The Political Road From Here

A nuclear Iran and a dramatic shift in Palestinian strategy top the list of concerns, argues a leading think tank head.

For the first time in more than four decades, a foe of Israel, Iran, may soon have the ability to threaten its existence.

by Gidi Grinstein
Special To The Jewish Week

Forecasting the future in a time of rapid change in technology, politics and economics is foolhardy. Rather, this essay is an attempt to articulate Israel’s emerging national security agenda, to capture some of the trends that are shaping our environment and to frame some of the challenges of transformation facing Israel.
But first: what are we trying to achieve? How should we measure the performance of our national security apparatus?

The traditional approach focuses on assessing inputs and outputs such as costs or casualties. But history teaches us that nations have thrived in spite of adversity while others collapsed in relative peace. Hence, a more relevant measurement may be the conduct of the resources that are most valuable, mobile, sensitive and elusive:

migration, long-term foreign investments and the flow of technology. Their vote of confidence in Israel would mean success.

A bird’s-eye view of Israel’s national security agenda would indicate that the country faces four major challenges. They are: to ensure physical survival; to secure political survival; to provide an adequate level of personal security from terrorism; and to strengthen the resilience and vibrancy of the Jewish people.

First, on the challenge of physical survival: For the first time in more than four decades, a foe of Israel, Iran, may soon have the ability to threaten its existence. Naturally, then, preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons — or containing it if such weapons are acquired — are on the top of our national security agenda. No one can overstate the gravity of this threat. Indeed, Israel’s brightest, as well as billions of dollars and the best of our diplomacy are invested in this issue.

However, the challenges of Iran and radical Islam call for a deep transformation of our global outlook. Here, Israel may be a focal point but hardly embodies the problem. These are matters of global concern that Israel cannot address alone. Hence, the relatively simple diplomacy of bipolar Cold War or of American supremacy will have to mature into a global outreach that balances our intimate strategic relations with the U.S. with closer bonds with rising powers such as China, India or Russia and is much more attentive to their concerns and priorities.

Second, on the challenge of political survival: In recent years Israel has been facing a new alignment of enemies, a network of nations and organizations guided by fundamental rejection of Israel’s right to exist. Frustrated by past failures to physically eliminate Israel by force and inspired by the collapse of nuclear powers such as the Soviet Union and South Africa, this “resistance network” has embraced a new strategy that is designed to bring about Israel’s implosion.

Their tools: fundamental de-legitimacy of Israel’s right to exist as a state that embodies the right of Jews for self-determination and rejection of any notion of ending the conflict; strategic use of terrorism to derail any political breakthrough that would formalize Israel’s existence in the region and undermining the two-state solution while promoting the one-state solution, which calls for establishing a single political unit of Jews and Arabs. In such a state, Jews eventually will become a minority and lose hold on the Jewishness of that nation.

The profound implications of this strategy cannot be overstated. Primarily, this new strategy questions the assumption that Palestinians should aspire to end Israeli “occupation.” It asserts that the best way to fight Israel may be to burden it with even more responsibility for the Palestinians in order to increase the administrative, political, diplomatic and economic burden on its shoulders. Some may even call for the Palestinians to voluntarily dismantle the Palestinian Authority, seeing no threat of an Israeli move to again control Gaza.

To undermine this strategy designed to bring about Israel’s implosion, Jerusalem must ensure a significant Jewish majority in the areas under its sovereignty. This would require managing the process of a territorial compromise under increasingly unfavorable circumstances as Israel’s end of the stick in a future Israeli-Palestinian agreement becomes shorter. Until 2001 the framework of such a deal would have been “land for peace.” Then it became “land for security.” If present trends persist, though, Israel may have to leave without adequate security guarantees.

Also, Israel’s disregard of the international scene and of public diplomacy, as reflected in the status, structure, budget and resources of our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, must be overhauled. Our objective must be to recapture the moral high ground or at least make a much more compelling case.

A third challenge has to do with the personal safety and security of Israel. As mentioned, a certain dose of resistance to our existence in the region in the form of violence and terrorism is almost inevitable in the foreseeable future. To date, Israel has been extremely effective in countering this threat and limiting its scope and impact with few and brief exceptions such as during the second Lebanon war or in 2001-‘02 during the second Palestinian uprising.

This will remain a major challenge. As terrorism cannot be eliminated, the national security objective should be to keep it at a level that doesn’t affect the vast majority of households, businesses, foreign direct investments or tourism. This will require the continuation of effective and surgical use of force without going overboard at the price of compromising other vital national security interests.

Finally, there is the issue of the security and well-being of the Jewish world. Israel has always aspired to lead the Jewish world. Yet only in recent decades has this hope been backed by demography and political and economic power and standing. In the first decades of Zionism and of the State of Israel, it was actually world Jewry that played a central role in ensuring Israel’s survival and prosperity.

To date, the well being of the Jewish world has taken a relatively marginal place on our national security agenda. Now, Israel needs to adopt a historical, systemic and broad view of the needs of the Jewish world and of the concerns of the diaspora. Key examples in this context include: To what extent should Israel continue to try to deplete the diaspora by encouraging aliyah? Is it time to embrace the idea that a vibrant diaspora is actually a Zionist imperative? What should be the role of the world Jewry in Israel: should it be confined primarily to writing checks and extending political support or can we forge new forward-looking partnerships? What is Israel’s qualitative contribution to the Jewish diaspora?

Finally, in such an environment we must nurture three core capabilities. On the conceptual level, we must learn the art of staying relevant by constantly questioning our working assumptions. Critically important in this context is the preservation of the flexibility of our national movement, Zionism, which has been successfully balancing multiple values and generating many original ideas to meet its challenges.
On the practical level, in stormy seas it is much more useful to develop in-depth understanding of our vision and to build agile, flexible and resilient capacities to progress in that direction than to plan or prepare for specific scenarios. On the institutional and structural level, we must improve our capacity to take decisions of political significance and implement them by reforming our system of government so that we will have more stable tenures with less fragmentation.

Naturally, pieces that deal with Israel’s national security agenda may tend to be a prescription for gloom and doom. However, one must remember that for decades, Israel has outperformed many expectations and can continue to do so if we correct our weaknesses and identify and focus on the secrets of our success: vision, vibrancy, agility,
courage and capacity to execute.

Gidi Grinstein is the founder and president of the Reut Institute (www.reut-institute.org), a policy and strategy group that supports strategic conduct by the government of Israel.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization