The additional billions of shekels that will flow into the IDF’s coffers at the expense of budgets for education, welfare, and infrastructure development will be a source of waste and irresponsibility. The IDF will lose its only chance to heal and strengthen itself through internal streamlining.
Spending on war, any war, has never deterred Israel’s enemies.
In an interview with a Japanese newspaper this week, Jordan’s King Abdullah II said it had emerged that Israel was not as strong as might have been thought. As someone with an interest in preserving Israel’s power, the king focused on the decline in Israel’s general strength, more than on the performance of the IDF in the second Lebanon war. Note the difference between Abdullah’s voice and the claims heard by many in Israel that the IDF’s failures in the war harmed Israel’s deterrence capability.
According to this perception, voiced by both politicians and generals, Israel was lucky. The IDF’s weaknesses were discovered in time in a limited military confrontation against a quasi-military organization, and the war provided a great opportunity to fix the problems uncovered by massively increasing the IDF’s budget in order to strengthen it.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is one of this group. He proved it when he decided in favor of acceding to the IDF’s outrageous demand to increase the 2007 defense budget by NIS 6 billion. This comes on top of the NIS 8 billion that was already given to the army to cover the costs of the war. The Joint Knesset Defense Finance Committee approved the huge budget supplement, out of the mistaken belief that will enhance the IDF’s deterrence capability. Wrong. The idea that there is some kind of link between the erosion of deterrence capability and the IDF’s performance in the war against Hizbullah is baseless.
The best example is the 1967 Six-Day War. The war ended in Israel’s most crushing victory against Arab countries. Ostensibly, the war’s results and the tripling of Israel’s territory, ought to have immeasurably strengthened the IDF’s deterrence capability, and ensure that the enemy would never dare raise his head. What happened in practice was utterly different. Israel, within highly secure and protected borders, shed more blood than ever before. The Palestinians were not deterred. PLO squads infiltrated over the Jordan River. Passenger jets were hijacked. Airline passengers were murdered in a terrorist attack at Ben Gurion Airport, and the climax was the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games.
Egypt also declined to be deterred. A few months after the Six-Day War, an Egyptian missile boat sank the Israeli destroyer Eilat, killing 47 of its crew and wounding 91. The 1967-70 War of Attrition along the Suez Canal left 594 IDF soldiers and 127 Israeli civilians dead. Six years after the sweeping victory of 1967, it turned out that Syria was not deterred either. It joined Egypt in a combined assault on Israel. 2,300 IDF soldiers were killed and over 7,000 wounded in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
The obvious conclusion is that the results of war, any war, have never deterred Israel’s enemies, nor stayed their hands. Therefore, even if the IDF’s failures in the war against Hizbullah are a good cause for concern, talk about damage to Israel’s deterrence capability is beside the point. Israel’s real problem is the widening cracks in its national strength. They are not new, but the second Lebanon war brought them to the fore. On one hand, the Lebanon war revealed Israel’s economic stamina. But on the other, Israel’s national strength (or national security) is made up of many components, not just the IDF.
Some of these components were weakened, including a further undermining of government stability and the fragmentation of political parties, the high frequency of elections, weak law enforcement agencies, the rising power of organized crime, falling standards of education, wide gaps in levels of pay, and a sharp increase in the number of poor.
The demographic threat includes the increase in Israel’s two non-Zionist populations - the Arabs and the haredim (ultra-orthodox) - to over 30% of the total population. The IDF, as the war demonstrated, is not what we thought it was.
The war against Hizbullah, in which the expectations fostered by the political and military leaders were not realized, mostly affected the civilian home front. The result was a loss of public confidence in its leaders and in the IDF’s commanders. The drop in national morale is one aspect of the damage to the nation’s strength. King Abdullah sensed this mood in Israeli society, and he reached his conclusion about Israel becoming weaker.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes.co.il - on January 2, 2007
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2006