The Alternative Vision of Israeli Security That Netanyahu Refuses To See

[Little Tich]

Source: The Jewish Daily Forward
By: J.J. Goldberg

Former Israeli military chief of staff Benny Gantz, in his first major policy address since retiring last February, recently presented a Washington audience with what amounted to an alternative vision of Israeli security.

Though his tone was understated and at times lighthearted, there was no mistaking his sharp disagreements with his former boss, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Gantz appeared September 25 at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel think tank, to deliver the annual Zeev Schiff Memorial Lecture in memory of the onetime Haaretz military correspondent. The speech (video here ) was an episodic, wide-ranging survey of Israel’s key security “challenges.” Specific topics ranged from the urgent but noncontroversial to what he called “hot potatoes.” The first category included the unraveling of the Middle East nation-state system, the rise of the Islamic State group and the increasingly critical role of intelligence. Hot potatoes included the upside of the Iran nuclear deal and the importance of a two-state solution with the Palestinians as an Israeli security interest.

Beyond the specifics, two overarching themes emerged repeatedly in the speech. One was the importance of flexibility and creative thinking in a Middle East newly dominated by uncertainty and unpredictability. The breakdown of the regional nation-state system and the chaotic rise of non-state actors, he said, have vastly complicated the task of identifying threats. In the past, anticipating events required observing neighboring governments and assessing their intentions. Today the players are so numerous, and their motives so fluid, that “you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“It takes a huge amount of a new kind of leadership,” Gantz said, “because we need to look again at our processes of how we learn things.”

The other overarching theme was the importance of self-confidence as a component in national security. Despite regional changes, Israeli strategists still manage to stay several steps ahead of opponents, Gantz said. It’s important to recognize that strength, he suggested. Readiness requires knowing not just the enemy’s capabilities but also your own. The less you know about the enemy, the more you must understand about yourself.

Read more: http://forward.com/opinion/321927/an-alternative-vision-of-israeli-security/

[DetlefK]

1. Because the arabic nation-states are artificial, colonial entities.

There never was a national identity in the arabic world. There are cultures and Clans and religion, but there is no over-arching secular ideal that the people are loyal to.

Why is there no Kurdistan? Because the areas where the Kurds live where split up among Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria when these borders were made by western powers by drawing lines with a ruler on a map.

The current situation in the Middle-East resembles Europe 500-1000 years ago: Europe was splintered into hundreds of fiefdoms and saw epic and brutal wars between Catholics and Protestants. The european concept of tolerance emerged because the Europeans were fed up with centuries of violence, especially after WWII.
It seems to me, despite the Middle-East being an equally wild mix of different groups, that the Middle-East has somehow not reached the threshold yet of "tolerance and peace at any cost".