Peaceworks

Key Points

• Far from being a passive implementer of policy, the Israeli military has been a major catalyst in embarking on the road to peace as well as the path to war. Such a high level of policy influence is uncharacteristic of the military in advanced democracies. However, it has been typical of political-military relations in Israel and has become even more pronounced in the past decade.
  
  Indeed, the changing nature of warfare in Israel and elsewhere has led to the emergence of a "political-military partnership"in which the military is no longer outside the policy-making process. At the constitutional level, formal decisions are still ostensibly made by elected political leaders. But in practice there is another, concealed, level at which the professional officer class is deeply involved in policy-making. In fact, the military is an equal partner in the policy process.
• The forces participating in the policy-making game are not officers versus their political bosses, but rather a coalition of officers and politicians versus another coalition of officers and politicians. Throughout the years of Israel's existence, there have been several fluctuations in the relative power of each side (the civil and the military). At the beginning of the twenty-first century the balance changed drastically toward the military due to several factors, among them the exacerbation of the subconventional war between Israel and the Palestinians.
• A series of events in the international arena at the end of the 1980s--including the outbreak of the first Intifada and the end of Soviet support to Syria--was interpreted by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as marking a radical change in Israel's geostrategic position and led it to argue for a peace initiative and territorial compromise. The ability of the IDF to press its case at the highest levels of Israeli politics was greatly enhanced by the fact that government ministers were reluctant to make clear and politically risky decisions on territorial matters and had come to depend heavily on the Intelligence and Planning Divisions of the Israeli General Stafffor expertise, information, and intelligence. While the Israeli chief of general staff (CGS) continued to participate actively in cabinet meetings, some of his fellow officers began to play prominent roles in the negotiations to implement the Oslo Accords. When Netanyahu became prime minister in 1996 he tried to limit the political roles played by IDF commanders, but he soon discovered that he could not conduct political-security negotiations without them.
• The IDF's support for the peace process began to erode in the latter half of the 1990s in the face of ongoing violence in the occupied territories and terrorist attacks in Israel. IDF strategists were particularly worried that the IDF, restrained by political pressures, could not win in these low-intensity conflicts. The beginning of the Al Aqsa Intifada and the failure of the Camp David talks in late 2000 convinced the IDF leadership that the peace process had failed. While Prime Minister Barak sought to maintain ties with Chairman Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, CGS Mofaz pressed publicly for a hardline policy toward the Palestinians. Unable or unwilling to rein in Mofaz and his like-minded colleagues, Barak adopted the military's policy.
• Sharon's assumption of the prime minister's office in 2001 did not restore harmony between the military and the government. Senior commanders complained of political restraints, accused politicians of blaming the IDF for not halting the ongoing attacks on Israeli civilians, and urged that the Palestinian Authority be treated as an enemy and fought directly. Not content with voicing internal criticism, the CGS and his senior officers made a point of expressing their position in the media--a position that enjoyed the support of the vast majority of both soldiers and civilians. The defense minister, the foreign minister, and others accused Mofaz of overstepping his authority, but he would not be silenced. Meanwhile, some lower-ranking IDF officers took the liberty of misinterpreting orders from the political leadership in their zeal to deal aggressively with the Palestinians. When Mofaz's term of office came to an end in the summer of 2002, it was widely anticipated that he would seek to build a coalition with Sharon's most serious rival, Netanyahu. As it turned out, Mofaz became defense minister less than four months later, joining the hard-line government formed by Sharon after the exit of the Labor Party from the National Unity Government.
• At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a combination of factors and conditions has led to the weakening of civilian control over the military, along with a rather high level of influence of the military over policy. In the policy sphere, these factors include dependence on the military monopoly on information, a relatively weak institutional system of civilian control that depends more on internalization of the principle of civil supremacy and less on strong constitutional mechanisms, and the absence of coordinating organs between the military and the civilian side. On the military side, these factors include weakness of the mechanisms that are supposed to separate the military from politics--for example, by creating obstacles to a swift transition from military service to a political career--and traditional resistance to the creation of checks and balances to military power such as a powerful council for national security.
• In retrospect, the change that occurred in the IDF's conception of security at the end of the 1980s was consistent with its military culture. The IDF may have switched to supporting a peace process, but peace was seen primarily as a means of achieving security, and security was understood in a narrow sense. For this reason, the military showed little interest in the economic arrangements that were supposed to create an infrastructure and incentives to preserve the peace. For the same reason, the military also paid little attention to efforts to prevent incitement and to foster education for coexistence.
  
  In the 1990s, as in previous decades, diverse opinions concerning the issue of peace did exist among the top military commanders, but it was easier for the IDF as a whole to line up with the demand for maximum security. But can one expect otherwise of the military--especially a military that has not stopped fighting for one week throughout the entire existence of the state? Perhaps we should look at it from the opposite direction and praise the military for the fact that despite the state of ongoing war it has no ambitions for territorial expansion, and most of the officer class still belongs to the more liberal side of Israeli society. Even if it is sometimes uneven, an impressive civil-military balance still exists in the country. How would militaries of other democratic countries behave if they were in the same situation?
• The Israeli case may shed important light on the future of civil-military relations in the United States, European countries, and other postmodern societies. The blurring of politics and military affairs, the influence of generals at the highest levels of policymaking, the ability of one overzealously destructive soldier to radically alter public policy: these dramatic trends may be the wave of the future. Advanced democracies are increasingly undertaking the same type of military interventions that Israel has carried out for decades--counterterrorism operations, subconventional warfare, and peacekeeping missions--the kinds of operations that were the direct cause of the current transformation in Israeli civil-military relations. The current U. S. war on terrorism, so strikingly similar to Israel's armed struggle, may even be the catalyst for such change.
• In the long term, the best means of guaranteeing civilian control over the military is to strengthen civil society. In the short term, however, several practical solutions can help remedy the present situation. These include restricting senior officers' free access to the media and limiting their participation in cabinet meetings. Other important changes would be to reduce the dependence of the civil authority on information and assessments from military sources, and to expect senior IDF officers to recommend to the political echelon not just one plan of action but a number of alternative schemes.

About the Author

Yoram Peri is professor of political sociology and communication at Tel Aviv University and head of the Chaim Herzog Institute for Media, Politics, and Society. Early in his career he served as political adviser to Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (1974) and as spokesman for Israel's Labor Party (1970-73). He had a thirty-year career with the daily newspaper Davar, serving as its editor in chiefin 1990-95. He has also been editor of the journal Israeli Democracy, has edited and hosted current affairs programs on television and radio, and has served on the Israeli Press Council.

A senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace in 2001-2002, Peri has also been a senior lecturer in the Department of Communication at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a research fellow at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies of Tel Aviv University, and a visiting scholar at Harvard University and Dartmouth College. In 2000-2001, he was a Fulbright Scholar at American University. He has been president of the New Israel Fund since 1999. His most recent book is The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin (2000). An earlier publication, Between Battles and Ballots: The Israeli Military in Politics (1983), is still considered the seminal work in its field. Peri holds a Ph. D. in sociology and political science from the London School of Economics.