FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
JERUSALEM – The bat wings of Shayetet 13, the ibis beak of Maglan. They were the first soldiers to be flown out by helicopter at dawn on Saturday morning as the alarm from Gaza reached commandos in the center of the country. These special forces (Flotilla 13 is considered at the level of the American Navy Seals) are supported in these hours by emergency groups such as Duvdevan (they inspired the TV series Fauda) and Sayeret Matkal (they served there Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the former Prime Minister Ehud Barak) , the Sayeret Golani, an elite group of the Mechanized Assault Infantry Brigade preparing for ground operations in the Gaza Strip. Among the 1,300 dead Israel has been mourning for eight days are about forty of these boys, who regret losing some of its best-trained soldiers.
When David Ben-Gurion ordered the creation of the Israel Defense Forces on May 26, 1948 – the acronym in Hebrew is Tsahal – the newborn nation was already fighting in the first of many wars, a consequence of the onslaught of Arab countries following the Declaration of Independence. Ben-Gurion immediately imagined the “people’s army,” citizens in arms defending their families and their country, as if every battle were an existential question: and those of 81 years ago certainly are, the prime minister’s advisers warned him The chances of survival are 50/50.
All in camouflage
Since then, service in the army, navy and air force remains compulsory for men and women (from 24 to 34 months), even if the feeling of relative security (shattered on Saturday) and the fact that the Arab Israelis and the ultra- Israelis Orthodox who do not participate in compulsory military service have reduced the proportion of conscripts over the decades, falling to 64 percent in recent years, while the number of Israelis willing to sacrifice work and family for a month of training per year has increased Leaving aside the year, it has also declined. Everything has changed. The number of reservists called up or put on alert by the General Staff is already 300,000.
Herzi Halevi, the current commander, inherited the development of strategic doctrine from his predecessors. The huge budget (almost $25 billion) was allocated for technological modernization by Benny Gantz, chief of staff during the two wars against Hamas in 2014 and now in the limited war cabinet: “The goal of these changes is to achieve a smaller, but more “To create a lethal force capable of countering unconventional enemies in complex environments and on multiple fronts.”
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His successor, Gadi Eisenkot, who now sits with him as an observer on the War Council, outlines a plan to reduce the number of 45,000 professional officers; release tens of thousands of less-trained reservists; Eliminate the dustiest tank brigades (some still used the old Pattons from the 1960s). “At the same time – writes Amos Harel, an Israeli military analyst in Foreign Affairs magazine – Eisenkot recognizes that high-tech superiority may not be enough to defeat an unconventional opponent. That’s why he decides to update the structure of the ground forces and form a new commando brigade.” In fact, he realizes that Hamas from Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon can now move paramilitary armies.
Ready for guerrilla warfare
When he talks about war, Aviv Kochavi, while studying at the military academy, philosophizes between quotes from Michel Foucault and Deleuze-Guattari about the thousand plans that one has to face that become battle plans: “This space is nothing other than that Result of your interpretation.” . So I asked myself: How do I interpret an alley? An urban planner would say it’s a space for walking. I explained to my soldiers that it was a place where walking was forbidden. A door? Don’t pass it by. A window? No see through. The enemy sees space in the traditional way and I don’t want to fall into his traps: the explosives on the door, the sniper behind the window. As commander of the Southern Division, he was the last to close the gates and leave Gaza behind, or so then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon hoped when he ordered the withdrawal from Gaza. As the penultimate chief of staff, he tried to convey to the soldiers the lessons of May 1968, the idea of becoming a guerrilla to fight against an urban guerrilla.