FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
JERUSALEM — The bat wings of the Shayetet 13, the Ibis beak of the Maglan. They are the first soldiers to be airlifted by helicopters at dawn on Saturday morning, when the alarm from Gaza reaches the commands in the center of the country. These special forces units (Flotilla 13 is considered at the level of the American Navy Seals) are supported in those hours by emergency groups such as the Duvdevan (it inspired the TV series Fauda), the Sayeret Matkal (they served the prime minister there Benjamin Netanyahu and former Prime Minister Ehud Barak), the Sayeret Golani, an elite group from the mechanized assault infantry brigade preparing for the ground operation inside the Strip. Among the 1,300 dead that Israel has been mourning for eight days, there are also around forty of these boys, the dismay of having lost some of the best trained soldiers.
When on May 26, 1948, David Ben-Gurion ordered the creation of the Israeli Defense Forces – the acronym in Hebrew is Tsahal – the newborn nation was already fighting the first of many wars, a consequence of the attack by the Arab countries after the declaration of independence. Ben-Gurion immediately imagined it as “the people’s army”, citizens in arms who defend their families and their lands, as if every battle were an existential question: and those of 81 years ago certainly are, the The prime minister’s advisors still warned him, the chances of winning to survive are 50 to 50.
All in camouflage
Since then, service in the Army, Navy and Air Force remains compulsory for men and women (from 24 to 34 months), even if the feeling of relative security (shattered on Saturday) and the fact that the Arab-Israelis and the ultra-Orthodox who do not participate in the draft have eroded the percentage of conscripts over the decades, in recent years it has fallen to 64 percent, while the number of Israelis willing to leave work and family aside for a month of training a year has also decreased. Everything changed. The reservists summoned or put on alert by the General Staff are already 300 thousand.
Herzi Halevi, the current commander, inherited the evolution of the strategic doctrine from his predecessors. The huge budget (almost 25 billion dollars) was directed towards technological modernization by Benny Gantz, chief of staff during the two wars against Hamas in 2014 and now in the limited war cabinet: «The objective of these changes is to create a smaller but more lethal force, capable of facing unconventional enemies in complex environments and on multiple fronts.”
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Successor Gadi Eisenkot, who now sits with him as an observer in the war council, outlines a plan to reduce the number of 45 thousand career officers; release tens of thousands of less trained reservists; eliminate the dustiest tank brigades (some were still using the old Pattons from the 1960s). «At the same time – writes Amos Harel, an Israeli military analyst, in the magazine Foreign Affairs – Eisenkot recognizes that hi-tech superiority cannot be sufficient to defeat an unconventional adversary. So he decides to update the structure of the ground troops and forms a new commando brigade.” In fact he realizes that Hamas from Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon can now move paramilitary armies.
Ready for guerrilla warfare
When he talks about war, Aviv Kochavi philosophizes, as he studied at the military academy, between quotes from Michel Foucault and Deleuze-Guattari, the Thousand Plans to face become the battle plans: «This room is nothing other than the result of your interpretation. So I asked myself: how do I interpret an alley? An urban planner would say it’s a space to walk. I explained to my soldiers that it was a space where walking is prohibited. A door? Don’t go past it. A window? No looking through it. The enemy sees space in a traditional way and I don’t want to fall into his traps: the explosive on the door, the sniper behind the window.” As commander of the Southern Division he was the last to close the gates, to leave Gaza behind, or so the then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon hoped when he ordered the withdrawal from the Strip. As the penultimate chief of staff he tried to instill in the soldiers those lessons from May ’68, the idea of becoming a guerrilla to fight an urban guerrilla.
2023-10-15 05:10:07
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