Agence France-Presse,
JERUSALEM: In 1948, the fledgling Israeli armed forces defeated seven Arab armies to forge the Jewish state. Sixty years on, they have a large if unconfirmed nuclear arsenal but have yet to overcome the persistent threat from Arab irregulars.
Indisputably the region's best equipped military power, the army has found in recent years that even its vast arsenal could not secure victory in successive and drawn-out conflicts against insurgents hidden among the civilian population.
Military service remains a mainstay of the Jewish state, serving to assimilate immigrants into Israeli society as much as defend it from external threats.
With a hefty budget of some 14 billion dollars in 2008, comprising around 17 percent of the state budget, Israel's military boasts some of the world's most sophisticated and lethal weaponry.
The advanced fighter jets, tanks and rocketry of its standing force of about 180,000 are constantly put to the test.
In successive Middle East wars, the Israeli military developed an awesome reputation for invincibility, particularly after its stunning victory in the 1967 Six-Day War which trippled the size of the Jewish state.
Even in 1973, when it came under surprise attack from Egypt and Syria, initially taking some unaccustomed setbacks, the Israeli army secured a clear victory after three weeks of fighting on several fronts.
But since then, Israel's military has found itself mired in less glorious adventures, including its costly 1982-1985 onslaught against Beirut and two Palestinian uprisings in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Faced with a wave of deadly suicide bombings in Israeli towns, the armed forces crushed the second uprising in 2003 only after sending thousands of troops and tanks into Palestinian cities, leading to a heavy civilian death toll on both sides.
In the south, the Islamist Hamas movement seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, becoming a source of much frustration in Israel as the army seems unable to put an end to incessant rocket and ground attacks.
But the military's defining moment in recent years was the 2006 Lebanon war against Hezbollah, when the army's clear technological edge failed to defeat the Shiite militant group in a month of devastating conflict.
Hezbollah pounded Israel with thousands of rockets, paralysing the lives of some one million of its civilians and exposing the military's inability to counter such attacks.
“It is obvious today that the front in the next war will be the civilian population which will come under rocket and missile fire,” said Amos Harel, the military correspondent of the leading daily Haaretz.
Although both Hezbollah and Hamas use tactics that do not threaten Israel's existence, they have undermined the country's sense of security, said reserve Major General Uzi Dayan.
“The Islamist movements are constantly gnawing at the sense of security of the civilian population,” the former head of Israel's national security council said.
Even Israel's nuclear deterrent, acknowledged by President Shimon Peres in his memoirs but officially neither confirmed nor denied, has proved of little use in the Jewish state's rivalry with its regional arch foe Iran.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's calls for Israel's destruction and the Islamic republic's strong moral, financial and alleged military support of Hezbollah and Hamas have placed Iran as the military's top challenge.
“The most bothering topic on the army's agenda is the Iranian threat. It's obvious that a large part of the army's budget and preparations are going towards ways of tackling this threat,” says Harel.
Pundits say that an air strike against a Syrian military facility last September was intended as a message for Damascus's chief ally, Tehran.
Harel said that the raid, which was carried out over the angry objections of Israel's main Muslim ally Turkey, was a “message of intent” to Iran.
Dayan said: “The army is only part of the overall mechanism to counter the Iranian threat and it is taking it very seriously. But such things are hard to judge until they are put to the test.”
