Israel’s fateful withdrawal

Lebanon exit marked zenith of Israel’s shift from offensive to defensive posture


Gabriel Siboni
Israel Opinion/Ynet
01 July '10

(Dr. Gabriel Siboni heads the Military and Strategy research program at the Institute for National Security Studies. Last week, it held a convention titled “The Withdrawal from Lebanon: 10 years later,” attended by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, former military leaders, and senior researchers.)

The withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 constitutes a significant and special event; an attempt to shape our security reality in the north unilaterally, while aiming to elicit broad international recognition.

The withdrawal marked the zenith of a significant change in the characteristics of Israel’s security doctrine. It appears that we still cannot formulate a clear answer to the question of whether it was a planned move that stemmed from strategic-political thinking, or whether it stemmed from the “peer pressure” that dominated the public discourse in previous years.

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It is possible that the withdrawal’s execution in practice, with all parties being surprised by the timing (including the IDF, South Lebanon Army, and Hezbollah) had some weight in respect to entrenching the attitude to the pullout both within the Israeli public and among Hezbollah members. Yet more than anything else, the withdrawal indicted a doctrinal change whereby Israel shifted from an offensive to a defensive approach.

Israel’s security strategy was set by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and premised on a defense strategy that allows for offense as a systematic-tactical component; hence, Israel developed offensive perception vis-à-vis terror organizations. Over the years, the IDF continuously implemented an offensive military policy that did not allow the terror threat to develop. This offensive approach maintained a low-level threat.

The years of our war on terror are replete with examples of offensive operations against terror groups in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. These operations assisted Israel in suppressing and maintaining terror groups’ capabilities at a low and relatively stable level, while creating a complex security reality that was limited to borderline communities.

Yet the longer the IDF stayed in Lebanon, the more we saw a gradual process of abandoning the offensive approach and adopting a clear defensive posture. The number of offensive operations declined, the operational freedom of commanders on the ground was considerably limited, and every operation produced limitations for future operations. As a result of this, we saw the emergence of an operational reality that made it difficult to continue adopting the offensive approach. All this was happening against the backdrop of a society that focused its discourse on our casualties in Lebanon.

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