Provoking Arab Hostility

Abstract

What were the policies that Israel chose to pursue, during the first two decades after its creation, to accelerate its transformation from a strategic liability to a strategic asset?

[The Zionists] will seek to involve [the U.S.] in a continuously widening and deepening series of operations intended to secure maximum Jewish objectives.

—U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1948

During the years 1955–56 (and perhaps as early as 1954), retaliatory strikes were also launched by the IDF in order to draw the Arab states into a premature war.

—Benny Morris, 2001¹