ABSTRACT
Since 1982 Israel has not fought any high-intensity conventional war. Instead it has been engaged in wars of attrition of a low-intensity character. Israel's record in this type of war is worthy of consideration because this seems to be the type of engagement Israel will be facing in the near future. In its large-scale conventional wars of the past, Israel tried to keep civilian society away from war, to achieve battlefield decisions as quickly as possible by being on the offensive, to minimize casualties to its own troops, and to translate military achievements into political gains. Most of the eight wars of attrition that Israel has been engaged from the 1950s to 2005, both of an asymmetrical low-intensity and a symmetrical high-intensity nature, however, did involve society at large. Commitment to the offensive notwithstanding, Israel also employed a defensive mode. The wars of attrition also invoked serious moral dilemmas as a result of the difficulty in distinguishing between combatants and non-combatants and the desire to avoid the excessive use of force.
