Herzliya Conference, day four: Summing up the threats

Here’s the Herzliya Conference’s fourth and final day, Thursday, in one sentence: Israel is a country surrounded by growing threats, and has few opportunities to change its region for the better.

That was the message conveyed, at least, by a few prominent speakers, among them Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, the IDF’s director of military intelligence, and Dan Meridor, an outgoing cabinet minister.

Kochavi’s exhaustive one-hour address on the breadth of challenges facing Israel covered much of the same ground as the conference’s first couple of days, and its comprehensiveness painted an uneasy picture.

“For the first time in decades,” he said, “we have four active borders that have terror activities: Lebanon, Syria, Sinai and Gaza. The change that’s happening is deep and foundational. The central characteristic of this change, even if it seems banal, is instability and uncertainty.”

He added that terror groups rather than states are now Israel’s only real enemies, which means two things for the region: Unlike states with governments and diplomats, “Jihadist groups are less deterred because they’re not state actors.” And he said that it will be hard to reach any kind of normalization with these groups because they’re undergoing “a process of Islamization” that makes the Arab-Israeli conflict more about religion and less about negotiable issues like territorial disputes.

Kochavi also warned about the dangers of Iran, which he said “does not see a high chance of an attack on its [nuclear] facilities” – though he noted that the harsh sanctions on Iran are causing a division in its ruling class.

Is Israel’s domestic political front, at least, doing well? Not really, implied Meridor. Although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has, finally, assembled a coalition government, Meridor said it includes “lots of people who don’t have experience.”

Meridor, though, has a bone to pick with his right-wing Likud party, which leads the coalition. A member of the party establishment, he was pushed out of its leadership a few months ago – ostensibly because he’s too moderate for the party’s young, increasingly hardline base.

Yesterday, he sounded bitter. “This is a good time for thought, something that is often missing in political processes,” he said.

Meridor shared many concerns with Kochavi, and stressed that Israel needs to be diplomatically proactive, calling on his country to “strengthen the peaceful world” and “make positive investments in the region” – though he didn’t really elaborate on what those would be. Amos Yadlin, who used to hold Kochavi’s post, echoed that sentiment and advocated unilateral moves to advance a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“There is no terror” now in Israel, he told the conference. “This is an opportunity to act unilaterally. I suggest we take our own destiny in our hands.”

But even if there were glimmers of hope, a feeling of “instability and uncertainty,” as Kochavi put it, still dominated the day.

“Can we no longer get to peace agreements?” Meridor asked. “How do we deal with no man’s lands? The battlefront is not what it was.”