Gabe Ende – Israel It’s the “Conceptzia”, Idiot!
Every political figure in Israel since the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 has severely warned of the consequences of “conseptziyot” –adherence to entrenched conceptions—in our political and military strategy. More than half a century and several wars later, however, this universally discredited phenomenon exhibits miraculous staying power.
The Agranat Commission, established shortly after the YK War, insisted upon the establishment of a National Security Council (the “Malal”) in order to structurally institutionalize critical strategic thinking at the highest level, mandating the formulation of diverse options for proposed government policies as an essential criterion. Those who have heard the commentary of Giora Eiland, a former director of Malal, have seen such thinking at its best. Since his retirement, however, Bibi has converted the position essentially into just another cabinet-level political perk.
As a result or not, the current war is replete with discredited “conceptziyot”. We were certain that Hamas, notwithstanding its jihadist character, was deterred as long as Israel prevailed upon Qatar to continue to provide it with regular financial subsidies—and that the “real Palestinian enemy” was Abu-Mazen’s moderate and ineffectual Palestinian Authority(!). More seriously, we were convinced that the only dangerous military corridor to Israel was underground and we thus wasted billions on a super-impervious and electronically sophisticated underground and undersea barrier, leaving the settlements in the “Otef” scandalously unprotected by ground and air units. The “conseptzia” was so ingrained that the officer corps of intelligence units flippantly dismissed evidence to the contrary transmitted by their rank and file. Just like in 1973…
And now we are hysterically committed to another Conseptzia: the need to indefinitely occupy and destroy significant enemy territory adjacent to our borders to prevent surprise attacks, even though the IDF is dangerously stretched beyond its proportions and the growing reality of a shift in American policy to one mandating withdrawal from these territories.
For the past fifty years, we have been moving from one “incontestable” conception to another, enabling the enemy to catch us again and again with our pants down and killing Israelis in the flower of their youth because of the intellectual and ideological rigidity of those in power and their monopoly on acceptable strategic conceptions.
Isn’t it time to put an end to this self-imposed existential danger—possibly no less critical in both the short and long range than the Iranian nuclear threat?
