Weekly Commentary: Caveat emptor: policy recommendations of Israeli security
officials
Dr. Aaron Lerner Date: 5 December 2013

It is important to put the policy recommendations of Israeli security
officials - and former officials - in context.

Security officials may have a good handle on the gizmos our various enemies
now possess and even what they have in the pipeline for future deployment.
They may even have an appreciation of their training and operations
doctrines and methodologies.

But when it comes to policy recommendations it is profoundly more
complicated than just the gizmos and the forces operating them as policy has
to also anticipate what the enemy decision makers will ultimately opt to do
with their gizmos and forces.

And that's where an ideological orientation can seriously distort the
analysis.

For example, back in 2000 Israel's Senior Negotiator with Syria, Major
General (Res.) Uri Saguy, who had served in the past as head of Military
Intelligence, took the position that "peace will not eliminate the strategic
threats to Israel, but will prevent their materialization". Saguy believed
that since Assad’s goal was to recover the Golan that once he had that Syria
would not attack Israel. That belief served as the basis for his support for
grossly unworkable security arrangements in the North as part of a plan to
leave the Golan.

Saguy is in very good company. Most of the top people in Israel's various
security and defense systems share a similar ideologically driven optimism
regarding the efficacy of "land for piece of paper".

Time and again over the last two decades the embarrassingly naive analysis
of Israel's security people led them to advocate reckless plans and
arrangements - with many of those actually implemented literally blowing up
in our faces.

It would be one thing if these security experts warned that the efficacy of
their recommendations hinged on the assumption that the Arabs will eternally
honor a final agreement.

But they don't.

Instead they contend that the arrangements they advocate are robust and
insure Israel's survival and wellbeing. Period.

Caveat emptor

Dr. Aaron Lerner, Director IMRA (Independent Media Review & Analysis)
(Mail POB 982 Kfar Sava)
Tel 972-9-7604719/Fax 972-3-7255730
INTERNET ADDRESS: imra@netvision.net.il
Website: http://www.imra.org.il