Christmas 1948 was one day away when The Palestine Post’s lead headline reported: “Tank and air battles rage near Egyptian border.”
It was not the full drama. Having erupted two days earlier, but been kept secret by the censor, the reported battle was actually Israel’s first invasion of another country. Even more importantly, it inspired a time-honored military doctrine which over the past 12 months was effectively rewritten.
Known as Operation Horev – after one of Mount Sinai’s names – the last major battle of the War of Independence was significant for its military size and diplomatic fallout, but its most important consequence was its long-term impact on Israel’s strategic thought.
In terms of size, the seven-month-old IDF launched its first-ever divisional attack, deploying four infantry and mechanized brigades which crossed the border into the Sinai Desert, surprising the Egyptian Army from its southern rear while the navy and air force faked a northern attack by bombing Gaza, Khan Yunis, and Rafah.
Diplomatically, the invasion was reversed by foreign powers, after US president Harry Truman sent ambassador James McDonald to David Ben-Gurion, warning him that if the IDF did not immediately withdraw to the international border, Britain would attack Israel, as its defense pact with Egypt demanded.
Ben-Gurion complied, silencing protests from the invasion’s commander, Yigal Allon, but the brief invasion’s effect was remarkable: Egypt, realizing the depth and scope of the attack it faced, and fearing a grand siege of its entire expeditionary force, agreed to enter ceasefire talks.
That’s what happened diplomatically. Strategically, the episode shaped a defense doctrine that guided Israel for 75 years.
How are military doctrines expressed, how do they come to be?
MILITARY DOCTRINES reflect the threats countries think they face, the resources they wield, and the aims they seek. The US, for instance, invests in its naval forces a much larger share than other countries because it is positioned between two oceans and also wants to maintain a global military presence.
Israel’s situation was, of course, entirely different. Geographically miniscule, demographically inferior, economically impoverished, and militarily challenged by all its neighbors, Israel needed a doctrine that would minimize its wars’ number and length and at the same time maximize its resources.
Resources were maximized by the creation of the IDF’s elaborate system of reserve duty, which let one of the world’s smallest countries field one of the world’s largest armies.
The doctrine’s other part was inspired by Operation Horev: Transfer the war into enemy territory. This aim underscored the doctrine’s other pillars, namely, strategic deterrence and tactical preemption. That meant using a strong military to dissuade the enemy from attacking, but if the enemy still chooses war – attack before being attacked, and do so in the enemy’s land.
This is exactly what happened in the Sinai Campaign of 1956 and the Six Day War of 1967, when Israel attacked before being attacked (but after facing naval blockades), and also in 1973, when Israel failed to preempt but still managed to keep the war outside its internationally recognized borders.
This doctrine proved itself not only by producing military victories, but also diplomatically, as the IDF’s achievements convinced the largest Arab state, Egypt, to lay down its arms and strike a peace agreement with the Jewish state after four gruesome wars.
Understandably, Israel stuck to its defense doctrine for another 45 years, failing to understand the fundamental change in its strategic surroundings and the doctrinal adjustment it required.
BY THE most bizarre and frustrating coincidence, the same year that Egypt struck a peace deal with Israel, the shah of Iran was deposed by Ayatollah Khomeini. Had the shah not been toppled, and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat not been assassinated, the Tehran-Cairo-Jerusalem axis would have led the Middle East to a brave future of regional harmony.
Instead, both the shah and Sadat were removed by a force that until then was seen as a domestic problem of Muslim-majority lands: Islamism.
Fought not only by the shah and Sadat, but also by the latter’s predecessor Gamal Abdel Nasser, Syria’s Hafez Assad and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, no country outside the Muslim world saw jihadism as a strategic threat.
Neither did Israel, even after the Khomeini revolution. First, Jerusalem waited to see whether the Khomeini regime would last, then – for a whole decade – it indulged in the illusion that the Iran-Iraq War was sapping Tehran’s energies, and then, when Iran accelerated its nuclear activity, Jerusalem focused on that, belittling the rest of its strategic threat to the Jewish state.
That is how when Hezbollah arose in Lebanon, Israel’s old defense doctrine was activated, and effectively said: if a military threat mobilizes, attack it, but if what threatens you it isn’t a military – it isn’t a strategic threat.
A military, in this thinking, was what Israel saw in its previous wars – infantry divisions, armored brigades, artillery batteries, and fighter jets. It is now a year since Israel learned, the hard way, that militias, despite lacking jets, tanks and corvettes, can also constitute a strategic threat.
Until 2023, Israeli strategists thought Israel could tolerate jihadist militias’ existence, because, like the Arab armies before them, they could be deterred. That was before an Islamist militia demonstrated its ability, and eagerness, to unleash thousands of riflemen on 32 communities along a 40-km. front.
Now Israel revised its doctrine: Neighboring states’ armies should be deterred in peacetime and preempted in wartime, but jihadist militias should be fought anytime, because Israel cannot afford their presence anywhere along its borders.
Israel will therefore kill such militias’ leaders, storm their troops, bomb their hideouts, burn their money, and do anything it takes to chase them away from its borders. It’s a doctrine fully shared by the Right, Center and Left, and it supersedes regional circumstances, international admonitions, and also allies’ cautions, even when delivered by an envoy of the president of the United States.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the best-selling Mitz’ad Ha’ivelet Hayehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sfarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.