Summary
Professor of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University and Director of the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies, and co-author, with Eitan Shamir, of “‘Mowing the Grass’: Israel’s Strategy for Protracted Intractable Conflict” (Journal of Strategic Studies, 2014), which argues Israel’s twenty-first-century use of force against non-state groups is a strategy of attrition aimed at enemy capabilities, not at impossible political goals (‘Mowing the Grass’: Israel’s Strategy for Protracted Intractable Conflict, PDF p.3, p.25).
Details
- The contributor note gives his posts as Professor of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University and Director of the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies (PDF p.25).
- Earlier works of his cited in the article include, with Stuart A. Cohen, ‘A Taxonomy of Israel’s Use of Military Force’, Comparative Strategy (April 1991); ‘Israel’s Small War: The Military Response to the Intifada’, Armed Forces & Society 18/1 (1991); ‘Israel’s Strategic Environment in the 1990s’, Journal of Strategic Studies 25/1 (2002); and ‘How Israel Bungled the Second Lebanon War’, Middle East Quarterly 19/3 (2007), cited both for the role of casualty fear in Israel’s responses and in the debate over the IDF’s poor performance in 2006 (PDF p.3, p.11-12, p.19, bibliography PDF p.26-27).
- His argument in the article is that critics misunderstand Israel’s rationale: realising it cannot affect radical non-state actors’ motivation in the short run, Israel “just ‘mows the grass’ of the enemy capabilities, with no ambition to solve the conflict” (PDF p.8).
Related pages
‘Mowing the Grass’: Israel’s Strategy for Protracted Intractable Conflict, Eitan Shamir, Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, Mowing the Grass