Israel: Borders and Security

Colonel Merrill A. McPeak

From Foreign Affairs, April 1976

Summary:  "Israel," as Mrs. Meir put it, "is entitled to defensible borders." But where might such borders be drawn? The lines on which Israel's army stood at the end of the war of June 1967 seemed formidable, but have disappeared into history. The U.N. Security Council, in its celebrated Resolution 242 of November 1967, visualized that "secure and recognized boundaries" might be placed essentially along the lines obtaining before the outbreak of the June hostilities. Although it has refused to "draw maps," Israel has made it plain that the old lines will not do, in part owing to security concerns. But genuine security depends on regional accommodation, which the Arab states say cannot occur until all of the occupied territory is returned. All parties agree that some kind of demilitarization arrangement in returned territory would be needed in any overall settlement, but little serious public attention has been given to ways in which comprehensive demilitarization might be useful as a security safeguard in the context of comprehensive territorial return.

Neither the Department of Defense nor any agency of the U.S. government bears any responsibility for the opinions expressed herein, which are entirely those of the author.

"Israel," as Mrs. Meir put it, "is entitled to defensible borders." But where might such borders be drawn? The lines on which Israel's army stood at the end of the war of June 1967 seemed formidable, but have disappeared into history. The U.N. Security Council, in its celebrated Resolution 242 of November 1967, visualized that "secure and recognized boundaries" might be placed essentially along the lines obtaining before the outbreak of the June hostilities. Although it has refused to "draw maps," Israel has made it plain that the old lines will not do, in part owing to security concerns. But genuine security depends on regional accommodation, which the Arab states say cannot occur until all of the occupied territory is returned. All parties agree that some kind of demilitarization arrangement in returned territory would be needed in any overall settlement, but little serious public attention has been given to ways in which comprehensive demilitarization might be useful as a security safeguard in the context of comprehensive territorial return.

Today, Israel continues to hold something like 90 percent of the territory taken in 1967; that it has evacuated as much as 10 percent is one of the concrete achievements of the current "step-by-step" diplomacy. But this diplomacy seems to have lost momentum, and, in any case, has produced harmful side effects, including a new, and perhaps shortsighted, kind of demilitarization. Israel's borders are now anything but "secure and recognized"; defense of the present lines seems to require the attainment of new levels of sophistication in an arms race, the cost of which Israel can no longer shoulder alone. We even hear claims that Israel's security may soon require that it move to the stage of nuclear confrontation with its Arab adversaries.

II

Things looked a great deal different as the dust of the June War settled, for it seemed that Israel had solved its security problem by creating a new geography. To review the changes briefly, the total land area under Israeli control had grown about four times, but the length of demarcation lines had actually shortened and, in general, the new lines were based on natural features. At the Suez Canal, Israel had the best "tank ditch" in the Middle East. The Gaza Strip, long a nursery for Egyptian-supported terrorism reaching to within a few miles of Tel Aviv, had come under Israeli administration. On the Golan, Israel at last held the high ground. The bulge of the West Bank, an implicit threat that Israel would be cut in two, had been superseded by the line of the Jordan River. More important, the air threat to Israel had disappeared, at least for the moment. Tel Aviv had been 12 minutes flying time from Egyptian bases in the northern Sinai. Now, launched from the most forward bases in Egypt, many Soviet-supplied aircraft either could not reach Tel Aviv, or could do so only with reduced bomb loads or by using flight profiles which would make them easy targets for Israeli interceptors. Moreover, with radars in the Sinai, Israel could rely on 30 minutes warning of Egyptian air attack. As the International Institute for Strategic Studies summed up the new situation: "The six-day war left Israel with a degree of security she had never known before, and one that required no external guarantee."

However, within a week of the June 11 ceasefire, Israeli and Syrian ground forces were skirmishing on the Golan Heights; by July 1, fighting had erupted along the Canal. On October 21, after just four and a half months of "ceasefire," Israel's largest warship, the destroyer Eilat, was hit by Egyptian missiles and sunk near Port Said with great loss of life. Artillery duels, commando raids and terrorist attacks all along the new frontiers escalated to the full-scale war of attrition in 1969-70. Israel's casualties during the roughly three-year period from the end of the June War to the renewed, United States-sponsored ceasefire of August 1970 were at least 700 killed and 2,600 wounded, about the same as for the June War itself.

Perhaps, however, the new lines, so much more easily defended, would permit a reduction in the heavy burden of Israel's defense expenditures. Not so. In both absolute and relative terms, Israel's defense burden increased between 1965 and 1972, and increased dramatically, as the following figures indicate:1

1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972

Defense

Spending 288 365 562 730 955 1278 1370 1375