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By Louis Rene Beres December,
2000
As Israel faces its most significant existential threats since 1948, citizens
should begin to ask serious questions about the prevailing levels of strategic
discourse. Persistently, a suffocating intellectual stubborness blocks
the way of productive Israeli strategic thinking. There is also great
danger that Israel's political and military leaders, presuming high-quality
scholarship in the universities and think-tanks, will continue to accept
academic recommendations with insufficient skepticism. The net effect
of such erroneous presumptions could include even unconventional war and
unconventional terrorism.
Let me be entirely candid. With precious few exceptions, the leading academic
strategists in Israel have offered little pertinent scholarship of any
real merit and a great deal of scholarship that is altogether injurious
- e.g., the dreadful scholarship that spawned and sustained the Oslo Trojan
Horse. Remarkably, on issues that deal with chemical/biological/nuclear
threats to Israel, the country's leading strategists remain mired in the
outdated "wisdom" of 1950s America. Clinging unimaginatively
to certain alleged benefits of nuclear deterrence and a favorable conventional
balance of power, these individuals ignore altogether (1) the essential
limitations of threat-system dynamics in a region that may soon join CBN
technology with irrationality; and (2) the essential and complex nuances
of national self-help in an increasingly anarchic world system. There
are, to be sure, other factors being widely ignored, but all such shortcomings
are the product of a misguided starting point for investigations.
What needs to be done? First, Israeli strategists must look directly,
unhesitatingly, relentlessly at their country's existential threats, and
must identify these threats - quickly and openly - as the central object
of their inquiries. Second, Israeli strategists must understand, without
any further delay, that Israel is a system, that the existential threats
confronting Israel are themselves interrelated, and that the effects of
these interrelated threats upon Israel must always be examined together.
Third, Israeli strategists must understand that the entire world arena
is best understood as a system, and that the disintegration of power and
authority structures within this macro-system will impact, with enormous
and partially forseeable consequences, the Israeli micro-system. Fourth,
Israeli strategists must turn away from prudence, from fearful and mainstream
kinds of analyses that may please the public and their paymasters but
are intrinsically valueless and without explanatory benefit. Fifth, Israeli
strategists must learn to read literature, not the mundane and simplistic
materials generated by American strategists (who themselves read no real
literature), but the work of authentic writers, poets and playwrights.
Frequently the insights that can be garnered from literature provide a
vastly better source of strategic understanding than the matrixes, metaphors
and scenarios of "experts." Sixth, Israeli strategists need
to recognize the advantages of private as opposed to collective academic
thought. Here they should be reminded of Aristotle's view: "Deception
occurs to a greater extent when we are investigating with others than
by ourselves, for an investigation with someone else is carried on quite
as much by means of the thing itself."
In matters concerning Israeli security, one may discover greater intellectual
value in the private musings of certain unaffiliated single individuals
than in the sum total of collaborative efforts spawned by professional
centers of strategic studies. Seventh, Israeli strategists now need to
open up, again and with greater diligence and insight, the question of
nuclear ambiguity. Here it must be understood that this is not merely
a matter of belaboring the obvious, but rather of optimally exploiting
appropriate and variable levels of disclosure for purposes of deterrence
and, possibly, preemption. Eighth, Israeli strategists need to open up
completely the still broader questions of nuclear weapons and national
strategy. This should be done, of course, in conformity with all of the
other above-listed strategic studies requirements.
Moreover, it is by no means obvious that keeping questions of nuclear
weapons and strategy "closed" is in Israel's security interests.
Ninth, Israeli strategists must cease their contemplation of an end to
national existence as a purely dispassionate, academic consideration.
For now, it seems these strategists can contemplate the end of the Third
Temple Commonwealth every day, and yet persevere quite calmly and purposefully
in their most routine affairs. This ironic and counterproductive juxtaposition
should no longer be the case if these scholars could learn to begin to
contemplate the very moment of Israel's collective disappearance. It follows
that Israeli strategists must begin soon to replace reassuringly abstract
conceptualizations of End Times with concrete imaginings of catastrophe.
I realize, of course, that such advice is altogether contrary to what
Israeli academics have learned in American graduate schools, but their
American professors were plainly wrong. As in the case of each individual
life, fear in this context has its proper place. And there is no necessary
correlation between existential dread and injury to "objective"
forms of scholarship. Tenth, Israeli strategists should pay special attention
to the requirements of scholarly audacity, of seeking, self-consciously,
to steer clear of the comfortable intellectual middle-ground and to take
risks, personal and professional, in finding serious answers to vital
questions.
There is little time left. Very little.
 
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