The Israeli public and politicians alike blame their new Premier Ehud Olmert for the poor management of the war with the Hezbollah fighters and the consequent loss of face.
Ever since its inception the Zionist state has been relying on its military might as the basis of its security. It was so belligerent that it did not believe in the theory of a balanced distribution of military power in the region.
The Zionist insistence on linking its survival with its military strength alone drove the state to adopt the theory of “absolute security” based on two things. First, establishing its military superiority over its Arab neighbors, which also meant that the Arab countries should be denied any opportunity to acquire powerful weapons. Israel succeeded in achieving these objectives initially with the cooperation of the European countries and at a later stage with the total support of the United States.
The Jewish state could, obviously, persuade the European arms manufacturers to supply their Arab clients only conventional weapons with rather old technology and could be used only for less harmful defense purposes.
It also could persuade the Western countries to withhold from the Arab countries the modern technology that would enable them to develop advanced weapons. In this manner Israel could maintain the vast difference between the strike power and destructive potentials of Israel and its neighbors.
Thus Israel managed to get the most advanced conventional weapons such as fighter planes, bombers, tanks, destroyers, submarines and missiles including some weapons on the banned lists.
Further they succeeded in making the US to stockpile its advanced weapons in Israeli territory with special access to use them if Israel needed. The US justification for such a defense arrangement was to pre-empt a situation that occurred in 1973 when the US had to deploy heavy weapons from the NATO arsenals in Spain and Germany to support Israel when the Barlief line had fallen. In the war of October 1973, Egypt crushed the Israeli Army of occupation. They destroyed the Barlief Line that was described by military experts as unparalleled in military history and ended the lie that Israel had an invincible army.
Israeli Defense Forces made considerable advancement leaving the Arab countries far behind. While on the one hand Israel acquired the nuclear and space technologies, on the other it successfully strove to keep the cutting-edge technologies inaccessible to the Arabs. Israeli bombers destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactors in June 1981. With such strategies Israel managed to maintain a “balance of intimidation.”
The principle of “absolute security” based on amassing all the most highly destructive weapons and denying them to its neighboring countries on the unshakeable belief that it would protect the Jewish people and their state has been proved faulty by the recent developments in south Lebanon. The Hezbollah, which could destroy 16,000 houses in the northern Israel and push the war to within the borders of Israel for the first time, has proved that the theory and practice of “ absolute security” will not save Israel and Jews. The Hezbollah is just a resistance group with no state authority or political machinery to assist it.
But Hezbollah debunked the myth of Israel’s invincibility. This has placed the Israeli prime minister in an unenviable spot, with the Jews within and outside the state challenging his credentials to conduct a war against even its militarily weak neighbors. The ruling majority believes that his management of the war was disappointingly inefficient as he failed to eradicate the Hezbollah and thus disproved the theory of absolute security on which Israeli has been relying all the time.
We the Arabs are not concerned about the upshot of the Zionists questioning Olmert’s qualifications to lead the State of Israel or politicians impeaching him. What we learned is that the national security of Israel based on the principle of “absolute security” is now posing a great threat to the real security of Israel. Ben Gurion chose to pin the Israeli security on the theory of “absolute security” after observing that Israel cannot eradicate the millions of Arabs. Then the present-day Israeli and Zionist leaders should realize that nuclear weapons would not be able to kill all the Arab millions and establish a Jewish state on their ashes. It is high time that Israeli leaders realized that the adherence to the principle of absolute security would only break the cornerstone of Israel’s security. Only a security theory based on the peaceful coexistence with its neighbors would guarantee the security of Israel.
