Narrative Deadspace: Seeing Different Connections of 1973 and 2023

As a professional military educator, I offer what follows as a first cut of how one might begin a self-critical learning process from the events transpiring in Israel.  These efforts are made with a reminder from the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. "The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and the commander have to make is to establish by that test the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature.  This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive."[1]

What I offer in the following is an attempt to begin learning from the 2023 Hamas War by understanding the kind of war it is and identifying challenges in the past that have caused myself and others to understand such wars in ways that were alien to their nature.  Of course, for me, understanding a war comes through understanding it in terms of narrative and the narrative’s connected and associated stories, messages, and words-deeds-images.
 

Where one stands determines what one sees.  The location of an observer is impeded by the shape of the surrounding terrain.  If one is at the bottom of a valley, then visibility will be more limited than if one stood high on a hilltop.  The area that one cannot see or that a weapon system cannot engage from a given position is called deadspace as it affords opportunities for opponents to move unobserved and/or unengaged.  The shape of the physical landscape in combination with the location of the observer creates deadspace.

In cyberspace, there is an entire portion of the web referred to as the dark web.  This includes domains that are discreet and not included on web browsers.  One must know the specific address to access such a site.  There are also applications that only allow entry to those with invitations from existing members and include highly secure forms of communication.  Both types of sites create deadspace for governments and security professionals.  The nature of bitcoin and other types of cryptocurrencies, that are only available through online commerce, also present effective deadspace – a means to conduct business transactions that are both unobservable and untraceable.

Narrative space also includes deadspace.  Some of this is determined by decisions of the observer, just as is true for physical space.  Where one stands determines the observable world.  In discussions of narrative there tends to be a lot of emphasis on social media.  This may be, in part, because there are existing tools that can track and map social networks thereby making it easier to understand the terrain.  The problem with this emphasis is that so focusing creates tremendous deadspace for those groups or organizations that do not primarily rely on social media to promote or promulgate their narrative.  Narrative is much more than social media.  It is also history and culture and language.  In this sense, what one studies or has been taught is also determinant of what one sees.
 

We are a week into the most recent war in the Levantine Middle East and I expect that everyone has heard more than a few allusions to the 1973 War that began fifty years prior to this war.  The calendar alone makes the comparisons logical, but as I have listened to a few military and national security analysts I have been disappointed by the depth or the lack thereof of the analysis.  The 1973 War was the last state-on-state war between Israel and its neighbors.  Some readers may point out the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon as a state-on-state war, but I do not agree.  The purpose of that war was to attack the Palestinian non-state groups launching attacks from Southern Lebanon and to take the fight to the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organization then headquartered in Beirut, Lebanon.

The significance of 1973 was that it marked the end of a paradigm in the struggle against Israel – Arab or Muslim states were no longer deemed to be capable of defeating the Jewish state and a variety of non-state actors became the primary approach to attacking Israel.  I use the phrase non-state actor rather than terrorist or violent extremist organization because it is broader and more appropriately reflects the approach against Israel.

I have my opinions on who is right and who is wrong in this current fighting, but I do not offer what follows as an expression or a defense of those opinions.  I am trying to be as objective as possible in describing the approach to fighting Israel that few in American defense or national security circles do a sufficient job in expressing.

Consider the variety of non-state actor attacks against Israel in the last fifty years.

• Violent groups or terrorists in common parlance
• Religious ideology
• Manipulation of the Palestinian societal narrative through education and media portrayal of the Israelis as subhuman or unworthy of humane interaction or treatment
• Economic attacks through boycott, divestment, and sanctions – expect this to increase as violence continues against the Palestinians in Gaza
• Academic departments in Western universities – there are few non-Jewish scholars who defend Israel and many more who regularly describe the perspective and rightness of the Palestinian grievances particularly as an expression of anticolonialism
• Global satellite or internet news sources – there are few global news outlets who tell the Israeli story.  Almost all major outlets with global reach provide a pro-Palestinian story
• International organizations to include the United Nations – since the UN vote to partition Palestine in 1947 there has been a concerted effort to capture international organizations to become anti-Israel as most clearly demonstrated by several committees with focus directly on the Israeli-Palestinian issues

Most of these types of attacks were never considered as legitimate or effectual battlefields for war.  In that sense, these were all narrative deadspace where opponents of Israel moved, operated, and built support and influence outside of observation or engagement on the part of Israel or friends of Israel.

The somewhat standard story for the 1973 War explains how Arab armies learned from their 1967 defeat, developed a strategy for victory, and then developed training to accomplish the strategy.  The story continues with the attack across the Suez Canal and through the Golan Heights to defeat Israeli initial defenses and threaten operational reserves with a combination of surprise, technical ability, tenacity, and determination.  The Israelis responded with aggression and creativity to drive the attackers back.  So goes a somewhat balanced presentation of the war.

While this story may be useful in helping to prepare for large-scale combat operations which is how it is traditionally used by the United States Army, I offer that it is not useful in understanding what also happened between 1967 and 1973 and how that more important transformation shaped the above stated list of non-state actor attacks against Israel and other Western interests in the fifty years since 1973.

The 1967 Arab-Israeli War effectively destroyed the notion of the power of the Arab state to achieve goals vis-à-vis Israel.  While non-state actors were extant prior to 1967 they became more and more significant since that war.  I am arguing that it was the Arab state failure in the 1967 War that led to the transformation from a state centered approach to fight Israel toward a non-state centered approach.  The list expressing the variety of ways to attack Israel through the narrative space as part of a narrative war was born in the frustrated failure of 1967.  One might even see in Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s approach to the 1973 War a narrative war approach.  He didn’t intend to win the war through violence.  He intended to win the war through diplomatic negotiation and what he needed to begin that negotiation was a military success which the crossing of the Suez Canal gave him.

Too many people, including myself in prior decades, look to the wars in which Israel participated as expressions of firepower or maneuver war philosophies.  While that may have been true for 1948, 1956, and 1967, every war since 1967, including the 1973 War, has been a narrative war.
 

The fighting that is currently a week old is the latest expression of narrative war.  There have already been numerous opinion pieces stating significant intelligence failures on the part of the Israel Defense Forces.  Most of the emphasis on these failures addresses technical failures, overreliance on technology rather than human intelligence or human observers and reactions forces, and an underestimation of Hamas as an opponent.  These issues will all certainly be addressed in the future committees and think tanks studies to be formed and conducted in the months and years to come.  What I want to emphasize here are an initial three instances of narrative deadspace in 2023.

1. The enemy is no longer in the behavioral box in which they have previously operated.  The 1973 and 2023 comparison generated narrative deadspace in that Israel was looking at Hamas as an organization intending to function within a box of competition long established between the two belligerents.  By that I mean that Hamas lashed out by small incursions or rocket and missile attacks, Israel responded with violence as punishment, and then the situation stabilized for a period.  This was often referred to as mowing the grass.  A friend of mine referred to Gaza as the world’s largest open-air prison.  If that is true, and I think it is, then the paradigm was that of prisoners and guards and that the prisoners regularly attacked the guards for the sake of lashing out.  This past week Hamas changed the scope and scale of the interaction.  To follow the paradigm of a prison; the prisoners (Hamas) decided to attack the homes and neighborhoods of the guards and to inflict significant terror upon them.  This was not intended as a prison break and unlike 1973, it wasn’t a conventional attack or offensive.  It was a raid to terrorize the guards and their families in their guardhouses, homes, and villages.
2. All enemies learn.  Many years ago, I lived in Israel and while serving there a U.S. military employee referred to Israel as the laboratory of modern war.  That is true.  Israel is a laboratory of war and what happens there often spills out of the laboratory and to the rest of the world.  Suicide bombing began in Lebanon as responses to the Israeli invasion and occupation.  Rocket attacks began as an asymmetric way to strike against Israel which inspired the Iron Dome anti-missile and rocket system which, in turn, inspired the massed rocket and missile attack on 7 October 2023 to overwhelm the shield.  The suicide bomber is a poor man’s precision guided weapon.  The massed rocket attacks, mostly consisting of inexpensive and poorly guided munitions, are the poor man’s response to sophisticated and expensive defense systems.
3. The people are a weapon system.  Benjamin Netanyahu has said on multiple occasions that Israel uses missiles to protect its people and Hamas uses people to protect its missiles.  That is true and should not be surprising even though many pundits act shocked and appalled by its reality.  Westerners do not need to go very far back in history to find a time when we used soldiers as if they were ammunition to be expended.  Both World Wars were great examples of this.  States and non-state actors without sophisticated technology will use their people, including and especially civilians, as a weapon system.  They will use their people as shields.  They will use their people to generate media attention to manipulate the narrative.  The people, in those cases, become the talking points, the messages, and the story.  By late on 7 October 2023, Western news sources were already talking about the Israeli airstrikes in response to the Hamas attacks and the deaths of Palestinian civilians.  The story was turning from massacred Israelis to massacred Palestinians.  That is by choice and design on the part of Hamas and many of those who live in Gaza.  The civilians understand what is happening and why and they recognize that they and their children may be a tool in the war.

 
These are only the initial three expressions of narrative deadspace.  As we learn more there will certainly be more revealed, but these three are a great place to regularly start in checking our own narrative deadspace.  What is the box in which I have placed my opponent?  What has happened from which my opponent may have learned?  What are the resources on which my opponent will rely?

For those wondering why this matters to them I want to make two points.  One, the United States and others have also been victims of their own narrative deadspace; most notably, leading up to 9/11, the rise and success of ISIS, the collapse of the Afghan national government in the face of Taliban offensive success, and the misreading of Hamas since Israel wasn’t the only intelligence service or group of national security analysts caught off guard in this attack.  Two, what is happening in Israel will not stay there.  Iran has funded Hamas for a long while now.  Those who are ideologically opposed to Western civilization and culture learn.  They truly learn; in that they will adapt their behaviors and actions based off what works.  Regardless of the illegality and immorality of the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023, they worked in transforming the interaction between Hamas and Israel.  Others like ISIS, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the scores of Iranian sponsored militias, and all related groups which operate in Asia, Africa, South America, Europe, and North America will act upon the lessons they are learning.  They will see the narrative deadspace of their opponents and like various infiltrators in past battles and wars they will move undetected through that space until they can strike a blow against their opponents.  This time, that opponent was Israel.  As we support Israel in this current fight, let’s work to make sure that we also learn and adapt so that we all close down our own narrative deadspace to prevent future atrocities.
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If we are narratively standing in the wrong place, then we need to move.  We need to seek better and more appropriate narrative vantage points opening our vision and our appreciation of the operational environment.  As with physical battlespace, one can also close down deadspace by placing additional observation such that even if the weapon system cannot shoot there, it is still covered by observation.  Such action requires awareness and conscious avoidance of existing deadspace.


[1] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1976, 88.