Rethinking Israel’s Syria Campaign

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,074, January 27, 2019

By Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen, BESA

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Moscow’s public demand that Israel stop its attacks in Syria places Israel’s longstanding air campaign at a critical juncture despite PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s avowed determination to sustain it for as long as necessary.

Three primary goals underlie Israel’s longstanding air campaign in Syria, dubbed the “Campaign Between Wars”: 1) preventing the buildup of a terrorist front on the Golan Heights; 2) preventing Tehran’s military entrenchment in Syria; and 3) preventing the acquisition of long-range precision missiles/rockets by Hezbollah and other Iranian-propped militias. In a 2015 doctrinal pamphlet entitled “The IDF’s Strategy,” then-Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot defined the Campaign Between Wars as designed to “weaken negative factors and achieve deterrence in order to keep the next war away.”

At present, there is broad consensus in Israel regarding the essential vitality of the above three goals. Yet the changing strategic circumstances in Syria have given rise to concerns that not only does the continuation of the campaign in its present form not forestall the danger of war, but it actually increases its likelihood due to the possibility of an uncontrolled escalation.

The clashes along the Syrian-Israeli border in the three years preceding the June 1967 war may help place the current confrontation in a broader historical context. Since 1964, the IDF had been conducting a “Campaign Between Wars” similarly aimed at achieving three main goals: 1) foiling the diversion of the Jordan River estuaries; 2) asserting Israel’s sovereignty in the demilitarized zone along the border; and 3) fighting Syria-originated attacks by the nascent Fatah terror group. The IDF General Staff, headed at the time by Lt. Gen. Yitzhak Rabin, sought to maximize the operational and strategic potential of these clashes while being keenly aware of the possibility of their possible escalation to the point of war. Rabin in particular believed that Syria’s defeat in a general war would also solve the problem of Fatah terrorism.

On April 7, 1967, Syrian fire on Israeli farmers tilling lands in the demilitarized zone expanded into a wider confrontation, with Israeli PM and Minister of Defense Levi Eshkol approving the use of air strikes to neutralize the Syrian artillery. In the ensuing air battle the IAF shot down six Syrian fighter aircraft.

This incident was without doubt a critical milestone on the road to the 1967 war. Had the “Campaign Between Wars” been designed expressly to foreclose the danger of war, then the April 7 clashes – for all their tactical achievements – constituted a systemic failure (though the deterioration to war was by no means a foregone conclusion). From a different vantage point, however, the “Campaign Between Wars” might have served the opposite goal: of improving conditions in case of an outbreak of war.

The same logic may be applied to the current Israeli campaign in Syria. While it is necessary to have it defined in precise and clearly articulated terms, manifested in the public domain by the above-stated three strategic goals, it is equally crucial for the Israeli leadership to realize that in the changing circumstances, even if the continuation of the campaign might lead to war, that war must be prepared for with a view to fundamentally changing the security situation on Israel’s northern border in its favor.

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An earlier version of this article was published in Hebrew in Israel Hayom on January 25, 2019.

Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen is a senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He served in the IDF for forty-two years. He commanded troops in battles with Egypt and Syria. He was formerly a corps commander and commander of the IDF Military Colleges.

January 28, 2019 | 3 Comments »

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  1. General Hacohen’s suggestion that Israel’s use of aircraft to end a Syrian artillery barrage against a kibbutz April 1967 brought on the 1967 Six-day war is, I think, inaccurate. It was only when Russia responded to the clash by falsely reporting to Nasser and the UN Security Council that Israel was massing fourteen divisions on the Syrian border (it wasn’t amassing any divisions at all) that Nasser felt obliged to confront Israel in the Sinai and the Gulf of Aqaba-Eilat, since he would have lost face to the Arab world had he failed to do so.

    Claims by the Syrians that Yitzhak Rabin had threatened to invade Syria and overthrow the Syrian government were proven by subsequent research tobe entirely fictitious. Actually, Rabin had only made a vague warning of future retaliation if Syria continued its campaign of shelling the border Kibbutzim, which had been in progress for nearly a year before the April 1967 clash. He said nothing about invading Syria or overthrowing its government.

    The Six-day War, then, was a result of a joint decision to start a war with Israel the Soviets and their Syrian client. Since the April aerial clash was just a pretext, the Soviets and the Syrians would undoubtedly have found another one as a rationale for initiating hostilities. There was little or nothing that Israel could have done to avoid a war.

  2. Hacohen’s tone and emphasis are very different when being interviewed by Caroline Glick for Breitbart News than in this article for BESA. Perhaps he felt he could be more frank talking to Glick and Breitbart.

    EXCLUSIVE – Former Israeli War Colleges Commander: ‘Without Judea and Samaria, Israel Cannot Defend Tel Aviv’
    25 Jan 2019
    President Donald Trump’s negotiating team may unveil its “deal of the century” peace plan for Israel and the Palestinians soon after Israel’s April 9 elections.

    Gershon Hacohen, a recently retired Israeli major general and former commander of Israel’s war colleges, now serves as a senior researcher at Bar Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Affairs, where he writes prolifically on the military significance of Israel’s relations with the Palestinians.

    Hacohen is considered one of Israel’s most brilliant strategists. He is also something of a voice in the wilderness among his fellow generals, who almost unanimously identify with the left side of the political and ideological spectrum.

    In light of the various media reports that have surfaced over the past year about the contours of the Trump plan, Hacohen has deep reservations about the plausibility of the American efforts.

    This week, Hacohen published a major study in Hebrew, which received frontpage coverage in the Hebrew media in Israel. In it, Hacohen analyzed the military implications for Israel of a possible Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria – otherwise known as the West Bank – in any deal with the Palestinians.

    In his report, titled, “A Withdrawal from Area C of Judea and Samaria is an Existential Threat,” Hacohen argued that Israel cannot afford to withdraw from any territory in Judea and Samaria.

    Breitbart News spoke with Hacohen to discuss his paper and what its implications are for the Trump administration as it prepares to unveil its peace plan.

    Breitbart News: How do you relate to the news that the Trump administration intends to release its peace plan after the election?

    Hacohen: We still don’t know what’s in the plan. I hope it is based on an understanding that we have to abandon the Clinton Parameters. They render Israel indefensible.

    [In December 2000, just weeks before leaving the Oval Office, then-President Bill Clinton presented what he referred to as the “Clinton Parameters” for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The Clinton Parameters called for an Israeli withdrawal from 98 percent of Judea and Samaria, along with 100 percent of Gaza, and the division of Jerusalem between Israel and the Palestinians with Israel surrendering sovereignty over the Temple Mount to the Palestinians. They called for Israel to swap sovereign territory with the Palestinians for the residual land in Judea and Samaria that it did not surrender. And they called for the Palestinians to establish a fully sovereign state on the lands that Israel transferred to their control. All U.S. peace plans since 2000 have been based on the Clinton Parameters.]

    Hacohen: The Clinton Parameters constitute an existential threat to Israel. They are a complete repudiation of then-Prime Minister and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s principles for peace with the Palestinians. I believe that Rabin’s four principles are the only rational basis for peace with the Palestinians. They are the only principles that will ensure that the Palestinians cannot pose an existential threat to Israel.

    Rabin set out his parameters in his speech to the Knesset a month before he was assassinated on November 4, 1995. In that speech, Rabin presented the Interim Peace Accord with the Palestinians for ratification and set out his vision for what a permanent accord would look like.

    Breitbart: What were the four principles?

    Hacohen: Rabin’s first principle was that Israel must remain a Jewish state with an 80 percent Jewish majority. He began ensuring that in July 1994, when Israel withdrew from most of the Gaza Strip and set up the Palestinian Authority as an autonomous government responsible for the Palestinians. The interim agreement, which he presented to the Knesset a month before he was murdered, ensured the completion of that mission. By extending Palestinian self-rule to the Palestinian population centers in Judea and Samaria in January 1996, the deal placed more than 90 percent of Palestinians under Palestinian governance.

    Ahmed Tibi, [one of PLO chief Yasser Arafat’s advisors and the time and a member of Knesset today] said then, “The occupation is over.” And he was right.

    Since Israel withdrew its military forces and civilian population from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Gaza has been the de facto Palestinian state. And in Judea and Samaria, the Palestinians have maintained their autonomous governance for 23 years.

    Breitbart: The world, and even Israel’s left, continues to insist that the occupation hasn’t ended.

    Hacohen: True, but they are wrong. Israel ended the occupation in 1996. It does not control the lives or the governance of the Palestinians. The Palestinians control their own lives and their own governance.

    Breitbart: What were the rest of Rabin’s parameters?

    His second premise what that Jerusalem must remain united under sole Israeli sovereignty. Rabin envisioned Jerusalem as being a much larger municipal area. In his view, it should incorporate the major settlements of Givat Zeev and Maale Adumim in its municipal boundaries. Rabin understood that there is no military or practical way of dividing the city. There is no “no-man’s land” in Jerusalem that would serve as a natural boundary. Arabs and Jews live together. They cannot be separated and any attempt to do so would produce a military and civilian catastrophe.

    Rabin’s third premise was that Israel needs to control the Jordan Valley – broadly construed – in perpetuity. As he saw it, the Jordan Valley includes all the land along Israel’s eastern frontier with Jordan, and stretches to the eastern settlement band along the Samarian mountain ridge in the north, and the Judean hills in the south.

    Finally, Rabin said that the Palestinian entity that would be formed in a final peace deal would be less than a state. It wouldn’t control the electromagnetic spectrum. It wouldn’t control the airspace. It wouldn’t have an army.

    Breitbart News: Rabin’s premises seem to have been forgotten by history.

    Hacohen: “Rabin’s premises were discarded five years after he was killed. [In July 2000, then-Prime Minister] Ehud Barak ignored all of them during the Camp David peace summit. Barak conceded Israeli control over the Jordan Valley. Barak’s peace offer to Arafat divided Jerusalem. It included no security arrangements. He gave the Palestinians an entirely sovereign state. And he introduced the concept of “land swaps” wherein Israel would give the Palestinians land in sovereign Israel in exchange for retaining Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem built after 1967 and major settlements in Judea and Samaria. The idea was crazy. Israel has no territory to swap.

    Breitbart: So the Clinton parameters were just an extension of Barak’s offer.

    Hacohen: That’s right. They were essentially an expanded version of what Barak offered and Arafat rejected at Camp David, and then in later negotiations. Arafat also rejected the Clinton parameters. If Trump’s plan doesn’t get away from the Clinton Parameters, and the assumptions that inform them, it’s a non-starter. They are just too dangerous.

    Breitbart: Why are the Clinton parameters so dangerous? Most of the generals in the IDF argue that Israel can walk away from Judea and Samaria and divide Jerusalem and survive.

    Hacohen: One reason, which [former Israeli ambassador to the UN and president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs] Dore Gold explained a decade ago, is that the Clinton parameters deny Israel defensible borders, in breach of UN Security Council resolution 242.

    [In the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, the UN Security Council passed resolution 242 which set out the basis for an eventual Arab-Israeli peace. Resolution 242 called for the Arabs to recognize Israel’s right to exist in “defensible borders.” Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff presented then-President Lyndon Johnson with a memo summarizing what such borders entailed. According the their memo, to survive, Israel needed to maintain control over much of the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza, Judea and Samaria, and the Golan Heights. Without that territory, Israel lacked the strategic depth to defend itself from future invasions.]

    Hacohen: The other generals ignore the significance of the joint doctrine our enemies Hamas and Hezbollah have adopted for fighting Israel. Rabin’s belief was that peace with the Palestinians would permit Israel to transfer its main military effort to fighting Hezbollah in the north. Thanks to the joint war doctrine that Hezbollah has crafted with Hamas since Israel withdrew from Gaza, Israel cannot easily neutralize the Palestinians in Gaza in order to free itself to fight Hezbollah in the north. If Israel withdraws from Judea and Samaria, we will face a unified enemy on three fronts. And that will be a disaster.

    Breitbart: But the other generals claim that Israel is strong enough to manage this threat, and it is safe to withdraw from Judea and Samaria. What are they not seeing?

    Hacohen: They think that we are much stronger than our enemies, but when a thousand Lilliputians tied Gulliver down, he was tied down. There are a thousand connections between Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. If we leave Judea and Samaria, it will be incorporated into their war doctrine. And if we have three fronts, it will be a disaster. It is a threat that Israel won’t be able to surmount because it won’t be able to free the forces to fight Hezbollah in the north as its main effort.

    Israel’s coastal plain doesn’t have the depth to protect the country. Without Judea and Samaria, Israel cannot defend Tel Aviv. My claim is that even in the age of peace we can’t take the chance because we don’t know what tomorrow will bring.

    Breitbart: It seems that none of your fellow generals agree with you. Former Chief of General Staff Lt. General Benny Gantz is running as a peace candidate. And three other former chiefs of staff may join him in his political party. Why don’t they see this?

    Hacohen: Part of the issue is the sociological. The leftist paradigm, that Israel can give up everything for peace, is the ruling paradigm. Part of the answer is ignorance of military affairs. They have not studied the wars of the past twenty years. They haven’t studied the war in Ukraine, or Iraq, or Afghanistan. Maybe if they studied them, they’d agree with me.

    Part of the answer is that they simply don’t understand that the world has changed since 1967. Some of my colleagues claim that if we withdraw to the pre-Six Day War boundaries and the Palestinians attack us, we can just repeat the Six Day War. That’s like saying that if we all walked to the edge of the Red Sea and asked God to part it again that it would happen. That isn’t strategic analysis. It’s fantasy.

    I have closely studied the Hezbollah-Hamas war doctrine. They created armed forces that can negate Israel’s comparative advantages as a hybrid military force. Anyone who understands this threat recognizes that Israel is hard-pressed to respond to this doctrine and force structure when we face it in Gaza and Lebanon.

    Israel has no answer to this doctrine if it is also applied to Judea and Samaria. To defeat Hezbollah, Israel needs to stay in Judea and Samaria. Otherwise, in time of war, it will be unable to deploy its main force in the North.

    Breitbart: At base, your colleagues believe that the way to reach peace is to separate from the Palestinians.

    Hacohen: My colleagues suffer from the same groupthink in relation to the Palestinians, and to our strategic environment more generally, as our predecessors suffered from in the period leading up to the 1973 Yom Kippur War. It was that groupthink that left Israel unprepared for that war.

    Regarding separation, [then-U.S. peace negotiator Martin] Indyk [under Clinton] said, “Good fences make good neighbors.” And my fellow generals agreed.

    “But that is entirely wrong. The neighbors in question aren’t two ranchers in Texas that go to the same church every Sunday morning. What happened with Gaza is that Israel built a wall to defend itself from Hamas. But instead of protecting Israel, it protected Hamas. It allowed Hamas to build a military organization because the fence protected them from [the] IDF. The fence created a reality according to which every action by the IDF taken beyond the fence is a declaration of war.

    In Judea and Samaria we don’t have a binary understanding of space – ours or theirs. We have a hybrid system. Jewish and Arab villagers living side by side is a better arrangement. It enables the IDF to carry out small military operations. Today Israeli forces can operate in Nablus every night. To do that in Gaza, you need a cabinet decision. If we lose the freedom of action in Judea and Samaria, it will be a disaster.

    The generals’ second assumption is that if a new threat emerges, the Israeli government will be free to deploy troops to Palestinian territory to defend against it. What we learned from Gaza is that the possibility of entering isn’t easy.

    Third, they believe that the IDF’s superiority will bring victory decisively and quickly, just as it did in the 1967 Six Day War. This is false. It’s not the IDF is weaker than the combined forces of its enemies. It is simply that Hamas and Hezbollah have developed a doctrine that plays to their advantages while neutralizing many of Israel’s advantages.

    Finally, the generals believe that withdrawing from Judea and Samaria will give Israel the international legitimacy to fight. This is also false. We learned it from all the post-Gaza withdrawal operations – Cast Lead, Protective Edge, all of them.

    Rather than receive the support of the international community, we have been vilified as war criminals for defending ourselves in the face of massive missile attacks.

    In other words, all of their premises are incorrect.

    Breitbart: The news reports of the Trump plan indicate that it expects Israel to withdraw from the vast majority of Judea and Samaria, and divide Jerusalem.

    Hacohen: I saw the reports. I also saw that the Trump administration denied them. But they are a source of worry. Because if they are true, they indicate that the Trump team has learned nothing from the past. And if they do go forward with something that looks like what has been reported, then their plan is a non-starter.

    Caroline Glick is a world-renowned journalist and commentator on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy, and the author of The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East. She is running for Israel’s Knesset as a member of the Yamin Hahadash (New Right) party in Israel’s parliamentary elections, scheduled for April 9. Read more at http://www.CarolineGlick.com.

  3. Hacohen’s warning is so nuanced and understated that it is evasive, and his point is easy to miss. But the jist of it, that Israel has to be prepared for a major Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah escalation into all-out war–is valid. His additional implication that Israel should hold back from attacking Syrian and Iranian targets,however, is not. Iran is determined to attack israel, using its proxies, at some point. The longer Israel waits to confront them, the better armedIran and its proxies are likely to be, and the heavier Israel’s losses.

    Of course, the Russians are the wild card here. If they give the green light to Syria and Iran to attack, they will. If Russia doesn’t give the green light, they probably won’t. Putin claims he is concerned to protect Israel’s security. However, Russia’s state-controlled media, such as RT and Sputnik, continue to serve up a regular diet of print-Israel, pro-Arab propaganda. Russia’s position toward Israel is thus sphinx like-hard to knw what Putin’s actual plans and intentions towards Israel are. Bibi, obviously, has invested a lot of time and energy in an attempt to win Putin’s coperation with Israel in Syria. Unclear how successful Bibi’s diplomacy towards Russia has been. Putin’s blaming Israel for Syria’s shooting down a Russian plane a few months ago is a worrisome sign.