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PDF FormatDespite these serious flaws, Hollow Land is more than just another instance of anti-Zionist propaganda (though readers who assume otherwise may be forgiven). It also contains a good deal of interesting and thought-provoking insights, many of which are contained in a chapter that discusses the combat tactics adopted by the IDF during Operation Defensive Shield and the Second Lebanon War. This chapter was slated to be published as an essay in the Israeli journal Theory and Criticism, but its publication was prevented on account of the protests of one of the chapter’s protagonists, Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi, who threatened a lawsuit for defamation, as well as by subsequent disputes between Weizman and the journal’s editors. The text was eventually published in 2008 by the radical-left Israeli journal Mitaam (“Mouthpiece”).
Here, Weizman claims that the “low-intensity warfare” tactics developed by the IDF have been greatly influenced by post-modern theoreticians. In the 1990s, the Israeli army established several research bodies tasked with formulating a new kind of warfare, the most prominent of them being the Operational Theory Research Institute (otri). According to Weizman, this group created a new military language based on complex theoretical concepts. Brigadier General Shimon Naveh, one of the institute’s founders, boasted in an interview with Weizman that his ideas were inspired by, among others, the writings of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, especially their collaborative work Mille plateaux (“A Thousand Plateaus”),which was published in 1980. Deleuze and Guattari, who would have rolled over in their graves if they knew their theory was being used by the Israeli army in a campaign against the Palestinians, outlined an extremely complex system of thought that criticized social and psychological structures aspiring to stability, hierarchy, and order. Instead, they proposed the ideal of branched-out, anarchic systems that allow for an uninterrupted and almost unlimited “flow.” The influence of this approach is obvious in Naveh’s interview with Weizman:
In the IDF we now often use the term “to smooth out a space” when we want to refer to operation in a space in such a manner that borders do not affect us…. Rather than contain and organize our forces according to existing borders, we want to move through them.
The resulting tactic of “walking through walls” was tried, with great success, in an IDF operation in the Nablus casbah (“old quarter”) during Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002. In order to take out Palestinian terrorists dug in among booby-trapped buildings and streets, the IDF used what Kochavi, then commander of the paratroopers’ brigade, called “inverse geometry.” Weizman recounts,
Soldiers avoided using the streets, roads, alleys, and courtyards that define the logic of movement through the city, as well as external doors, internal stairwells, and windows that constitute the order of buildings; rather, they were punching holes through party walls, ceilings and floors, and moving across them through 100-meter-long pathways of domestic interior hollowed out of the dense and contiguous city fabric.
The soldiers’ movements through the casbah did not conform to linear military conventions. Rather, they were based on the concept of “swarming,” or military operations in which autonomous or semi-autonomous units of action attack an enemy from different directions and then regroup. The same tactic was employed in the IDF raid on the Balata refugee camp, just weeks before Operation Defensive Shield. Kochavi’s orders to his troops stated, in part,
We completely isolate the camp in daylight, creating the impression of a forthcoming systematic siege operation… [and then] apply a fractal maneuver, swarming simultaneously from every direction and through various dimensions of the enclave.… Our movement through the buildings pushes [the insurgents] into the streets and alleys, where we hunt them down.
This “non linear” approach garnered impressive tactical success in refugee camps. For example, in an IDF operation in the Nablus casbah, a particularly treacherous urban area, eighty Palestinians were killed, the majority of whom were terrorists, and only one IDF soldier, who was hit by friendly fire.
Weizman, of course, is unmoved by these tactics’ success—indeed, he hardly considers them a success at all. He quotes human rights organizations which determined that “dozens of Palestinian civilians died during the attacks,” and does not bother to mention that most of the dead were not killed in Nablus at all, but in the battle of Jenin, where the swarming method wasn’t widely used. Furthermore, he cites testimonies of Palestinian families that experienced the tactic firsthand, as holes were blasted in the walls of their apartments from which Israeli soldiers emerged. He declares that the “unexpected penetration of war into the private domain of the home has been experienced by civilians in Palestine… as the most profound form of trauma and humiliation.” The trouble with Weizman’s moral outrage in this case is that both the material and emotional damage described here pale in comparison to the massive destruction typical of warfare in heavily populated urban areas. Empirically speaking, the harm caused by the IDF’s “swarm” operations in the Palestinian refugee camps simply do not come anywhere near the degree of carnage exacted by the Russians in the Chechen capital of Grozny, or the damage inflicted by the Americans on both Mogadishu and Fallujah, to take just a few recent examples.
Unfortunately, the tactics that proved so effective during Operation Defensive Shield failed to meet the challenge posed by the Second Lebanon War. Weizman sardonically points out that the two commanders most prominently identified with the failure to prevent the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit and the blunders in the Second Lebanon War of 2006 are the same otri “whiz kids” who orchestrated the raids on Balata and Nablus in 2002, brigadier generals Kochavi and Gal Hirsch, who was at the time the joint operations/staff officer of the Israeli central command. The latter, who commanded the Galilee division during the war, issued the now-infamous order to take the Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil by using “a simultaneous, multidimensional swarm pouncing”—jargon that was roundly (if not completely fairly) mocked after the war. The Wynograd Commission’s report, for instance, which examined the shortcomings of the Israeli performance during the war, dryly stated, “It would have been better had his orders been given, in their entirety, in a language understood by all.”
Why did the “swarm” approach that had worked so well in Nablus fail so utterly in Lebanon? Weizman has a ready explanation: During the Intifada, “the occupation forces” were attacking “poorly armed Palestinian guerillas” and “frightened civilians.” Hezbollah, by contrast, was a highly organized opponent smart enough to use the IDF’s swarming techniques to its own advantage. To be sure, such speculations were popular both during and after the war, but it is doubtful that they provide a sufficient explanation—after all, most direct engagement between the sides ended with Hezbollah’s combatants retreating, and in Jenin, the IDF suffered more killed than in the famous battle of Bint Jbeil. Moreover, the claim that the hypertheoretical approach endorsed by otri caused confusion among the IDF’s lower ranks is also unsatisfactory, though it does contain more than a grain of truth. Far more likely is that this type of thinking became harmful only as it moved up the ranks, to the IDF high command. One must not forget that during the operations in Balata and Nablus, Shimon Naveh’s post-modern philosophy and terminology served a well-defined and limited purpose. In Lebanon, however, confusion reigned: Soldiers and officers received contradictory orders, the logic of which was not at all apparent. In short, when the complicated theory was subordinated to simple military logic, it got real results; when it replaced this logic, it proved useless. Kochavi once called the methods used in Nablus an “organized mess.” Unfortunately, in the Second Lebanon War, the mess overwhelmed the organization.
