The Israeli Myth of Omniscience: Nuclear Deterrence and Intelligence

Middle East Policy 1991

The debates held in Israel during the course of the Gulf War brought to light some remarkable revelations about pre-war Israeli policies. In this article I will describe two such revelations, the first about the Israeli use of nuclear threats against at least three Arab states in the past, and the real nature and capacity of the Israeli intelligence services.

The nuclear debate began with a speech by [Labor member of the Knesset] Yitzhak Rabin on February 18, Defense Minister Moshe Arens' reply to Rabin on February 20, followed by other statements, culminating in several important press articles which appeared on Friday, February 22. Throughout that debate, reflecting primarily the Israeli establishment's perspectives, the failure of its war planning was attributed solely to various technicalities which may be internal to Israel, but more often were diagnosed as due to the American refusal to listen to Israeli advice. This report will be confined to covering such views, ignoring those of the right-wing opposition, which continues to speak up. Conspicuously absent in the debate was any critique, however oblique, of the basic assumptions of the Israeli strategy: i.e., the assumptions described by Uzi Benziman ("A Check of Addresses," Haaretz, February 15) as "dating from the era of Palmach,"that is to say from 1942-1946. Indeed, all conceptual foundations of Israeli politics and strategy, in particular the underlying racist preconceptions about the Middle East as a whole (not just about the Palestinians!), were fixed in that remote era and have remained unchanged since.

The best reports of Rabin's speech were those by Amnon Levy, Hadashot, and Dan Margalit, Haaretz, both of February 19, while the [English language] Jerusalem Post omitted all points of importance. The speech was addressed to the Labor Knesset faction, and it contained three crucial points reiterated again and again. They were, first, that Israel will always have to live in war or under the threat of war with the entire Arab world. Such phrases as "future direct wars with the Arabs" abounded in the speech. The Gulf War is looked upon by Rabin as merely one of such wars "in which, owing to a miracle, a foreign army is fighting our worst enemy for our sake" (Foreign Minister David Levy). "This is a luxury case for Israel, unlikely to recur in the future" (Margalit). The next war anticipated by Rabin will be against Syria, and it is likely to be much less luxurious.

Rabin's second point was that the aim of Israel in all such wars "must be to assume an essentially aggressive role, so as to be in a position to dictate the terms of a conclusion." A prerequisite of this is "a further increase of the offensive power of the Israeli Air and Armor forces needed to achieve a quick victory" (Margalit), and to prevent the Arabs from using weapons such as missiles and thus to prevent Israeli casualties in the rear. "What did we tell them [the Arabs]? If you send missiles on Tel Aviv, Damascus will be turned into a ruin. If you send missiles on Haifa--not only Damascus but also Aleppo will cease to exist. They will be destroyed root and branch. Without dealing with missile launchers, we will devastate Damascus. The same applies to Baghdad. We told the Iraqis, if you dare send a missile, Baghdad will turn into dust" (Levy). "Israel should preserve its deterrent power by simply saying that in the event of a single land-to-land missile strike on Tel Aviv, then Damascus, Aleppo and Baghdad will exist no more (Margalit).

The third point of Rabin's speech was that continued fighting and the threat of fighting the Arabs in such a manner requires the subordination of everything in Israel to the needs of the armed forces. Hence Rabin's criticism of anyone who has ever "demanded more education, more concern for social welfare," or who has wanted, as he put it, "to live comfortably." The critique was first and foremost aimed at Likud. All the cuts in the Israeli Defense budgets have been decided by Likud. Only a few days before Rabin's speech, Minister of Finance Itzhak Modai, had proposed further cuts. If anything, Rabin's speech again demonstrated that Labor continues to be more hawkish than Likud. Moreover, Rabin was highly critical of the preparation of the rear for this and future wars. He estimated that without the Americans, the number of the Israeli victims of the recent missile strikes would have been much higher.

Naturally, Rabin's speech had its reverberations. In a leading article in Hadashot (February 19), Amnon Levy, after comparing Rabin to an exceptionally hawkish Likud ex-general, Bar Kochba, asked: "Is it not impolitic to threaten Syria so openly and so virulently, just when it is a part of the anti-Iraq coalition? Is it justified to provoke so strongly a state which at the present juncture is on the same side we are?" After further questions to Rabin concerning Israeli internal affairs, Levy proceeds to the last "and the most essential" question: "What shall we do from now on? According to Rabin, all our power of deterrence has crumbled, after the threats presumed preventable by it were carried through" when the missiles actually struck Israel. Therefore, asks Levy, "What will be our defense from now on, in the absence of deterrence?"

Benziman (ibid.) goes even deeper in his query. He wants to know how exactly Israel can obliterate Damascus or Baghdad. He questions neither the Israeli ability nor the Israeli right to do so. But he is curious, because in the aftermath of Rabin's speech "many commentators interpreted it as the announcement of the option of the terminal [i.e., nuclear--I. Shahak] weapon." According to Benziman, "This does not need to be so, because the capital of Syria can be totally destroyed by aircraft and other conventional means. But when Rabin was asked--privately--what answer did he have to the Iraqi missile strikes, he used the same formula: a merciless strike on Baghdad." But although the formula is the same, Israel's ability to destroy Baghdad by conventional weapons is apparently not the same. Therefore Benziman concludes that Rabin "may not mean putting the whole region in the nuclear market. But in that case Rabin would have to answer some probing questions about the Israeli capability to carry the war to the municipal area of Baghdad."

The quoted passage, obviously censored, badly needs an interpretation. The assumption of Benziman is that Rabin's assurances about "obliterating" huge cities like Damascus or Baghdad by conventional means alone sound quite improbable. Even in the case of Damascus, which is located in the range of Israeli artillery, experience shows that a city of that size cannot be "obliterated" by a combination of artillery shelling and aerial bombing. The Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982 involved a continuous bombing of that city from the air plus a merciless barrage of artillery and mortars stationed on hilltops overlooking it, i.e., much closer and more advantageously than they could be stationed in Rabin's hypothetical case of "obliterating Damascus." The case of the recent bombing of Baghdad by the allied air forces also shows that a big city cannot be thus "obliterated." All evidence points out that there is only one way to really obliterate a big city: by the use of nuclear weapons, in the manner of Hiroshima. Aleppo and Baghdad, for instance, can be reached only by Israeli missiles or airplanes, and thus their "obliteration" by conventional weapons is even more implausible than that of Damascus. It must therefore be assumed that Rabin meant exactly what can be reasonably inferred from his words.

The conclusion is inescapable that Israel has, for years, threatened Syria and Iraq with its nuclear weapons. According to an article by Rabin himself published a few days afterwards (Yediot Ahronot, February 22), Saudi Arabia was being threatened by Israel as well. Moreover, those nuclear weapons with which the three said Arab states have been threatened can be assumed to have been not just "tactical" ones, but intended to wreak maximum death and destruction. A celebrated Israeli writer, Yaakov Sharett (son of former Prime Minister Moshe Sharett) offered the same interpretation of Rabin's speech in Davar on February 24, while expressing his indignation over the very idea of relying on nuclear deterrence. Reuven Padatzur, the military correspondent of Haaretz ("A symptom of failure," February 25) also understands Rabin as calling for the use of nuclear weapons. "Everyone understands what is the only possible means of ‘obliterating' two Syrian cities."

We cannot yet know all the considerations which prompted Shamir's government not to resort to the Israeli retaliation strategy, as it had always been professed. We only know that American opposition to it was one of the considerations. We cannot preclude, however, that the difference of opinion between Labor and Likud (excepting Sharon), the former representing much more hawkish and ruthless attitudes towards the Arab states, might also have been a consideration. But whatever the Shamir government's considerations, it is now apparent to everybody concerned that Israel's nuclear-retaliation strategy, followed according to Rabin for a number of years, failed dismally during this war. The already quoted lament of Amnon Levy -- "What will be our defense from now on, in the absence of deterrence?" -- must be seen in this context.

The above-mentioned speech of Yitzhak Rabin also had reverberations unrelated specifically to the possible use of nuclear weapons. Rabin also forcefully argued the case against Moshe Arens, Rabin's successor as the minister of defense. No wonder Arens found it advisable to reply, yet without even mentioning Rabin's threats of "obliteration" of Arab cities. Arens' speech before the Knesset Committee for Foreign and Defense Affairs and the discussions it generated are conveniently summarized in an article by Uzi Benziman ("Another Version," Haaretz, February 22) and in three articles by Davar's political correspondent, Daniel Ben-Simon ("What has happened to the Intelligence?" February 22). These summaries convincingly demonstrate the debate's momentousness.

Arens' crucial point was "the fact, now finally apparent to everybody, that Iraq has built a powerful military machine. This fact commands us to undertake, at a time of our own choosing, some soul-searching that would show the extent to which the Israeli Intelligence was cognizant of the power of this machine in advance" (Ben-Simon). According to Benziman, Arens implied that "the Israeli Intelligence components" which failed "to assess the real power of Saddam Hussein's war machine," were the generals "Ehud Barak and Amnon Shahak" [no kin of mine -- I. Shahak], i.e., respectively the Deputy Chief-of-Staff (to become the Chief-of-Staff on April 1, 1991) and the commander of the Military Intelligence [Aman]. Both enjoy the reputation, for reasons I do not understand, of the most intelligent among the Israeli generals on active service. As Benziman puts it: "In the army, Barak and Shahak are the superstars, the cream of the crop." This is why Arens' aspersions on them "shocked the committee members badly. But as soon as he noticed that his words had such an impact, he reversed himself and said that the Israeli Intelligence was still the best in the whole world" (Ben-Simon). It was too late, however. The debate, which had portentous implications for Israeli domestic politics, was already in progress.

Benziman, Ben-Simon and other commentators clearly intimate that a majority of the members of the Knesset Committee for Foreign and Defense Affairs, of which most Israeli politicians of high stature are members, have turned, perhaps for the first time in Israel's history, highly critical, and even angry at the Israeli Intelligence's performance. And they have reason to be angry. According to Sima Kadmon (Maariv, Supplement, February 22) "Five days before the war broke out" the KCFDA members were handed the following official assessment by their advisor [for Intelligence] Dr. Hayim Yavetz, Sharon's former chief expert 1981-83: "It is 100 percent certain that not a single missile will strike Israel, that the Americans will destroy the entire Iraqi army within four to six hours' time, and that Iraq will be restored to its natural role of a country whose only business is to grow palms and build irrigation canals drawing water away from its rivers.

Some critiques voiced in the ensuing debate can only be described as ridiculous and understood only as continuations of the formerly prevailing "omniscience of Intelligence" myth which until last month ruled supreme in Israel. Thus Yossi Sarid of the leftist Ratz party, described by Benziman as "a member of some of the most sensitive subcommittees of the KCFDA, who has good connections with the Intelligence community," is also reported by Benziman to have drafted an "unwritten" article -- meaning not authorized by censorship for publication -- criticizing Israeli Intelligence. Excerpts from this "unwritten" article, which deals with "the responsibility of Mossad for the ignorance of the [Israeli] Security System about the underground tunnels of Baghdad," are nevertheless quoted by Benziman. Here is a sample: "It appears," writes Sarid, "that those bunkers and communication networks have been built by quite a few international companies. How could it happen that our agents have not been planted in those companies? Who can believe that Mossad has been prevented from bribing some foreigners employed in Iraq only by lack of funds?"

Still, some critique, even by Sarid, strikes right to the point. Among the major politicians, the one who had some rather cogent points to offer was Moshe Shahal, former (Labor) minister of energy (until March 1990). Simultaneously with his critique of Intelligence, Shahal announced in all the Hebrew papers of February 22 that he conditionally supported the formation of a Palestinian state and that in several months' time he would be running for the leadership of Labor against both Rabin and Shimon Peres. After expressing to Ben-Simon his disappointment with the quality of Israeli Intelligence, he cited the following proofs of its inept performance in regard to Iraq, which he himself defined as "shocking":

When the Iran-Iraq war ended, I demanded a discussion of the situation by the Cabinet, of which I was (then) a member. The Prime Minister agreed at once, and so we were handed the reports by [Chief-of-Staff Dan Shomron, Ehud Barak and Amnon Shahak. All these reports were just vacuous; it was clear that they feared to take a stand about anything. The Israeli army's assessment of Iraq for 1989 was all relying on [a single source]: an article published by General Ala Aldin Taha Hussein in an Iraqi paper. ... The Military Intelligence, when asked [by the ministers] whether the article corresponds to Saddam Hussein's position, refused, on purpose, to say yes or no. ... When during a cabinet session, I inquired about that article a little more, they finally told me that in their opinion Iraq was too preoccupied with its economic concerns to have any intention of attacking Israel. When I wondered why, in that case, they wouldn't demobilize their soldiers after their war with Iran was over, they answered that according to their estimates, Iraqi infrastructure for mass production was still not advanced enough to employ huge masses of demobilized soldiers, but they would be demobilized as soon as this superstructure was readied to absorb them.

Another Labor ex-minister, Uzi Baram, added another illustration to the mentality of the Israeli army and Intelligence:

No one in the Army High Command wanted to venture a prediction about whether a war will or will not break out. They had information they considered reliable, that the Iraqis had not developed chemical missile warheads; nevertheless they kept scaring all of us that the Iraqis had developed them. Why? I will tell you: because if the Iraqis had them, they would later be in the position to tell us ‘we told you so'; and if the Iraqis did not have them, they would later be in the position to tell us, "you see, nothing happened."

Yossi Sarid, in sections of his critique more sensible than that quoted above, says first that, in his opinion, "the Gulf War brings to the pinnacle the chain of colossal mistakes of [the Intelligence] for which Israel has always had to pay dearly"; and second that "they are the kinds of people who don't understand the nature of their own work and who never cease being taken by surprise when the reality proves them wrong," as has happened again and again. Sarid traces the failures of the Intelligence to a quite remote past. Their assessments of the situation in 1967, 1973 and 1977 (about Sadat's intentions) were erroneous throughout. "In 1980 the Intelligence predicted the Iran-Iraq war to be very short, with Iraq easily defeating Iran in no more than a few weeks' time." Then, Sarid recounts the faulty estimates of the Intelligence about Lebanon in 1981-82, saying, wrongly I believe, that "Begin, Sharon and Rafael Eitan went into the war because they were unduly influenced by Intelligence estimates." Furthermore, Sand reveals that "the knowledgeable Intelligence analysts predicted the duration of that war as very short, and its termination by the expulsion of the Syrians and the PLO from the entire territory of Lebanon and the establishment in that country of a stable Christian regime living in peace with Israel as assured" (my emphases). In this way, Sarid, incidentally for the first time (at least in the Hebrew press), revealed the true Israeli aims in that war. After commenting on the ineptitude of the Intelligence before the beginning of the intifada and shortly thereafter, Sarid finally concludes:

In Iraq's case, one can say that information in the Intelligence's possession was neither right nor wrong, but simply nonexistent. Even after the August 2 [1990] invasion of Kuwait, the intelligence community continued to grope in the dark. With such an Intelligence, we will keep on being taken by surprise in the future exactly as we have always been taken by surprise in the past (Ben-Simon).

Benziman adds that according to Sarid,

. . . until the outbreak of the [Gulf] war it was not known [in Israel] whether Iraq had the capability to produce the mobile missile launchers by itself. Even today the Security System provides every day different presumptions about the intended targets of the already launched missiles. ... Finally, Israel still has no idea where exactly the Iraqi headquarters are located.

Benziman devotes a separate article ("The second version," February 22) to the excuses offered by the Israeli Intelligence to shun responsibility for these failures. (In passing, the same subject matter is also dealt with by Ben-Simon.) Given the intellectual poverty of such apologetics, it does not merit a detailed discussion. Let me just confine myself to a sample of quotes: "Iraq is a big country, so that we could not assign equal priority to each of its districts." "In the Military Intelligence itself no reason has been found to think that anything went wrong." "Nothing essential in the Iraqi ability to wage war has been unanticipated by us." "Knowledge derived from our evidence is superior to that of anyone else." It is enough to recall in this context that the Israeli government, to its utmost surprise, learned of the invasion of Kuwait from its ambassador in Washington, who had been duly notified about it by the Americans. Also, the warnings of the Israeli authorities about Saddam Hussein's intentions to attack Israel, now solemnly quoted by Rabin and others for the purpose of self-exoneration, were of the same kind as those which Israel routinely makes about the aggressive intentions of any Arab state, including Saudi Arabia.

Contrary to its current posturing, Israel was for a long time pursuing quite friendly negotiations with Saddam Hussein. In the winter of 1989-90, a Rabin visit to Baghdad was under consideration by both countries concerned. In a long article in Yediot Ahronot (February 15, 1991) former Director General of the Foreign Ministry (under Peres) Abraham Tamir recounts in detail his numerous amicable encounters with some top-level Iraqi politicians, including Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, and how these encounters continued until early spring 1990. There is no evidence as yet to determine whether, after a decade of friendly contacts with Israel, Saddam Hussein's policies really turned anti-Israeli in March 1990, or whether the friendly contacts had been intentional deception all along. I lean towards the former hypothesis. But, if Saddam Hussein wanted to deceive Israel, he fully succeeded. Israeli Intelligence was assessing Iraqi intentions, while being deceived by this friendliness to the point of supposing that it could afford to neglect gathering evidence about Iraq. The result is that it remains ignorant of Iraq (and not only of that country) even now. Instead, the priority for gathering intelligence, of however inferior a quality, has been assigned to Syria.

The dismal failure of the Israeli Intelligence, which I have been personally detecting for a long time, has been proven here beyond the shadow of doubt, with the help of the most highly reliable Israeli sources. The facts presented in this report, however, require an explanation, however tentative. How could the Israeli Intelligence remain so abysmally ignorant for so long? The question of how such an incompetent body could manage to retain a high reputation can safely be left aside. But incompetence itself begs for explanations which in Israel already have begun to find their way into print. The primary reason cited is the entrenched anti-Arab, racist preconceptions, to the best of my knowledge not encountered to like degree in intelligence services of any other country. The secondary reason, also cited, is anti-intellectualism, entrenched in the subculture of all the elite units of the Israeli army, from which all its commanders are routinely recruited. The third reason cited is, paradoxically, Zionist theology, which is irrational enough to occasionally defeat the best efforts to interpret data rationally. Let me begin with the second and third points, to free myself for a more extended discussion of the first.

A diagnosis concordant with the allegations made here appears in the above-mentioned article by Sima Kadmon, which extensively quotes the claims made by a veteran military-intelligence officer, subsequently an Israeli military attache in Washington, Colonel (reserves) Yoel Ben-Porat, one of those few Israeli Intelligence insiders who correctly predicted the war of 1973. Ben-Porat recounts the grounds on which his descriptive and analytical substantiation of that prediction was rejected by the then-commander of military intelligence, General Elie Zeeira. Zeeira told him that, as one neither born nor educated in Palestine, Ben-Porat must have retained a "diaspora mentality" predisposing him to hysteria. Such ad-personam Zionistic arguments, perceived as weighty enough to decide matters of substance, are, as I have often experienced personally, very much a part of Israeli elite culture. Next, Ben-Porat lists all the commanders of Israeli military intelligence, in order to conclude that "in the past 30 years, after General Herzog [now the President of the state] retired, none of the military intelligence commanders, with one single exception, have come from the ranks of the Intelligence itself." All have been "commando-trained generals," with the peculiar outlook which that training shapes. By the way, the exception noted by Ben-Porat, General Yehoshua Saguy, now a Likud Knesset member of low repute, who really "rose from the [Intelligence] ranks," was probably the worst of the lot. He was officially named as responsible for the intelligence debacle during the invasion of Lebanon. As for Herzog, he was dishonorably discharged in 1958 by Ben-Gurion after giving orders for a national mobilization of reservists without proper authorization. As a consequence, he found it advisable to exile himself to New York for quite a while.

Examples abound of deceit and incompetence within the ranks of Israeli Intelligence. Ben-Porat recounts the case of the above-mentioned Dr. Yavetz, who has a whole history of abject failures behind him. The history began back in 1973, but Dr. Yavetz has always found ways to rise in rank afterwards, because he was a master in adapting himself to the commando mind-set of his superiors.

Let us proceed to the point listed above as first and crucial: the performance flaws of Israeli Intelligence attributable to its prejudices against the Arabs. Ben-Porat discloses that of all commanders of the military intelligence, only one, General [now professor] Yehoshafat Harkabi, had a good command of Arabic, in addition to genuinely professional knowledge of Arab civilization and history, and of Islam. Knowledge of the Arabic language is common among the military intelligence officers, but its quality is described by BenPorat, as "wanting." It is usually limited to what is needed for a task at hand. In the other branches of Israeli intelligence the situation is no different. To cite just one example, the career of Yitzhak Shamir. According to his semi-official biography, he served for several years as a high-level Mossad agent, rising to the directorship of its Paris office. In that capacity he was responsible for Mossad operations in a number of Arab countries, which he visited. Still, his knowledge of the Arabic language and civilization remains at the lowest level, while his knowledge of the French language and civilization is reliable. Ignorance of the Arabs and their culture which in the Israeli intelligence forms a pattern, can be regarded as intentional, dictated by the racist superstitions of its officers. Ben-Porat describes how astonished the Israeli experts were by "the missiles falling on Tel Aviv and destroying houses there," and explains their astonishment by

a mental and intellectual barrier in our brains which, in advance, precludes the possibility that Arabs may have any technological achievements. How can it be that the same Arabs whom the Bible describes as doomed to remain idiots until the end of time, can launch missiles which succeed in hitting Tel Aviv? Shouldn't it be obvious that we alone are capable of mastering the missiles?

The biblical reference is to the verse about Ishmael, "And he will be a wild man" (Genesis 16:12). The verse is routinely used by the Israeli army rabbis to "explain" the allegedly "unchangeable nature" of the Arabs.

Ben-Porat compares the recent astonishment of Israeli Intelligence at the degree of Iraqi military might with their astonishment at the successes of the Arab armies in 1973, the achievements of the intifada and other instances in which the Arabs have proven capable of accomplishing something. His conclusion is that "the [Israeli] Intelligence and Security Establishments are arrogant enough to take it for granted that the Arabs cannot have any achievements, that they are organically incapable of planning, designing and implementing the designs. Such preconceptions about the Arabs are entrenched very deeply in their minds." Whenever evidence to the contrary appears, all the Israeli Intelligence officers can do is either express their surprise or use lame excuses such as those quoted above. "This is the root of the problem, whose resolution requires a lot of thinking in depth," concludes Ben-Porat. Indeed, he is perfectly correct. The problems of Israel, in every walk of life, can be traced to the all-pervasive racism, whether generalized anti-Gentile racism or particularized anti-Arab racism, both of which dominate its society.

The two crucial features of Israeli policies of the past, namely the nuclear threats and the character of its Intelligence, are both based on racist policies which are, contrary to the common assumption prevailing in the United States, much more prominent in Labor than in Likud. We may only hope that the experience the Israeli establishment went through during the recent war will be traumatic enough to give rise belatedly to some in-depth thinking about Israeli racism.

Israel Shahak