A History of the Israeli Army
Schiff, Ze'ev
A HISTORY OF THE ISRAELI ARMY: 1874 TO THE PRESENT Ze'ev Schiff/Macmillan/$25.00 Eliot A. Cohen Ze'ev Schiff has the well-deserved reputation of knowing more about the Israel Defense Forces...
...The father of the modern Israeli Air Force, Ezer Weizman, once graduated only one pilot from a training course because he was unwilling to compromise on the quality of pilots...
...48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986 time since 1948...
...Most frustrating, he is often flatly wrong and obviously so...
...1066018...
...Army for most of this century) sends its most talented men in-to fighting units...
...James Hackett Edwardsville, Illinois William Ticker replies: Mr...
...One meets few Israeli generals who seem unusually devious or cunning—far more impressive is the directness of their intellects and speech, the unerring sense they have for the root of a problem or challenge...
...Of course, you can also stain, varnish, or paint them if you prefer...
...As Schiff reminds his American readers, the breathtaking Six Day War cost Israel what in the United States would have been the equivalent of 80,000 dead...
...Since the essence of command is leadership, one of its first chiefs of staff, Moshe Dayan, insisted that the command "Forward...
...Both friends and foes of the IDF like to think of it as a clever—sometimes, diabolically clever—force, but I suspect that the true secret of its strength lies elsewhere...
...This quality also marks the burgeoning Israeli arms industry, which manufactures weapons that reflect the armed forces it must serve—at once rugged and sophisticated...
...More important, even the events of the Lebanon War suggest that the IDF has lost little of its basic skills, and as Schiffs book confirms, the strengths of the IDF have such deep roots that it will require much more than a surfeit of hardware to choke them...
...IDF commando exploits are still the envy of the world's special forces...
...If the police come to your house, break down your door, ransack your belongings, and don't find any evidence of wrongdoing, the exclusionary rule does nothing to protect you...
...Although its essential physiognomy has remained constant—a relatively small (continued on page 52) 126 Fifth Ave., Dept...
...Stack them...
...This combination of brilliance and occasional ineptitude has a number of roots...
...Nothing, not even the most conscientious kind of professionalism, can substitute for the visceral knowledge that real war (I'm not talking about a Grenada) can come at any moment...
...be replaced by "Follow Me...
...Dershowitz indicates in his own writing, is that he is skilled in appellate legal work and not jury trial work...
...The excellence of Israeli training stems from this concentration on the basics, in-deed, an iron insistence on them...
...In 1967 they gained great victories but brought peace no closer...
...The IDF has its share of careerists and bureaucrats, no doubt, but unlike any other Western military it has its mind wonderfully focused, to paraphrase Johnson, by the knowledge that it may have to fight for its life within a fortnight...
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...Since the essence of war is fighting, the IDF (like the German army of old but not, alas, like the U.S...
...The poor, infantry-dominated army of the 1950s has given way to a highly mechanized, technology-rich force comparable in size and quality to those of the major European powers...
...A HISTORY OF THE ISRAELI ARMY: 1874 TO THE PRESENT Ze'ev Schiff/Macmillan/$25.00 Eliot A. Cohen Ze'ev Schiff has the well-deserved reputation of knowing more about the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) than anyone else, including the Israeli minister of defense and the chief of staff...
...Address City _ I State lip -Check One ^Payment enclosed ^Charge this purchase to ^AMEX OMASTERCARD O VISA Account# Exp...
...In-deed, only in the 1956 Suez War can one argue that the Israelis achieved more than their minimal aims—in that case, by cementing an alliance with France and inducing Egypt to refrain from blocking the Tiran Straits or sponsoring fedayeen raids into Israel for the next eleven years...
...In especially difficult times (e.g., the Yom Kippur War) it has been willing to recast its tactics and organization to adjust to a changing battlefield...
...Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once said, "The West . . . has immensely strong allies of which it makes no use: the people of the Soviet Union, and indeed, of the...
...Schiff shows that the history of the IDF has been one of enormous change...
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...His other books, perhaps less familiar in this country, are no less interesting and informative...
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...they're interlocking Each free-standing unit is 273 "w x 11 Ih "d x 37"h and is designed to interlock and stack...
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...The long-time military correspondent of the elite Israeli newspaper Eliot A. Cohen, author of Citizens and Soldiers: The Dilemmas of Military Service (Cornell), is currently writing a book on military disasters...
...As Schiff points out, a number of leading Israeli generals and statesmen realized only too late that they had no idea of how to exploit their achievements to change the political makeup of the Middle East—by creating an autonomous Druse state, for example, or a semi-independent West Bank Palestinian canton...
...Schiff and other observers have worried that the IDF, as a result of its continuous growth in size and sophistication, may be losing the spiritual qualities of resourcefulness, improvisation, and creativity which characterized its early years, particularly during the Six Day War...
...In addition—and this is a theme that Schiff raises only tangentially—the IDF's excellence at the tactical, operational, and (more recently) technical levels of war has come at the expense of strategic acumen and achievement...
...As I point out at length in my book, Vigilante, the galling thing about the exclusionary rule to the Fourth Amendment is that it only protects the guilty...
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...Back copies available @ $2.00 each...
...There is no "illegally obtained evidence" to be thrown out of court...
...A History of the Israeli Army, a revision of an earlier book, gives an excellent, if compressed (262 pages), ac-count of Israel's wars and of the IDFas an institution...
...Although revolutionary in some respects—its largescale use of female soldiers, for example—the IDF is doctrinaire when it is eminently sensible to be so—in its insistence, for example, that one does not abandon wounded comrades unless absolutely compelled to...
...Win or lose, after each war the IDF has re-examined its structure, doctrine, and weapons, indeed its entire self, in order to learn from its mistakes...
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...Nor have the great triumphs of the IDF been with-out cost: in both 1967 and 1973, for ex-ample, the Israelis lost approximately a quarter of their expensive and highly skilled air force...
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...I'm not arguing that the jury made the right decision...
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...Unreasonable" in the United States Constitution does not mean "random," as Mr...
...52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986...
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...COHEN (continued from page 49) active force of regulars and conscripts backed by a huge militia of reservists— it has undergone remarkable transformations...
...Dershowitz indicates that jury work is a separate skill and relies upon those skilled in that area...
...I'm just pointing out that nasty little clause in the Seventh Amendment that judges and lawyers love to ignore...
...Ricker quotes the Constitution and immediately preceding the quotation misquotes the Constitution...
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...CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 9) from the particular to the general where the path does not exist...
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...In the original Karen Silkwood verdict, for example, the federal appeals court simply rearranged the facts of the case and came to its own different conclusion...
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...In this respect the IDF resembles the German army of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—fantastically good at battle but surprisingly naive politically and inept strategically...
...The misquote is typical of his distortion and his failure to grasp the truth and essence of an issue...
...And if you move, just fold them down and take them with you...
...But anyone who has followed a few cases through the appeals process—especially in civil courts—knows that judges often simply substitute their own verdict for that of the jury...
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...Schiff s account of the failure of Israel's first retaliatory actions in the 1950s, the IDF's lack of preparation for the grinding battles of the War of Attrition, the absence of combined arms doctrine in the Yom Kippur War, and the ponderous actions of Operation Peace for Galilee makes it all too clear that the Israelis have committed their share of mistakes and experienced their share of disappointments and catastrophes...
...Tucker places in each of his paragraphs...
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...The Yom Kippur War led, ultimately, to the peace treaty with Egypt, but that occurred as much through the efforts of Henry Kissinger and Anwar Sadat as anyone else...
...First, there is the IDF's seriousness, particularly among its officer corps...
...First and foremost, because the Israelis must concentrate on assuring their very survival in a hostile Arab world, they have not had (or at least, have not thought that they had) the luxury to think about strategy in its Clausewitzian sense...
...Some ten of the book's sixteen chapters summarize the main events in Israel's military history, including Israel's six major wars—the War of Independence (1948-1949), the Sinai Campaign (1956), the Six Day War (1967), the War of Attrition (1969-1970), the Yom Kippur War (1973), and the Lebanon War (1982)—and the chronic problems of terrorism and guerrilla warfare...
...Hackett makes a distinction between the wording of the Seventh Amendment"no fact tried by jury shall be otherwise re-examined in any court of the United States"—and my paraphrase: "retrying a case on the facts...
...The IDF's simplicity also explains its extraordinary practicality and adapt-ability...
...Again, infuriatingly, he misquotes, misuses, or distorts in-formation...
...List Price $59.95 $39.95 NOW ONLY THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986 49...
...What point is he trying to make andthrough what kind of logical mire is he attempting to drag us...
...No other periodical regularly publishes for the English speaking reader this vital information...
...So the unit can be used immediately...
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...The third column of page 20, Mr...
...For the average American soldier war is a theoretical possibility, an event that might occur in the course of his professional career but most likely will not...
...The dismay with which the senior officer corps greeted the prevarications of then-Defense Minis-ter Ariel Sharon in 1982 testifies to the continuing integrity and innate good sense of the Israeli high command...
...Moreover, none of its strategic short-comings should detract from the fact that the IDF has proved itself extra-ordinarily capable at the technical, tactical, and operational levels...
...Israeli military technology (and above all, the IDF's ability to use technology) matches that of the superpowers in a number of areas...
...It's not clear, however, how such an approach would make the IDF less effective...
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...its logistical system, for example, no longer needs the callup of all civilian vehicles to function...
...Granted, appellate judges usually make every effort in finding some subtlety of the law to overturn a verdict they don't like...
...The argument here is near the argument which says that one who is skilled in editing, but does not himself write as an author, is showing disdain for writing in general...
...the skill of her colonels and generals and the quality of the mechanized or armored brigades and divisions they command is undisputed...
...What complete blather...
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...Indeed, his book is a useful antidote to those accustomed to thinking of the IDF as a near-perfect military instrument...
...The second great virtue of the IDF is, curiously enough, its simplicity...
...Each month The Samizdat Bulletin brings to its readers translations of important letters, news items, protest statements, mere,, and other important documents currently circulating under rnd in the Soviet Union, which have been smuggled to the West at great risk...
...Ha'aretz, Schiff has written extensively about the IDF and its wars: most recently, a fascinating and highly critical account of Operation Peace for Galilee, Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982...
...without tools...
...The particular problem with criticizing writing such as Mr...
...Hackett's characterization of my argument as "Let's get the golldang lawyers and judges outa there, and use some common sense," I never use the word "golldang...
...And he is right, as usual...
...Until very recently, the threats seemed too dire, their enemies too intransigent, to make sophisticated Israeli thought about the relationship between military power and political ends seem more than an academic exercise...
...Because no one can lead without gaining therespect of his fellows, the IDF relies heavily on peer evaluations rather than accumulated academic degrees in selecting officers...
...I must disagree...
...Random searches may be unreason-able, but unreasonable searches are not always random...
...other subject nations: It must stretch out its hands to these oppressed people...
...Only when the police do find incriminating evidence is the exclusionary rule wheeled into place...
...Tucker's is that it takes three paragraphs to clarify the issues, place proper perspective, and refute the contention Mr...
...Not that this indictment should be overdone: The Israelis have won most of their wars in the broader as well as the narrower sense, and Israel today just may be more secure than at any Ronald Reagan has called THE SAMIZDAT BULLETIN "The voice of Russia's only free press...
...He occasionally has valid points but they become lost in his wandering verbiage...
...Again, on page 19 in the second column, Mr...
...Finally, as to Mr...
...They bemoan the "Americanization" of the IDF, what they see as a pernicious addiction to weight of firepower and high technology...
...One of which, as Mr...
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...Ricker says "Criminal attorneys who understand the system best—Alan Dershowitz, for example—don't even bother to go before juries anymore...
...I argue in my book that the exclusionary rule actually violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because it offers constitutional protections to only one small group—people who had actually committed crimes...
...Ticker suggests in this second column of page 19...
...Hackett says that I am wrong in saying that the Warren Court expanded the rights of "criminals" instead of "criminal defendants...
...Even for Israel, which realizes that it must fight its wars quickly, and by and large has done so, victory has its price...
...Traditionally, the IDF has concentrated on the essentials, submitting all of its practices to a ruthlessly wielded common sense...
...The invasion of Lebanon in 1982 did eliminate the PLO mini-state in southern Lebanon, but, as Schiff argues, this came at the cost of extraordinary domestic upheaval, an enhanced position for Syria in Lebanon, and the revelation of IDF techniques to the Syrians and their Soviet patrons...
...An Israeli general today has probably fought in at least three sizable wars, not to mention a host of skirmishes of various kinds...
...But one can also argue that Israeli strategic blindness has sometimes been caused by the very success of Israeli arms...
...But the Israelis have not always succeeded from a strategic point of view...
...This knowledge, which the IDF shares with the society that enfolds it, enables the Israeli military to eliminate much of the wasted time and motion, the bureaucratic silliness and pettifoggery, that plague any peacetime military...
...Although directed primarily at those who know little about the IDF save for its reputation, A History of the Israeli Army will repay a reading even by those who know a good bit about it...
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...Generals who excel at operational art, and the statesmen who know that they have such generals and competent forces at their command, can easily forget the imperative of sound strategic judgment, believing instead that battlefield success is all there is to war...
...It now depends less than before on mobilization of the country's total resources for war...
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...In 1948-1949 they secured their state's existence—no mean task—but failed to create the conditions for a peace settlement...
...In the other six chapters Schiff discusses various aspects of the IDF throughout its post-Independence existence, including doctrine, intelligence, personnel, and civil-military relations...
...For the Israeli it is a constant reality...
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...Alan Dershowitz works on the appellate level for numerous reasons...
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...Like virtually all Israelis, Schiff displays a kind of proprietary pride in the IDF, but he does not hesitate to record its failings and to make some harsh judgments about its performance...
Vol. 19 • October 1986 • No. 10
