Israel's Civilian-Military Divide
The generals and politicians have surprisingly different views of the Iranian threat

Have you ever wondered why Iran, after halting (according to Western intelligence reports) its nuclear weapons program in 2003, resumed it (according to more such reports) by 2005? Patrick Tyler, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, thinks he knows. It wasn't because the initial shock of the American invasion of Iraq had worn off. The Iranian nuclear program was probably restarted, Mr. Tyler believes, in reaction to a "clandestine war" waged by Israel against Iran—a war launched, he states in his new book "Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country—And Why They Can't Make Peace," by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu that came to power following the 2009 Israeli elections.

Come again? Is Mr. Tyler joking when he claims that post-2009 events influenced a decision made by 2005? Not as far as I can tell after several re-readings of his new book's prologue. Among the Mossad's many accomplishments, it would seem, is also time travel.

FORTRESS ISRAEL
By Patrick Tyler 
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 562 pages, $35

The prologue is "Fortress Israel" at its most hallucinatory. But the book's subsequent 20 chapters deliver an equally unreal message. This is that there has been practically no threat to Israel from its Arab and Muslim neighbors since the Jewish state's establishment in 1948; no denial of its right to exist; no declaration of intent to destroy it; no boycott of its diplomats and businessmen; no killing of its citizens by hostile countries or organizations based in them; and no war it has had to fight for which it doesn't have only itself to blame. Iran is just the latest example.

The Arabs' refusal to come to terms with a Jewish state after 1948? This was only, Mr. Tyler writes, because Israel, a country the size of New Jersey and not as wide at its narrowest point as the length of Manhattan, unreasonably rejected Arab demands for territorial concessions, such as granting Egypt a "corridor through the Negev that would reconnect the two halves of the Arab world," ceding to Jordan the city of Lydda (a 15-minute drive from downtown Tel Aviv) with its international (now Ben-Gurion) airport, and giving Syria half the Sea of Galilee, Israel's main water source. Mr. Tyler backs up his assertion about Egypt with a footnote referring the reader to historian Avi Shlaim's "The Iron Wall." What Mr. Shlaim, an Israeli expatriate with no great love for his native country, actually wrote is that the Egyptians demanded, not a "corridor," but "annexation of a large strip of territory in the Negev." So much for Mr. Tyler's accuracy in quoting from his sources.

The 1956 Sinai Campaign, launched by Israel in response to repeated fedayeen raids from Egyptian-controlled Gaza and large purchases by Egypt of state-of-the-art Soviet arms for which Israel was the only conceivable target? An entirely "unprovoked attack," according to Mr. Tyler.

The 1967 war, triggered by Gamal Abdel Nasser's sending the Egyptian army back into a Sinai that had been demilitarized, declaring a naval blockade of the Israeli port of Eilat and threatening to destroy Israel if it reacted? Israel started it, Mr. Tyler says, because it "was not interested in diplomacy." (In fact, for three long weeks before going to war, Israel frantically sought to muster an international coalition to challenge the blockade. While U.S. and European diplomats dithered, Egypt poured more troops into the Sinai.)

Egypt and Syria's surprise attack on Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, which left more than 2,500 Israelis dead and more than 8,000 wounded? "A catastrophe" that "should have been averted," Mr. Tyler claims, had only Israel not "failed to analyze [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat in depth and refused to believe that an Arab leader, for the first time since 1949, was honestly talking about long-term peace with Israel." (Sadat had indeed begun to talk about peace, but not about negotiating its terms, which he insisted on his right to dictate.)

Negotiations with the Palestinian Authority? Israel lost all interest in them after the murder of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Yes, Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak in 2000 and Ehud Olmert in 2008-2009 offered the Palestinians almost the entire West Bank and Arab Jerusalem in return for a peace treaty. But the Palestinians, Mr. Tyler writes, were compelled to say no because, psychologically, Mr. Barak was more interested in "forcing a surrender than making peace with his enemy," and Mr. Olmert, under police investigation on corruption charges, wanted only to "somehow overcome the state prosecutors who were pursuing him."

It is a game played with loaded dice. The Egyptians, the Syrians, the Jordanians, the Lebanese, the PLO, even Hamas: Time and again, Mr. Tyler claims, all have reached out a conciliatory hand to Israel, only to have it rudely pushed away or cunningly grasped in order to twist it. And why? The reason, according to the author, is that "six decades after its founding, [Israel] remains a nation in thrall to an original martial impulse, the depth of which has given rise to succeeding generations of leaders who are stunted in their capacity to wield or sustain diplomacy as a rival to military strategy." These leaders "perpetuate a system of governance where national policy is dominated by the military."

In Israel's entire history, Mr. Tyler maintains, only two of its leaders have dared fully resist this "martial impulse," on which generations of Israel's native-born youth, the prickly fruit of Jewish history, have been raised: Moshe Sharett, who spelled David Ben-Gurion as prime minister in 1954-55, and—toward the end of his career—the Yitzhak Rabin of the Oslo Agreement era. Shimon Peres, though he pushed harder for Oslo than did Rabin, is treated by Mr. Tyler as a conniving manipulator. All of Israel's other prime ministers—Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, and Messrs. Barak, Olmert and Netanyahu—are described as having been either in league with or the tools of their generals. And these generals all have harbored an instinctive distrust of, and belligerency toward, the Arab world that is part of the Israeli military ethic.

This is Mr. Tyler's "inside story" about Israel's behavior over the past 60 years—and it is simply wrong. Not that the army, which has always played a large role in Israeli society, hasn't played one in politics, too. But because it is a citizens' army in which most people serve and in which all officers start out as ordinary privates, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have always formed the most pluralistic of Israeli institutions. All shades of opinion in Israeli life have been and remain represented in the IDF, from boot camp to the general staff.

True, the conscript in basic training may hate military life whereas the general would not be a general unless he liked it, but historically, it has never been the case that the higher up one goes in the Israeli military hierarchy, the more "militaristic" it automatically becomes. There have been times when the IDF's top echelon has clamored for military action that Israel's political leadership resisted, as in the weeks before the '67 war, and times when it has been reluctant to run the risks the politicians urged on it, as in the final stage of the botched war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006. Generals more cautious than the politicians they are responsible to have never been a rarity in Israel. The list includes such former IDF chiefs of staff as Yigael Yadin (1949-1952), Haim Bar-Lev (1968-1971), Dan Shomron (1987-91), Amnon Lipkin-Shahak (1995-1998), and Gabi Ashkenazi (2007-2011).

Chief of Staff Itzhak Rabin and Generals Moshe Dayan and Mordechai Hod

Nor have all the hawks been consistently hawkish. Moshe Dayan, one of Mr. Tyler's arch-villains, was indeed a military hard-liner throughout the 1950s and pressed for a speedy start to the '67 war. Yet as minister of defense during that war, he unsuccessfully tried to talk the politicians out of attacking the Syrian Golan Heights, and he was one of the main architects of the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, which called for a total Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai. Ezer Weizman, a commander of the air force and Israel's seventh president, followed a similar trajectory. They were complex figures, far from the bloodthirsty buccaneers that Mr. Tyler caricatures.

The IDF is, moreover, nowhere near being the all-powerful force in Israel that Mr. Tyler makes it out to be. It doesn't, as he asserts, "dominate the national budget." (Military spending, though the 2011 budget's largest item, comprised only a bit more than 15% of it). It doesn't "run a large portion of the economy." (Apart from weapons and military bases, the only significant IDF-owned asset is the popular radio station Galei Tzahal). It doesn't "exert immense influence over communications and news media through censorship." (Nothing is ever censored by the military in Israel that is not genuinely security-related, and very little of that is, too.) And it certainly doesn't make its own decisions on anything but purely internal matters. Israel always has been, and is today more than ever, a fractious, democratic society in which it is the politicians and judges who have the final say.

The current debate over attacking Iranian nuclear installations is an excellent illustration of this, and one all too understandably ignored by Mr. Tyler, who begins his book in Tehran in 2012 but tellingly chooses to end it in Gaza in 2009. It is no secret that the IDF's current leadership is against an immediate attack on Iran. It is not sure how successful such an attack will be. It doesn't know how well it can defend Israel against the missiles that will rain down in retaliation from Iran, Hezbollah and possibly Syria and Hamas-controlled Gaza. It knows the Americans have the means to do the job better, and it doesn't wish to jeopardize a long-standing and crucially important relationship with them by launching a strike they have asked Israel to refrain from.

It is Israel's political leadership, particularly, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Barak, that is most inclined to attack, though not because this will accrue to its political advantage. The accusation that Mr. Netanyahu is looking for a war with Iran to divert attention from his domestic failures is preposterous. He knows that the Israeli public doesn't want a war and will severely punish him at the polls for one that is anything less than the unqualified success that the army can't promise him it will be.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Benny Ganz ( Chief of Staff of the IDF) and Ehud Barak then Defence Minister

Rather, both Messrs. Netanyahu and Barak are genuinely convinced that they can read history better than the generals—and the lesson of history, they believe, is that governments with hegemonic ambitions and genocidal intentions like Iran's must be stopped in their tracks before they have the means to carry out their threats. Both men know that no matter how often Washington reiterates its commitment to keep Iran from going nuclear, the U.S. has broken commitments to Israel in the past and is perfectly capable of doing so again, and that by the time it does, Israel may no longer be in a position to strike.

It is an agonizing and fateful decision, perhaps the most difficult an Israeli government has ever had to make. The politicians say: Strike soon. The generals say: Don't. The politicians will think it over and decide, Mr. Tyler's "inside story" notwithstanding.