Israel’s Army Goes to War With Its Politicians
The military and intelligence chiefs are trying to protect the state’s values from a dangerous right wing.
nytimes.com
TEL
AVIV — IN most countries, the political class supervises the defense
establishment and restrains its leaders from violating human rights or
pursuing dangerous, aggressive policies. In Israel,
the opposite is happening. Here, politicians blatantly trample the
state’s values and laws and seek belligerent solutions, while the chiefs
of the Israel Defense Forces and the heads of the intelligence agencies
try to calm and restrain them.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offer last week of the post of defense minister to Avigdor Lieberman,
a pugnacious ultranationalist politician, is the latest act in the war
between Mr. Netanyahu and the military and intelligence leaders, a
conflict that has no end in sight but could further erode the rule of
law and human rights, or lead to a dangerous, superfluous military
campaign.
The
prime minister sees the defense establishment as a competitor to his
authority and an opponent of his goals. Putting Mr. Lieberman, an
impulsive and reckless extremist, in charge of the military is a clear
signal that the generals’ and the intelligence chiefs’ opposition will
no longer be tolerated. Mr. Lieberman is known for ruthlessly quashing
people who hold opposing views.
This latest round of this conflict began on March 24: Elor Azariah, a sergeant in the I.D.F., shot and killed a Palestinian
assailant who was lying wounded on the ground after stabbing one of
Sergeant Azariah’s comrades. The I.D.F. top brass condemned the killing.
A spokesman for Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, the chief of staff, said, “This
isn’t the I.D.F., these are not the I.D.F.’s values.”
But
right-wing politicians backed Sergeant Azariah. “I.D.F. soldiers, our
children, stand before murderous attacks by terrorists who come to kill
them,” the prime minister said. “They have to make decisions in real
time.” Mr. Lieberman, then still the leader of a small far-right
opposition party, turned up in military court to support the soldier.
Mr. Netanyahu also called the soldier’s father to offer support.
An
I.D.F. general told me that the top brass saw the telephone call as a
gross defiance of the military’s authority. The deputy chief of staff,
Maj. Gen. Yair Golan, chose one of the most sensitive dates on the
Israeli calendar, Holocaust Memorial Eve, to react: He suggested that
Israel today in some ways resembles Germany in the 1930s.
Mr.
Netanyahu countered that General Golan’s words do Israel an injustice
and “cheapen the Holocaust.” His defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, a
former chief of staff and a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s party, backed the
army. He told a gathering of top officers to speak freely, even if it
went against political leaders.
The
prime minister summoned Mr. Yaalon to an “urgent clarification
discussion.” Shortly after, he invited Mr. Lieberman to join the
government coalition with his small parliamentary faction and offered
him the defense portfolio.
In
Israel’s short history, army commanders and the heads of the
intelligence agencies have often advocated the use of force and in many
cases showed contempt for the law and human rights. Political leaders
have typically been more measured.
In
1954, military intelligence initiated, out of sight of Prime Minister
Moshe Sharett, a series of terrorist attacks in Egypt with the aim of
causing a rift between that country and the United States and Britain.
In 1967, the military urged Prime Minister Levi Eshkol to allow an
offensive strike on Egypt and Syria. When he asked them to wait, they
plotted to detain him in a basement until he gave in.
What
caused the army and the intelligence agencies to become, relatively
speaking, doves while the politicians have become the hawks? In the last
three decades, the army and the intelligence agencies have become more
cautious about breaking the law. The threat of prosecutions in the
International Criminal Court has helped. Also, the defense agencies are
motivated only by national interest, rather than ideology, religion or
electoral considerations. Top army and intelligence officers are also
intimately familiar with the nature of Israel’s occupation of
Palestinian territories — and its price.
But
above all, the clash between the political and defense establishments
can be summed up in two words: Benjamin Netanyahu. Many of the military
and intelligence officers who have served under him simply detest him.
“I told Netanyahu that a chasm of non-confidence had opened up between
him and them,” Uzi Arad, a former national security adviser, told me.
“He is the worst manager that I know,” said Meir Dagan, the former
director of the Mossad. “I quit the job because I was simply sick of
him.”
In
2010, Mr. Netanyahu got into a serious fight over Iran with Mr. Dagan
and his two colleagues, Yuval Diskin, the former director of the Shin
Bet, Israel’s internal security service, and Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi,
the former I.D.F. chief of staff. The military and intelligence leaders
believed that the prime minister’s plan to attack Iran’s nuclear
installations was politically motivated by electoral considerations and
would embroil Israel in a superfluous war. Moreover, they thought he was
going about it illegally, bypassing the cabinet.
“I
have known many prime ministers,” Mr. Dagan told me. “Not one of them
was pure or holy. But almost all had one common quality — when they
reached the point where their own personal interest touched upon the
national interest, it was the national interest that prevailed.” But,
Mr. Dagan said, Mr. Netanyahu was a rare exception.
Mr.
Netanyahu has clashed with the security establishment over a number of
issues, from proposals to improve conditions for Palestinians in the
West Bank (the prime minister opposed them) to accusations that
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas incites terrorism (the
Shin Bet says he helps fight it) to Mr. Netanyahu’s proposal that the
families of terrorists be deported (the Shin Bet discourages it, and the
attorney general has said it would be illegal). Both the Shin Bet and
the Mossad opposed the campaign against Hamas in Gaza in 2014, and the
prime minister’s management of it.
In
some conversations I’ve had recently with high-ranking officers about
Mr. Lieberman’s appointment as defense minister, the possibility of a
military coup has been raised — but only with a smile. It remains
unlikely. The biggest challenge to the relationship between the
right-wing politicians and the top brass will come if Mr. Lieberman
tries to get the army to do the kinds of things he has enthusiastically
proposed in the past.
What
would the army and intelligence chiefs do if the new minister issued
instructions not to prosecute people who committed crimes like Elor
Azariah’s in Hebron? Or if Mr. Lieberman demands, as he has done in the
past, that Israel assassinate Hamas leaders if they do not return the
remains of fallen Israeli soldiers, or “conquer Gaza” or “bomb the Aswan
Dam,” as he has said Israel would do if it ever faced war with Egypt?
Will they execute his orders, or refuse because they can grasp the
dimensions of the catastrophe that such actions would bring about, and
suffer the personal consequences?
Ronen Bergman is a
contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a senior
correspondent for military and intelligence affairs at Yedioth Ahronoth.
He is at work on a history of the Mossad.
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Replacing Ya'alon with Lieberman is another step in efforts by Israel’s new right-wing political elite to take over the state
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