On Monday, US Secretary of State Colin Powell will deliver a speech at the University of Louisville in which it is expected he will set forth an American plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. In a meeting with European leaders this past Tuesday, Secretary Powell announced that he was wrong last spring to have accepted Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s demand that a total cease-fire of seven days precede any resumption of negotiations or freeze in Israeli building activities in the Jewish towns in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Powell now publicly sides with the Arab view that Israel must enter negotiations while its citizens and cities remain under constant attack. The ramifications of this US position shift are that the Bush Administration now apparently accepts the Palestinian- Pan-Arab view that terrorism against Israelis is a legitimate way for Palestinians to express opposition to Israeli policies.

The American adoption of this Palestinian – Pan-Arab position, together with President Bush’s embrace of the call for the establishment of an independent state of Palestine raises a number of questions for Israeli military strategists. What is the strategic significance of the establishment of a state abutting Israel that overtly engages in terrorism and other forms of violence against the Jewish State? How will an independent Palestinian state differ from the Palestinian Authority from a military perspective?

How will an independent Palestinian state impact the regional military balance between Israel and its Arab neighbors? How will international backing of Palestinian terrorism impact Israel’s ability to ensure its survival? Finally, how must the answers to these questions impact the government’s policies regarding Israel’s positions in negotiations that will take place under fire and under increasing American pressure to establish an independent State of Palestine as quickly as possible?

According to retired IDF Major General Meir Dagan, former terrorism advisor to Prime Minister Netanyahu, and military affairs advisor to Ariel Sharon during his tenure as Opposition Leader, “After a year and two months during which the Palestinian Authority has actively waged a terrorist war against Israel, there can be no room for doubt in anyone’s mind that the Palestinian entity that will be established will be hostile to Israel and as a result, Israel will have to relate to this state as an enemy state.”

Although it is now clear that the new State of Palestine will be hostile, what will be the practical significance of this hostility? Last week, the Ariel Center for Policy Research published an analysis entitled, “The Palestinian Security Forces: Capabilities and Effects on the Arab-Israeli Military Balance.” The author, IDF Lt. Col. (res.) Gal Luft, who is now completing his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, served as a battalion commander in the Gaza Strip and West Bank throughout most of the 1990’s and in that capacity worked closely with the Palestinian forces. Luft judges that Arafat has amassed a regular military force of 46,000 troops. In addition he estimates approximately 40,000 additional personnel are members of the PLO’s Tanzim militia, augmented by several thousand additional forces in the Islamic Jihad and Hamas terrorist organizations. Because many members of the regular security forces also serve in the Tanzim militia, it is difficult to arrive at the precise number of Palestinian forces.

Arafat’s regular forces are disbursed among thirteen separate and distinct security organizations, the largest of which, the National Security Forces, numbers some 14,000 soldiers who are organized into brigades and battalions in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. This body, which constitutes the backbone of the Palestinian fighting forces, has yet to take part in the fighting against Israel. In an interview early this week Luft explained, “The most reasonable explanation for this is that Arafat decided not to have his main force take part in the fighting in order to continue to enjoy the image of the underdog fighting a fierce, professional army. The problem is that no one seems to notice that his main force has been standing on the side watching. When the IDF invaded six cities in the Palestinian controlled areas and met with zero resistance, it seems that the lesson the army took away is that it can come and go as it pleases – like a knife cutting through margarine. The truth is that the Palestinians made the decision not to resist us. If they decide otherwise, the picture will look completely different.”

Luft contends that the term “Police Force” that was attached to the Palestinian forces is a misleading distortion of reality. “There is no Palestinian police force here,” he says. “There is a Palestinian army. It is organized as an army, trained as an army and carries out the fighting functions and operations of an army.”

When the Palestinian Authority was first established, everything seemed different. Israel armed the Palestinian forces and ensured they were adequately trained. According to Brigadier General (res.) Dov Gazit, who served as the first Coordinator of Activities with the Palestinian Police for the IDF, “We operated from the assumption that they were supposed to provide us with security and quiet. During the initial phase, when they first came into the field, things looked promising. Aside from some isolated incidents, the daily cooperation went smoothly.” On the other hand, the built-in contradiction between the Israeli expectation for cooperation and the Palestinian national aspirations was clear to anyone who wished to see. “They did not confiscate illegal arms as they were treaty-bound to do. They also absolutely refused to implement other key elements of the security accords such as extraditing suspected terrorists to Israel and they had difficulty carrying out arrests of terrorists. We accepted this state of affairs at the time because we understood that they were just getting organized and they had a need to be sensitive to their public opinion,” Gazit recalls.

According to Luft, the first big fault-line in cooperation between the Israeli and Palestinian forces developed in September 1996, in the wake of the Israeli Government’s decision to open a subterranean tunnel under the Western Wall in Jerusalem. The Palestinian Authority’s decision to react to the action by firing on Israeli forces caught the Israeli army by complete surprise. Luft contends, “For us the battles were a partial eye-opener because they showed our forces in the field just how quickly our relations with them could turn from cooperation to confrontation. On the other hand, we still didn’t understand that we had to stop viewing the Palestinian forces as a police force and had to start looking at them as a military force.”

For their part, the Palestinians viewed the battles of September 1996 as a total military victory and a true watershed event. Luft notes, “The Palestinians refer to the battles as ‘The September War.’ In three days of fighting they killed more of our forces than we killed of theirs, and among our casualties, they killed a Colonel and moderately injured another Colonel and a Brigadier General.” Luft continues that in the aftermath of what the Palestinians considered an unvarnished success, they embarked on a vast build-up of their force levels and worked intensively to improve the quality of their forces and their battle-readiness. Palestinian commanders were sent to Pakistan, Egypt, and other countries to receive advanced training.

These commanders then returned to the Palestinian Authority to train the troops in the field. Luft points out that the improvement of the Palestinian forces was demonstrated when, “Shortly before the current so-called intifada began, the Palestinians conducted a brigade exercise and they didn’t look bad at all.”

Last week, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres promised that the Palestinian State that he will help establish would be demilitarized. Luft rejects the Foreign Minister’s announcement out of hand with a mixture of derision and anxiety. “All the talk about demilitarization is just hot air. Such talk is more a sedative for the Israeli public than a statement with any real substance. If until now the Palestinians broke every promise and breached every commitment they took upon themselves regarding limitations on their force levels, type and quantity of weaponry and cooperation in destroying the terrorist infrastructures and organizations, what evidence exists that they will behave differently as a sovereign state? To the contrary, the Palestinians will have much less to lose by breaching their signed commitment and we will have much greater difficulty enforcing our positions once they have their state. If for instance the Palestinians place heavy artillery on the heights commanding the West Bank and aim their guns toward Ben-Gurion International Airport, what will Israel do? How will we explain to the world that we attacked a sovereign state that everyone supports because its actions were a clear provocation and we needed to defend ourselves? In the Versailles Peace Treaty, the Allied governments limited the German army to one hundred thousand troops. Twenty years later we had the Whermacht. All these announcements about a demilitarized state are cheap demagogy – an attempt to hide the truth from the Israeli people.” While Luft is concerned with what he views as the IDF’s underrating of the already existing Palestinian forces, he does not believe that the Palestinian Army will be able to mount a serious threat to Israel in a conventional war between the two countries. The greater danger that he foresees is the role that the Palestinian army will play as part of a coalition of Arab states in a regional war against Israel. “The most problematic scenario for Israel is the highly likely possibility that the Palestinians will participate in an Arab coalition against us. They have an interest in such a war and they will have the capacity to sabotage our mobilization of our reserve forces and are liable to damage the IDF’s ability to move forces and tanks to the Jordan Valley and the Golan Heights.

Here then, the Palestinian military threat is transformed from organized terrorism to a blow on Israel’s strategic capabilities to prevail in a regional war.”

Luft agrees with Major General Dagan that no doubt exists that signing a peace treaty will in no way reduce the Palestinians’ hostility toward Israel or lower their level of motivation to fight Israel. He explains, “We have to understand that the key to a state’s military strength is its perception of the threat arrayed against it. Without a doubt the Palestinians feel threatened by Israel. In addition to the threat perception you must add the huge mobilization potential of the Palestinian army because 75 percent of Palestinians are under the age of 35. We also mustn’t forget the fact that Palestinian society is highly militaristic.” In summary, Luft concludes that granting sovereignty to a Palestinian state will increase the maneuvering room of an already existing enemy army, while at the same time reducing Israel’s ability to enforce its positions and ensure its security.

Major General (res.) Yom Tov Samia, until recently the Commander of the Southern Command of the IDF, explains that in his view, it isn’t the Palestinian regular forces who manifest the primary threat to Israel but rather “the commingling of regular forces and terrorist squads and the backing that the terrorists receive from tens of thousands of regular forces.” From Samia’s perspective, “We have to reach a situation where in the framework of a Palestinian state, there won’t be armed militias operating at the side of the Palestinian army. There will be a need to demand that their forces are consolidated under one command hierarchy and one Chief of Staff who will not be Arafat or his successors.”

General Dagan agrees with General Samia’s assessment and in his view, it is not the Palestinian forces at their current levels that constitute the paramount threat to Israel from the Palestinians, but rather the integration of terrorists and terrorist doctrine into the Palestinian regular forces that manifest the greatest danger – a danger he views as a threat to Israel’s very survival. “The Palestinian state will constitute a strategic threat to the survival of Israel because of the absorption of terrorist doctrine into its fighting forces. The sense the Palestinians have now, that they can operate from bases in close proximity to Israeli population centers without fear of Israeli military reaction will only be amplified after they receive independence. From their territory the Palestinians can destroy the whole fabric of life in Israel, to an extent that will make life here completely unbearable over time. They will be able to repeatedly and continuously sabotage our electrical grids, our telecommunications lines and infrastructures, and they will be able to deplete our water supply and pollute our environment – lowering our air quality, polluting our soil and our streams. They will be able to terrorize our citizenry with mortar and Katyusha rocket attacks on our urban centers. In short, by creating a reality of a war of attrition, they will embitter our lives to an extent far greater than what they have accomplished until now, and over the course of time, bring about the disintegration of the State of Israel. Plainly, from their actions and behavior up to now, one can conclude without any reasonable doubt that not only will they have the ability to do this, they also have the desire to do this.”

Generals Samia and Dagan also agree that in addition to the Palestinian terrorist threat, from a military perspective, the Palestinian state must not have the ability to raise a true conventional army. To prevent this, both insist that Israel must ensure it retains complete and sole control over the international borders of the Palestinian state.

According to General Samia, in a future accord between Israel and the Palestinian entity, “Israel must insist that the Palestinian army will not be an army in the full sense of the word. It must be a limited force without heavy weaponry. In order to ensure that this is the case, it must be agreed that for the next fifty years, Israel will be the sole party responsible for ensuring security against foreign threats. The only armed force that can be deployed west of the Jordan River is the IDF.”

General Dagan adds, “I am not so much bothered by the term ‘sovereignty’ as I am concerned by the content behind it. If, from a purely military perspective the Palestinians retain more or less what they have today, then we can live with it. The damage they can do to us in a regional war will be point specific, limited – temporary control over an isolated settlement or delaying the movement of our heavy equipment to the Jordan Valley for a few hours. Things like these will not, at the end of the day, influence the IDF’s ability to win the war. The main problem will arise if they are granted control over any international border. Then they will automatically become a regular member of an Eastern front arrayed against us that will include Iraq, Syria and Jordan. If this is allowed to happen, then, in the event of war, we can have our first engagement of Iraqi armored forces not on the Jordan River, but in Ramallah, ten kilometers from Jerusalem. This is the real danger. On the other hand, if we can limit their sovereignty in a way that will ensure our control over the lateral roads that cross the West Bank to the Jordan Valley and we continue our sole control over the international borders, we can live with it.”

After Secretary of State Powell’s address on Monday, Israel will be forced to enter into negotiations with the Palestinians from an extremely weak bargaining position. By not seizing the diplomatic and military initiative in the wake of September 11th, the Israeli Unity Government enabled the Arab bloc to link the establishment of a Palestinian state to their support for the American war against Islamic terrorism. Powell’s latest announcement that he is removing America’s backing from Prime Minister Sharon’s position that negotiations cannot be undertaken under fire creates a situation unprecedented in its bleakness. It deprives Israel of international support for its claim that the granting of Palestinian statehood must be conditioned on that state living at peace with the Jewish State.

It can be reasonably assumed that the international community, led by the Bush Administration, which now openly differentiates between the right of other sovereign states to self-defense and the right of the State of Israel to act to ensure its survival, will reject the views expressed by Generals Samia and Dagan, and Lt. Colonel Luft’s assessments regarding the military threats to Israel emanating from a Palestinian state. Given the current international climate, insistence by Israeli negotiators that Israel retain control of all international borders even after the establishment of the Palestinian state is liable to cause a major crisis in Israel’s relationship with the United States. However, as the experts explain, Israel has no choice. In the words of General Dagan, “The establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state, in the full sense of the word will be catastrophic for the State of Israel.”

This article ran in the weekly newspaper, Makor Rishon, on November 16, 2001

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR