Summary
Israel’s twenty-first-century strategy against hostile non-state groups, as Inbar and Shamir present it in their 2014 article of that name: on the assumption that Israel is in a protracted intractable conflict, force is used not to attain impossible political goals but as a patient strategy of attrition to debilitate and periodically destroy enemy capabilities, achieving only temporary, cumulative deterrence and periods of quiet along Israel’s borders (‘Mowing the Grass’: Israel’s Strategy for Protracted Intractable Conflict, PDF p.3, p.6).
Details
- The phrase is IDF parlance, used by officers usually in a tactical sense; it appears in no IDF doctrinal document, which the authors call typical of an IDF culture allowing informal operational and doctrinal concepts (PDF p.5, note 12).
- Its premise is that the motivation of radical ideological non-state actors cannot be affected in the short run, so Israel “just ‘mows the grass’ of the enemy capabilities, with no ambition to solve the conflict”, and the authors characterise it as an anti-Muqawama strategy mirroring, ironically, the patient Arab Muqawama strategy it answers (PDF p.8, p.11).
- Between large rounds its instruments are air responses where Israel has escalation dominance, targeted killing of scarce skilled personnel, interdiction of advanced weaponry, covert operations and preventive arrests; only after a series of aggressions does the IDF mount a large-scale operation, whose main objective is to cripple severely the enemy’s military capabilities, with ground invasion reserved for grave provocations (PDF p.11-13).
- Rearmament is expected, which is what necessitates continuing to mow; the authors demonstrate the mode through Operation Defensive Shield (2002), the Second Lebanon War (2006), Operation Cast Lead (2008-09) and Operation Pillar of Defense (2012), and conclude it achieves the temporary quiet that is Israel’s main goal (PDF p.13, p.15, p.25).
- The phrase is used differently by the editors of From the River to the Sea, who write of eighteen years of blockade during which Israel regularly bombed a population held behind barbed wire as mowing the grass, in Israeli military parlance (From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, lines 203-243).
Related pages
‘Mowing the Grass’: Israel’s Strategy for Protracted Intractable Conflict, Muqawama, Cumulative Deterrence, Deterrence, Dahiyeh Doctrine, Disproportionate Force