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Israel’s wars: decisions for the few

Avigdor Liberman and Benjamin Netanyahu on a poster calling for social justice, 2012. Wikicommons/Oren Rozen. Some rights reserved.

As Israel faced increasing tensions
at the Gaza border fence, with the Iranian nuclear deal, and with Iran’s
proxies in Syria, the Israeli Parliament passed an amended text to the Basic
Law enabling “under extreme circumstance” the Prime Minister and the Defense
Minister to wage war alone. It thus removes the requirements for the
government’s full approval of large-scale military operations. 

The legislation, approved by 62 votes
in favour and 41 against, passed while Prime Minister Netanyahu was regaling the
media with the results of the Israeli intelligence investigation into Iran’s
nuclear prospects. But one of the law’s main inspirers – former national
security advisor Yaakov Amidror – insisted that speculation about the two
events being interrelated were unfounded. 

Still, and not necessarily because of
its concurrency with Netanyahu’s flamboyant press conference, this reform to
the Basic Law has provoked some severe and even trenchant comments from strategic-security
echelons. In Yesh Atid political party (centre), some politicians referred
to the text as “insane”, and renowned security scholar and former Member of
Parliament Yehuda Ben Meir judged it as point-black “inappropriate”. Reasons
for concern are presumably grounded, given that the Knesset’s joint committees
on Foreign Affairs and Defense, and on Constitution, Law and Justice had
initially rejected the bill that later passed in plenum, and through a
relatively narrow majority (below 52%). 

The legislation’s spearheads, Justice
Minister Ayelet Shaked and Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Avi
Dichter, argue that the move adapts Israel “to the present state security
requirements”. But impudently enough, both in the adopted text and ensuing
declarations, the proponents resort to non-committal expressions such as
“extreme circumstance” and “present state security requirements” which hold no
substantial significance, for the fundamental reason that Israel lacks any
formal national security doctrine. Israel’s national security concept relies in
fact on customary norms and tenets most of which are themselves often subject
to harsh and still unresolved domestic debate. 

In addition, most of Israel’s
security and defense decision-making process machinery is not public information;
and where it is, what counts more is the personal character and political
weight of the relevant actor within the top security entourage (prime minister,
defense minister, chief-of-staff, with their respective offices) rather than
his formal seat and related prerogatives in the cabinet and security apparatus.
Procedures and mandates are loosely framed, allowing for a non-negligible
degree of arbitrariness in moulding decision-making dynamics between the core
actors. 

The new legislation removes all political
oversight on salient choices such as waging war, or embarking on moves that can
lead to conflict. Before, in order to initiate some significant military action
the Prime Minister had to consult and obtain the accordance of the whole
Cabinet of Ministers. Under the current configuration, the much smaller and
largely undefined Security Cabinet is itself enough in providing the green
light to military operations. A last-minute, controversial addition –
furthermore -specifies that when some unspecified “extreme circumstance”
requires immediate response, the Prime Minister, alone and by informing the
Defense Minister, can wage war. 

Overemphasis on security concerns is
far from uncommon in Israel’s societal debate. It may be rightly said that in
many ways this is a “nation in arms”, and living in a constant situation of no
war, no peace. 

The 1948 Declaration of Independence
solemnly recited that state independence is born “out of betachon in
the Rock of Israel”, whereby the Hebrew term betachon may refer either
to “faith”, as faith in a superior entity, or, more precisely, to “security”,
as in military and strategic security. At the peak of the 1948-49 War of
Independence, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s funding father, admitted adamantly: “I
am not capable of seeing anything now other than through the prism of
security…Security is involved in all branches of life”. 

Some twenty years later, following
the Six Day War and consequent occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,
the security concept would be bestowed with the highest responsibility of
entrenching a novel narrative, congruent with the territorial landscape now
extending beyond the 1949 armistice line. Despite the countless attempts over
the years and decades, resulting in innumerable failures and few scanty
successes at trying to reach some negotiated final status agreement, today the
notion of Israeli national security seems mostly devoted to status quo preferences:
those advocating Israel’s unique notion of “permanent temporariness” in exercising
the occupation and dispossession of vast lands in the ‘territories’. 

It is on security grounds, indeed,
that today both the Israeli civil and military echelons tend to reject pledges
for territorial compromise based on the 1949 armistice line (or proportionate
land-swaps). Their argument is mainly, although not exclusively, security-centred:
the neat juridical, political, and spatial separation of Jewish-Israeli
settlers from Palestinians (autochthons and refugees) is a way to secure and
possibly foster colonial permanence, thus ensuring prolonged if not permanent
strategic depth to Israel’s security apparatus and rapid reaction force, far
beyond the indefensible 1949 Green Line.  

The paradox of Israel is a remarkable
one: a state which is so dismayingly concerned with its ontological survival,
so deeply preoccupied with security as the sole non-commendable dimension in
decision-making; and yet, where the national security doctrine relies on
surprisingly weak, nearly non-existent foundations. In this frame, the
Shaker-Dichter Law is no help, for it adds a novel layer of indeterminateness
to already shady decision-making proceedings. 

The new bill further overstretches
the adaptability of the national security concept to politically collateral
objectives as, in this case, the rebalancing of executive security and defense
powers within the cabinet, and to the advantages of its chairman. With this
move, and in the absence of some properly defined minimal security threshold,
the very conceptualization of national security is now mandated to the sole and
impromptu calculations of the Prime Minister with a dozen civil and military
servants, when not to him alone: a rather questionable path for a nation whose
faith is said to be born out of the betachon “in the Rock of
Israel”, rather than “in Israel’s temporary king alone”.   

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