Maoz - Defending the Holy Land: a critical analysis of Israels security & foreign policy

This book has been brewing in my mind for nearly three decades. I have closely followed Israel's national security and foreign policy over the years. Like for many other Israelisscholars and laypersonswho followed these policies, this was not a detached and distant scrutiny. It was an anthropological process of participating observation. I have both taken part and had major stakes in many of the events and processes that are discussed in this book. As a soldier I participated in three of the wars that are discussed herein: I served as a young soldier in the War of Attrition, fighting in the northern section of the Suez Canal. As a reserve officer I participated in the Yom Kippur War and the Lebanon War. I also did numerous tours of duty (in both my standing army career and my reserve duty) in the occupied territories. In the early 1990s I had a brief stint on a team advising Yitzhak Rabin on strategic affairs.

For the most part, this process of observation was rather depressing; only a few years during this period offered rays of hope. What bothered me more than specific episodes of ineptitude, folly, and deceptionand there were many of these over the yearswere two aspects of policy-making that have not received sufficient attention. First, I was concerned by the persistent failure of the policy community to learn from Israel's mistakes. This lack of self-inspection applied not only to politicians and bureaucrats but also to a significant portion of the scholarly community in Israel, the Israeli media, andof coursepublic opinion. In too many areas of policy, Israel has experienced persistent and repeated failures. Yet, many of these failures were explained away or covered up as somethingelse. Even when they were recognized as failures, no meaningful reforms were undertaken. Things remained pretty much as they had been before the fiascos.

Second, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the uncritical treatment by most Israelis of the foundations of Israel's national security doctrine. Although Israelis are generally a critical and cynical breed, there is an underlying consensus on many fundamental security and foreign policy issues. There is a general agreement on the underlying assumptions of Israel's security and foreign policy (for example, on the elements of the threat to Israel's security). There is a general consensus on some fundamental principles of Israel's security doctrine (e.g., the need to rely on an offensive and escalation dominant doctrine). And there is a fairly consensual interpretation of certain outcomes of these policies (e.g., that Israel's nuclear policy has been a phenomenal success). Consensus is a good thing if it is based on correct assumptions and principles. My feeling was that too many of the foundations of Israel's security and foreign policy doctrine have become religious principles rather than propositions that need to be tested against the empirical facts. Because almost nobody bothered to examine whether this general consensus is based on a correct reading of Israel's environment and policies, there was a significant void in the literature dealing with Israel's national security and foreign policy. There were almost no efforts to evaluate the various contours of these policies. This book is an attempt to systematically examine and review both the foundations of these policies and their operational expressions.