Israel's National Security Towards the 21st Century

For more than 50 years now, Israel's national security conception has changed very little. Its stability derives from its overall success in meeting a variety of challenges throughout this period, and from the fact that the conditions on the basis of which it had originally been formed remained roughly the same. These factors are no longer valid. The decrease in the likelihood of an all-out conventional war, and the rise of non-conventional threats, change fundamentally the type of challenges this policy has to meet. And major changes in the structure of Israeli society, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the international system - combined with an ongoing revolution in military affairs (RMA) - create a new environment in which this policy must function. The present volume aims at describing and analyzing some of the theoretical and empirical aspects of the coming changes in Israel's national security conception. Its first two articles set these changes within a theoretical framework by: (a) presenting thenew challenges to the traditional concept of national security in the aftermath of the Cold War, and (b) discussing the sources of change in national security doctrine, primarily major discontinuities such as regime changes, defeat in war, disappearance of a major threat, and revolutionary technological breakthroughs that alter the foundations of national power. This framework is then followed by a discussion of the Israeli context of national security: the way the IDF may adapt itself to recent changes in warfare known as the revolution in military affairs, and possible strategies by which Israel can deal with the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) which replaced, since the early 1990s, the all-out conventional offensive as the main danger to Israel's national existence. The last article analyzes Israel's war objectives. It concludes that in contrast to the past, where Israel had positive objectives, in the future she is likely to seek only negative (or preventative) ones.