Israel has long defended itself through a "doctrine of retaliatory action," which President Eisenhower angrily characterized in 1955 -- after savage Israeli reprisal raids into Gaza and Jordan -- as "more like a head for an eye than an eye for an eye." The doctrine has not worked since Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon, which, in common with Gaza today, was launched to punish missile attacks (from Hezbollah country) and force the release of two Israeli soldiers seized by Lebanese guerrillas and carried back across the border. Today, Israel is blockading and intermittently pummeling Gaza (about 1,200 Palestinians were killed in the January 2009 "Gaza War") to secure the release of Sergeant Gilad Shalit, who was abducted in 2006, and to stop the sputter of missile attacks from Hamas country.
Although Prime Minister Netanyahu continues to extol the efficacy of coercion and reprisal, he is straining Tel Aviv's relationship with Washington, and leading Israel toward failure and international isolation.
Historically, the Israelis have used carefully timed wars to secure and even expand their borders. In the 1956 Suez War, for example, they joined a British and French attack on Egypt (to recover the Suez Canal from Nasser's nationalization) and used the conflict to seize the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. What followed gave a fascinating glimpse into the evolving Israeli strategy of "escalation dominance." Before the 1956 war, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had warned Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett that "the safety and continued existence of the free world" depended upon major Israeli concessions on territory, good behavior (no more reprisal raids), the opening of Jerusalem, and the repatriation or cash compensation of the Palestinian refugees. After the war, with Israel briefly in possession of the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip, those two tracts were traded for U.S. acceptance of Israel's 1949 borders (far bigger than those conceded by the UN in 1947) and U.S. indifference to the plight of the refugees. Until the Israeli invasion, Washington had been focused on the refugee issue. After the invasion, Washington focused on getting the Israelis out of Egyptian territory. Although the Israelis complained that they were "cheated" of the spoils of war in 1956, they actually traded them for Ike's weary acceptance of Israel's broader frontiers -- all of the land that had been given the Jews in 1947 as well as the best part of the Palestinian grant -- as well as Ike's weary acceptance that nothing would be done for the Palestinians after all.
In the years that followed, the Israelis recognized that short, sharp military actions would be used to ignite crises that would distract international attention from Israeli stonewalling, or permit a steady outward creep of Israel's frontiers. Moshe Dayan admitted as much. Coveting the Golan Heights before they were actually seized in the 1967 Six-Day War, Dayan noted that "we'd send a tractor to plow some place in the demilitarized zone... and we knew ahead of time that the Syrians would shoot. If they didn't shoot, we'd tell the tractor to move deeper, until the Syrians fired on it. And then we'd activate artillery and the air force. We thought, 'we can change the armistice lines by a series of operations that are less than war.'" Always claiming to be a "status quo state," Israel was actually an expansionist one.
President Kennedy recognized this, and vowed to uphold a U.S. embargo on the sale of major weapons systems to all Middle Eastern countries, including Israel. He would send, as he put it, "tractors, not tanks; bread, not bombs." But Kennedy was the president who sparked Israel's breakthrough to military predominance; he bowed to congressional pressure and became the first U.S. president to sell Israel cutting-edge weaponry, early warning radars, and then, stunningly, in 1962, Hawk anti-aircraft missiles (the cream of the NATO arsenal), which the Israelis tactlessly installed around their Dimona nuclear weapons facility. Kennedy had been trying to close Dimona in the interests of nonproliferation, and certainly resented the chutzpah. President Johnson was even more obliging than Kennedy; flush with U.S. foreign aid, the Israelis spent increasing amounts on defense - 9.5 percent of GDP in 1965, 10.4 percent in 1966, 17.7 percent in 1967 and 26.3 percent in 1971. LBJ's ambassador in Tel Aviv, Wally Barbour, warned in 1965 that the effect of American-subsidized Israeli defense spending was destabilizing, leading as it did to "Arab fury and intractability." It made Israel feel invulnerable, and unwilling to make any concessions. It also made it easy for Israel to contemplate further offensives, which Barbour urged Washington to prohibit and punish with "total economic sanctions." Secretary of State Rusk agreed, deploring the Israeli tendency to "take the law into their own hands."
In 1967, Israel went on the attack again. Nasser's bombast was used by the Israelis to justify a preemptive attack on Egypt, Jordan and Syria. By escalating a minor threat -- Nasser's announced but never implemented blockade of the Gulf of Eilat -- the Israelis delivered a knock-out blow to three neighboring militaries and raked in the massive annexations that we today call the "occupied territories": Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Instead of compelling Israel to obey the November 1967 UN resolution demanding an Israeli withdrawal from the conquered territory and a political settlement, LBJ stunningly endorsed the "good beating" the Israelis had administered. A senior State Department official resigned to protest that "basic change in the attitude of the U.S. government ... from one of balance and fairness to one of total support for the development through force of an Israeli empire."
Publicly committed to negotiations with the Palestinians and Israel's neighbors, Israel has made little effort to crown those negotiations with success for the simple reason that permanent tension is useful; it is the weather in which Israel flourishes. As long as the region is in flux, the Israelis can eternally postpone concessions and final settlements. They can continue building settlements and military roads in the occupied territories in the name of "security." They can cling to their controversial nuclear weapons as the only salvation against "wild" neighbors.
But, as events in Gaza now demonstrate, escalation dominance no longer works, and Netanyahu is exposed as having no new usable doctrine to replace it. The first cracks appeared in the Lebanon War of 2006. When Hezbollah paramilitaries fired Katyusha rockets into northern Israel and seized two Israeli sergeants from a Humvee patrolling the border, Israel reflexively demanded "a head for an eye." "If the soldiers are not released," the IDF chief of staff growled, "we will turn Lebanon's clock back twenty years." He wasn't kidding. Israeli airstrikes took out bridges, roads, airports, harbors, water and sewage treatment plants, power grids, schools, hospitals, shops and homes. At least 1,000 Lebanese civilians were killed in the campaign, several hundred Hezbollah fighters, and 121 Israeli troops and 43 Israeli civilians. The attempt at escalation dominance -- ratcheting the rocket attacks and kidnappings into a knock-out blow against Hezbollah -- failed. The two kidnapped soldiers were returned -- in a prisoner exchange -- but they were dead. Hezbollah lived on, and has been rearmed. Israel was condemned for its disproportionate use of force everywhere but the Bush White House. Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in December 2008-January 2009 repeated the methods of Lebanon. More than a thousand Palestinians were killed -- including hundreds of civilians -- and factories, workshops, mosques, homes and water treatment plants were destroyed.
Despite tactical successes in Lebanon and Gaza, Israel earned international condemnation, which has intensified in this latest effort to enforce the blockade of the Gaza Strip. When Israel escalates and takes a "head for an eye," it no longer enjoys the respect or connivance of the international community. Certainly a final settlement of the Palestinian question will not appear final to diehards in Hamas or Hezbollah, or to their Iranian minders, but it will prick Hamas' bubble in Gaza and create the conditions for a determined assault on extremism and violence. If Israel embarks seriously on peace negotiations, to include the cession of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the removal of settlements, then it will rally more support for its efforts to defend itself. If Israel hastens the establishment of a viable Palestinian state, it will steal votes from Hamas and gain legitimacy in what is sure to be a long and bitter struggle against the region's "rejectionists." By casting himself as a rejectionist, Netanyahu is doing Israel (and the United States) no favors. When Eisenhower scolded the Israelis fifty-five years ago for their "merciless severity," then Prime Minister Ben-Gurion reacted Netanyahu-like: "Our future depends not on what the goyim say, but on what the Jews do." "Yes," his foreign minister shot back, "but it is also important what the goyim say."
Dr. Geoffrey Wawro is the General Olinto Mark Barsanti Professor of Military History and Director of the Military History Center at the University of North Texas. He is the author of Quicksand: America's Pursuit of Power in the Middle East (Penguin Press, 2010.)
israel loves to cling to its lies . . . the only think it is creating is global instability . . . and it is more than time that the US stops being the broker . . . America must join with the UN to impose sanctions, trade embargoes, et al against israel . . . it must also back an independent enquiry about the massacre of the Mavi Marmara . . . US complicity in israel's crimes has to end it is beying contemptible . . . it is a war crime.
Israel states that no tear gas cannisters were fired at protestors.
WOW! Either the IDF have a very bad aim, or Israel has self-propelled tear gas cannisters.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/u-s-demands-idf-probe-how-american-lost-eye-at-west-bank-protest-1.294566
The young lady was far away from the children. The Israeli Milita shot three bullets at her hitting her in the eye blinding her. She is a American we care you do not.
The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews.
Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it.
Turkey threw out a million Greeks and Algeria a million Frenchman.
Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese and no one says a word about refugees.
But in the case of Israel , the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees.
Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single one.
Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis.
Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms.
But when Israel is victorious, it must sue for peace.
Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.
Other nations, when they are defeated, survive and recover but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed.
Had Nasser triumphed last June [1967], he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews.
No commitment to the Jews by any government, including our own, is worth the paper it is written on.
There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Blacks are executed in Rhodesia .
But, when Hitler slaughtered Jews no one demonstrated against him.
Well I guess that's true, if you don't count the hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians who died to bring him down.
It has become known, recently, as World War 2
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/u-s-demands-idf-probe-how-american-lost-eye-at-west-bank-protest-1.294566
Well, fine then, if you insist. I was always receptive to criticism…
I won't address Mr. Wawro's "creative history". Doing so would necessitate more than the 250-word ration.
Let me point out just one of his more minor fallacies: Mr. Wawro would have us believe that throughout its 62-years modern history, the state of Israel has pursued a consistent, conscious strategy of "escalation dominance". But anyone who reads history (rather than re-writing it) knows that during that period Israel had circa 20 governments. Which governments represented very different ideologies, from "pink" socialists to "dark blue" right-wing nationalists. Ideologies (and individuals!) fiercely opposed to & harshly critical of each other. From Shamir "the toughman" to Barak "concede half of Jerusalem". For a while, Israel even had a government relying for its parliamentary majority on the support of Arab Israeli parties. The notion that somehow all these diverse politicians would agree, through decades, on some sort of common policy is laughable.
Mr. Wawro's story is nothing but a re-work of an old conspiracy theory. Had he written the blog in Arabic, he would probably have made reference to the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion". As it is, since he probably thinks (erroneously IMO) that he writes for a largely Western audience, he gave that bit a miss.
Perhaps to start any conversation with the assumption that such a mindset should never be questioned?
Maybe, when Dr. Moritz Güdemann, chief rabbi of Vienna in 1897, said "Zionism is a suicide attempt on the part of Judaism."
( i took that quote from here http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2010/05/quote-of-the-week-dr-moritz-g%C3%BCdemann.html - there's a photo there that kind of sums up the whole project of Zionism.)
Before you start accusing me of antisemitism, look into Theodor Herzl, the father of the Zionist movement. Antisemitism was propagated by the fathers of Zionism in order to further their goal of a secular Jewish state in Palestine.
Zionism, and the insistence that their actions are representative of the Jewish people at large, are the biggest cause of antisemitism in the world today.
Did you know there is a community of about 25,000 Jews in Iran, that worship openly and are treated well by both the secular and religious leadership there?
It's not Judaism, but Zionism that is hated.
The only defense Liberals like Waxman and Wiener have is to slander.
Have we not noticed how those who defend the most despicable always end up attacking the person and not answering the facts. It might be laced with a twisted view, like the 9 dead were killed by friend or it was entirely their fault.
But in the end those of us in the Jewish Diaspora who have had enough of watching Liberal Democrats resort to the safety of name calling behind Ethnic lines, we will never forget this slander.
The facts like the 9 dead speak loud and clear. Obama had better start earning his Nobel Peace Prize. I'll be happy to eat crow if he manages to drag Israel across the line to return to the borders of 1967. A recent head of Israeli Military command said with F16's and advanced missiles, drones.. that Israel no longer needs the Golan for defense.
Better Israel suffer a cold but real peace than to be hated outside of America. They might be able to have it...who knows but no East Jerusalem and it's dead. Obama thinks there is still room for the PA to back down.. there is not.. not now that Israel keeps strengthening Hamas but it's cruel massacres.
Israel no longer takes just a head for an eye.
Noboby will believe your peace scams. With Oslo Arabs had a real opportunity to make a real peace with Israel and they destroyed it because they hate peace and because they thought that Israelis were begging them to make peace. Now it's too late.
Arabs don't want peace with Israel and all this so-called peace activity creates more war.
Giving land does not bring peace? Has Israel tried giving the Palestinians total freedom, 24% of what they once asked for and East Jerusalem?
You make peace with enemies then they become former enemies. The Jewish Diaspora is growing increasingly impatient with Israel and even in America too. Better Israel does the deed than be pushed by demographics to give Palestinians the vote. Sharon and Olmert hardly bleeding hearts all arrived at this fact. The Palestinians are not leaving. To expect America in the future to love Israel while it rules for an eternity over Palestinians is too much to expect.
Quit trying to distract from that. You are not that good a debater.
As for facts did Eisenhower say what is quoted or did he not?
You are nitpicking making "Weary" as important as the quote. The underlying facts are not addressed by you except with the term "massive" to describe the land annexed by Israel.
Clearly you consider your bicycle tour as a factual exercise, what a witty image you provide and for you a nice joke at the expense of Palestinians. To them their daily humiliation by Israel's occupation is The Whole World. To all of us who protest Israel's occupation: we count the tens of thousands killed by the IDF and IAF. To you it's all a conflict over such a tiny plot of land?
Why the fuss I can see you telling your students? Why bother about Israel as they only want a tiny strip of land that no one important will miss?
If it is so tiny why not support the PA to be free of Israel? You opened up the door by doing what you attacked the author on: using your own set of conjecture but you give no facts to refute the ample amount supplied. A bicycle trip is only factual in terms of writing about your holiday. You know better. If it is nothing then it is nothing for Israel to give it back.
You support Israeli aggression? That's your right: mine is to disagree.
Sooner or later Mexico and Canada will figure out the ramifications of the US's continual single veto of UN Security resolutions that would hold Israel accountable to the rule of the same international law that the rest of the world is obliged to follow.
There isn't a security agency anywhere in the Western world - not even the French - who believed the Arab allies weren't going to attack Israel.
Before the declaration of the State of Israel in May 1948, several Arab countries adopted discriminatory measures against their local Jewish populations,removing property and houses by force. The descendants of these repressed minorities at the hands of the Arabs make up 41% of the Israeli population today. So you see, it's OK for Arabs to throw out innocent people and create refugees...but not Israel, oooo dear me no.
The latest Islamist propaganda feeds on altered history such as this. They and the international Left are orchestrating these 'aid flotillas'. Don't believe that? Dig this:
http://nbyslog.blogspot.com/2010/06/exclusive-man-who-got-rachel-corrie.html
Gong
Americans don't understand Arabs.
It should be treated as other rogue states. If AIPAC and others wish to fund Israel's endless war actions, fine - but stop sending Israel our tax dollars and military aid.
As for your claim that the Israelis were "expansionist," that might well be true. A nation surrounded by those bent on its destruction may wish to have more defensible borders. But that does not mean what the Israelis did was wrong or unlawful. Land may be taken in a defensive war. 1967 was a defensive war, because Egypt committed a war act in closing the straits. Syria, as its main ally and treaty pact participant, was also fair game under international norms.
Considering the state of war between Syria and Israel, there is no reason to return the heights. Proof in the pudding of Israel's intentions is it traded land for peace
It's the same rational but NO Israel is not Nazi just far more humdrum.
~15 Jews (less than half are actually in Israel) can NEVER win against 7 BILLION non-Jews, especially since only a very miniscule number of that 7 BILLION will care if Israel ceases to exist.
Over 6 BILLION of those people either do not care if Israel goes away or very much want to ensure Israel goes away.
With those odds, if I were a Jew, I would be looking for a way to blend in, instead of looking for ways to piss off the rest of the humans on earth.
Once the US successfully neuters itself by wasting all its wealth and power, Israel is toast. Even threatening the Samson Option will not save them. In fact threatening the rest of the world will just make the demise of Israel faster and more deadly.
I wonder when it will finally sink in to the Israeli brains that being an extreme aggressor only works for a while and them the payback is extremely horrible.
I suspect that Israel will get its horrible pay back within my life time. I just hope most Israelis figure out that Israel is not a safe place to be and they use their dual passports to flee to safety.