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June 10, 1994 - Image 70

Resource type:
Text
Publication:
The Detroit Jewish News, 1994-06-10

Disclaimer: Computer generated plain text may have errors. Read more about this.

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The Intifada:
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The Palestinian uprising proved again that force of
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AP/NATI HARNIK

0

An Israeli officer directs the unloading of a tank.

0

ur children threw stones at
your soldiers, and they
left." That's how one Pales-
tinian woman in Gaza
summed-up the grinding six-year
war in the occupied territories im-
mortalized as the intifada.
Indeed, the clips of elite Israeli
troops "sneaking out" of the Je-
balya refugee camp in the dead
of the night, to avoid a final hail
of stones, have left many Israelis
feeling that as armchair analysis
goes, that crisp rendition rings
pretty true.
And that has lead them to ask
a series of prickly questions, like:
How come one of the most so-
phisticated, experienced, and
best-equipped forces in the world
was bested by an "army" of rag-
tag children? Were the mistakes
of the intifada strategic or mere-
ly tactical? And what are the im-
plications of this defeat for Israel's
army and society at large?
The answers to these questions
range from the philosophical and
psychological to the technical.
"Yes, Israel lost the intifada,
but that was inevitable from the
start," said Hebrew University
military historian Martin van
Creveld. "The loss wasn't physi-
cal; it was a defeat of morale that
was experienced by far more il-
lustrious 'powers' — the British,
French, and Americans — before
us."
Some 100,000 black Africans
died in the anti-colonial struggle
in Kenya, for example, contrast-
ed with 20 whites. But despite
those lopsided losses, the British
pulled out anyway. So perhaps
Israel's greatest mistake was its
failure to learn from the experi-
ence of others — and worse, Mr.
van Creveld added, from expe-
riences of its own.

For what Israel (the original
David that prevailed over a suc-
cession of Goliaths) forgot, in the
course of time, was that the weak
have a built-in advantage over
the strong:
"The Palestinians won the in-
tifada because they were willing
to die and we weren't," Mr. van
Creveld concluded succinctly. "Is-
rael understood this precept un-
til 1967. The whole history of the
Jews is evidence that weakness
is a recipe for survival. But some-
how Israel overlooked this lesson
when it, too, grew strong."
That, Mr. van Creveld pro-
posed, is what confounded Israel
in the intifada. Moreover, that
same "mixed blessing" of strength
also spawned a form of rigidity
that held the seeds of self-defeat.
For less than being won by the
Palestinians, the intifada was lost
by Israel because it was fighting
with the wrong army.
Reuven Gal, head of the Israeli
Institute for Military Studies and
formerly the chief psychologist of
the IDF, agreed. "The IDF is
strictly a combat-oriented force,
whereas the intifada was essen-
tially a long series of policing ac-
tions," he explained.
Some IDF forces could have
been retrained to deal with the
uprising (much as British forces
were in Northern Ireland). The
General staff could even have
formed a special "Intifada Corps"
schooled in sophisticated counter-
insurgency methods. ("The army
has special units for almost every-
thing else," commented Mr. Gal.)
Instead, Israel kept on send-
ing crack combat troops — from
mechanized infantry to armored
corpsmen — to chase kids down
blind alleys and handle riot con-
trol. "In essence, the IDF lost the

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