Center for a New American Security

Regular readers of this blog know we avoid the Israel-Palestine conflict like no one's business. Unless there are tactical lessons to be drawn from the experiences of either the IDF or its opponents, we would just as well keep our hands off that tar baby. (We actually had a good debate, among the three of us, whether or not to comment on the stories out of Gaza and Rafah this past week and, in the end, decided not to. For wild pictures from Rafah, though, go here.)

But George Habash died yesterday, and his career deserves some study. Habash, like your humble blogger, was a product of the American University of Beirut. And perhaps more than any other Palestinian leader, he was responsible for the decision to use terror attacks as a means of calling attention to the plight of the Palestinian people. For readers who associate Palestinian terror attacks with Islamists, it will be of interest that Habash was born to a Greek Orthodox family -- and was the leader of a secular Marxist organization that probably had more in common with the Red Army Faction than it did with Hamas.

Mr. Habash was best known as the Palestinian leader who adapted modern terrorist tactics as a weapon in the conflict with Israel. From the bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket in 1969 to the simultaneous hijacking of three Western airliners to Amman, Jordan, in September 1970, [the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] stayed in the news with high-profile attacks that other Palestinian groups never seemed able to match.

“When we hijack a plane it has more effect than if we kill a hundred Israelis in battle,” he told the German magazine Der Stern in 1970. “For decades, world public opinion has been neither for nor against the Palestinians. It simply ignored us. At least the world is talking about us now.”

Of interest to students and analysts is the question of whether or not Habash and the decision to resort to terror tactics helped or hurt the Palestinian cause. That's a question we'll leave asked but unanswered. For now, here are some links to various death notices and obituaries of Habash.

al-Hayat (Arabic)

New York Times

BBC

al-Jazeera (Arabic)

Le Monde (French)

Ha'aretz

an-Nahar (Arabic)

Abu Muqawama has been thinking a lot recently about propaganda, information operations, and the new media. Cue Nick Blanford, who has an e-article up on NOW Lebanon on the mind games going on between Israel and Hizbollah at the moment. It includes this interesting vignette from the 1990s:

In September 1997, Hezbollah fighters ambushed a 16-strong unit of elite Israeli naval commandos near the coastal village of Ansarieh, midway between Sidon and Tyre. Eleven members of the squad were killed in the ambush and another died in the rescue attempt. The ambush is cited by Hezbollah as one of its top three most successful military operations between 1982 and 2000.

Shortly after the last Israeli helicopter clattered into the distance, Hezbollah fighters and local villagers were picking up the bloody remains of Israeli soldiers killed by Hezbollah’s roadside bombs. The remains included part of the head and other body parts of Sergeant Itamar Ilya, who was blown to pieces when a bomb he was carrying detonated in the fire fight.

Negotiations brokered by German and then French intelligence resulted in a swap 10 months later in which Ilya was exchanged for 60 Lebanese detainees and the corpses of 40 resistance fighters. The sergeant’s remains were handed to the International Committee for the Red Cross in a simple cold box.

But by the time the Israeli military transport plane touched down in Tel Aviv, Ilya’s remains had been transferred to a coffin draped in the Star of David flag. His coffin was carried solemnly off the plane by Israeli soldiers and was buried. The story could have ended there. But Hezbollah had another trick up its sleeve.

Using the internet, Hezbollah began posing questions on its website addressed to the Israeli public. The first queried the findings of the two Israeli inquiries into the Ansarieh debacle, which found that there had been no intelligence breach by Hezbollah. Hezbollah’s teasing questions on its website about how it could have known the Israeli commandos were coming led to public pressure on the Israeli government to convene a third commission of inquiry.

Then Hezbollah posed questions about the body parts it had returned to Israel. Hezbollah always said that the remains included body parts from two other soldiers apart from Ilya, adding it had DNA evidence. But the Israelis had kept it quiet, creating the impression to the Israeli public that the only missing soldier from Ansarieh was Ilya and that the other 11 soldiers had been buried intact.

Hezbollah posted photographs of the body parts which included five feet. “How can one man have five feet?” taunted the website. “Your army is concealing the facts. They not only disrespect your sons when they are alive by sending them to certain death, they also disrespect them after they are dead. The bodies of your sons are incomplete and mixed up with pieces of others,” the Hezbollah website said.

The propaganda ploy sparked an uproar in Israel, as a deeply embarrassed Israeli army was forced to admit that it had opened up the graves of two soldiers killed at Ansarieh to add the new body parts.

Suddenly, families of the dead soldiers were demanding autopsies and DNA tests to check that the remains in the graves were really their relatives and not a mish-mash of separate bodies.

The Ansarieh episode was a prime example of Hezbollah’s ability to blend battlefield prowess with skilful propaganda, and underlined to Israel more than any other incident that its days occupying south Lebanon were numbered.

Holy cow, we know you all want to talk about last night's national championship game, but everyone who reads this blog needs to read Matt Matthews's interview with retired Israeli general Shimon Naveh on the 2006 Israel-Hizbollah war. Not only does Naveh display a more nuanced view of Hizbollah than is normally seen or heard south of the Blue Line, but he also has a withering critique of the IDF's officer corps. Some choice excerpts:

"Look, Hezbollah are Lebanese patriots. I don’t know if you are aware of it. There are many tensions within the theory. They are Shi’a but they are Lebanese patriots. They pursue their own political and military agenda and yet they are Lebanese patriots. In fact, their entire fight against the Israelis very much served several purposes. One was regaining Lebanese sovereignty over the south, but the other one was to really boost up this duality between being a social-political entity and a militant entity."

"First of all, I cannot get into Halutz’s mind; it’s too tough. ... He’s an idiot. In this sense he’s an idiot, as I said in the interview. He’s really a fool; he’s a clown."

"I know one brigade commander who I think should be executed for cowardice. First of all, remember, there was no coherence in what he was doing. He was told to move troops in, then pull out, move in and then pull out. Sometimes plans would change five times a day. Yet when he gave this command to a specific guy whom I referred to – the commander of 7th Tank Brigade – he was given the mission to go in and he was afraid, simply afraid. He used this as excuse."

"Basically I think that the IDF was totally unprepared for this kind of operation, both conceptually, operationally and tactically – mainly conceptually and practically. The point is that the IDF fell in love with what it was doing with the Palestinians. In fact, it became addictive. When you fight a war against a rival who’s by all means inferior to you, you may lose a guy here or there, but you’re in total control. It’s nice. You can pretend that you fight the war and yet it’s not really a dangerous war. This kind of thing served as an instrument corrupting the IDF."

Andrew Exum has an analysis up on Harvard's Middle East Strategy blog on what lessons U.S. policy-makers and military professionals can draw from the 2006 war which builds off the Naveh interview:

Some will say the lesson in Israel’’s 2006 war is that the U.S. military can go "soft" by spending too much time on counterinsurgency in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, forgetting the kind of combined arms skills that come in handy in major combat operations. This would seem to be the opinion of the current Commandant of the Marine Corps, among others. Counterinsurgency theorists would say this is ridiculous. John Nagl describes counterinsurgency as “"graduate-level warfare," and it follows that just as a PhD candidate in mathematics would not forget how to solve basic algebra equations, it is unlikely a junior officer in the U.S. Army will necessarily forget basic infantry battle drills while sipping tea with sheiks in Anbar Province. (And besides, until the U.S. military truly learns counterinsurgency, it is unlikely to “"overlearn" counterinsurgency.)

It is true, though, that much of the blame for the IDF's poor performance in the 2006 war must fall upon the IDF’'s officer corps (and Israeli politicians for slashing the IDF'’s training budget). Complacency is the enemy of any good military, and it certainly seems as if the IDF grew too accustomed to the kind of missions they performed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories after the 2000 withdrawal from southern Lebanon. In the same way, the U.S. military officer corps in Iraq and Afghanistan is perhaps the most combat-proven officer corps in our nation’'s history. But operational commanders must work hard to ensure that the overall culture within the officer corps is not overrun by complacency. This is their job, as officers, commanders, and custodians of the nation’'s military.

If you do not read anything else today, though, read the Naveh interview. Looking forward to the comments on this one!

Public service announcement: Barry Rubin's Israel-based think tank has a new website. Abu Muqawama finds some interesting articles in Rubin's MERIA journal from time to time, including this one on Lebanon's Islamist groups.

But this report on the (in)effectiveness of the Israeli Air Force in the 2006 War with Hizbollah is one he'll read cover-to-cover.

Frustrated by its inability to stem rocket attacks on Israeli soil, Israel expanded its attacks on civilian targets to exact punishment on Hezbollah supporters and the government and people of Lebanon. Israel doggedly explained its action by reiterating again and again that Hezbollah fighters were “terrorists” and that Hezbollah was ultimately responsible for any damage caused, but outside of a small circle of supporters, Israel increasingly was objectified as the aggressor.

Abu Muqawama has been listening this morning to an exchange between Nicholas Blanford, a journalist based in Beirut, and retired IDF Maj. Gen. Moshe Kaplinsky. This exchange took place at the Washington Institute's 2007 Weinberg Founders Conference, and it is fair to say the vast majority of the audience was strongly pro-Israel. Nick has been reporting on military affairs in southern Lebanon since the mid-1990s, and though some of Abu Muqawama's fellow Hizbollah-watchers will take issue with his analysis of the political situation in Lebanon and Hizbollah's military preparations, Abu Muqawama thinks he presents a good, dispassionate analysis for this American audience. Nick's reporting on Hizbollah's military capabilities and performance -- for the Christian Science Monitor, The Times of London, and Jane's -- has been the best analysis Abu Muqawama has read in any language.

The real fun begins when Kaplinsky has to explain to this audience how the IDF ended up with egg all over its face in 2006 and then present his analysis of the political situation in Lebanon. Abu Muqawama largely trusts Nick when he talks about what is going on in southern Lebanon today, in 2007. By contrast, Abu Muqawama's three-year old niece probably has a better understanding of southern Lebanon than Moshe Kaplinsky these days. That's too harsh, perhaps, but since the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and the collapse of Israel's human intelligence capabilities in southern Lebanon, Israel and the IDF have displayed a remarkable lack of understanding of the internal dynamics at work within Lebanese society and its political system. It is funny, though, that Kaplinsky praises American support for the Lebanese Army, considering the #1 mission of the Lebanese Army is to defend Lebanon against ... Israel!

Anyway, that's what the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades say. Clancy Chassay, who filmed and edited this fantastic video report from Gaza, isn't the kind of reporter who is going to ask any critical questions. (Um, what exactly does that mean, this "resistance," and how exactly does that constitute a "strategy" that's going to make your people safer and not just provoke furious retaliation?) He's more likely to buy into this whole "noble resistance" thing and blame the U.S. for the region's troubles. That said, who cares? As long as his guerrilla-romancing politics allow him to carry out this kind of "insurgent's eye-view" reporting, Abu Muqawama applauds and will pick up his bar tab in whatever trendy Gemmayze cafe he frequents these days.

Regular Abu Muqawama readers know this blog avoids all things Israeli-Palestinian like the plague. The politics are so poisonous that you can't say much of substance without everyone immediately breaking down into two polarized camps. That said, the U.S. military studies the IDF quite a bit. They are a 'western' Army that fights with American-style equipment and American-style small-unit tactics. So it's only natural that we study their counterinsurgency performance in the West Bank and Gaza in the same way we study the British experience in Malaya or the French experience in Algeria.

A report released by an Israeli psychologist is making waves in Israel at the moment. The report details the way in which the occupier (the IDF) has systematically brutalized the Palestinian population. Now relax, everybody, because Abu Muqawama isn't taking sides here, but even the most green E-1 in the U.S. Army these days understands Israeli military behavior in the Occupied Territories to be pretty crappy counterinsurgency.

Some say Israel -- because of the settlers, because of the unique history between the Israelis and the Palestinians, because of religious claims on both sides -- can never practice truly effective COIN. Fair points. But then, the behavior of the IDF certainly doesn't set the conditions for a negotiated political settlement either. The Observer reports:

A study by an Israeli psychologist into the violent behaviour of the country's soldiers is provoking bitter controversy and has awakened urgent questions about the way the army conducts itself in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

Nufar Yishai-Karin, a clinical psychologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, interviewed 21 Israeli soldiers and heard confessions of frequent brutal assaults against Palestinians, aggravated by poor training and discipline. In her recently published report, co-authored by Professor Yoel Elizur, Yishai-Karin details a series of violent incidents, including the beating of a four-year-old boy by an officer.

The report, although dealing with the experience of soldiers in the 1990s, has triggered an impassioned debate in Israel, where it was published in an abbreviated form in the newspaper Haaretz last month. According to Yishai Karin: 'At one point or another of their service, the majority of the interviewees enjoyed violence. They enjoyed the violence because it broke the routine and they liked the destruction and the chaos. They also enjoyed the feeling of power in the violence and the sense of danger.'

In the words of one soldier: 'The truth? When there is chaos, I like it. That's when I enjoy it. It's like a drug. If I don't go into Rafah, and if there isn't some kind of riot once in some weeks, I go nuts.'

Another explained: 'The most important thing is that it removes the burden of the law from you. You feel that you are the law. You are the law. You are the one who decides... As though from the moment you leave the place that is called Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] and go through the Erez checkpoint into the Gaza Strip, you are the law. You are God.'

The soldiers described dozens of incidents of extreme violence. One recalled an incident when a Palestinian was shot for no reason and left on the street. 'We were in a weapons carrier when this guy, around 25, passed by in the street and, just like that, for no reason - he didn't throw a stone, did nothing - bang, a bullet in the stomach, he shot him in the stomach and the guy is dying on the pavement and we keep going, apathetic. No one gave him a second look,' he said.

The soldiers developed a mentality in which they would use physical violence to deter Palestinians from abusing them. One described beating women. 'With women I have no problem. With women, one threw a clog at me and I kicked her here [pointing to the crotch], I broke everything there. She can't have children. Next time she won't throw clogs at me. When one of them [a woman] spat at me, I gave her the rifle butt in the face. She doesn't have what to spit with any more.'

Yishai-Karin found that the soldiers were exposed to violence against Palestinians from as early as their first weeks of basic training. On one occasion, the soldiers were escorting some arrested Palestinians. The arrested men were made to sit on the floor of the bus. They had been taken from their beds and were barely clothed, even though the temperature was below zero. The new recruits trampled on the Palestinians and then proceeded to beat them for the whole of the journey. They opened the bus windows and poured water on the arrested men.

The disclosure of the report in the Israeli media has occasioned a remarkable response. In letters responding to the recollections, writers have focused on both the present and past experience of Israeli soldiers to ask troubling questions that have probed the legitimacy of the actions of the Israeli Defence Forces.

The study and the reactions to it have marked a sharp change in the way Israelis regard their period of military service - particularly in the occupied territories - which has been reflected in the increasing levels of conscientious objection and draft-dodging.