Israel's Absolute and Relative Power

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Israel’s absolute power is the accumulation of Israeli military capabilities, whether in conventional military equipment or in electronics, while relative power is the comparison of its strength with the strength of the parties militarily challenging it.

Israel’s absolute military power grows with time, because it continually manufactures new combat tools, and it habitually assesses its military needs of every kind and works diligently to secure them, whether through domestic manufacturing or through the Western states, the United States especially. Since 2006, Israel has been working hard and diligently to develop defenses against the tactical military capabilities of its enemies, joining night to day in scientific research and experimentation to reinforce its confidence in itself and its army.

Since 2006, Israel has developed its space-based capabilities, enabling it to track the activities of Arab resistance in Lebanon and Palestine, and has focused primarily on developing tunnel-detection devices and on tactics for underground military activity — a new field of military activity for the Israeli army, which had traditionally arranged its affairs for waging wars above ground.

Israeli military industries are focused on developing robotic soldiers capable of confronting the enemy above and below ground, but their success in this field remains limited. Israel recently announced the formation of a new branch attached to the army, specializing in electronic warfare and social media.

Israel does not tolerate large losses within its army, and always works to spare its soldiers the risk of death; the pattern of its military training has also changed, or had new elements introduced into it — there is continuous training on how to protect civilians from the ravages of war, and other training on expelling Arab forces controlling Jewish settlements in northern and southern Palestine.

Israel also constantly works to accumulate smart weapons and electronic aircraft, and the United States has decided to supply it with strategic F-35 jets, with smart weapons arriving continuously. Accordingly, we must not underestimate Israel’s military capabilities, or its destructive capacity should it wish to wage a scorched-earth war.

The Proportionality of Power and Action

Anyone following Israeli statements and training activities realizes that Israel is no longer what it once was, and that many changes have come over Israeli positions and Israeli arrogance and bravado. This stems, at root, from the dialectical relationship linking power to words and deeds.

Power forms the cradle that determines the level of words and deeds, and the higher the level of power rises, the more self-confidence rises, and the louder the echo of the voices that ring out; and the lower the level of power falls, the lower the level of self-confidence falls, and with it the level of demands and ambitions, and the echo of the voices, if any remain, grows fainter.

The stronger a person grows, regardless of the form that strength takes, the higher his sense of pride and honor rises, and a feeling of self-respect and confidence flows within him, that he is a person of free speech and independent opinion — the opposite leads to a feeling of abasement, humiliation, and submission to the will of others, and a person’s feeling that his self-respect is shrinking, and that others are the ones deciding for him, on behalf of his own feeble self.

The strong are the ones who shape the educational environment, the ones who control the means of information transmission, such as the education system and the media, and the ones who write the law and interpret it as they please. Law is respected when it serves the interest of the strong, and ignored when it conflicts with the interest and whim of the strong; the strong are the ones who determine the camps of enemies and friends, the ones who distribute favors and largely control the interests of human beings, drawing close whomever they please and depriving whomever they wish.

This feeling of power Israel possessed up until the end of the twentieth century no longer exists, and the Zionist arrogance the Arabs grew accustomed to has receded sharply, because the pool of power in which Israel used to swim has shrunk considerably. Israel has recognized these changes, and has consequently recognized that it must not give free rein to its military displays, lest it fall into illusion and deceive its own people and the peoples who support it.

The dialectic of swimming within the balance of power now takes its place in Israeli strategic thinking, and deeds no longer precede words — rather, words have begun to loom large over the muscular environment troubling Israel.

I noticed, during my last Israeli detention, that the Israeli interrogator focused on statements in the media and on writings. Across many long years, I never heard an Israeli interrogator ask about my statements and writings, but 2014 saw a different kind of interrogation, which prompted me to tell the interrogator that Israel has become like the Arab states that pursue words and commentary. I told him this is the mark of the weak, and thank God Israel has come to suffer from a lack of self-confidence just as the Arab states do.

Factors Behind Israel’s Weakness

Israel is not, as I said, weak in absolute terms, but it has weakened relatively, and this was clear in the outcomes of the wars it waged in 2006, 2008/2009, 2012, and 2014. Israel could not achieve military accomplishments, and chose instead to kill civilians and demolish homes, because it possesses high destructive capacity — but its relative weakness stems from a number of factors, the most important of which are:

1. The emergence of Arab-Islamic organizations with a clear, strong doctrine against the occupation that defiles the land and the holy sites — organizations that raise their members on sacrifice and self-giving for the sake of God, glorifying martyrdom and martyrs, instilling zeal in the hearts of those belonging to the homeland; organizations not of a haphazard, arbitrary, or improvised character, but ones that believe in material and moral preparation and readiness.

2. Beyond committed Islamic upbringing, these organizations are keen to give their members distinctive military training, in preparation for meeting the enemy, and have made the Arab soldier a different soldier from the one we knew in the Arab armies or non-Islamic organizations.

3. The organizations’ attention to security standards designed to withhold information from the enemy. We have witnessed Arab armies and organizations wide open before the enemy’s security services, with abundant information always available to the enemy about the activities of armies and organizations, and even about their intentions.

These organizations have not reached a degree of total security purity, but their efforts toward pursuing spies and agents and monitoring the capabilities of electronic devices are ongoing, and their security conditions are continuously improving. These are organizations that watch over the security of their soldiers and the security of their members, leaving nothing to chance or amateurism.

4. The development of military tactics the Israeli army had not encountered and was not prepared for, at least in preceding years. These organizations saw that there was no way to achieve armament equal to Israeli armament in technical terms, and became certain that Israel would remain superior in both quantity and quality, and that it was necessary to develop whatever could protect Arab resistance and spoil Israel’s operations — so the resistance developed the tunnels, in order to neutralize the effectiveness of Zionist aircraft and artillery bombardment.

The resistance did not possess air-defense means, and could not possess an air force, so it devised the idea of disabling the effect of enemy aircraft by taking refuge underground, thereby managing to greatly limit the effectiveness of aircraft, and also of tank warfare, by possessing anti-armor missiles and heavy military equipment.

5. The military development pursued by the Islamic organizations, which enabled them to develop their missile capabilities and electronic devices. The Islamic organizations possess an enormous arsenal of missiles whose range has developed and whose explosive payload has developed. These missiles have contributed to generating terror across various Israeli circles, particularly civilian circles, considered Israel’s very soft underbelly.

Arab resistance has also managed to develop rifles and electronic listening devices, and to manufacture electronic aircraft capable of gathering information, and the resistance will soon have completed the manufacture of weapon-carrying aircraft. This development has compensated for the risks of cutting off routes and supplies from abroad, and cities of underground military industry have developed, beyond Israel’s reach.

Beyond the development of Arab resistance, Israel’s level has declined politically, socially, and militarily, having failed, over the past thirty years, to produce an effective political leadership with broad acceptance on the international stage. Israel has been struck by political fragmentation, and its government barely withstands internal political storms.

Israeli social fragmentation has been reflected in the political situation, and Israeli political coalitions have become extremely fragile, easily toppled.

Militarily, the Israeli soldier is no longer what he was during the state-building phase — the soldier now is flabby, fearful, his morale severely damaged, while his military upbringing has deteriorated considerably before the invasion of comfortable living and modern technology. The Israeli soldier’s level of readiness for sacrifice has fallen considerably, invaded by the various temptations of life.

The Undermining of the Security Doctrine

For the reasons above, Israel no longer wages wars as it once did — it now understands that its wars are no longer clean, and that its army meets tough resistance capable of defeating it, and Israel also understands that its traditional security doctrine no longer holds, or that some of its main pillars are no longer valid.

Israel is no longer capable of waging wars solely on enemy territory — wars now extend into the territories it has seized, and it also understands that preventive war is no longer effective, because the organizations now in place maintain high readiness, always prepared, fingers on the trigger, and it also understands that many of the organizations’ military secrets are protected, beyond its reach, and understands well that its deterrent power has declined, and that its enemies have developed a military capability that could prove deterrent, particularly if missiles reach Israeli civilians — and this is what drives Israel to remain constantly preoccupied with its military concerns, developing serious tactics and technologies, hoping this might restore its army’s old prestige and its air force’s effectiveness.

Israel sometimes threatens, Lebanon especially, but does nothing — something we never used to see from Israel before, since it used to strike before threatening. Now it threatens a great deal, and we recognize its threats now resemble the threats the Arabs once made against it in the 1950s and 1960s.

It now faces a genuine deterrent force, one that may not be capable of routing the Israeli army and liberating Arab land, but is capable, at the very least, of defeating the Israeli army should it decide to embark on a new military adventure.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “قوة إسرائيل المطلقة والنسبية” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.