By: Jonathan Hill

Deterrence policy for the Israelis during the early 1950’s failed to address the fundamental issues Israel had with the Arab world. It tried to find immediate and quick solutions to major problems primarily through retaliatory strikes instead of focusing on how best to achieve a lasting peace. These reprisals can be viewed as short-term policy. Thus, rather than creating a lasting peace, Israeli deterrence policy delayed and often times exacerbated the eventual outbreaks of violence between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The policy of punitive retaliation assumes that the recipients of the retaliation will cease their attacks if the costs of pursuing violence are high enough. The fundamental fallacy of this belief is that the violence is curbed only in the short run. The strategy of retaliation played a major role in Israeli policy for years, and peace was not achieved until Israel implemented different policies.

Deterrence can be exemplified by the retaliatory policies toward Jordan and Egypt between the First Arab-Israeli War (1948) and the Suez Crisis (1956), and best understood by comparing the results. While the disproportionate cost pressed on the Jordanians forced them to capitulate in the short run, in the long run the Jordanians attacked Israel in the June 1967 War. The analogous action towards the Egyptians only heightened tensions in both the short run and long run, eventually spiraling into the Suez Crisis. Regardless of the success of deterrence policy in the short-run, the retaliatory policy was destined to fail in the long run because it did not decrease belligerency between Israel and the Arab world. A long-run perspective is one where the states do not base their actions upon short term events, but rather make strategy by taking into account long term costs. A successful long-run policy would be conducted through diplomatic channels rather than through military means. Examples include establishing peace agreements and alliances. I argue that the Israelis should have focused on long-term strategy instead of short-run fixes in order to achieve a lasting peace with its neighbors.

Cost/Benefit Analysis Towards Egypt
For a militaristic deterrence policy to succeed, Israel needed to coerce its opponents through harsh retaliations to the point where the Arab states’ would find it in their best interests’ to prevent infiltrations into Israel. According to Princeton University’s Jonathan Shimshoni, “Active deterrence of state actions would require the targeting of state objects.”   State objects include communication networks, bridges, roads, and general infrastructure. The lack of damage inflicted on Egypt’s state objects by Israel leading up to the Suez Crisis is therefore a major reason why deterrence failed against Cairo. The failure of Israel to inflict the necessary damage is due to both the geographical location of Gaza and the lack of Egyptian political interest in Gaza itself.

After the dust settled from the First Arab-Israeli War in 1948, Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip, located on the southwestern border of Israel. This location enabled some Gazans to easily infiltrate Israel, but given the geopolitical remoteness of Gaza to the Egyptians, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) could not significantly retaliate unless they crossed the entire Sinai Peninsula and hit the Egyptian heartland. To the extent that this was beyond the political and military will of Israel, the only realistic option for a retaliatory strike against Egypt was to attack Gaza. 

For Egypt, retaliatory attacks on Gaza inflicted relatively insignificant costs compared to the benefits received from infiltrations into Israeli territory. Indeed, the Palestinians living in Gaza were not given Egyptian citizenship and were considered expendable by Cairo.   This created a problem for Israel because in order to maintain a credible deterrence policy, the IDF had to increase the costs on Egypt until they were unbearable. However, attacks on Gaza did not escalate the costs to the level necessary for successful deterrence.

The infamous Gaza raid of February 1955, resulting in more than forty dead Egyptian soldiers and even more wounded, illustrates the failures of Israeli deterrence policy.   Nasser’s commitment to confront Israel became internationally publicized after the raid. Subsequently, it became known that Egypt had purchased some two-hundred tanks from the Czechs, known as the Czech Arms Deal, which signaled the beginning of the escalatory spiral towards the Sinai Crisis.   That the arms deal announcement came immediately after the Gaza raid sheds light into Nasser’s true interests in the region. A deal of this magnitude and influence is not made over night, but rather after a protracted bargaining period. This implies that the negotiations had already been well under way by the time of the February Gaza raid. Therefore, the Gaza attack provided a pretext for Nasser to escalate the conflict without appearing as the aggressor to the international community.

This shows that Nasser sought to escalate the conflict. According to historian Benny Morris, “Before the raid Egyptian policy had, with few exceptions, consistently opposed infiltration; after it… the Egyptian authorities themselves initiated terrorist infiltration for political and military reasons”. This demonstrates that any provocation by Israel to increase the costs on Egypt played right into Nasser’s hands, and the costs inflicted on Egypt did not offset the benefits Nasser received from Israel’s deterrence policy.

Cost/Benefit Analysis Towards Jordan
The Qibya raid on the West Bank in October 1953 is analogous to the Gaza raid in action but opposite in effect. In 1954, the commanding general of the Arab Legion stated, “In these attacks, men, women, and children are slaughtered indiscriminately.” This perception of the violence of Israeli actions would later impact Jordanian policy. Israel’s objective with the Qibya raid was to impose costs on the Palestinian communities living in the West Bank disproportionate to their actions to encourage a tightening of Jordanian oversight in the border areas.   This policy succeeded in Jordan because of both the West Bank’s geographic proximity to Israel and the Hashemite kingdom’s fear of revolution. Because Amman valued the West Bank, IDF attacks in this region inflicted the necessary costs for successful deterrence.

Quickly, Israeli attacks in the West Bank pushed the Hashemite rulers past the breaking point. Israel managed to create an environment where the Jordanians desired the cessation of violence more than continued resistance. Eventually, Jordan was in a position where the only way to curb Israeli attacks was to control incursions into Israel proper. Subsequently, in order to maintain domestic stability, the Hashemite kingdom had to be extremely careful to ensure the support of its significant Palestinian population. Whereas the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip were not citizens of Egypt, the Palestinians in the West Bank were citizens of Jordan. Therefore, it was in Jordan’s interests to ensure that the Israelis did not retaliate severely in the West Bank.

Recall that following al naqba (the catastrophe), more than half of the Palestinian refugees fled to Jordan. According to U.N. figures, in 1954 over 450,000 Palestinian refugees lived in Jordan – nearly one third of the population at the time.   If the retaliatory attacks had continued, then the Palestinian population would likely have overthrown the Jordanian government. Consequently, it was in the Jordanian government’s best interests not to risk escalation with Israel, to cease infiltrations into Israeli territory, and to maintain the status quo.   Following the assassination of King Abdullah in 1951, Israel presented Jordan with “proposals to curb infiltration, which was also in [Jordan’s] interest.” Therefore, the Israeli deterrence policy succeeded momentarily in Jordan because it was in Jordanian interests to end infiltration into Israel.

Insofar as these short-term successes brought about a ceasefire rather than a comprehensive peace, they were only bittersweet. During the genesis of the state of Israel, the policymakers placed too little emphasis on building a trusting relationship with their neighbors. The incompatibility of violence and confidence building is the fundamental flaw in deterrence policy. Despite the success in stalling for a very short time the incursions from Jordan into Israel, Jordan attacked Israel in the June 1967 War. This shows that even an example of ‘successful’ deterrence still failed to create a lasting peace. 

Egyptian Domestic Pressures/Interests
Egyptian domestic politics never presented Israel with the opportunity for successful deterrence. There are three reasons for this: (1) Nasser needed belligerency with Israel to maintain support at home; (2) Nasser’s power base was the military; and (3) Nasser vied for regional dominance.  Following the First Arab-Israeli War of 1948, the Egyptian people started a revolution to oust King Farouk and install a government with leaders that would oppose Israel and restore their national pride. After Nasser gained control of the Revolutionary Command Council in 1954, he had to adopt a belligerent policy toward Israel in order to maintain the support of his followers. Nasser had painted himself as an Arab leader in the eyes of the Egyptian people. One necessary corollary to that image is that he resisted Israel unconditionally. In fact, Egyptian peace negotiators once ‘candidly’ explained to the Israelis that they wouldn’t return stolen property only so as not to appear too cooperative with the ‘Zionists’. It follows that Nasser would have sought every opportunity to create a state of belligerency with Israel without open war – which was the exact situation between Israel and Egypt between 1948 and 1956. This policy not only gained him the support of the hoi polloi of the Egyptian population, but the military as well.

The Egyptian military supported a hard-line policy toward Israel to revenge its embarrassing defeat in 1948. Between the First Arab-Israeli War and the signing of an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty at the Camp David Accords in 1979, the Egyptian army fought Israel in four wars and supported countless raids on Israeli citizens. This pattern of action suggests that Cairo preferred military action to diplomacy. This preference was also implied by Egypt’s unwillingness to recognize Israel’s right to exist. Finally, Nasser’s own political ambitions encouraged a hostile policy towards Israel. Nasser envisioned himself as the leader of the Arab world, and to demonstrate both his resolve and leadership, he needed to resist Israel. Along with the political support Nasser received from his Arab allies, he also was personally very committed to Arab unity. Further, Nasser could unite his people by directing their grievances toward Israel.

As a result of these domestic influences, Israeli policymakers should have realized that any escalatory act would be matched – if not further escalated – so Nasser would not appear weak to the Arab world. The Gaza raid gave Nasser justification to escalate the conflict and present himself as an Arab leader and hero. Therefore, the Israeli actions actually benefited Nasser, and thus, it was in his interests to maintain a status quo of low-level belligerency with Israel. 

Israeli Domestic Pressures/Interests
Israeli interests in the region were dominated by concerns with security and development.  The two doctrines that dominated Israeli policy in the 1950’s were Moshe Sharett’s policy of accommodation and David Ben-Gurion’s policy of intransigence.  According to Ben-Gurionism, “Israel stands alone in a hostile world.” The hard-line policy often involved taking drastic action in order to make a point. During the Sabha raid, for example, on November 2, 1953, a battalion sized force was used to respond to simple harassment of Israeli soldiers along the DMZ. Raids such as this worked well for the Israelis in the short-term because they stopped infiltrations along the border for a period of time. Violence resumed in the long-run, however, and the retaliatory raids did not bring Israel closer to peace agreements with its Arab neighbors.

Israeli politicians were prisoners to the hard-line policy for two reasons. First, Israeli policymakers refused to take into account the interests of the surrounding countries. Modern game theory tells us that the Israelis should have recognized that violence was in Egypt’s interests. Second, the basic nature of Israel’s democracy contributed to the hard-line policies. Inasmuch as the politicians were always running for reelection, they had to balance their desire to be reelected with the long-run interests of the state. Refusing to retaliate would be to appear weak on defense, something no Israeli politician could afford. Thus, the interests of the state became second to the interests of the individual politicians. And without the leadership and foresight present to remedy the problem, this pattern of violence continued.

Soon, deterrence became very costly for Israel. The price was amplified because in the early 1950’s, the government sought to spend more money on the development of the state of Israel and less on the military. A cessation of deterrence actions would have been in Israel’s interests if the ceasefire had been mutual. However, the Israelis could not have trusted the Arab states to just leave them alone after all of the casualties the IDF had inflicted on them. Thus, another factor that influenced Israeli deterrence was the economic cost to Israel to continually support extensive military action. It became clear to both Dayan and Ben Gurion that deterrence was too costly, which led to significant cuts in the military budget.

Egyptian/Jordanian/Israeli Long-Run Interests
The long-run goals of the three players were influential in deterrence policy as well. Nasser’s desire for power and leadership in the short-term and his dependence on belligerent relations with Israel for domestic support suggests that it was in his long-run interest to maintain malevolent relations in order to continue gaining influence in the Arab world. To solve this problem, Israel needed to focus on the long run and decrease belligerency among Arabs. Israel’s use of the military to solve nearly every problem increased hatred of it in the Arab world. Had Israel adopted policies which placed long run interests before short-run fixes, subsequent Israeli-Arab wars could have likely been avoided.

A different argument works with Jordan. Israeli policy succeeded in deterring infiltrations from Jordan in the short-run, but the Jordanians were openly hostile to Israel in 1956 and 1967. This shows that even the success Israel enjoyed vis-à-vis Jordan only worked in the short-run. Indeed, while lives had been saved in the short run, Israel did not lose enemies or gain friends in the long run . Until political leaders rose to power who favored lasting peace over immediate gain, the cycle of violence continued. Therefore, in the long run, Israeli deterrence policy failed both with Egypt and with Jordan due to the absence of a solution to the belligerent relationship between Israel and the Arab states. 

Contemporary Implications
Despite the success in the short-run of deterrence policy in some cases, punitive retaliatory strikes failed to create peace, and therefore failed in the long run. For Israel to achieve peace, a careful study of the factors affecting the long-run interests of all relevant parties is necessary. Indeed, Israel’s failed deterrence policy in the 1950’s can offer lessons for the continued violence in the region:  punitive Israeli retaliations only increase tensions with its Arab neighbors. Many other scholars agree that this kind of deterrence is fraught with logical inconsistencies. Militaristic deterrence policy is not the answer. Rather, Israel should focus on long-run initiatives through diplomatic channels to achieve a lasting peace. Until Israel and the Arab states find the political leadership to follow this idea of a sustainable peace, the present cycle of violence will continue.