, which is certainly true for the Palestinian people. As Paul Connerton observes, memory, as a process of recollection, calls back unique events, not as isolated episodes, but as parts of a...

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

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...