Category: Israel 2003-08

I have been so sad to learn of the death, both early and I think sudden, of Tanya Reinhart. (Hat-tip for David for alerting me to this.)
Tanya was a strong proponent of Palestinian equality and national independence and a fierce critic of the particular round of the ‘peace’ process — that is, all process, no peace– that was inaugurated with Yasser Arafat’s signing of the Oslo Accords with Israel in 1993.
I had never met her until I went to Israel and Palestine with the International Quaker Working Party in 2002. We met her at Tel Aviv University, where she was a very distinguished member of the faculty of linguistics until last December, when she found the situation in Israel had become so hostile to her that she left Tel Aviv and moved to New York to teach at NYU.
Since I came to England two weeks ago I have had several impassioned discussions with Palestinian friends old and new about the whole course, meaning, and content of Oslo. My position, in a nutshell is that Oslo was specifically designed by the Israeli party to to be an indeterminate process, that is, to leave quite open the nature of the ‘final outcome’ whose negotiation, according to the text of the Oslo Declaration of Principles, should be completed by mid-1999.
To me, that indeterminacy was a very serious structural flaw in the DOP. A peace agreement whose negotiation is completed but whose implementation is phased according to an agreed schedule is one thing– there, at least, everyone knows what the final destination will be. But a peace ‘process’ that leaves quite undefined the final outcome will (a) provide more continuing power within the process to the existing power holders and (b) leave everyone from all sides extremely jittery regarding what the final outcome will be, and therefore prone to over-reactions to any tiny blip or setback along the way.
Such as we saw from both sides in the years that followed Oslo– but particularly, perhaps, from the Israeli side.
Having said that, I would say– as someone who sat bemused on the lawn of the White House on that bizarro day in September 1993 when the Oslo Accords were signed there– that despite that flaw there was still a chance the Palestinians could do well out of the process, provided they had wise strategic leadership that maximized the many levers of potential power at their people’s disposal.
Which included, let us remember, considerable sympathy from many parts of the international community and from a still-vibrant peace movement inside Israel.
Instead of which, they had Yasser Arafat (Abu Ammar), a man who (a) had zero concept of how to develop and pursue a strategy, and (b) proceeded, immediately after the return to the Occupied Territories that Oslo bestowed on him, to dismantle all the organizations and networks of community-based ‘people power’ that by then were the Palestinians’ major strategic asset. (And whose activities during the largely nonviolent First Intifada had, indeed, led to the conclusion of the Oslo Agreement in the first place.)
Arafat was a truly terrible negotiator– one might even say recklessly or criminally so, from his people’s perspective. The major case in point was his allowing the Israelis, under the terms of the Oslo DOP, to build a whole entire new road system within the West Bank with which successive governments of Israel then proceeded to strangle the Palestinian communities there.
So maybe Tanya Reinhart was right– maybe there was nothing the Palestinians could have done to “improve” Oslo, or to pull from that sow’s ear of a flawed agreement the silk purse of an acceptable, final-status peace agreement? I honestly don’t know, though I do strongly think that with much wiser leadership, the Palestinians could have had a good shot at doing that.
Where Reinhart was absolutely right, however, was to note the terrible effects that Oslo had on the balance of political and demographic power within the occupied West Bank. The new, Israelis-only road system was an absolute disaster for the Palestinians. So was the building of additional settler-only housing there– the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank doubled in the five years after Oslo, and today stands at around 500,000 (counting East Jerusalem settlers along with the rest.)
Where she was right, too, was to roundly criticize the claim that Ehud Barak made, that the ‘deal’ he offered Yasser Arafat at the end of of 2000 was a “generous offer” whose inexplicable rejection by the Palestinians just “proved” their bad intentions all along… That claim– coming from a Labour Party Prime Minister– did more than anything else to kill the Israeli peace movement as a large, significant force within Israeli society.
And now, that brave and percipient advocate of human equality Tanya Reinhart is dead. What a terrible, terrible shame.
As for the Palestinians, at least they now have a unity government. Let’s hope it can start to turn around the situation of their people, still reeling from more than a year’s-worth of the tough and deeply anti-humane siege.that Israel initiated but in which all the major governments of the world have shamefully colluded.

Just six months ago, Israeli chief of staff Dan Halutz and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert were riding high. On July 12, they had launched what they were still convinced would be the knockout blow from which Lebanese Hizbullah and its Iranian allies/backers would never recover… And on July 17, despite some early signs on setback in that war, they still seemed very upbeat about its prospects of success…
Now, six months later, how are the mighty fallen.
I wrote a long essay in Boston Review about how the flaws in the concept that Halutz used in the war were considerably magnified by the chaos in the decisionmaking of Israel’s national command authorities at the highest level… And the result was a humiliating battlefield and strategic reverse for Israel, which damaged all portions of the Olmert government very seriously.
That damage has continued to play out in the Israeli body politic in the months since the August 14th ceasefire. Israel’s “Winograd” state commission of enquiry into the whole Lebanon episode still continues its work, after an earlier inside-the-IDF enquiry delivered a stinging indictment of the role of the chief of staff…
Halutz finally, today, submitted a resignation that in the view of many Israeli observers was long overdue. Amos Harel wrote in Wednesday’s HaAretz:

Now, Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz will need to overcome their mutual loathing and decide quickly on Halutz’s replacement. If a lengthy inheritance battle develops, that will only deepen the IDF’s depression.

Harel also wrote,

by resigning now, [Halutz] increases the pressure on his partners in the war’s failed management, Olmert and Peretz, to follow suit.

Olmert is at political risk not only from the continuing work of the Winograd Commission, not only from his continued humiliating position in the opinion polls and the apparent collapse of the brand-new political party that he heads, “Kadima”… On Tuesday, state prosecutor Eran Shendar announced he had

ordered the police to begin a criminal investigation into Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, on suspicion of having tried, in his former role as finance minister, to influence a tender for the sale of a controlling stake in Bank Leumi.

So there we have it. A fateful time for Israel, indeed, with its national command authorities in a large degree of internal turmoil and disarray and public confidence in the political leadership at rock bottom.
A situation, I should add, that is also mirrored to a great extent in a Washington whose main center of power– in the Vice President’s office– seems to march in near political lockstep with its friends in Israel..
For these reasons, over the past day or two I have again become much more concerned about the launching of a “Wag-the dog” scenario. Desperate times might lead to a truly “desperate” search for remedies.

Good for Americans for Peace Now– the support group in the US for the Israeli PN organization… They’re organizing a campaign to demand that the Prez implement the ISG report.

(And for his part, Israeli PM Olmert seems almost apoplectically opposed to the report, especially its claim that there is a strong linkage between the US’s ability to avoid disaster in Iraq and the need to make some– long, long delayed!– progress towards implementing resolutions 242 and 338 on the Syrian and the Palestinian fronts.)

Strategic Assessment, published by the institute formerly known as the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, has a new issue, wholly available online, that is almost completely devoted to analyses of the 33-day war between Israel and Hizbullah.
The best article there, imho, is this one by Ron Tira, who is described in my paper copy of SA as “Formerly the head of a unit in Israel Air Force intelligence (‘Lahak’).” That tag-line also says that an abridged version of the article was published by HaArtez on September 15. I guess I missed it there.
Tira’s general analysis of the strategic shape of, and developments during, the war is largely similar to the one I described in my recent article on the war in Boston Review. But he goes into quite a lot more detail regarding the doctrinal and operational flaws of Israel’s performance.
He is absolutely crushing in the criticism he expresses of the ground force operations during the war. In a section subtitled The Absence of a Coherent Operational Concept for the Ground Forces he writes,

Too little, too late: Israel introduced ground forces into Lebanon in the fighting belatedly, indecisively, and above all, without a clearly defined operational concept.
… The Chinese strategist Sun Tzu claims that a military leader’s objective is to dictate to his enemy the nature of a war in which he has a relative advantage, and he should not be drawn into a type of war in which the enemy has a relative advantage. If this is not possible, said Sun Tzu, fighting should be avoided. For Clausewitz, in war one should attack the enemy’s plans. Israel played into Hizbollah’s hands, and conducted the campaign in accordance with Hizbollah’s plans and strengths and, as such, from the outset there was almost no chance of victory.

But it is notable– since he’s an air force person– that Tira is not an advocate of the view that airpower alone could have been expected to win the war (as Israeli chief of staff Dan Halutz had apparently originally hoped.) Tira writes: “The idea of an operation based solely on [stand-off] firepower and without land maneuvers is still unproven and unfounded, and to date has scored just one success – in Kosovo. However, circumstances indicated that the second Lebanon War was very different from events in Kosovo… ”
He is also critical of the reliance that Halutz apparently placed on the “Shock and Awe” aspects of the early days of the war. Indeed, he’s pretty critical of the “Shock and Awe” approach as a whole– or rather, of “Effects-based operations” (EBO), which is the technical term in US military jargon for Shock and Awe…
This is how Tira defines the “direct” results of the way Israel fought the 33-day war:

The direct upshot of the deterioration in the IDF force buildup and in the operational design, and the consequent adoption of particular campaign themes, was the failure to destroy, repress, or even to substantially impinge on enemy activity according to the primary parameters of Hizbollah’s operational design. Indeed, towards the end of the war, Hizbollah fired more than 200 rockets per day into Israel, while at the start of the war around 100 rockets were launched per day (even if the mixture shifted during the war toward short range surface-to-surface rockets). Hizbollah’s fighting forces continued operating while inflicting damage on the IDF, and even in most of the ground battles that they lost, they did not collapse or retreat. Hizbollah’s command and control echelon continued to function throughout the war. Its fighting spirit for the most part stayed strong, and currently there are no signs that its political will has been irreversibly impaired. While Hizbollah preferred to arrive at a ceasefire, this was based on a justifiable wish to “lock in its profits” (i.e., to stop the fighting at a stage where its force was maximizing its achievements and was perceived as the victor) and not because it was in distress or on the verge of collapse. In Hizbollah’s eyes, and in the view of some Arab onlookers, Hizbollah won the battle.
Moreover, the fact that several hundred Hizbollah fighters faced up to four Israeli divisions and the Israel Air Force, and ended the war standing up after inflicting significant damage on IDF forces, may also generate indirect results that are at best problematic. Some of the parties that followed the progress of the war may conclude, correctly or otherwise, that the IDF of today is not the IDF of the past, and that the Israeli (and, in generally, the Western) soldier is weaker and finds it difficult to deal with the difficulties of battle. It is hard to overestimate the importance of this perception, if it takes hold.
… the manner in which the second Lebanon War was conducted and the way in which it is viewed may affect the perception of Israel’s military superiority and, as such, may impact on many aspects of the reality in which Israel has existed since 1967. It is very difficult to foresee future political intent and to assess the probability of war; however it seems that in the wake of the second Lebanon War, at least some of the relevant parties may believe they can do battle with Israel and emerge from the fighting with the upper hand.

In other words, he’s expressing the fear that the credibility of Israel’s broader strategic deterrence may well have been significantly dented. H’mm, so maybe Israelis might consider that negotiations would be a better way to resolve their outstanding differences with their neighbors, rather than continuing along the path of refusing negotiations while sheltering behind the projection of the threat of using a huge amount of military power against anyone with outstanding claims against them?
Tira, unfortunately, doesn’t draw that conclusion. Maybe he’ll come to it over time?
In that section, though, he does also note that by being able to credibly “project” a very fearsome military deterrent against its neighbors since 1967, Israel has until now been able to get by very well without having to maintain an actual war-time type of economy:

The perception of Israel’s military superiority was responsible for generating the requisite conditions for the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, the peace process with the Palestinians, and thirty-three years of quiet on the Golan Heights. It allowed Israel to sustain a peacetime economy and a society of plenty and wellbeing, despite the absence of peace. And due to the perception of its military superiority, Israel became an American strategic asset that justified the investment of an aggregate amount of about $100 billion and the provision of dozens of billions of more dollars in guarantees, the best arms available, and a political umbrella.

He notes that there might be a real threat now that the Americans might reconsider Israel’s “strategic worth” to them, after the military debacles of the summer. (Don’t worry, Ron. Israel’s bought-and-paid-for friends in the US Congress won’t be judging Israel’s military capabilities on anything as crass as their intrinsic merits any time soon… I certainly don’t see any signs that the flood of taxpayer $$ going your way is going to stanched anytime soon.)
Here’s another intriguing quote from Tira:

Hizbollah designed a war in which presumably Israel could only choose which soft underbelly to expose: the one whereby it avoids a ground operation and exposes its home front vulnerability, or the one whereby it enters Lebanon and sustains the loss of soldiers in ongoing ground-based attrition with a guerilla organization. Hizbollah’s brilliant trap apparently left Israel with two undesirable options…

And finally, this:

To a large degree, the second Lebanon War was our Vietnam. Like the US in Vietnam, we tried to overcome guerillas with firepower but without massive maneuvering, force was put into use in rolling gradualism, the enemy leaned on a strategic rear in a neighboring country that was not attacked, and we did not engage in battle wholeheartedly and with a full commitment to victory. The bad news from the second Lebanon War is that we failed. The good news is that our regular and reserve forces are solid and committed; the problem is that they were assembled and deployed incorrectly. There is also good news in the fact that we received a wake-up call, and a second chance to learn and improve.

Those “good news” items there do seem like rather thin gruel for Israelis. Let’s hope the “learning and improving” they embark on now will include a more realistic assessment of their need for a changed balance between, on the one hand, war preparations and the projection of a massive military threat, and on the other, diplomacy and a real, good-faith commitment to negotiating all the outstanding issues with the neighbors on a basis of reciprocity and mutual respect.
So far, the international community has done pitifully little to make Israelis face up to this as a real and very necessary choice. But surely, if the Lebanon war “teaches” Israelis anything it should be that reliance only on military force can never resolve your problems and assure your security in a satisfactory way. Building relationships of reciprocal respect and mutual interest is (still) the best way to do that…. Anywhere in the world.

I’ve been having a bit of an email exchange today with Sarah Leah Whitson, the director of the Middle East Division of Human Rights Watch, over their decision, yesterday, to rush out a press release criticising the Gazans’ latest use of nonviolent mass action to halt Israel’s resumed practice of punitive home demolitions in Gaza.
The text of the HRW press release is now available on-line. It is titled OPT: Civilians Must Not Be Used to Shield Homes Against Military Attacks.
In Sarah Leah’s emails to me she has stressed two points: (1) The point, also made in the press release, that ““Whether or not the home is a legitimate military target, knowingly asking civilians to stand in harm’s way is unlawful.” And (2) that for Palestinian military commanders, in particular, to ask civilians to act as “human shields” in this way represented an unlawful attempt to pur civilians at potential risk.
I have pointed out to her that by these lights, for Mandela (who was a military commander, much more than Ismail Haniyeh– who was quoted in the HRW release– ever was) to call for South Africa’s non-whites to engage in nonviolent mass actions against the apartheid regime, which were often very risky indeed, would also likewise have been considered “unlawful” or even– as HRW grandiosely terms the situation in Gaza “a war crime.”
I pointed out that many other people, in addition to alleged “military commanders” also joined the mobilization effort in Gaza. I pointed out that there has been no suggestion of any coercion being applied on anyone to participate in this quite voluntary human-shielding action. (This is, of course, the most marked difference with the situation when Israel– in the past, and reportedly as recently as last July– has forced Palestinians at gunpoint to act as human shields during its actions in the OPTs. This issue of the presence or absence of coercion is surely a very important one indeed.)
I also wish I’d pointed out more forcefully than I did that– contrary to what SL said both in the press release and to me– it does make a significant difference whether the threatened target of Israel’s violent action was a “legitimate military target”, or not…
So the conversation will doubtless continue. I still strongly question why Sarah Leah and the rest of HRW’s staff [previous word edited on Jan. 28, 2009, with apologies for the earlier, very disrespectful characterization of these people ~HC] rushed to get this very definitive and accusatory press release out so very quickly. Especially given that– as I’d noted here yesterday– over the past four months HRW had said not one word about Israel’s horrible, very harmful resumption, back in July, of the practice of demolishing large numbers of family homes in the Gaza Strip for purely punitive purposes.
It was that practice that the latest “human shields” operation was trying to prevent… and thus far, successfully so…
HRW did have the grace– finally!– in yesterday’s press release to mention the fact and scale of Israel’s resumption of undertaking punitive home demolitions min Gaza… But that very salient fact was buried ways down toward the end of their press release. And notably, the text completely fails to call on Israel to cease this extremely harmful and violent practice, which– in the absence of any evidence at all that the homes in question were used to store weapons– is a quite evident and serious infraction of the Geneva Conventions.
I note, however, that the Israelis must have been very peeved at the success of the latest human shield operation because earlier today they sent ground force (tank and sniper) units into northern Gaza, installing some of these units in Palestinian homes as a way of thereby “converting” them into military positions. Given that the population density in Gaza is such that people usually live in all these houses, this almost immediately turns these individuals– whom the IOF usually keeps through coercive means as prisoners in one or more rooms of their own homes– into coerced human shields. What they are “shielding” there is of course the IOF’s aggressive and violent presence in and atop their home.
(Sarah Leah, where’s the outrage?)
One of the homes taken over today was that of female Hamas legislator Jameela al-Shanti, one of the main organizers of the recent civilian mass actions.
Here’s that AP account linked to above:

Troops also took over the home of a Hamas legislator who earlier in the month helped to organize a women’s demonstration that let dozens of militants escape an Israeli siege on a Beit Hanoun mosque, the lawmaker, Jamila Shanti, told The Associated Press.
She was not in the house at the time…
A bulldozer chipped away at the walls of the two-story structure so troops could enter, relatives inside the house and neighbors told her, she said. Once inside, they locked about 15 members of her family, including five children, into a single room and threw furniture and clothes out of windows, she said.
“They are only making us more stubborn,” she said. “We will resist with our last drop of blood.”
Bulldozers, skirting regular roads where mines could be planted, also created new routes of access by knocking down greenhouses in Jebaliya, Beit Hanoun and neighboring Beit Lahiya, and two small farmers’ houses.
The army confirmed it was operating in the area as part of its ongoing offensive against Gaza rocket squads, but gave no other details.

Poor Ms. Shanti. Just a couple of weeks ago the IOF’s artillery shelled her house, killing her sister-in-law Nahla, and terrifying all the children who live there. Can you imagine how the children felt during today’s ghastly, inhumane action?
In what possible way was the house a legitimate military target for the IOF?
… And finally, one last note on HRW’s application of what seem like evidently biased double standards regarding the whole “human shields” issue. You probably recall the furore back in July when a bunch of Israeli parents apparently took their “cute” little girl-children to visit a nearby and quite active artillery position in northern Israel, during the war with Hizbullah… and the girls all got to write little messages with felt-tip markers onto the large and very destructive artillery shells that were standing around there… And the whole scene was photographed and quite widely discussed in some parts of the blogosphere (including here, by Scott.)
This looks much more serious as an instance of “human shielding” than anything that happened in Gaza this week. The IDF artillery position was clearly itself a “legitimate military target”, and the commanders seem not to have tried to shoo the Israeli families away from the place. But can you only imagine the uproar if Hizbullah had targeted the position and hit it with its rockets– and 10 or 12 Israeli children had been blown up while they were there drawing their little designs and messages on the IDF’s artillery shells?
And Human Rights Watch said what about that incident??? As far as I can figure out, absolutely nothing.
But when the Palestinians of Gaza try to undertake an unarmed action of social defense of homes unjustifiably targeted for punitive demolition, HRW can’t hurry fast enough to issue its denunciation.
Truly, as I told Sarah Leah, I don’t understand what they’re thinking.

Here is an English-language version of a fascinating interview that Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the US, Dani Ayalon gave recently to ben Kaspit of Ma’Ariv. (Thanks to the US government’s taxpayer-funded Open Source Center for the translating.)
Ayalon makes many intriguing points here, some of which I have bolded for your reading ease. However, I’m in a rush and don’t have to comment more right now, except to note that he confirms what I have been writing all along, namely that the strengthening of the Democrats in the recent election is not necessarily seen by Israeli policymakers as bad for them:

The Americans’ support for us is not partisan. Nancy Pelosi, Tom Lantos, Rahm Emmanuel, Joe Bayden, Steny Hoyer — all those prominent Democrats — are huge friends of Israel…

And this, about what he was hearing from Democrats (and others) during the 33-day war:

when the war in Lebanon started, one of the most liberal Democrats told me: “Go for Nasrallah’s head.” The Neo-Cons are not the only ones who understand terror these days. The world is changing. Everybody knows now what Israel is going through. They understand the consequences of terror. From the US point of view, Israel has turned into something like a laboratory, a model that proves that terror can be beaten, that there are ways of dealing with suicide terrorists. Every day that goes by with no suicide terrorist blowing up in Tel Aviv helps the Americans prove to the Europeans that they must not blink, that they must not make compromises with terror…