Israel’s Security Becomes a More Subtle Problem

JERUSALEM —  All but tearing his hair, lawmaker Moshe Nissim pounded the lectern and demanded: “How is it that your hand didn’t shake, Mr. Prime Minister? . . . To sign an agreement with the PLO? . . . Before explaining the issue of the security of the Jews of Israel? . . . You didn’t mention the issue of security! . . . You still haven’t mentioned it!”

Security. For Israel, surrounded from its inception by hostile Arab states, security has meant survival, the do-or-die imperative not to allow even one chink in its armor.

Now, things have changed. If opposition members can now accuse the Israeli government of glossing over security risks in the peace agreement that it signed with the Palestine Liberation Organization, there is a very simple reason.

On security, Israel has never had it better, according to many of the country’s leading strategic analysts. And the main threats are no longer Arab armies poised to invade, but subtler enemies that require subtler measures.

“Presently, I don’t see any existential threat to Israel,” declared Shlomo Gazit, former chief of Israel’s military intelligence. “That is what allows us to move toward the so-called experiment with peace without taking a risk.”

That is also what may allow Israel to sign a peace agreement with Syria in the next few months, which would mean giving up land in the Golan Heights, in the wake of giving up political control of the Gaza Strip and Jericho to the PLO.

“The map had to change completely for Israel to be able to take the kind of risks involved,” said security scholar Shai Feldman of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.

That is just what occurred. Over recent years, Israel’s international isolation declined. The Soviet Union reformed, fell apart and stopped propping up its client armies in the Mideast--particularly Syria’s. Then came the watershed of the Persian Gulf War, when the American weapons on which the Israeli army’s are based got top marks for performance and the threat from Iraq was diminished.

“The Gulf War made American weapons look so strong,” said Oded Ben-Ami, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s spokesman on defense affairs. “It is no longer possible for the Arabs to push Israel into the sea.”

The Gulf War also highlighted the changes in the nature of the threat to Israel.

Israeli strategic analysts who used to worry more about ground attacks now focused on the air, on the potential destruction that could come from long-range missiles even as primitive as the Iraqi Scuds that landed in Tel Aviv.

With such long-range threats, the argument that Israel must retain control of the West Bank for “strategic depth,” as a protective buffer, appeared less convincing. What Israel needed was not just the West Bank but 1,000 miles of buffer to separate it from Iran and Iraq.

In the meantime, the Labor Party came to power with its doctrine that Israel does not require political control of the West Bank to guarantee the security arrangements it needs there.

The Labor Party propounds a new thinking about security: that real security will come from doing what it takes to make peace, including giving up land, and from going even further and fostering efforts to solve the social problems that spawn terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism.

This is the real threat now, many think: the rising Islamic activism that is spearheaded by Iran and shows up as terrorist operations by groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Israeli-occupied territories or by Hezbollah in Lebanon, and as political movements in Algeria and Jordan.

“The Israel-PLO agreement is a strong blow against the Islamic movement. It’s a setback for the Islamic movement, first and foremost,” Joseph Alpher, director of the Jaffee Center, said.

Ben-Ami, reflecting Rabin’s thinking, pointed to Iran as the main threat to Israel and worried aloud that its Islamic extremism is spreading ever farther.

The kind of scenarios that keep Israeli security planners up nights now involve a takeover of the Egyptian government by Islamic fundamentalists, or Iranian success in producing nuclear-tipped missiles, a development Alpher said is expected by the end of the decade.

The new approach to security is hard for many Israelis to accept after years of claims by the hard-line Likud Party that Israel needs every inch of land to survive. Anti-government protesters carry signs reading, “The Land of Israel Is in Danger,” and the Likud-led opposition members of Parliament have made many a speech like Nissim’s, denouncing what they see as government neglect of security issues.

Israel’s security situation could shift drastically, abruptly. “The nightmares come from the possibility of rapid, sudden changes,” said analyst Mark Heller, also of the Jaffee Center.

But if the Mideast continues to appear to move toward peace, observers predict that Israel’s security concepts and military doctrine will also continue to change.

Eventually, Feldman said, Israel may back away from its emphasis on preemptive strikes and its policy that the best defense is a good offense, based on forward-deployed forces.

Israel, by signing the self-rule agreement, has indeed taken security risks--such as promising to hand law enforcement in part of the West Bank over to Palestinian police. But Israeli leaders appear to be hoping the risks will be offset by the gains that come with political peace with the PLO.

In any case, security analysts emphasize, the PLO never constituted a threat to Israel’s very existence and still does not. Its uprising against Israeli occupation brought problems in what Ben-Ami called “personal security,” the feeling of danger experienced by every Israeli.

The security risks of the self-rule agreement remain on that level, but they have many politicians and military thinkers concerned.

The agreement contains security “holes,” Zeev Schiff, military commentator for the newspaper Haaretz, wrote. For example, what happens if the agreement is violated? How will Palestinian and Israeli authorities jointly keep order?

But Schiff advocated filling the holes rather than canceling the agreement, and former military intelligence head Gazit agreed.

“The risk is simply one, that it simply won’t work out and there will be the disappointment of both parties,” he said. “That would be extremely demoralizing.”