How the Oct. 7, 2023, attack reshaped Israel’s security doctrine, and the importance of strategic depth to defend Israel’s borders, were the topics of a morning briefing attended by diplomats and foreign press at the Carlton Hotel in Tel Aviv on Tuesday.
The event was sponsored by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA), a think tank focused on building a stronger Middle East-Israel-U.S. alliance.
A key message of the half-day conference was that Israel must maintain the buffer zones it has established along its borders with Lebanon, Syria and the Gaza Strip to prevent another Oct. 7-style invasion in the future.
Keynote speaker U.S. Army Brig. Gen. (ret.) Ernie Audino, the only U.S. general officer to have served a full year embedded as a combat adviser with a Kurdish Peshmerga brigade in Iraq, said that in 1967, the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff commissioned a study to discern the necessary defensible terrain Israel needed to survive.
“It corresponded almost precisely to the post-1967 borders for Israel because it included key terrain necessary to provide military advantage to maintain Israel as a contiguous nation," he said.
"It is irrational and illogical to cede that terrain to your adversaries. And I submit to you that today, with modern weapons, with increased range and increased precision, what was defensible terrain in 1967 is not enough.”
To a question from JNS regarding whether Audino's remarks suggested that the current buffer zones should be still bigger, Israel Defense Forces Brig. Gen. (ret.) Yossi Kuperwasser, director of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS), explained that the buffers aren’t meant to thwart new technologies.
“The purpose of these buffers is very simple: to prevent two kinds of threats that were present at the Oct. 7 invasion. One is to prevent invasions, to prevent the possibility of invasion, which is the most terrible thing that can happen, as we saw on Oct. 7, and second, to prevent direct fire,” he said. Anti-missile defense and other methods will deal with the new technological threats, he added.
Kuperwasser estimated that Israel needs eight to 10 kilometers (five to six miles) of buffer zone penetrating into Lebanon and Syria. In the Gaza Strip, which is only 7.5 miles at its widest point, Israel should control “as much as it can” to prevent direct fire. Israel currently controls about 70% of the Strip. In Lebanon, Israel’s buffer zone extends up to six miles, and in Syria, about nine miles.
The panelists painted a bleak picture of the situation in these territories. IDF Col. (ret.) Jacques Neriah, a senior fellow at JCFA and a former foreign policy and national security adviser to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, said Lebanon and Syria are in "chaos."
Syria is rebuilding its army of 25 divisions, mainly from what he called the “most ferocious jihadists," who have already slaughtered 1,000s of Alawites, Druze and Christians. In Lebanon, Hezbollah is an accepted part of the government with 13 members in parliament. The Lebanese army has been unable to oust the terror group and since August, Hezbollah has at least thrice tried to smuggle weapons and explosives into Lebanon, he said.
JCFA President Dan Diker said that the Palestinian Authority must be a part of any discussion regarding defensible borders. While Israel enjoys more strategic depth in Judea and Samaria than in the other areas discussed, the same principles apply. A 13-year-old girl with an SA-7 shoulder-fired missile could potentially bring down a plane arriving at Ben-Gurion International Airport, he said.
Israel faces a 70,000-man army in the P.A., Diker added, more than five times bigger than the 12,000-member cap placed on it by the Oslo Accords.
All agreed that Israel would need to maintain its buffer zones for the foreseeable future. “We cannot abandon the territories that we have entered after the fall of [Syrian President] Bashar al-Assad," Neriah said. "They provide for us a sort of secure guarantee—maybe not enough—but still enough for the first warning.” In Lebanon, the moment Israel retreated, the vacuum would be filled by Hezbollah. Terrorists would be looking into the windows of Metullah, a northern Israeli border city, just as it had on the eve of the Oct. 7 war, he said.
Kuperwasser said that in Gaza, Hamas has made no genuine effort to disarm. Even if it did, Israel would need to control territory within Gaza to create an effective buffer for the surrounding Israeli communities, he added. Israel would also need to maintain control of the main corridors into the Strip to prevent smuggling, he noted.
“Until it is deradicalized, we must have the ability to take action against new threats of terrorism from Gaza. We cannot rely on the international stabilization force that is being built because we cannot count on them to take military action,” Kuperwasser said.
Diker told the diplomats gathered that no matter what government wins the next election, its central security principle will revolve around the issue of defensible borders. “You can write a cable back to your foreign ministries because it's really the case, and why we wanted to spend this time with you," he said. It's not a topic they would find in the media, Diker said, "But this is the central organizing, security, military defense principle—defensible borders for Israel—particularly after Oct. 7.”