FREEMAN CENTER FOR STRATEGIC STUDIES
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[or] http://www.freeman.org
Read THE MACCABEAN ONLINE: URL: http://freeman.io.com/online.htm
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RESCUING
ISRAELI STRATEGIC STUDIES (AND ISRAEL)
By Louis Rene Beres
Professor
Department of Political Science
Purdue University
E-MAIL BERES@POLSCI.PURDUE.ADA
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As Israel faces its most significant
existential threats since 1948, citizens should begin to ask
serious questions about the prevailing levels of strategic
discourse. Presently, a suffocating intellectual
stubborness stands in the way of productive Israeli strategic
thinking. Moreover, there is great danger that Israel's
political and military leaders, presuming high-quality
scholarship in the universities and think-tanks, will accept
properly credentialed academic recommendations with insufficient
skepticism. The net effect of such "courtesies"
could be of considerable consequence, including even
unconventional war and unconventional terrorism.
Let us be entirely candid.
With precious few exceptions, the leading academic strategists in
Israel have offered little pertinent scholarship of any real
merit and a good deal of scholarship that is altogether injurious
- e.g., the dreadful "scholarship" that gave rise to
the Oslo Trojan Horse. Remarkably, on issues that deal with
unconventional weapons threats to Israel, the country's leading
strategists remain substantially trapped in the outdated and
cliched wisdom of 1950s America. Clinging unimaginatively
in their work to certain alleged benefits of nuclear deterrence
and a favorable conventional balance of power, these individuals
ignore altogether (1) the essential limitations of threat-system
dynamics in a region that may soon join nuclear technology with
irrationality; and (2) the essential and complex nuances of
national self-help in an increasingly anarchic world
system. There are, to be sure, other factors being widely
ignored, but all such shortcomings are the product of a misguided
starting point for investigations.
What needs to be done?
First, Israeli strategists must look directly, unhesitatingly,
relentlessly at their country's existential threats, and must
identify these threats - quickly and openly - as the central
object of their inquiries. Second, Israeli strategists must
understand, without any further delay, that Israel is a system,
that the existential threats confronting Israel are themselves
interrelated, and that the effects of these interrelated threats
upon Israel must always be examined together. Third, Israeli
strategists must understand that the entire world arena is best
understood as a system, and that the disintegration of power and
authority structures within this macro-system will impact, with
enormous and partially forseeable consequences, the Israeli
micro-system. Fourth, Israeli strategists must turn away
from prudence, from fearful and mainstream kinds of analyses that
may please the public and their paymasters but are intrinsically
valueless and without explanatory benefit. Fifth, Israeli
strategists must learn to read literature, not the mundane and
simplistic materials generated by American strategists (who
themselves read no real literature), but the product of authentic
writers, poets and playwrights. Frequently the insights
that can be garnered from literature provide a vastly better
source of strategic understanding than the matrixes, metaphors
and scenarios of "experts." Sixth, Israeli
strategists need to recognize the advantages of private as
opposed to collective academic thought. Here they should be
reminded of Aristotle's view: "Deception occurs to a
greater extent when we are investigating with others than by
ourselves, for an investigation with someone else is carried on
quite as much by means of the thing itself."
Significantly, in matters concerning Israeli security, one may
discover greater intellectual value in the private musings of
certain unaffiliated single individuals than in the sum total of
collaborative efforts spawned by professional centers of
strategic studies. Seventh, Israeli strategists now need to
open up, again and with greater diligence and insight, the
question of nuclear ambiguity. Here it must be understood that
this is not merely a matter of
belaboring the obvious, but rather of optimally exploiting
appropriate and variable levels of disclosure for purposes of
deterrence and, possibly, preemption. Eighth, Israeli
strategists need to open up completely the still broader
questions of nuclear weapons and national strategy. This
should be done, of course, in conformity with all of the other
above-listed strategic studies requirements. Moreover, it
is by no means obvious that keeping questions of nuclear weapons
and strategy "closed" is in Israel's security
interests. Ninth, Israeli strategists must cease their
contemplation of an end to national existence as a purely
dispassionate, academic consideration. For now, it seems
these strategists can contemplate the end of the Third Temple
Commonwealth every day, and yet persevere quite calmly and
purposefully in their most routine affairs. This ironic and
counterproductive juxtaposition should no longer be the case if
these scholars could learn to begin to contemplate the very
moment of Israel's collective disappearance. It follows
that Israeli strategists must begin soon to replace reassuringly
abstract conceptualizations of End Times with concrete imaginings
of catastrophe. I realize, of course, that such advice is
altogether contrary to what Israeli academics have learned in
American graduate schools, but their American professors were
plainly wrong. As in the case of each individual life, fear
in this context has its proper place. And there is no
necessary correlation between existential dread and injury to
"objective" forms of scholarship. Tenth, Israeli
strategists should pay special attention to the requirements of
scholarly audacity, of seeking, self-consciously, to steer clear
of the comfortable intellectual middle-ground and to take risks,
personal and professional, in finding serious answers to vital
questions.
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LOUIS RENE BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is the author of fourteen books and several hundred scholarly articles dealing with international relations and international law. His work is well-known to the Prime Minister, to the Chair of the Knesset Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence, to the IDF General Staff and to Israel's intelligence communities.