THE LIMITED CONFLICT TRAP
Yehuda Wegman
Policy Paper No. 149,
(Hebrew) 2003
Executive Summary
The
security doctrine of the State of Israel, which is derived from its
geo-strategic situation, has always emphasized a short war and a rapid
victory over the enemy. In contrast, according to the doctrine of the
“limited conflict”, which was promulgated in the IDF as soon as the
“peace process” began, terror dictates ongoing warfare for the State
of Israel. At the time when “peace” was chosen as an alternative
strategy to security and it was proclaimed that “in the age of
missiles, strategic depth no longer has any value,” the IDF, too,
adopted as its new combat doctrine the US army’s rules of “operation
other than war” (OOTW), which was translated into Hebrew as “limited
conflict” in which the “weak” defeats the “strong” by attrition.
In
the process of “attrition”, the “strong” absorbs intensifying blows
from terror and guerrilla acts that are mainly directed at its
unprotected civilian interior. The accumulation of such blows over
time is aimed at fostering a social – not military – turnabout in the
“strong” party, which becomes convinced that it is not really
“strong”. The inability to defend itself leads the “strong” party to
surrender its principles in return for an end to the attacks. The
“limited conflict” doctrine portrays the IDF as the “strong” side,
which absorbs and reacts, and the Palestinians as the “weak” side,
which initiates and attacks. Amazingly, the “limited conflict”
doctrine, which, as mentioned, was accepted by the IDF, has no answer
to the question of how in the Israeli-Palestinian reality the
“strong”, attacked side is supposed to prevail over the “weak” one.
The
glaring flaw of the new “doctrine” is that it is based on a reality
and on modes of thought that were derived from other arenas, which
bear no similarity to the Israeli-Palestinian arena. Analysis of the
“limited conflicts” that other peoples have dealt with shows that in
contrast to the Israeli case, there is not a single civilian in
France, Britain, and the United States whose daily life was impaired
by the “limited conflict” that his country’s army waged overseas.
After an extended period of fighting according to the rules of the
“limited conflict” and at a heavy price in blood, both the political
echelon and the IDF were forced to give up on the “attrition” and
undergo a conceptual revolution, which brought them to the notion of
“high intensiveness” and aggressiveness that proved – again – to be
the only answer to terror.
