By: Salim Salam
The collapse of the concept of “the possibility of achieving peace without the Palestinian people” was the subject of the previous episode (November 21, 2023) of this series of articles, in which we review the most prominent central concepts that formed the basis of the Israeli political security vision, which deepens the Israeli consensus on the fact that it has been subject to abject failure, but rather by complete collapse, which is increasing and rising and voices calling for reconsideration, but after the effort is first to identify them, based on the conviction that identifying these concepts is the first step that is the inevitable step in the process of restoring what should be restored in the Israeli political and security faith, and then in restructuring the organs, systems and arms charged with implementing this faith. In the future
This presentation of these concepts is based on the monitoring and documentation provided by a joint project recently launched by the Pearl-Kitson Foundation, whose central motto says: “We build long-term foundations for the Equality Camp in Israel,” and “The Molad Centre for the Renewal of Democracy in Israel,” under the title “The Collapse of Concepts Road to the Failure of October 7, 2023.” This project laid out a detailed map of the concepts that collapsed, leading themselves and their collapse to failure. We have so far presented four of the central concepts identified by that map and we present, in this episode, to the fifth central concept for which the “concept document” has put a title derived from the Israeli political practice that illusioned and imagined that the Israeli army can “dance on all ropes and in all weddings” at the same time: “there is a sufficient army for all,” or “the army is able to perform all tasks”! While developments, especially since October 7, have proven that the settlement project in the Palestinian areas is draining the bulk of the army’s resources, its forces and capabilities, until it is putting Israel face to face with the necessity of choice: either settlement or security!
Settlements in the West Bank drain the bulk of the IDF’s manpower.
On the morning of October 7, the military force deployed by the Israeli army on the border with the Gaza Strip was composed of only two military battalions, while the force deployed by the army at the same time in the West Bank areas included no less than 32 battalions. This information, which could have seemed “absolutely normal” before October 7, embodies the fact that settlements in the West Bank drain the bulk of the IDF’s manpower (soldiers) and therefore, therefore, frustrates its ability to protect other border areas, and prevents it from being able to conduct the necessary and proper trainings in preparation for a possible future war. Based on this, what happened on October 7 made it clear, beyond any doubt, the price of Israel’s choice to favour settlements over anything/sector/field/place else in Israel and put them, therefore, in front of an urgent need to choose from now on: either settlements or security!
How did Israel get to this specific point? The document “The Collapse of Concepts” draws the chronology line that reached it, returning its starting point to September 2013 when the government of Benjamin Netanyahu decided to stop assigning soldiers from the army to guard the Israeli towns located on the northern border (with Lebanon), and at the southern border (the Gaza Strip and Egypt). This was followed, in June 2014, by a decision to separate half of the “current military security centres” in the towns of the “Gaza envelope,” among other decisions to make budget cuts. In June 2016, a senior Israeli Defence Ministry official stated that “the army is limited in its ability to conduct training and improve efficiency among its soldiers and officers, because a large part of the army forces are deployed in the areas of Judaea and Samaria (the West Bank) and engaged in the tasks assigned to them there.” In December 2021, work was completed on the construction of the electrical wall surrounding the Gaza Strip, with a length of about 65 kilometres and at a total cost of three and a half billion shekels. Then, in the same month, the IDF collected all the pieces of weapons it had previously distributed to residents of the “Gaza cover” towns for the purpose of self-Defence.
The document emphasises the fact that the IDF, for all its magnitude, human, hardware and technological, remains as a “limited resource,” meaning that it is not possible to provide an infinite number of soldiers, tanks, helicopters and various means of combat for each town in Israel. Therefore, the way the military’s resources are used and decisions on how and where its forces are deployed reflect the priority ladder as determined by the state.
Why was the need to allocate 16 times more troops/military battalions to protection in the West Bank than what was allocated to protect the border with the Gaza Strip? For a “very simple” reason, the settler right, the document says, has for decades established a civilian settlement project “in the heart of a hostile area” that requires enormous security resources, at the expense of sectors, areas and other areas, certainly.
Here we must stop to refer to the fundamental historical fact that the one who launched the “settlement project in the heart of a hostile area” (the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Syrian Golan) and that laid its first bricks and provided support and legal cover for its vanguards, individuals and then organisations, was not the “settlement right” but the one who preceded in power by the alliance of Israeli “left” and “centre” parties, then the right came and focussed very huge efforts and resources in order to intensify settlement and expand its project in a spectacular way.
However, despite our historical observation here and beyond, the authors of the “Document of Concepts” go along the line they set themselves from the beginning and write that “contrary to the claims of the right” (and here, too: these intended claims preceded the rise of the right to power!), the reasons for the establishment of this settlement project and the monitoring of the enormous security and economic resources it requires “are not, and never were, security reasons, but rather religious and ideological reasons: the urgency of the arrival of the Saviour, the seizure of the biblical land of Israel, the exclusion of the Palestinian population and the prevention of the return of land within the framework of any political agreement.”
Settlement is a serious problem with several heads!
To achieve control of as much land as possible in the West Bank, many settlements and outposts have been established so that they are separated by very large distances, which now means that “the civilian presence spread throughout the West Bank does not contribute to ensuring and strengthening protection, but rather burdens the security forces and consumes a large part of the resources of the security apparatus and adds a non-finity number of points of friction that prolong Defence lines,” according to the assessment made by the commander of the Central Military Zone and the former Deputy Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army, General Moshe Kablinsky.
According to very conservative estimates, the (border) line between Israel and the West Bank is at least five times longer than it would have been without settlements.
More than half a million Israelis today live in the “Judea and Samaria areas” (the West Bank), mostly in settlements west of the separation wall that “provides them with protection,” but many settlements, as well as almost all settlement outposts, are located east of the wall, and quite a few of them are even in the midst of “negative Palestinian residents.” In order to provide protection to these, whether in nurseries and kindergartens, in schools or on the streets that connect settlements to Israel as well as the routine daily life of tens of thousands of people (settlers) who “create permanent friction and tension with Palestinians,” the IDF needs to allocate a huge amount of manpower and military resources.
For example, in the Jewish settlement in the heart of the IDF-controlled city of Hebron, about 800 “permanent settlers” and about 250 Jewish “pils of religious schools” (Yeshivot) live. In order to protect these, among 33,000 Palestinians, the IDF maintains in the city a full battalion of infantry and two companies of “border guard” police officers, a total of approximately 600 security personnel. This means that protecting two settlers requires “more than one soldier,” on average. Another example: Just two days before Black Saturday, the army allocated at least three military battalions and many other military means to secure the guard of the mass prayer organised by the settlers in “Joseph’s Tomb” in the heart of the city of Nablus. The authors of the document quote from research published by the Molad Centre in 2017 about the heavy security burden that the settlements pose on the shoulders of the state and the army, which stated that the size of forces that the Israeli army is forced to deploy and maintain in the West Bank is equivalent to half and sometimes two-thirds of the total fighting force in its possession. That is, these forces are even larger than those prepared to defend all other fronts combined (Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip and the Arabs in the south).
However, this is not the only problem that the settlement project creates and exacerbates. It not only diverts massive security resources to the West Bank, for messianic ideological reasons and motives, but it also severely damages the efficiency of the military and its readiness to fight war on other fronts. Military formations that spend most of their time on police missions in West Bank areas do not find enough time for preparatory exercises for future war scenarios. This was recently confirmed by Major General (Reserve) Isaac Brick, the former commander of the Armoured Brigade and Military Colleges, in the wake of the surprise attack carried out by Hamas in the depth of Israeli territory on October 7, adding: “We do not have enough army to entrust it with daily police tasks in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and then to expect it to perform its mission of protecting the northern border, with Lebanon. That’s not possible.”
On top of this and that comes another intractable and dangerous problem resulting from settlement and its project represented in the daily terrorism practised by settlers, which makes the task of protection in the West Bank more difficult and complex to degrees, and then therefore necessarily increase the volume of resources and the risks resulting from this, very significantly. If in 2021, for example, there were 450 incidents of “settlement violence” (including arson, stone-throwing and live fire) against Palestinians in the West Bank, this number doubled in 2022 and according to the IDF itself there were 850 such incidents, an average of two incidents three per day! Here, the military has to “deal” with these events, and then “address” any Palestinian responses to them. But these figures recorded a very sharp rise in the recent period, especially after October 7, so that the head of the “General Security Service” (Shabak) and the head of the army staff were forced to explicitly warn of the consequences of the continuation of this situation, in one of the sessions held by the “Retracting Ministerial Council for Security Affairs” in the recent period.
Iqmal: “Either settlements or security”!
Confirming the collapse of the concept of “there is a sufficient army for all”, the “concept document” concludes in this context: “It is clear today, more than ever, that Israel is forced to choose: either settlements or security”! The current situation, in which the military’s resources, in large part, are used to protect settlers is “not an inevitable fate but a political decision made by Israeli governments.”
This is an Apple Translation of the Arabic version of an opinion published by The Palestinian Centre for Israeli Studies “MADAR”, is an independent research center specialized in Israeli affairs, based in the city of Ramallah. Founded in the year 2000.