Security Without Policy

Israel and the Day After Gaza

The Subway, George Tooker, 1950

As details slowly begin to emerge about the prospective Israeli end-states for the War in Gaza begin to emerge, I felt like I would take a moment to briefly write about why I think the Israeli security apparatus has found itself so thoroughly unable to resolve any of long-term conflicts it has found itself in.

I will say upfront, that I’m deeply influenced in this discussion by Ronen Bergman’s fantastic history of Israel’s use of targeted killings in Rise and Kill First—so if you’ve already read that I doubt my perspective is going to be particularly insightful. If you haven’t read it, you really should.

As it stands, the current Israeli proposals range from an amorphous “security regime” that would in practice almost certainly turn Gaza into a patchwork shared security architecture akin to Area B in the West Bank to just an outright return of settlers to Gaza.

None of the proposals really talk at all about a policy that would resolve the political grievances that sustain and drive the terrorism that gave rise to the atrocities that took place on October 7th. It is in most ways a continuation of the abdication of politics in the security-focused Israeli establishment.

In prior years it was what we once referred to as “mowing the grass,” which was in essence a doctrine that existed to avoid ever having to make a political solution. The idea was that at certain intervals Israel would engage in punitive operations against Hamas in Gaza to “reestablish deterrence” every time Hamas was gaining in capabilities and boldness.

I’ve always thought of it as being a relatively arbitrary term for what has been Israeli security policy as far back as the Black September Organization and the PLO. The Israeli government engages in routine targeting killings to destabilize and in the short term reduce the capabilities of terror organizations—but without ever actually doing anything politically that would reduce support for these groups. All tangible Israeli interest in a politically viable solution to the social conditions that give rise to terrorism effectively died with Rabin, although it was arguably kept on life support with Peres.

I say all of this because the United States has learned over decades of fighting and dying that you can’t just kill/capture raid your way to a political solution. If we could kill our way out of an irregular fight, then JSOC alone would have been sufficient for the United States to announce victory in Afghanistan and Iraq in time for Christmas 2004.

What the United States learned from our long adventures in counter-insurgency is that when you’re fighting an irregular force that derives its ideological legitimacy from political grievances—you use violence to create space to implement a political solution.

Violence in this context is a tool that can be used in order to forcibly change a political reality. You can clear an irregular force from a given geographic space in order to implement a new political agreement amongst those that inhabit that space. It isn’t just that you kill whatever combatant is there, it’s that you kill them in order to do something else.

Sectarianism, lack of government services, corruption, economic malaise, etc., is the actual source that you’re trying to remedy—the killing is merely the means you use to get to addressing these problems.

If you are going to do something like arm the tribes of Anbar and kick in the doors of AQI members, you need to pair that with a long-term and sustainable political solution that gave rise to the militancy in the first place. If you don’t want to do the second half of that, feel free to ask how it all went for Nouri al-Maliki.

This all gets me back to the topic of how Israel views the use of violence at an institutional level. When you’re just mechanistically going through the motions of endlessly engaging in punitive strikes like a form of State ritual, you forget to stop and ask what exactly you’re supposed to be using violence for. This sort of institutional culture also affects the range of options for what you actually see as a viable end state.

Now the war is obviously not over, and I’m sure the Israeli government has yet to decide on what their preferred end-state actually looks like—something you usually prefer to figure out before starting an invasion—the range of public options being floated reflects their long-term institutional culture. Whether it’s an Area B-like security regime or a return of settlers is in reality just a reflection of Israel’s inability to see beyond a short-term security-first mindset.

Either option—or anything in the middle—is really just going to be more of the same. These options all avoid having to actually make a political choice in Israel like coming to some sort of two-state solution that could establish an actual Palestinian State that Israel could partner with long-term. That would of course involve Israel making politically unpalatable choices like forcibly removing Israeli settlers from the West Bank.

Instead, you get security in the most vague and amorphous sense. Killing in this sense has no real end except that in the immediate proximate sense you kill singular persons who could pose a national security threat. You can also vaguely handwave about “restoring deterrence,” but in reality, that means little more than delaying having to make choices by months or years.

Until Israel changes how they view the use of violence, Hamas will be able to recruit young men to slaughter civilians. Refusing to learn the hard lessons the United States did, Netanyahu will be remembered the same way Nouri al-Maliki has been—as the worst prime minister their country has ever had.