On 10 October 2023, three days after Hamas massacred civilians in southern Israel, the London New Statesman asked the veteran writer on military affairs, Edward Luttwak, whether there was a danger that the strategy the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) was pursuing «degenerates into a siege, like the kind we saw in Aleppo?» «No», he replied, «they will not target civilians. Aleppo was all about targeting civilians. This situation is nothing like Aleppo, where the Syrian government was bombing to kill people. The Israelis are only bombing to kill Hamas. They are bombing selectively. If they don’t have an actual operational target they will not bomb. In Aleppo there was no pretence.» 

Five months later, the number who have died in Gaza, widely believed to be over 30,000, may have matched the toll that was achieved in Aleppo, the most terrible episode of the worst recent civil war, over four years. The International Court of Justice, using the words of the Genocide Convention, has warned Israel to stop killing civilians and not to inflict on the Palestinians «conditions of life calculated to bring about [their] physical destruction». With starvation and disease rapidly encroaching, many believe that is precisely where Israel’s campaign has already led.

The Statesman was interviewing the writer about this new book on «lessons from the Israel Defence Forces», co-authored with Eitan Shamir, who directs the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, Tel Aviv. Luttwak’s view of Gaza has barely evolved in the intervening months: his press articles boast of Israel’s double success in physically destroying Hamas and keeping its own casualties low. Of the deaths and suffering of innocent civilians, many of them children, there is little mention, even in his voluminous Twitter feed: «Yes civilians but not innocent: as with WWII Germans who served the Nazis, they serve Hamas», he opined on 22 January. This is, of course, the same rationale that the Islamist organisation used to justify its own slaughter of kibbutzniks and festival-goers last October. Luttwak gets angry about the media’s acceptance of Gazans’ refugee status, but not the suffering Israel has caused them.

There is hardly a hint of these issues in Luttwak and Shamir’s book, although after the Gaza wars of 2008-9, 2012, 2014 and 2021 they are hardly new. The study’s theme is that the Israeli military possesses a determinedly «innovatory» spirit, as manifested in its organisation and technology. Although the volume is mercifully free of the hackneyed claims that the IDF is the world’s «most moral military» and Israel itself the region’s «only democracy», it is relentlessly upbeat about the institutional, technological, strategic and social modernity of the Israeli forces, compared to those of the USA, UK and France – all of which, it suggests, have learnt much and have more to learn from their lean Middle Eastern ally.

Moreover, the IDF, Luttwak and Shamir argue, is unusually open to novel forms of military practice. Their history of its engagement with military doctrine, from its origins in the Zionist armed groups before the Second World War to later interactions with British, French, German and American traditions, leads them to the radical conclusion that it has ended up without a controlling set of ideas, leaving it essentially open to – you guessed it – innovation.

The Dahiyah doctrine

Some might wonder if innovation is always quite the virtue that this account suggests. Doctrinal openness may allow practice to turn into doctrine, and this is what many commentators believe has happened: Israeli has a coherent approach, at least for situations like Gaza, the «Dahiyah doctrine». However, you will search in vain for any mention by Luttwak and Shamir of the Beirut suburb after which this is named, which the IDF pulverized in 2006, or of its main ideas, the destruction of government and civilian infrastructure alongside the deliberately «disproportionate» use of force to deter civilians as well as the armed enemy.¹

Indeed, it is striking how completely The Art of Military Innovation fails to encompass the Israeli innovations of most relevance for understanding today’s catastrophe. There is no mention of how the IDF perfected the Dahiyah approach in its bombardments of Gaza throughout the fifteen years before October 2023, the first of which was notoriously described, in a chilling euphemism which stuck, as «mowing the grass». Surprisingly, since Shamir himself was one of those who codified the «mowing» approach as a doctrinal development, this is glossed over in the book.²

Instead, Gaza figures almost exclusively as a source of Hamas attacks, and never as a place into which Israel has made destructive incursions. Likewise, despite a generous exploration of the IDF’s organisational innovations, our authors make not a single reference to its groundbreaking International Law Department (ILD), although this is the pivot around which claims that Israel’s bombing is «selective» have been developed. For more than three decades, the department’s officers have been integrated into military decision-making. Through their involvement, techniques like warnings to residents when a neighbourhood has been selected for bombing, much touted as evidence of Israel’s care for civilians, have become routine.