The accursed doctrine that led to the Israeli army’s debacle against Islamic terrorism in 2006

The trap of the walls

Israel structured its combat system at the beginning of the century according to the concepts implemented by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The first use was in 2002 in an attack on the Palestinian city of Nablus. At the time, Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi, who led the troops responsible for the attack, defined it as a kind of “reverse geometry.” that urban syntax was reorganized through a series of microtactic actions. In the officer’s words, his men had to move through cities by creating “tunnels on the surface” and reinterpreting buildings, streets and alleys. They had to stop submitting to the authority of spatial boundaries to create their own. Nearly nothing.

This is how Eyal Weizman summarizes it in his dossier “Gaza: Walking through walls” after consulting the Hebrew Country’s Officers’ Manual and interviewing several Israel Defense Forces (IDF) commanders. But don’t be tense, because all this talk corresponds to such a simple idea as avoiding conflict points that the enemy uses to lay ambushes. From doors to windows through alleys. No more and no less. This maxim of “walking through walls,” as the Jewish army calls it, was declared in 2004 by Kochavi himself, then commander of the paratrooper brigade, one of the contingent’s hardest-hit shock troops.

In his words, the space that is focused on during war can often be thought of beyond the traditional: “We interpret the alley as a place through which one is not allowed to go, the door as a place through which one must pass forbidden.”, the window as a place through which one is not allowed to look because there is a weapon waiting for us in the alley and a bomb trap behind the doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical way, and I do not want to obey this interpretation or fall into his traps. Not only do I not want to fall into their traps. I want to surprise you! This is the essence of war. I have to win”.

To achieve this long-awaited victory, the IDF knew that their men would have to “emerge from an unexpected place.” And so they had to “opt for the method of walking through walls,” like “a worm eating its way, appearing in certain places and then disappearing.” This surprise, this unexplained method of advance, would allow the soldiers to “come from behind and meet the enemy” who was waiting for them hidden in a corner or had placed explosive devices behind a window or in the middle of an intersection. . “I told my troops: If you are used to moving on streets and sidewalks, forget it! “From now on we will all walk through walls!” adds the official.

One of the countless points of this new type of warfare was the advance into enemy territory like a kind of “swarm of bees”. Except that there are no specific targets – enemy command posts, missile silos… – to avoid key resistance points. According to the officer, this approach aimed to abandon old concepts such as “advance in strict lines and in linear formation – regiments, battalions…” and opt for more diffuse, distributed and flexible battle orders. “We have to adapt to the enemy’s stealth capability… Swarming, as I understand it, is the simultaneous arrival at a target of a large number of nodes, ideally from 360 degrees… which then divide and disperse again,” he added.

Egregious failures

José Antonio Peñas, author of “Tank. A century of history‘ (Pinolia) has examined this form of combat for one of the many military essays and articles he has behind him. “Since the 1950s, Israel had always won the wars in which it took part. “Amidst this drunkenness of victory, they thought that conflicts would become more asymmetrical as the years went by and that it was best to reverse the classical concepts to defeat the enemy,” he claims. Several military institutes and think tanks such as the Operational Theory Research Institute (founded in 1996) as well as personalities such as Shimon Naveh – retired brigadier general – and Kovachi himself were responsible for researching the new tactics.

“It’s actually not clear how they came up with this and who came up with these new ideas. My conclusion is that they have been overrun by postmodernism. They were convinced that they were the only ones who understood the future war and that they would easily defeat the enemies around them,” the expert adds. Peñas criticizes not only this approach to combat, but also the terminology associated with it. “In practice, it was a lot of theory, topped with complex words that gave the whole thing the necessary packaging.” They said that the battlefield should not be a “geographical reality” but a “fluid and plastic intellectual concept.” They spoke of an advance like “shoals” or “schools of fish”, of an “inverted geometry”…,” he claims.

According to Peñas, the Israelis first tried this tactic in Nablus, a city that “could not offer any resistance,” and came to believe that they had reached the pinnacle of the art of war. They couldn’t have made a worse mistake. They confidently implemented their new ideas in the invasion of southern Lebanon against Hezbollah in July 2006. And they did it without taking into account that the enemy had been preparing for years. “The militia had fought against and driven out Israel in 1999. Since then, they have devoted themselves to planning their defenses, training their soldiers and building tunnels…” he claims. This was a death trap. During the 34 days that the conflict lasted, the IDF tried to use its “reverse geometry” and failed miserably.

“Israeli commanders said that their goal was not to physically defeat the enemy, but rather to make it clear to them that they were defeated and then destroy them, and that they wanted to ‘swarm’ and surprise the Hezbollah militiamen,” explains Peñas. The problem is that this entire circus was run by “officers and commanders from Tel Aviv with no presence on the ground” and that the troops advanced “without it being clear how, without mechanized support and without concrete tactical objectives.” The result was that “they began to suffer many casualties” because they were playing a game for which the enemy was more than prepared. They used new, guerrilla-related ideas to destroy an opponent with decades of experience in the so-called “guerrilla.”war dirty’. And it was a debacle.

The most painful example occurred in a small village, whose collapse, according to the IDF, would take no more than a few hours. “The elite forces that attacked it were in a hornet’s nest. They expected little resistance and half of a squadron fell in the early stages. They fired at them from all sides and lacked support and order of battle,” the Spanish expert added. The chaos forced the Jews to use Merkava IV tanks as ambulances, as this was the only vehicle available to them that could withstand this amount of fire. “Hezbollah withdrew, not because it was defeated, but because it exhausted this point of defense and moved on to the next,” he concludes.

The 2006 war was a debacle for the IDF. Initially, it cost 121 dead and one thousand and a half injured in a country with a very low population density. At the same time, however, he pointed out that this form of combat doctrine was not suitable for a conflict against militiamen. “All the officers and thinkers who had produced these tactical ideas were suddenly fired or promoted to get them out of the way. “It was the first time they accepted that they had made a mistake,” says the author. However, at the moment he cannot be sure that Israel has completely rejected the idea of ​​“walking through walls”. In fact, Weizman’s dossier confirms that, at least for now, it is difficult to know how the Jewish soldiers on the ground will behave.

For the Spaniard it is clear that the maxim of the Jewish country remains the same as when it was founded in 1948: use violence. And that usually ends in disaster: “Carl von Clausewitz said that war is an extension of politics by other means.” The problem is that it is a very serious problem when it becomes the only politics.