Patrick Tyler, Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country—and Why They Can’t Make Peace (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 576 pp., $35.00.

AS PART of its negotiations with the United States, Israel promised to freeze “all settlement activity” (including natural growth of settlements), a pledge later enshrined in the “road map” agreed upon in 2003. Later, Israel argued that it had arranged a private deal with the Bush administration, in exchange for its withdrawal from Gaza, to allow settlement growth within the “construction line” of such settlements—in other words, to build up but not out.

Daniel C. Kurtzer, then the American ambassador to Israel, denies discussions between the United States and Israel resulted in what he called “an implementable understanding.” But I have a vivid memory of a conversation with him in his ambassadorial office in which an exasperated Kurtzer complained that he had been unable to get any satellite photos or detailed maps from the Israeli government or army showing where these construction lines were.

Yet I had just spent a few nights watching Israeli troops patrol in the occupied West Bank. The Israeli commanders showed me their maps. Every building in that area of the West Bank had been photographed by satellite, mapped and given an identification code. Presumably, that was true for the entire West Bank. Yet somehow the Israelis could not come up with maps of their own settlements for Kurtzer and their closest allies, the Americans.

Another strong memory: With much fanfare, Condoleezza Rice traveled to Israel in the context of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza to negotiate an agreement on travel and access for Palestinians and goods, not only through the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza but also between the West Bank and Gaza. She pressed hard to get a deal that included a regular bus route to be run by the Israeli military between the two parts of the future Palestinian nation. It never happened. A senior Israeli commander in Gaza told me bluntly that “we never intended to arrange such a bus.”

Another: During the 2006 war in southern Lebanon, Rice visited Israel to try to negotiate a cease-fire. While she was there, on July 30, Israeli airstrikes on an apartment building killed twenty-eight civilians, half of them children, in Qana in southern Lebanon—the same town Israeli forces had shelled in the 1996 Lebanon conflict, killing more than one hundred civilians sheltered in a United Nations compound.

Rice, angry and embarrassed, gave a terse press conference after staying up most of the night to get an Israeli agreement for at least a forty-eight-hour halt to airstrikes. It was broken quickly, even before she landed at Ireland’s Shannon Airport to refuel. Finally home, she went straight to the White House to see President Bush. He said to her, Bush told Olmert, “Calm down, Condi.”

There are numerous examples of Israeli politicians shading the truth with even their best ally, the United States, and finding reasons to dilute or renege on their promises. And there are many instances in which the security mind-set in Israel, which always thinks of itself as embattled, overrules the willingness to take political or strategic risks.

“No one ever got demoted for being too careful,” a senior military-intelligence officer once told me. “Security is about reducing risks, not taking them.”

But it is a major leap from this reality to the assertion that a cohesive Israeli military elite not only runs the country but also has so distorted Israeli politics by its own aggressive view of the world as to make peace impossible. Yet that is the thesis of Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country—and Why They Can’t Make Peace by journalist and historian Patrick Tyler. To his credit, even he doesn’t seem to believe it by the end of this historical inquiry, at least not with the crassness and simplicity of his own subtitle.

After all, Israel’s military and intelligence “elite” has been arguing, both privately and publicly, that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities now would be either ineffective or counterproductive, even deeply damaging. This has infuriated the elected prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. In this instance, the military elite seems dead set against war, certainly without American support.

Of course, Tyler is really talking about the Palestinians, but he both begins and ends his book with Iran.

THE FAILURE to reach a lasting Middle East peace cannot just be laid at Israel’s door, let alone simply at the door of its military elite, and Tyler acknowledges this as his book rolls along. This is a text of the twenty-first century by an experienced reporter who clearly does not like what Israel has become or is becoming and who has an overriding sympathy for those whom he perceives as Israel’s victims. In my view at least, the failure to reach a lasting solution to the conundrum of a modern, majority-Jewish state living at peace in the Middle East has many parents, including some living in the United States.

Though fascinating, Tyler’s book is a bit odd. It suffers, in my view, from false advertising. It is less an investigation into “fortress Israel” and its supposed ruling military elite than a diligent and insightful history of Israel’s leaders and their military engagements, some of them clandestine, since the establishment of the state.

Tyler, a former colleague of mine at the New York Times, has a terrific eye for telling detail. He is an assiduous gleaner of facts and tidbits better known in Israel, through Hebrew-language journalism and history books, than in the West—and certainly than in America, which generally doesn’t like its Israeli heroes to have too much clay in their feet.

There are interesting discussions of the deeply flawed personalities of numerous military and political figures, from David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan to Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and, of course, Ariel Sharon, who in Tyler’s eyes represents nearly everything wrong with today’s Israel—aggressive, hotheaded, quick to shoot, dismissive of the Palestinians, and eager to seize and keep as much land as possible. They come across as men of mixed reputations and character, driven (like most people) by pettiness, envy, fear and arrogance.

Yet we really don’t find out much about these men that hasn’t already been published elsewhere. And to me there is a failure to comprehend—or, if comprehended, to acknowledge—the extraordinary nature of their collective achievement. Rabin, for instance, is a perfect example of a military man who took extraordinary risks for peace—and actually took a huge step toward permanent peace. Rabin also is a perfect contradiction of Tyler’s thesis.

That Rabin was assassinated before he could go further toward a settlement with the Palestinians and the Arabs by an enraged, passionate settler driven by religious motives is also a fine example of one more of the many reasons why Israel has trouble making peace—because of deeply religious settlers who think God has given them all of Eretz Yisrael, some of whom will kill before they ever leave it. These settlers represent a significant cause for stalemate, along with the small, one-issue religious parties that cripple Israeli politics and the inescapable fact that Israel has very real enemies. All this is true, but none of it has much to do with a military elite, let alone with a “Spartan” mentality that Tyler thinks has arisen to massacre the supposedly pacific and “Athenian” vision of Israel’s European-born founders.

TYLER OFTEN refers to the tragedy of Moshe Sharett, the Russian-born second prime minister of Israel, who was the country’s first foreign minister under Ben-Gurion and was his heir—until Ben-Gurion returned to push him out of politics. Tyler sees him as the fallen angel of Israel’s history, a man who opposed reprisal raids and wanted to live peacefully among the local Arabs. In Tyler’s telling, he was outmaneuvered by the cynical Ben-Gurion, his devious civilian aide Shimon Peres and the generals of the young Israeli army, including Moshe Dayan.

Tyler writes:

This book seeks to explain with realism and fairness how the martial impulse in Israeli society and among its ruling elite has undermined opportunities for reconciliation, skewed politics toward an agenda of retribution and revenge, and fomented deliberate acts of provocation designed to disrupt international diplomatic efforts to find a formula for peace.

He adds that Sharett’s “meticulous journals” demonstrate that “military ambition too often trumped moral aspiration, once the cornerstone of Zionism, to build a homeland that devoted its energy and resources toward integration.”

For Tyler, the complicated Ben-Gurion was the main obstacle to Sharett’s vision of regional peace. Ben-Gurion, Tyler writes, “denounced Sharett’s moderate approach to the Arabs as cowardly.” He says that Sharett

had embraced the new international order of Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, and the United Nations following the two most destructive wars in history. The new order stood for conflict resolution by means other than war; it stood for negotiation and compromise. Statehood, as far as Sharett was concerned, required Israel to align its policies with those of the great powers and with the new UN Charter, and central to the charter was the inadmissibility of conquest as a means to resolve disputes.

Ben-Gurion, on the other hand, Tyler writes, “believed in Zionist exceptionalism, and so he and the youthful sabra military establishment stood to fight.”

This is the core of Tyler’s thesis. He asserts, “Here was the essential tension in Israeli political culture: the clash between Sharett’s impulse to engage the Arabs and the military establishment’s demand to mobilize for continual war.” He summarizes this way: “Early Zionist notions of integration and outreach were undermined by a mythology that Israel had no alternative but war.”

But there is no real reason to believe that a combination of outreach, the UN Charter and the Eisenhower administration was going to resolve Israel’s problems with larger, mostly unstable neighbors led by military officers who were itching to take revenge for their defeat in the 1948 war. Nor was President Eisenhower, in those very different years, likely to come to the defense of Israel if it were being overrun. As Tyler himself writes, in 1956 Ben-Gurion told Eisenhower’s secret representative, Robert B. Anderson, “I do not believe that you would go to war against Egypt if they attacked us.”

Tyler simply puts too much weight on Sharett versus Ben-Gurion as the key to the formation of the Israeli mind-set and the supposed victory in modern Israel of Sparta over Athens, as Tyler would have it. There were not two equal roads diverging in the Israeli desert of the early 1950s, and a good case can be made that Ben-Gurion’s aggressiveness kept Israel alive at a delicate time.

Sharett may have been the right man at the wrong time. But in many ways Sharett, a man of diplomacy, was a weak leader and a failure. He presided helplessly over the fallout from the scandalous Lavon Affair, in which Israeli secret agents in Egypt planned to blow up Egyptian, American and British targets to make the Nasser regime seem unstable but about which he as prime minister was kept unaware. Later he proved unwilling to use this fiasco to confront his opponents.

Sharett was an inadequate leader who did not command the confidence either of the army or of his mentor Ben-Gurion; he was outmaneuvered and in some sense paralyzed by the new pan-Arab nationalism and the attraction of Nasser, which was clearly a danger to the new Jewish state.

SIMILARLY, TYLER tries to draw a broad line between the country’s military elite and the rest, and from time to time he seeks to draw a slightly more narrow distinction between a supposedly warlike “sabra” mentality of the native-born Israelis and the more dovish and ineffectual immigrants. But of course that’s a distinction with very little value, since over time nearly everyone in the military is native born. The most numerous new immigrants are Russians, who are more Likud than Likud—more anti-Arab and more willing to fight it out than most of the native-born or sabra population.

The military in Israel is one of the most vital institutions of the state, to be sure, and certainly the best resourced and best organized; its arguments carry great weight. Given generally universal military service, subject to complicated exceptions for Israeli Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews, the period that young people spend in the army tends to shape them. Those experiences also produce friends and alliances that persist through life, providing contacts throughout the society.

Young Israelis trained in military intelligence and computer work are the backbone of the country’s successful modern economy, founding companies that often get their start with military contracts. Soldiers in companies and brigades form fierce alliances, almost like tribes. The rivalry between the Givati and Golani brigades, for instance, shapes lives and friendships as well as political and business relationships. The paratroopers and the pilots of the air force have similar alliances.

And sometimes they go into politics, especially the generals, because they are among the best-educated, bravest and well-known figures in Israel. But of course they are not always very good politicians, especially in the political jungle that is the fractured Israeli system, where small parties devoted to single issues—religious education, for example, or ensuring that El Al does not fly on the Sabbath—make or break governments.

But while there is a military elite, it is hardly monolithic. There are generals on the Right and on the Left. There are heads of the intelligence services on the Right and on the Left. And in fact there are more generals, including intelligence chiefs, on the Left in Israel than on the Right. Indeed, it is the military elite, including former Mossad leaders Efraim Halevy and Meir Dagan, that has been most vocal in challenging Prime Minister Netanyahu on the wisdom of attacking Iran. But that has hardly stopped the decline of the Left in Israel.

Further, Israel’s failure to produce a lasting peace treaty with the Palestinians is hardly the sole fault of the generals or of some vague “military elite.” It is first and foremost a failure of politics, of nerve and of timing.

After all, who actually achieved the various peace treaties that Israel has managed to negotiate? A former military commander and terrorist named Begin, a former general named Rabin and a former general named Barak. The same people had their failures at peace, too, but they were hardly against the idea when they judged that the national interest demanded it. Ariel Sharon, presented by Tyler as Israel’s Mad Max, dripping with aggression and blood, may have had ulterior motives, as he certainly had strategic and political ones, but he did after all pull Israeli troops and settlers completely out of Gaza.

And when the Israeli military has had clear political orders, it has generally followed them. It dismantled the settlement of Yamit when Begin ordered it, pulled out of Sharm el-Sheikh and the Sinai, and dragged Israeli citizens and settlers out of their synagogues and homes in Gaza as well as four settlements in the West Bank—with much emotion but also with professionalism.

And of course if the political leadership orders the army to war against Iran, it will obey, however reluctantly.

Even Shimon Peres, who famously never served in the military and is considered a grand old man of the peace movement, was deeply involved in military planning as a defense aide, defense minister and prime minister. This same Peres, a contradictory and human figure, was vital to convincing France to give Israel the plutonium reactor at Dimona, vital to the beginning of the settlement movement and vital to the Oslo peace process.

DESPITE THE old phrase about defeat being an orphan, the failure to make peace has many parents. And certainly included among them are the failures of the fedayeen to get their act together under the British; the failures of the United Nations to enforce the 1948 agreement creating two states out of the British mandate; the failures of the Palestinian people—and they have become a people and deserve a nation—to seize opportunities when they arose; the failures of Palestinian leaders from Yasir Arafat to Mohammed Dahlan to Mahmoud Abbas to manage their own people and be truthful with them about what peace would require; and the failures of the Arab world to give much more than mere rhetoric to the Palestinians—especially to Abbas, when he had a legitimate democratic mandate and wanted to make peace. But the Arabs failed Arafat, too, who was loved by the Arab world when he was fighting Israel but not when he was negotiating with it.

Certainly the failures must include the Israeli settlement program, the government-supported effort to colonize what some Israelis regard as God’s land grant to Abraham and thus create “facts on the ground.” But this program was not initiated by the military; it was the product largely of the Left, including the chameleon Shimon Peres, and ignored by Israeli politicians who should have known better, such as Ehud Barak.

And among the greatest failures must be included indifferent, wavering and often contradictory American policies—led by successive presidents reluctant to challenge the power of Congress and offend the fund-raising machine that is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). That reluctance continued even when Israeli leaders such as Rabin and later Barak had policies that were far more flexible than those of AIPAC and criticized the lobby for daring to oppose them.

What’s striking about these American presidents is that they have not been willing to push Israel to live up to even its own freely given promises—pledges made not to the Palestinians or the United Nations but to those presidents themselves. For example, Sharon promised George W. Bush personally that he would remove all illegal outposts created by Israeli settlers after March 2001, when Sharon took office. The pledge was written into the road map of the international quartet (composed of the UN, United States, European Union and Russia), along with the language on a settlement freeze, including “natural growth.” Sharon signed the road map. After Sharon’s stroke, Ehud Olmert was elected as his successor and said he would stand by those promises.

Olmert dismantled exactly one such outpost, Amona, in early 2006. He chose to do so after considerable warnings to the settlers and during the daytime. The result was a predictable conflict between settlers and the police and army, which Olmert then used as a pretext to say that it was too politically difficult to dismantle any more. When I asked him if he had no sense of shame about breaking his promises to his finest allies and lying to them as if the United States were the British rulers of mandatory Palestine, to be hustled and worked around, he bristled.

I asked him why he as prime minister chose not to enforce his country’s own laws, and he bristled again.

I said that the Israeli army dismantled supposedly illegal Palestinian houses in occupied territory, and even in Jerusalem, at will. They could do so because they acted with no warning and operations took place before dawn. Olmert then looked at me like I was an idiot who could not understand the obvious fact that he could not treat Israelis the way he treated Palestinians. Olmert, it should be noted, did not serve in the military, except in an arranged journalist job so he could have the army on his résumé. Yet it was Olmert who pressed for the most recent wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

But where was Washington on the settlement issue? Even to me it was obvious that “natural growth” could not explain the explosion in the number of Israeli settlers living beyond the Green Line—and not just in the so-called major population centers in the West Bank such as Gush Etzion and Ma’ale Adumim. Even Kurtzer, who did not like it, admits that the Bush administration was largely silent in the face of these Israeli policies.

Political dysfunction—whether Israeli, Palestinian or American—has had as much to do with the failure to finally force through a lasting two-state solution as any supposed Israeli military elitist cabal or groupthink.

A last memory. In October 2004, when Sharon was trying—yes, Sharon—to get political support for his decision to pull out of Gaza, he sent then defense minister and former military chief of staff Shaul Mofaz to meet with the religious sage of the Shas Party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the former chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel. Rabbi Yosef is a kind of ayatollah-like supreme leader for the Shas Party, and his word is law.

So Mofaz spent much time with him, showing him maps of Gaza and humbly explaining the need to withdraw Israeli settlers there. I remember most vividly the rabbi’s long white beard spread out over a map of Gaza, covering settlers and Palestinians alike with a wiry white fuzz, as Mofaz explained.

The rabbi condemned the withdrawal because it was done without concessions from the Palestinians. But the elected leader of Israel, the scion of the military elite, nonetheless carried out his plans, the first withdrawal of Israeli settlers from occupied land since Yamit.

Steven Erlanger writes on foreign affairs and has been the Paris bureau chief for the New York Times since 2008. He was bureau chief in Jerusalem from 2004 to 2008.

Pullquote: Tyler's book is less an investigation into “fortress Israel” and its supposed ruling military elite than a diligent and insightful history of Israel’s leaders and their military engagements.Image: Essay Types: Book Review