Israel After the War

Ze'ev Schiff

From Foreign Affairs, Spring 1991

Article preview: first 500 of 5,650 words total.

Summary:  "Now that the Gulf War is over, Israel will have to take a hard look at its security doctrine and ask itself a number of key questions about its future security" (1) whether its passive acceptance of the Iraqi Scud missile strikes has not damaged the credibility of its deterrence (2) whether it would not have been faced with a Pyrrhic victory, or possibly even defeat, had Iraq directed its invasion against Israel: "many Israelis, including senior army officers, know that... Saddam Hussein's mistake was to turn on Kuwait first" (3) whether it can safely rely on its links with the USA for adequate intelligence of the region, or should expand its own capabilities, especially in respect of satellites (4) what to do against the long-term threat of proliferation of missile and warhead technologies to potential enemies. The central defence policy goal must be to repair Israel's power to deter a future aggressor in the Saddam Hussain mould.

Ze'ev Schiff is Defense Editor of the Tel Aviv daily, Ha'aretz.

Now that the Gulf War is over, Israel will have to take a hard look at its security doctrine and ask itself a number of key questions about its future security. The 39 missiles fired at Israel brought with them a sense of trauma compounded by humiliation over the fact that the country would have to absorb these strikes in its heartland without hitting back. This was the first time since the 1948 war of independence that Arabs had succeeded in striking at Israel's civilian homefront.

The country's inhabitants, young and old, were forced to don gas masks; infants were placed in special incubator-like devices to protect them against chemical weapons. Many Israelis, especially those who had survived the Holocaust, were haunted by gruesome associations. And despite the American effort to demolish the missile launchers, the attacks did not stop, though they did abate somewhat. Even a superpower, it seems, did not find it easy to neutralize the missile threat quickly.

Though the Scuds did not pose an existential threat to the country, the civilian population remained vulnerable. And all the while, because of political constraints, Israel had to make do with passive resistance instead of actively defending itself.

II

Israelis cannot avoid asking what could have happened if the war had taken a different course.

If Saddam Hussein had directed his forces westward, toward Israel, rather than southward into Kuwait? If he had sent a few dozen divisions into western Iraq and deployed some of them along the Jordanian border? His agents could have fabricated incidents on the Israeli-Jordanian frontier to provoke the Israelis into retaliating against Jordan. He could have explained the movement of his forces into western Iraq by citing the need to aid Jordan.

Militant public opinion would have forced King Hussein to allow the stationing of Iraqi forces on Jordanian soil, as he had in 1967. Israel would have taken this move as the crossing of a "red line," but its ability to respond would have been limited. The army would have had to declare a massive call-up of reserves but would not have been able to keep them mobilized for long, as the Israeli economy would soon have been devastated. Thus the government would have had to face the question of whether to launch a preemptive strike; even had it refrained from doing so, Saddam Hussein would probably have found a way of provoking Israel into war.

It is reasonable to assume, moreover, that such a war would have been joined by Syria, forcing Israel to deal with a broad eastern front on which it would face the armies of Iraq, Syria and Jordan. The Iraqis would have stationed most of their missile launchers in western Iraq, some close to the Jordanian border or even hidden within Jordan proper. Reducing the range to Israel would have enabled the Iraqis to increase the amount of explosives in their warheads, thus causing greater damage.

It is highly doubtful whether in a scenario of this sort ...

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