Security Cooperation and Challenges

Transcript Security Cooperation and Challenges Dr Schmuel Bar Director of Studies, The Institute for Policy and Strategy, Israel Dr Uzi Arad Former Chairman, Israeli National Security Council Sir Richard Dearlove The Master, Pembroke College, University of Cambridge 30 March 2011 The views expressed in this document are the sole responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of Chatham House, its staff, associates or Council. Chatham House is independent and owes no allegiance to any government or to any political body. It does not take institutional positions on policy issues. This document is issued on the understanding that if any extract is used, the author(s)/ speaker(s) and Chatham House should be credited, preferably with the date of the publication or details of the event. Where this document refers to or reports statements made by speakers at an event every effort has been made to provide a fair representation of their views and opinions, but the ultimate responsibility for accuracy lies with this document’s author(s). The published text of speeches and presentations may differ from delivery. Transcript: Security Cooperation and Challenges Dr Uzi Arad: Good afternoon, I’ve been invited to come and reflect on the evolution of security cooperation and challenges between Israel and Britain in the past 60 years. But when reflecting on this it occurs to one, that when it comes to defence and security matters, one should look before those 60 years, actually to look at the past 90 years. That is to look at the 30 years that preceded the creation of the state of Israel, during the time of the mandate and the intervening years between the First World War and the Second World War there was a great deal of military and security cooperation and that forged much of what was to follow. And if I were to characterise the nature of that relationship, it is clearly a complex relationship that developed. It is fluctuating over time as we just said and if there is a qualifier that I would employ to characterise that relationship, it is one in which it is a suppressed dimension. Suppressed in all the connotations of this term. That is to say it is being kept for public knowledge, so much of it was secret, like arms supply, not just intelligence, which it should be, but also arms sales to Israel were kept secret over the years, as if this is something to be suppressed. But also it is suppressed in the sense that there is an inhibition from fully developing the potential that there is. That is why it is a study or observation of a suppressed relationship. Now I said that the roots of that security relationship can be found in the years prior to 1947. What one should know is the fact that often shapes the relationships between nations, certainly from Israel's point of view, are the real vital things that come to their existence. War, or peace, security and things like that. As is well known from the First World War, the Jewish community in Palestine sided with the British and then, during the intervening years the mandate, the British mandate in Israel, did leave a great deal of legacy, which would account for much of Israeli sentiment after that. I am told that in one of those series in Britain, there is a reference to ‘what have the Romans done for us,’ that is presumably reflections that they must have done for you British. But we do know what the British have done for us. They have done a great deal in terms of what they left behind; by way of law, administration, government and many, many things that matter. Now there is a myth about the fact that the British were always pro-Arab and there is the myth of Lawrence of Arabia and the like. But in our mythology, the Israeli, we also remember other British eccentrics such as Orde Wingate who, in many ways had trained some of the early Israeli military leaders to come, meet Dayan, possibly Yigal Allon and others. That was the Second World War. Of course during the Second World War the story was untold in its fullest form that, to this day the extent of collaboration between the Israelis, the Israelis- www.chathamhouse.org.uk 2 Transcript: Security Cooperation and Challenges to-be and the British has been much wider than thought. I once looked in to which agencies during the war were doing what with whom. It turns out that the Special Operations Executive (SOE) was one that was working with the Haganah, and that was why Dayan went on those raids to Vichy, that’s why some of the parachutists were dropped over Eastern Europe, they were all SOE. MI6, Sir Richard, you would like to know worked with Irgun, and managed Irgun out of his station in Istanbul and collecting intelligence on Eastern Europe. It is interesting to see that division of labour, all of them of course cooperated and trained and worked: intelligence, military, covert activities everything, with the various Jewish organizations much against or behind the knowledge of the police authorities of the mandate. Which shows you the ambivalence that prevailed not only between the British agencies, but so there was between the Israeli and the Jewish agencies and so forth. And then there was the large number of Jewish volunteers to the British brigade, to the Jewish brigade that fought the war itself. Although Palestinians were also called upon to volunteer, none had volunteered. It was an all Jewish volunteered force that fought during the war alongside the British. And then after the war, we had those years in which there was a battle over immigration to Palestine, if we are to talk about contradictory policies or ambivalent policies, we should always remember that Israel had been first to practice it. Because the golden formula that Ben Gurion struck on the dilemma what to do at that time. He leveled what any Israeli would recognise, that said we would ‘fight the British white paper as if there was no war against Germany and we would fight the Germans as if there was no British white paper.’ And that was an exercise in conflicting policies if there is to be one, and it is reiterated ever since. The result of that was, when the state was formed, there was a huge legacy of experience, work and cooperation with the British that mattered when it came to key personalities. The Ambassador mentioned today that three Israeli Presidents served in the British Army in British uniform. But when I look at the rest of them, the entire leadership of the Israeli Army that fought in 1948-49 and who managed the Israeli, were all trained or served in the British Army. The Foreign Office was staffed by many who were educated here, Abba Eban even comes to mind but he was not the only one. When it comes to the military I can think of more; Laskov, Yadin, Makleff all the major commanders of the Israeli Army had much British in their training. And what is little known, but I will tell you even here, that when you think of the people who led the Mossad in its early years, and in the first twenty years, all of them were influenced by their background with the British. Reuven Shiloah the first, www.chathamhouse.org.uk 3 Transcript: Security Cooperation and Challenges the late David Kimche having been an anglophile, Nahum Admoni, former head of the Mossad and anglophile and even Efraim Halevy, known to you, I think many, British born. So you have that huge presence of people who worked, served, cooperated on things military with the British over the years. That must have left its imprint on the Israeli attitude, and it was very much against that backdrop that one must look at the evolution of that relationship. But when you skip over that first period, you see the ambivalence that developed. A primary matter for Israeli-British diplomacy in the sixties and seventies was the question of arms supply. Interestingly enough, now that there is a full embargo, and there has been a full embargo for a number of decades, it is not remembered that in the sixties and seventies Britain supplied Israel with its tanks, with airplanes and with submarines. And that supply was done on a matter of selling, but also there was some leveraging of the influence that came with it. But there was a steady supply of major weapons systems and that was at the core of the military diplomatic cooperation in the sixties. That was stopped in the seventies. Since then there’s been nothing of the kind. What did develop instead were the things that we now recognise as the many streaks in British policy; on the one hand, you have the famous tilt in foreign policy in favour of the Arabs, which had been codified. And I remember coming to this city in 1974, hearing that first hand from James Craig, to whom that doctrine is referred that Britain should always exhibit its higher degree of sensitivity to its interest in the Arab world rather than to Israel. It was therefore a position that was well articulated, and that to this day, I believe to be the dominant feature of the diplomacy. But at that time it was referred to as the Craig doctrine. In terms of other areas of cooperation, the security deepened but it became submerged.

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