2023-10-23 03:27:51
Experts warn: Israel will not encounter a regular army in Gaza, but rather a militia versed in the guerrilla system and supported by an extensive network of tunnels. The scenario hides many parallels with the conflict that faced the Jewish state in 2006 against the Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon. From the ‘casus belli’ – terrorist attacks on their territory – to the way in which the enemy will fight them. What is unknown is whether the Hebrew armies will use the strange doctrine they applied in those days – based on the ‘inverse geometry’ of the battlefield – or will have modified it after it cost them a painful defeat in that conflict.
The trap of the walls
Israel structured its combat system at the beginning of the century on the concepts implemented by philosophers Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari. The first time it was used was in 2002, during an attack on the Palestinian city of Nablus. At that time, Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi, leading the troops in charge of the assault, defined it as a kind of ‘reverse geometry’ in the that urban syntax was reorganized through a series of microtactic actions. In the officer’s words, his men had to move around the cities by creating “tunnels on the surface” and reinterpreting buildings, roads and alleys. They had to stop being subject to the authority of spatial limits to forge their own. Almost nothing.
This is how Eyal Weizman collects it in his dossier ‘Gaza: walking through walls’ after having consulted the officers’ manual of the Hebrew country and having interviewed several commanders of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). But don’t get tense, because all this talk corresponds to an idea as simple as avoiding conflict points that the enemy uses to set up ambushes. From doors to windows through alleys. No more no less. That maxim of “walking through walls,” as the Jewish army calls it, was explained in 2004 by Kochavi himself, then commander of the Parachute Brigade, one of the hardest-hit shock forces in the contingent.
In his words, the space to which the gaze is directed in war can be conceived in many ways beyond the traditional one: «We interpret the alley as a place through which it is forbidden to walk, the door as a place through which passing is forbidden, the window as a place through which it is forbidden to look because a gun awaits us in the alley and a bomb-trap awaits us 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. I just don’t want to fall into his traps. I want to surprise you! This is the essence of war. I need to win”.
To obtain that long-awaited victory, the IDF understood that its men had to “emerge from an unexpected place.” And that is why they had to opt “for the methodology of walking through walls”, like “a worm that eats its way, emerging at certain points and then disappearing.” That surprise, that way of advancing that was not specifically explained, would allow the soldiers to “come from behind and hit the enemy” who was waiting for them hidden in a corner or had placed explosive devices behind a window or in the middle of a crossroads. . «I told my troops: If until now you were used to moving on roads and sidewalks, forget it! “From now on we will all walk through walls!” adds the officer.
Among the countless points contained in this new way of waging war, the advance on enemy territory like a kind of “swarm” of bees was included. In addition to not having specific objectives – opposing command posts, missile silos… – to avoid key resistance points. According to the officer, this approach sought to abandon old concepts such as “advance in strict lines and in linear formation – regiments, battalions… -” and opt for more diffuse, dispersed and flexible battle orders. “We must adjust to the enemy’s stealth capacity… Swarming, in my understanding, 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 ‘Tanks. A century of history‘ (Pinolia), has studied this form of combat for one of the many military essays and articles that he has behind him. «Since the 1950s, Israel had always won the wars in which it had participated. In the middle of that drunkenness of victories, they considered that, as the years went by, the conflicts would be asymmetrical and that the best thing was to reverse the classic concepts to overcome the enemy,” she maintains. Several military institutes and think tanks such as the ‘Operational Theory Research Institute’ (established in 1996) and figures of the stature of Shimon Naveh – retired brigadier general – and Kovachi himself were responsible for the study of the new tactics.
«It’s actually not clear how they came up with it, nor who came up with these new ideas. My conclusion is that they were invaded 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,” adds the expert. Peñas is critical not only of this way of approaching combat, but also of the terminology that surrounds it. «In practice that was a lot of theory crowned by complex words that gave it packaging. They said that the battlefield should not be a ‘geographical reality’, but a ‘fluid and plastic intellectual concept’. They spoke of advancing like ‘swarms’ or ‘schools of fish’, of ‘inverse geometry’… », he maintains.
According to Peñas, the Israelis tried this tactic for the first time in Nablus, a town that “could not offer any resistance,” and they became convinced that they had reached the zenith of the art of war. They couldn’t have made a worse mistake. Confident, in July 2006 they applied their new ideas in the invasion of southern Lebanon against Hezbollah. And they did it without taking into account that the enemy had been preparing for years. «The militia had fought and expelled Israel in 1999. Since then they had dedicated themselves to planning their defenses, training their soldiers, creating tunnels… », he maintains. That was a death trap. Throughout the 34 days that the conflict lasted, the IDF tried to apply its ‘reverse geometry’, and it crashed miserably.
An IDF soldier throws a smoke grenade at a Hezbollah ABC bunker
“The Israeli commanders said that they were not seeking to defeat the adversary physically, but rather to make him understand that he was defeated and then crush him, and that they wanted to ‘swarm’ and surprise the Hezbollah militiamen,” explains Peñas. The problem is that this whole circus was directed by “officers and commanders from Tel Aviv with no presence on the ground” and that the troops were advancing “without being clear how, without mechanized support and without specific tactical objectives.” The result was that “they began to suffer many casualties” for playing a game for which the enemy was more than prepared. They used new ideas close to the guerrilla to crush an opponent with decades of experience in the so-called ‘war dirty’. And it was a debacle.
The most painful example occurred in a small village that, according to the IDF, would not take more than a few hours to fall. «The elite troops who attacked it found themselves in a hornet’s nest. They expected little resistance and half of a squadron fell in the early stages. They were shooting at them from all sides and they lacked support and order of battle,” adds the Spanish expert. The chaos forced the Jews to use Merkava IV tanks as ambulances, since it was the only vehicle at their disposal that could withstand that volume of fire. “Hezbollah withdrew, but not because they had been defeated, but because they exhausted that point of defense and moved on to the next,” he completes.
The 2006 war was a debacle for the IDF. To begin with, it cost 121 dead and a thousand and a half injured in a country with a very low population density. But, at the same time, he put on the table that this form of combat doctrine was not appropriate for a conflict against militiamen. «All the officers and thinkers who had given birth to those 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. Although, at the moment, he cannot say for sure that Israel has outright rejected the idea of ’walking through walls’. In fact, Weizman’s dossier confirms that, at least for the moment, it is difficult to know how the Jewish soldiers will act on the ground.
What the Spaniard is clear about is that the maxim of the Jewish country remains the same as when it was created in 1948: apply force. And that usually ends in disaster: «Carl von Clausewitz said that war is an extension of politics with other means. The problem is that, if it becomes the only policy, it represents a very serious problem.
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