Hezbollah and Hamas Deterrence Equations (original) (raw)
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From War to Deterrence? Israel-Hezbollah Conflict Since 2006
For 7 years now, the border area between Israel and Lebanon has witnessed calm and stability. At first sight, this has all the appearances of a paradox. The 2006 war between the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and the Lebanese organization, Hezbollah, was followed neither by a peace agreement nor by a mere diplomatic process. Both sides prepared their forces to wage the next war and additionally have been confronted in past years to major changes in the distribution of power in the Middle East in the midst of the so-called “Arab Spring.” Against all odds, the area comprising north Israel and south Lebanon remained very quiet these last months. This monograph argues that the key to understand this paradox is the game of deterrence played by both Israel and Hezbollah. Specifically, an informal deterrence dialogue has been developing between Israel and Hezbollah and that strategic stability prevailed because of this indirect exchange. Because both sides understood that a next round would be devastating and that each could not entirely eliminate the threat of retaliation in a first wave the solution has been to bargain deterrence, meaning to deter the other party from attacking its homeland by pledging a full-scale retaliation. But to say that stability has been preserved between Israel and Hezbollah thanks to deterrence does not mean that this is a perennial state. This monograph also stresses the precariousness of such deterrence system. The stand-off between Israel and Hezbollah reached this level only through specific measures and conditions that can be reversed in the future. In particular, exogenous factors such as the unraveling of the Syrian civil war or the developments of the Iranian nuclear issue can jeopardize the equilibrium. Moreover, the study of Lebanese politics emphasizes the uncertainties related to the logic of deterrence with a nonstate actor like Hezbollah. This is why this analysis offers a cautious look at deterrence theories in the Middle East and reminds that such situations are neither naturally engendered nor eternally established.
Learning to Deter: Deterrence Failure and Success in the Israel-Hezbollah Conflict, 2006–16
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What are the sources of stable deterrence? Exploring the conºict between Israel and Hezbollah before and since the 2006 Lebanon War, this article seeks to shed light on this important question. The core argument of the article is that a principal explanation for the decade-long deterrence stability between Israel and Hezbollah is that both actors learned to adopt a deterrence strategy that met the theoretical conditions for deterrence success as laid out in the security studies literature. The article examines the parties' behavior in the lead-up to, and then in the long aftermath of, the 2006 war. And although there are likely multiple explanations for the deterrence stability along the Israeli-Lebanese border from 2006 to 2016, this article concentrates on Israel's and Hezbollah's deliberate efforts to avoid another war. This comparative examination shows that deterrence failed and succeeded as predicted by rational deterrence theory. In addition, given the vast military disparity between Israel and Hezbollah, this case enables scholars to advance their understanding of how relatively weak actors, including violent nonstate actors, can coerce and deter stronger opponents. I argue that to deter a superior opponent, a weak actor needs to convince its adversary of its ability to render its own tactical capabilities strategic and the opponent's strategic capabilities tactical. A weaker actor can thus deter a superior opponent if it can secure the ability to repeatedly hold the latter's assets at risk and minimize its own vulnerability. For the weak actor, reduced vulnerability means a credible and effective residual ability to inºict pain. While such asymmetric deterrence requires a degree of shared knowledge and military capabilities, this case highlights the role of deterrence communication. Deterrence communication does more than reºect the structural elements of capabilities and resolve. It also ampliªes the psychological impact of military capabilities, and thus plays a role in manipulating the perception of threat and shaping assessments. The mainstream policy and media debate on Hezbollah has traditionally
Deterrence by insurgents: Hezbollah’s military doctrine and capability vis-à-vis Israel
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Deterrence between states is a long-established theory in security studies, but it is rare, if not unique, that an insurgency would deter a state from attacking another country. Insurgencies in the Middle East are increasingly playing an international role, of which deterrence is only a part. This generates an interesting dynamic in which an insurgency uses non-traditional tools to dissuade an adversarial state from attacking the group or country in which it resides. Thus, the research topic is: How is Hezbollah able to deter Israel?
Israel deterring Hamas : tactical successes, strategic challenges
2016
Deterrence has played a large role in Israel’s management of its conflict with Hamas throughout three distinct periods (1987-2000, 2000-2007, 2007-present). To accomplish deterrence against an actor that has varied in form across distinct periods with different political contexts, it has utilized myriad forms of deterrence, some of which are not part of the everyday deterrence vocabulary elsewhere. After initial instability, each of the three distinct periods has so far featured extended periods of calm following Israeli tactical shifts and the establishment of new deterrence relationships. The shifts between periods themselves, however, have led relatively stable deterrence relationships previously established to collapse or become irrelevant. Explaining these shifts and illuminating the operation of deterrence during each of these periods is an integral part of the first aim of this thesis and is a primary focus of its body chapters. Israel’s myriad tactical successes have not thu...
MA Thesis, 2020
For more than thirteen years now, Hezbollah and Israel, against all the odds of asymmetric deterrence, have been maintaining a relatively stable deterrence status quo. After the deployment of Katyusha rockets in 1992, and starting in 1996, Hezbollah established with Israel a set of rules, commonly known as, the “rules of the game”, to mediate their military confrontation on the lines of deterrence. Importantly, throughout the evolution of the deterrence relationship between both parties, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah’s discourse and speeches have become a centerpiece to assess Hezbollah’s military capability, its will, and its commitment to deter Israel. After Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, and specifically during the 2006 war, Nasrallah, as the Secretary General of Hezbollah, further bolstered the party’s discourse of deterrence vis a vis Israel. In this context, this research work builds primarily on the analysis of Nasrallah’s speeches and statements that focus on deterrence, as translated exclusively in this thesis from Arabic to English, starting in 1992. This thesis evaluates an understudied case, asymmetric deterrence in the Middle East, by testing the theory of deterrence on Hezbollah and Israel. Likewise, it analyzes the translatability, thus, the efficacy of Hezbollah’s exponential growth in military capability, as reflected in Nasrallah’s and the party’s discourse of deterrence between the years 1992 and 2019.
Israeli Strategic Deterrence Doctrine and Practice
Comparative Strategy, 2020
Israel is a unique country by many criteria, but among the foremost, it is the only country whose neighbors have threatened it for most of its existence with total eradication. Even today when Israel is by far the most powerful military power in the Middle East most of its population views total destruction of the country and genocide of its population as a near-certain outcome of military defeat. Despite Israel’s military advantages, Israel’s defense doctrine views war as a the “no choice option” which carries a heavy social and economic price tag. Therefore, Israeli doctrine relies heavily on projection of deterrence. This is based on “hard” elements such as technological superiority and – not least – the perception of Israel as a non-declared nuclear power, and “soft” elements, such as a broad Israeli consensus regarding the justification and legitimacy of fighting when the Homeland is attacked. Israel’s deterrence doctrine has developed in the face of constant challenges and evolving threat environments. Events over the years have given rise to debates in the Israeli public regarding the “erosion” of Israeli deterrence. However, these debates are replete with fallacies: conflation of conventional, non-conventional (nuclear) and sub-conventional (terrorist) deterrence; the assumption that degradation of deterrence in one area necessarily degrades deterrence in another; and disregarding the linkage between Israel’s nuclear deterrence and the motivation of its enemies to engage in high levels of conventional hostilities. In addition, an understanding of Israeli deterrence doctrine must be based on the distinction between three national situation levels in the context of which deterrence must be achieved: “Routine”, “Emergency” and “War and the role of “compellence” and pre-emption of offensive capabilities of the enemy as an instrument for inducing deterrence (“pre-terrence”). Other aspects that must be addressed include the erosion of deterrence over time after a “deterrence-generating” event (in Israeli strategic parlance “refreshing deterrence”), the role of “red lines”, psychological, ideological and religious factors that are paramount in Israeli doctrine which has always embraced the concepts of “tailored deterrence” and modes of signaling. Ultimately, it is the argument of this article that Israel has succeeded in maintaining strategic deterrence vis-à-vis neighboring states. Deterrence of terrorist organizations however has been based – when it existed – mainly on tactical deterrence through day to day actions which add up to an ever-shifting perception of the object of deterrence regarding Israel’s resolve to act against it. This perception is laden with cultural and psychological overtones and passed through overlapping prisms of history, culture, language, ideological axioms, modes of transmission and reception of information on the “other” and finally, the psyche of the leadership of the party to be deterred, identification of the decision makers with the interests which are threatened and the dynamics of threat assessment within that leadership. Failure of Israeli deterrence has been mainly due to Israeli negligence in transmitting the deterrent message, filters in the enemy leadership that preclude the message from getting through, and influence of the ideological/religious/political Weltanschauung of the enemy leadership. This article attempts to provide an understanding of the evolution of Israel’s deterrence doctrine, its successes and its failures, and, mutatis mutandis, lessons that it can offer to deterrence doctrine in general and to that of the United States in particular.