Defending the Holy Land
A
Critical Analysis of Israel's Security and Foreign Policy
by Zeev Maoz
Ann Arbor:
The University of Michigan Press, 2006. 714 pp. $45
Reviewed by
Efraim Inbar
Middle East Quarterly
Spring
2009, pp. 82-83
http://www.meforum.org/2139/defending-the-holy-land
Maoz, professor of political science and director of the
International Relations Program at the University of California-Davis, has
written a long, well-organized, and detailed book. But those attributes
are not enough to distract from the author's often unhinged animosity to
Israel. For Maoz, practically everything the Jewish state has done in the
area of defense and foreign policy over the last sixty years was wrong.
His last chapters are devoted to explaining the failures, ending with some
policy prescriptions. For anyone who enjoys sophisticated Israel-bashing
and has the patience to read more than 600 pages, Maoz has provided the
book.
His narrative of unrelenting criticism erodes the
credibility of his arguments. The author implausibly tries to show that
Israel's "military adventurism" was much to blame for the 1967 war and
argues that Israel played "more than a small part" in the outbreak of the
War of Attrition (1967-70) although Cairo clearly initiated that
combat.
The author's account of the Arab-Israeli conflict reflects a
total misunderstanding of the central role played by Israel's use of force
in compelling the Arabs to come to grips with Israel's permanence.
Military victories in 1956 and 1967 are curiously and myopically seen as
exacerbating Israel's relations with its neighbors, rather than as
important events in Egypt's gradual realization that Israel could not be
destroyed—a process that culminated in the 1979 peace treaty. Similarly,
the author fails to see that the military victory in the 1973 Yom Kippur
War, despite the strategic surprise on two fronts, was another significant
step in the Arab recognition of Israel as an entrenched fact.
The most astonishing critique is directed at Israel's
nuclear policy, despite its obvious success. Maoz advocates Israel's
renouncing nuclear weapons and joining a regional security regime. Greater
naiveté can hardly be imagined.
Maoz repeatedly belittles the dangers posed by the Arab
states and portrays Israel's perception of those dangers as unwarranted.
Indeed, Maoz views Israel's defensive military operations as
trigger-happy, ignoring that the Middle East is conflict-ridden and
war-prone, and that Israel's neighbors often resort to the use of force.
The author generally dismisses Israel's right to attack states and
organizations that refuse to live in peace with it. One can doubt the
wisdom of the 1982 Lebanon war, but it included defensive aims. But the
author ignores the threat of terrorist and Katyusha attacks by the
Palestine Liberation Organization .
The oft-repeated accusations of Israel's "disproportionate
use of force" or "excessive force" blissfully ignore the fact that states
in war have no obligation to limit military responses to the level pursued
by their enemies but, instead, have the duty to use force to defeat their
opponents. Escalation often attains military and political goals.
The learned author turns a blind eye to Arab reluctance to
accept Israel. He displays a misguided preference for diplomacy in an area
where the best political currency is brute force. It is the Pavlovian
instinctive reaction of liberals to suggest engagement and peace talks,
insisting that the Arabs are ripe for peacemaking with the Jewish state
when even today, thirty years after the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, the
State of Israel still does not appear on maps printed in Egypt.
Maoz accuses Israel of rejecting numerous peace deals,
assuming that acquiescing to Arab demands would end hostilities. His
approach includes several problematic assumptions. The first is that such
demands have been issued with the honest goal of ending the conflict. The
second is that the end of hostilities—should it even be in the offing—is
worth any price. For example, the rejection of giving up half of the Lake
of Galilee to an unstable Syrian dictatorship is hardly justifiable.
According to Maoz, it was a missed opportunity. Alternatively, the Jewish
attachment to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount in particular probably
precludes the possibility of satisfying the Palestinians today. Why not
accuse the Palestinians of an exaggerated territorial appetite? In their
history, they have never controlled Jerusalem. Moreover, the Temple Mount
is the holiest place to the Jews, and the Jews have constituted a majority
of the city population during the past 200 years.
Moreover, Maoz disregards international history and
practice. Inexplicably, he rejects that the outcome of a territorial
dispute with the Syrians reflects the power relations between the two
countries. Many of the borders in the world are the results of the power
differential between neighbors. This is why Syria finally accepted the
annexation of the Alexandretta region by Turkey, and this is precisely why
the border between Israel and Syria has been quiet for the past
thirty-four years. For all purposes, termination of hostilities—the test
of peace for Maoz—was passed successfully on the current Israeli-Syrian
border. In addition, he naively assumes that an ethnic conflict such as
the Israeli-Palestinian one will end after a deal has been signed.
An epithet sprinkled throughout the book is Israel's
"militarism." How can Israel be accused of militarism and exaggerated
influence of the military when the most important decisions in the area of
national security in the past fifteen years—Oslo (1993), Lebanon (2000),
Gaza (2005)—were taken either without consulting the Israel Defense Forces
(IDF) or against their advice?
Finally, Maoz's historical account is sometimes inaccurate.
What he calls "provoked infringements into the DMZs [demilitarized zones]"
on the Israeli-Syrian border were actually attempts by Israelis to till
the land that was under their sovereignty. He terms the IDF aggressive
when Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin stopped the diversion of the Jordan
waters in 1965-66 with a very limited use of firepower. He calls the use
of sticks against demonstrators in the first intifada "brute
force," not taking into account Rabin's reluctance to use live ammunition,
which could have increased Palestinian casualties. As Rabin wryly remarked
at the time, "Nobody dies of a beating." Moreover, Rabin restricted the
use of live ammunition despite this increasing the risk to Israeli
soldiers. After all, stones used by Palestinians occasionally killed
Israelis. In contrast to the claims by the author, the offensive measures
in the second intifada, such as preventative detention and targeted
killing, scorned by Maoz, were vital to lowering the damage inflicted by
Palestinian terrorists. The author simply refuses to take a look at the
facts that prove him wrong.
Defending the Holy Land symbolizes a much larger
problem and reveals the perversity of knowledgeable academics who adopt
the wrong conceptual lens, disregarding basic common sense.
Efraim Inbar is professor of political studies at
Bar-Ilan University and director of the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for
Strategic Studies.
Related Topics: Arab-Israel conflict &
diplomacy, Israel
Efraim
Inbar | 
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