Category: Israel 2003-08

Gideon Levy in Ha’Aretz. A true voice of the Jewish/Israeli conscience. Read him:

Nineteen inhabitants of Beit Hanun were killed with malice aforethought. There is no other way of describing the circumstances of their killing. Someone who throws burning matches into a forest can’t claim he didn’t mean to set it on fire, and anyone who bombards residential neighborhoods with artillery can’t claim he didn’t mean to kill innocent inhabitants.
Therefore it takes considerable gall and cynicism to dare to claim that the Israel Defense Forces did not intend to kill inhabitants of Beit Hanun. Even if there was a glitch in the balancing of the aiming mechanism or in a component of the radar, a mistake in the input of the data or a human error, the overwhelming, crucial, shocking fact is that the IDF bombards helpless civilians. Even shells that are supposedly aimed 200 meters from houses, into “open areas,” are intended to kill, and they do kill. In this respect, nothing new happened on Wednesday morning in Gaza: The IDF has been behaving like this for months now.
But this isn’t just a matter of “the IDF,” “the government” or “Israel” bearing the responsibility. It must be said explicitly: The blame rests directly on people who hold official positions, flesh-and-blood human beings, and they must pay the price of their criminal responsibility for needless killing.
… A few hours after the disaster, while the Gaza Strip was still enveloped in sorrow and deep in shock, the air force was already hastening to carry out another targeted killing, an arrogant demonstration of just how much this disaster does not concern us…
Mourning, of course, did not descend on Israel, and there was not even a single manifestation of genuine participation in the sorrow. It did not occur to Israel to promise compensation to the families and it did not provide help, apart from transferring some of the wounded to hospitals in Israel. We provided more aid to the victims of the earthquake in Mexico, even though there we didn’t have a hand in the disaster. For the most part, the media were not very disturbed by the killing and devoted less attention to it than to the Gay Pride parade.
A day or two after the disaster it was totally forgotten and other affairs are filling our lives. But it is impossible just to go on to the next item on the agenda. This disaster is not an act of God. There are people who are clearly responsible for it, and they must be brought to justice….

Also in HaAretz: Zvi Bar-El, and even Bradley Burston.
From Burston, poignantly:

A few months before that March election, at a huge memorial in Tel Aviv marking 10 years since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, I listened to the newly elected leader of the Labor Party, Amir Peretz, speak with passion and evident conviction of his goals:
“I have a dream, Yitzhak, that one day an industrial zone will be set up in the no-man’s land between Sderot and Beit Hanun. Entertainment venues and playgrounds for our children and Palestinian children will be set up, and they will play together, and build a common future together.”

So much for meaningless rhetoric, eh?
And while much of the Israeli press is carrying soul-searching like this over the massacre of Beit Hanoun, what do we hear about Beit Hanoun from politicians, the media, and other members of the political elite here in the US?? Silence!
And then, in the wings of the discussion here in the US you can here, as always, the loudly twittering chorus of all the people who will try to find ways to excuse Israel, whatever it does. Including wiping out 18 members of a single extended family with “misguided” artillery fire.
We do need to see, of course, the exact settings on the fuzes of those artillery shells. Why, after the first one or two of them slammed into the apartment building, did they just keep on coming? The IOF clearly has a serious fire-control problem. But whether this is “technical” or due to the human intervention of extremists in the IOF who are keen to keep tensions stoked high: that is one important thing to know.
Either way, under the doctrine of command responsibility the commanders–right up to the commander-in-chief– who set in motion the deployment and the orders that sent that artillery unit there must also be held completely accountable… Including by the US taxpayers who pay all these people’s salaries and buy them their deadly war-toys, and whose interests are then directly put in jeopardy by the IOF’s actions.

Israel’s national command authorities continue the sustained and serious process of implosion that was sparked by the many failures of strategy and intelligence (in both senses of the word) revealed during the 33-day war against Hizbullah. (See my Sept. 5 post on JWN on this topic, here. August 23, here and here.)
The latest Haaretz-Dialog opinion poll reveals that

Olmert’s approval rating this week plummeted to 22 percent, compared to 48 percent six weeks ago. Defense Minister Amir Peretz fared even worse, with only a 14 percent approval rating, down from 37 percent six weeks ago…
By comparison, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni enjoys a broad support base: She had a 51 percent approval rating, while only 33 percent think that her performance is inadequate. Still, even Livni lost 10 points compared to her approval rating six weeks ago.

The Kadima-led government was of course– like “Kadima” itself– formed almost solely on the basis of its promise to pursue a unilateral withdrawal of the IDF from some parts of the West Bank. (Oh, and let’s not forget the promise Olmert made in his campaign that he sought to make Israel a “fun” place to live. They haven’t done too well on that one, either… )
But the indecisive– indeed, from Olmert’s viewpoint, quite disastrous– war against Hizbullah showed once and for all, along with the continuation of some low-level anti-Israel rocketing from Gaza, that a completely un-negotiated withdrawal cannot assure Israelis of the security they crave, no matter how high the walls are with which they seek to separate themselves from their neighbors. To get security, you need peace agreements with neighbors. As between Israel and Egypt, or between Israel and Jordan. And to get a peace agreement you either need to be able to crush the enemy and ram a surrender down his throat, as Sharon tried but notably failed to do with Lebanon in 1982– Or, you need to negotiate.
Welcome to the world of the interdependence of nations.
So anyway, the fateful decision that Olmert made on July 12 to fight against the entire country and people of Lebanon backfired on him miserably. In late August he told the Israeli people that the promised partial withdrawal from the West Bank would now be “indefinitely postponed”. Since then Kadima and its government have had, really, no continuing raison d’etre. The country’s leadership has been dangerously adrift; and a whole cascade of scandals concerning sexual and monetary malfeasance has meanwhile been showering down on many of its top people, from President Moshe Katsav on down.
It is my understanding– perhaps faulty?– that in the Israeli system, as in the British system, the head of state plays mainly a ceremonial role, but can also play a crucial political role in two particular ways: (a) by choosing which party head to invite in and have first crack at forming a government– a role that is particuarly sensitive in a strongly coalition-based system such as Israel’s, less so in basically two-party Britain; and (b) by providing quiet and non-partisan counsel to the serving prime minister at sensitive times.
Evidently, President Moshe Katsav, who is fending off serious charges of sexual aggression, is not in a great position to play any of these roles. But of course, it is not just, Olmert, and Peretz who are in trouble. The IDF’s chief of staff Dan Halutz is also, at this exact same time, trying to deal with increasingly insistent calls for his resignation. Indeed, almost the entirety of the “centrist” portion of the country’s political elite is in an extremely deep funk.
So where is Israeli public opinion headed? Sadly, it seems that so far it’s headed toward the right. That same Haaretz report, which is by Yossi Verter, tells us that

Opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, is still benefiting from his support for the government during the war, with a 58 percent approval rating, compared to 29 percent who disapprove.
Indeed, if elections were held now, Likud would receive 24 seats in the Knesset, while Kadima would only win 16 seats, a loss of 13 seats. Labor, which seemed to have hit bottom during the previous election, with 19 seats, would now win only 15.
Another major winner would be Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, which would capture 18 Knesset seats if elections were held now.
Survey participants were also asked to express their confidence in four leadership duos, each comprising a civilian and a military personality. The four were: Ehud Barak and Avraham Burg; Ami Ayalon and Avishay Braverman; Benjamin Netanyahu and Moshe Ya’alon; Tzipi Livni and Shaul Mofaz.
The results were clear: Netanyahu and the former chief of staff received 30 percent support, followed by Livni-Mofaz with 19 percent, Ayalon-Braverman with 15 percent and Barak-Burg with 10 percent.

And what about the Israeli left?
Amongst Jewish-Israeli leftists, the story has for the most part remained a sad, sad tale. They seem to be saying almost nothing. By Googling around for the well-known names and organizations, I did find this account of a conference call that Meretz head Yossi Beilin had on August 20 with people in the excellent, US-based Brit Tzedek v’Shalom organization. In it, the most that Beilin could do was call for a repeat, 15 years later, of the landmark, all-party Madrid Peace Conference, that had been convened by the first Bush administration on October 31, 1991.
According to the transcript, he said this:

My idea is that we should push for something like this so that Syria, Lebanon, Palestinians, Israelis, and of course America or the Quartet, will participate in such a conference, will launch bi-lateral talks between Israel and Syria, Israel and Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinians, and try to suggest that in a few months it could be possible to have peace treaties with our neighbors.
I must admit that right now it might seem quite detached from reality. The reality seems very gloomy when you think about Israel, when you think of these thirty days of nightmare in which it was almost a courageous step to go from Tel Aviv to Haifa. And people do think that this mighty army of ours could not overcome the small militia of Hezbollah in a short while. So the question right now is whether the embarrassment, the confusion, the gloomy feelings and the weakness of the leaders, might lead us, at the appropriate time, to go toward something which will attract the attention of the peoples in the region, of the peoples in the world, away from this sadness, or darkness, into a hope and into light. This is the question.

Indeed.
So we still need to go back and understand what happened to the Israeli peace movement during the war. Luckily, my dear friend (and former deputy speaker of the Knesset) Naomi Chazan had held a conference call with Brit Tzedek v’Shalom on August 6– that is, while the war was still underway. So it’s good to go back and see what she was saying then:

where is the peace movement in all of this? Frankly, the Israeli peace movement has been very seriously divided during the course of the war and is seriously divided today. Every Saturday night there have been demonstrations in Tel Aviv. I would say that 90 percent of the demonstrators the first few weeks were Arab Israelis, Palestinian Israelis. These were demonstrations that were organized by the radical peace movement in Israel and essentially populated by members of Hadash and Balad [far left Israeli political parties]. It was very difficult for Israeli Jews to participate in these demonstrations. I admit, I’ve been to every single one of them, and I did so because I felt from the word ‘go’ that military action would escalate and perhaps get out of control and I felt it might be possible to do some kind of public action to stop it. I should probably know better at my age, but nevertheless I think one has to voice these things publicly as well.
The demonstration that was held last night was different because at least significant portions of Meretz, which is also very heavily divided, joined last night’s demonstration and I spoke, Yael Dayan spoke as well. So there’s the beginning of a movement. This morning A.B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, and David Grossman, Israel’s most noted literati, published a big ad in Haaretz saying that even though they justified the war they think it’s enough; they think its time for a ceasefire. So we’re beginning to get a more tactical approach from the moderate segments of the peace movement in Israel. But I would say that this war has split the peace ranks even more than the second intifada.
The one ray of light here is actually the women’s peace movements, which have been very consistent in opposing the war from the outset and have made their voices heard through organizations like Bat Shalom, and Women’s Coalition for a Just Peace, or through the newly formed coalition, Women Against War, or through the International Women’s Commission which actually brings together Palestinians and Israelis and internationals. So the consistency of the women’s peace movement here is notable.

(In this regard, check this out.)
Naomi is one of the sharpest analysts, as well as the most compassionate people, whom I know. The whole of her presentation there with BTV is worth reading.
Including this– expressed on August 6, remember…

I think the key victim of this war is unilateralism. Unilateralism for now on will be a non-starter, both because of the Israeli public mood but also because it is not a viable strategy for achieving lasting accord. But what we have learned from this war as well is that there is a clear benefit to withdrawal to an internationally recognized boundary. But that is not enough because in the case of Lebanon, where Israel withdrew to an internationally recognized boundary, and therefore enjoys a certain amount of support in the global arena, this was not accompanied by an agreement and without an agreed withdrawal to an internationally recognized boundary. Israel’s security, and I think the security of the entire Middle East will be in peril.
But moving from there, the question is, how can one take advantage of what is occurring now and avert disaster, to create the conditions so that this type of situation does not recur. And it seems to me that ironically, but also in a promising way, a ceasefire may open some serious opportunities here. The silver lining is that there are real possibilities for opening negotiations with the Palestinians if the Israeli government will have the courage to pursue these opportunities.
And more significantly, this may be the chance to begin to explore seriously the Arab League initiative, what’s known as the Saudi initiative, which talks about the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel as part of a comprehensive agreement that will include Lebanon and Syria. So on the diplomatic front I am more optimistic if all efforts are made now to channel some of the lessons of what is taking place into constructive avenues. What is needed now though is a ceasefire agreement. Everyday that passes not only are more civilians being killed on both sides, but the mood is becoming so terrible that it’s making any thought of talking much more difficult. So there is an opportunity here and I don’t think one should lose sight of this opportunity.

There’s an amazing congruence there with what I was writing for the CSM that very day– it appeared in my August 10 column. And I regret to admit I hadn’t been in touch with Naomi at all during the war (or, indeed, for some months now.)
So there are a few teeny pinpricks of light from Jewish Israel: individuals of conscience and integrity like Chazan, Beilin, or Ury Avneri and the rest of the great, principled Gush Shalom crowd. Another potential point of light: the militarists and advocates of more toughly “strong-arm” policies really don’t have either a workable plan for resolving Israel’s problems or a record of unimpugned credibility within Israel or abroad. Hard, I think, for any western government professing a support for democratic principles to give unabashed support to a government in which, for example, Avigdor Leiberman might be Defense Minister (as is currently being discussed.)
As I’ve said on a number of occasions in the past six weeks, the present moment is a time of great uncertainty, great vulnerability, and also– potentially– great opportunity within the Israeli political system. If only the other powers in the world on whom Israel is still, despite all its disavowals, so very deeply dependent could get together and express their strong support for a robust, comprehensive, 242-based final peace agreement between Israel and all its neighbors, then now could be a very good time to push forward on winning such a peace.
But in the US, significant parts of the political elite don’t actually these days want to push forward toward a 242-based peace agreement. Why not? That is the issue that, I think, we peace activists inside the US and worldwide need to be pressing hard on.

From HaAretz’s Meron Rapoport today:

“What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs,” the head of an IDF rocket unit in Lebanon said regarding the use of cluster bombs and phosphorous shells during the war.
Quoting his battalion commander, the rocket unit head stated that the IDF fired around 1,800 cluster bombs, containing over 1.2 million cluster bomblets.
In addition, soldiers in IDF artillery units testified that the army used phosphorous shells during the war, widely forbidden by international law. According to their claims, the vast majority of said explosive ordinance was fired in the final 10 days of the war.

This is, of course, a follow-up to the piece Rapoport published Friday (Sept. 8), as discussed on JWN here.
Today’s piece continues:

The rocket unit commander stated that Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) platforms were heavily used in spite of the fact that they were known to be highly inaccurate.
MLRS is a track or tire carried mobile rocket launching platform, capable of firing a very high volume of mostly unguided munitions. The basic rocket fired by the platform is unguided and imprecise, with a range of about 32 kilometers. The rockets are designed to burst into sub-munitions at a planned altitude in order to blanket enemy army and personnel on the ground with smaller explosive rounds.
The use of such weaponry is controversial mainly due to its inaccuracy and ability to wreak great havoc against indeterminate targets over large areas of territory, with a margin of error of as much as 1,200 meters from the intended target to the area hit.
The cluster rounds which don’t detonate on impact, believed by the United Nations to be around 40% of those fired by the IDF in Lebanon, remain on the ground as unexploded munitions, effectively littering the landscape with thousands of land mines which will continue to claim victims long after the war has ended.
Because of their high level of failure to detonate, it is believed that there are around 500,000 unexploded munitions on the ground in Lebanon. To date 12 Lebanese civilians have been killed by these mines since the end of the war.
According to the commander, in order to compensate for the inaccuracy of the rockets and the inability to strike individual targets precisely, units would “flood” the battlefield with munitions, accounting for the littered and explosive landscape of post-war Lebanon.
When his reserve duty came to a close, the commander in question sent a letter to Defense Minister Amir Peretz outlining the use of cluster munitions, a letter which has remained unanswered.
It has come to light that IDF soldiers fired phosphorous rounds in order to cause fires in Lebanon. An artillery commander has admitted to seeing trucks loaded with phosphorous rounds on their way to artillery crews in the north of Israel.
A direct hit from a phosphorous shell typically causes severe burns and a slow, painful death.
International law forbids the use of weapons that cause “excessive injury and unnecessary suffering”, and many experts are of the opinion that phosphorous rounds fall directly in that category.
The International Red Cross has determined that international law forbids the use of phosphorous and other types of flammable rounds against personnel, both civilian and military.
In response, the IDF Spokesman’s Office stated that “International law does not include a sweeping prohibition of the use of cluster bombs. The convention on conventional weaponry does not declare a prohibition on [phosphorous weapons], rather, on principles regulating the use of such weapons.
“For understandable operational reasons, the IDF does not respond to [accounts of] details of weaponry in its possession.
“The IDF makes use only of methods and weaponry which are permissible under international law. Artillery fire in general, including MLRS fire, were used in response solely to firing on the state of Israel.”
The Defense Minister’s office said it had not received messages regarding cluster bomb fire.

I don’t feel the need to add anything except my sadness at the inhumanity that seemed, “demonically”, to have taken possession of the IDF commanders who planned and ordered these kinds of actions, and my appreciation to both Rapoport and to his informants who saw the need to bring these facts to light.
Of course, a good part of the evidence is still all out there, spread over the lands of south Lebanon, so many of which have now become killing fields because of this wildly indiscriminate and disproportional spraying around of cluster bomblets.
But it is also great to start investigating the perpetration of these criminal actions. Who undertook them? Who planned and ordered them? Too bad that no-one in the Kirya (Israel’s Defense Ministry complex) is prepared to speak more openly about it. But it is certainly very laudable that that rocket unit head recognized, and was prepared to say to Rapoport, that what his unit had done with the cluster bombs and phosphorus shells was “insane and monstrous.” Indeed.

Today’s HaAretz has an informative article on Israel’s use of artillery, including a new form of “cluster rocket” as well as cluster bombs. It’s by Meron Rapoport.
He writes this:

Y., a reservist… , fired at least 15 cluster shells. “It was in the last days of the war,” he says. “They gave us orders to fire them. They didn’t tell us where we were firing – if it was at a village or at open terrain. We fired until the forces that requested the shelling asked us to stop.”
Another peculiarity involves the type of shells that were used. The 155-mm. artillery batteries use two types: American-made shells, known in the IDF by the acronym matzrash, and Israeli-made shells, called tze’if. Y. learned that with the Israeli cluster shells, the percentage of duds – i.e., of bombs that essentially became land mines – was lower than that of the American-made ones, and yet they fired only the latter kind. But the major portion of the damage wasn’t done, apparently, by the 155-mm. guns that S. and Y. fired, rather, apparently, by the new MRLS rocket launchers that the IDF used in operations for the first time in the second Lebanon war.
In the late 1990s, the IDF purchased 48 of these launchers from the United States. Each one holds 12 rockets, which act essentially like large cluster bombs. According to the official specifications, each such rocket contains no fewer than 644 tiny bomblets that are supposed to disperse in a 100-meter radius above the target. “Like a soccer field full of bombs,” is how one artillery reservist described it.
Y. says that his battalion commander said that when the IDF Apache helicopter came down near Ramot Naftali, killing its two pilots, one suspicion was that it had been hit by such a rocket that had been fired in the area at the time. It was later determined that this was likely not the cause, but the discussion of such a possibility basically amounted to an official admission that such rockets were indeed being used against southern Lebanon. How many exactly? It’s hard to know. The UN people have no precise data on the breakdown of unexploded ordnance from MRLS rockets, or American or Israeli cluster shells.
[UN humanitarian coordinator for Lebanon David] Shearer says it’s clear that most use of the cluster weapons was made in the final 72 hours of the war. “In the beginning of the war, too, there were reports on the use of cluster bombs,” he says. “But only a few. In the three last days, a tremendous amount of them were fired. It’s also hard to know where they were aimed. The dispersion of the bombs is so wide that even if the original target were outside a populated area, many bombs fell amid the houses.”
Y. and S. [both reservists in the IDF artillery force] confirm this appraisal of events. “In the last 72 hours we fired all the munitions we had, all at the same spot,” says Y. “We didn’t even alter the direction of the gun. Friends of mine in the battalion told me they also fired everything in the last three days – ordinary shells, clusters, whatever they had.”

Rapoport started his piece with more exploration of the situation regarding the targeting of some of the IDF’s artillery:

S.is a reservist in an artillery battalion, and he is not at ease with what he did during the second Lebanon war. He fired shells [not cluster bomb shells, apparently; but not lollipops either, ~HC], sometimes at a rate of one per minute. He and his fellow soldiers fired 200 shells one night and on other nights, “only” 50 or 80. S. doesn’t know what damage was done by the shells he fired. He didn’t see where they fell. He doesn’t even know exactly where they were aimed. Artillery gunners like him only receive coordinates, numbers, not names of villages. Even those commanding the team or the battery don’t know exactly what they’re firing at.
“Tell me, how do the villages there look? Are they all destroyed?” S. asked me after I told him that I was in contact with UN personnel who were patrolling the villages. What really made something inside S. snap was when his battalion was given an entire village as a target one night. He thinks it was Taibeh, a village in what is called the eastern sector, but he’s not sure. The battalion commander assembled the men and told them that the whole village had been divided into parts and that each team was supposed to “flood” its alloted space – without specific targets, simply to bombard the village.
“I told myself that the people left in that village must be the weaker ones, like in Haifa,” says S. “I felt that we were acting like Hezbollah. Taking houses and turning them into targets. That’s terror. My soul is important to me. When I hug my girlfriend, I want to feel good about myself. And I don’t feel good about what I did in the war. I felt like I really should have tossed my weapon and run away.”

Remember that each one of these artillery shells carries a serious explosive charge. (Remember the size of the artillery shells in the pics of the Israeli girls lining up to “sign” them– they were taller than some of those girls there, I recall.)
Rapoport writes that, “One reservist artillery officer estimated that the Israel Defense Forces fired about 160,000 shells during the recent war.” However, this article in yesterday’s HaAretz reported that IDF officers told a Knesset committee that the number had been around 237,000. Anyway, to put this in perspective, Rapoport notes that in the Yom Kippur, which was a large engagement fought on two fronts– one of them the very broad Sinai front– against the regular armies of two significant Arab states, “the IDF fired less than 100,000 shells.”
He notes that in the recent war Israel also fired “several hundred cluster rockets and cluster bombs” and then tells us more about those, as noted above.
Altogether, this report gives us more info about Israel’s extremely profligate– indeed, quite possibly “indiscriminate”– use of artillery during the war, in general. It adds significant new details to the cluster bombs story. (See also the Aug 17 HRW report on that, and this Sep 5 report from the UN’s IRIN news service.) And it also gives us some hints of where people might look to find info about the chain of command that had authorized and led to these firings and the apparently indiscriminate content of some of those orders. All of which is vital info in this context.

Yes, that is what the IDF has now said that Israel rained on Lebanon in the 33 days of the recent war, according to this HaAretz report…. And then there were all the additional tens of thousands of air-delivered and navy-delivered munitions,
That report also tells us that the direct costs of the war came to 11.2 billion NIS (i.e., shekels), which is $2.56 billion.
(The price of how many lattes there?)
No word yet on how those costs are going to be covered… That news report says lamely that the Knesset Budget Committee “authorized an additional NIS 1.75 billion for the defense establishment, of which NIS 600 million will be used to cover war expenses.”
Also, “MK Avshalom Vilan (Meretz) said that war is an expensive business and asked why no cost-benefit analysis had been done.”
Just a little late to start asking those questions, Mr. Vilan, don’t you think?
During the war, we may recall that Hizbullah launched some 4,000 of its rockets– the vast majority of them the ones that Michael Totten described as “pipsqueakers”– against Israel.
Well, this is a week when many important questions are starting to be asked in Israel… and some are even starting to be answered.
Amos Harel writesin Thursday’s HaAretz:

Chief of Staff Dan Halutz was yesterday subjected to the harshest criticism he has encountered since the end of the fighting in Lebanon last month. The army’s handling of the confrontation was roundly blasted at a meeting convened by Halutz with dozens of reserve generals at the Israel Defense Forces base at Tzrifin. The gap between the manner in which the chief of staff portrayed the war and the way the reservists saw it, in the words of one participant, “diametrically opposed.” That said, many of the participants said that Halutz appeared to listen intently to the criticism leveled against him.

And Ze’ev Schiff tells us that:

Two Israel Defense Forces General Staff officers, operations chief Major General Gadi Eisenkut and the Intelligence Division’s head of research, Brigadier General Yossi Beiditz, strongly opposed last month’s decision to launch a broad ground offensive against Hezbollah shortly before the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling for a cease-fire in the war in Lebanon.
The decision to embark on the operation was made on Wednesday, August 9, when it was already clear that the Security Council would vote on a cease-fire resolution soon thereafter. The council in fact passed the resolution at 5 A.M. on Saturday.
Beiditz wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz that his division believed that the last-minute offensive would not significantly affect the enemy or lead to achievements. Beiditz sent a copy of the letter to Chief of Staff Dan Halutz.
Eisenkut opposed the decision for operational reasons.

Schiff tells us that there has also been disagreement in Israel over the value of the– according to him, repeated– operations to capture the town of Bint Jbeil: “The operation against the town, which IDF forces had to retake several times, led to significant losses.”
… And finally, at the end of a long evening’s reading here, this classic from Defense Minister Amir Peretz: “The aim of the campaign was to create the space for a diplomatic achievement.”
Right, Minister. And if you believe that, then I have a nice piece of real estate in Florida I’d like to sell you. (I.e., you must be extremely stupid and gullible.)
Here’s what the great Quaker peace activist A.J. Muste said: “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.” Think about it.

I’m always intrigued both by those very revealing ‘dogs that don’t bark in the night’ (as in ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’) and by dogs that, though barking, are not portrayed as barking in the night.
So why is the US MSM– and the British MSM, come to that– so noticeably silent on the ongoing leadership and self-identity crisis that is unfolding within Israel?
If you read HaAretz daily, and Ynet as often as you can, as I do, then it’s evident that there is a major crisis of confidence and of self-identity going on in the Israeli political elite these days.
Thus from the English-language HaAretz site, just from Wednesday’s edition, we have the following stories:

(1) This one, about the fact that the attorney general has rejected two of the five people (men) whom Olmert had named to serve on the committee he is forming to look into the problems of the recent war. The reason? Because, as an Israeli good-governance NGO pointed oput, these men are both executives with major defense-contracting companies, and therefore have a clear financial/professional stake in the ooutcome of the committee’s work… (Oh, Israel and its massive, globally active military-industrial complex– how far from the more idealistic dreams of the Zionist forefathers, eh?)
(2) This one, about the fact that HaAretz has found potentially five more women who claim they have been either sexually harrassed or sexually assaulted by State President Moshe Katsav– at least one of whom now says she’s prepared to join the existing complainant in testifying publicly against him.
(3) This one, by Ze’ev Schiff, noting that IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz now faces a “crisis caused by the lack of confidence that some top Israel Defense Forces officers, and many reservists, have in him,” after the recent war, and that, ” Halutz and Defense Minister Amir Peretz … do not work well together, a problem that has manifested itself in the competition between them over the committee that each set up to investigate the war. Each leader also faces problems unique to himself… The problem with Peretz is that his term marks the first time in Israeli history that an inexperienced defense minister has been in power during wartime.” (Read the whole piece there. It’s interesting.)
(4) This article, saying that PM Ehud Olmert “did not know in advance” that the Housing Ministry had put out for tender contracts for building 690 apartments in two West Bank settlements. (Most experts in international humanitarian law, I note, consider the building of these settlements to be a, “a trave breach” of the fourth Geneva Convention, that is, a war crime.)… So the Housing Minister just went ahead and put these contracts out for tender, reportedly without Olmert’s knowledge. But guess whom he had informed about them in advance? That would be Defense Minister Amir Peretz, who in his job as DM is, of course, right there in the chain of command regarding anything to do with Israeli actions in the West Bank which is a territory under Israeli military occupation. (As the figure on this blog’s sidebar will tell you, this occupation has now been going on for no fewer than 13,397 days.)
Well guess what again? Amir Peretz (see #3 above), is also the head of the so-called leftwing “Labour” Party and a self-proclaimed “lover of peace”. And now he’s signing off on this gross expansion of the settler presence in the West Bank? No wonder the country’s in an extremely confused situation!!
(5) And then there are this pair of articles in the paper: This one quotes Amir Peretz (see above) as saying “A way has to be found to … do everything possible to create conditions so that there will be a dialogue on the Syrian front”, and this one says that Olmert “yesterday” (i.e. today) told a Knesset committee that ” “it would take a great deal of imagination to see in this situation potential for dialogue [with Syria].” Oh, I have to reproduce a bit more of this report, which is very interesting indeed:
MK Ran Cohen (Meretz), who called Olmert’s appearance before the committee “haughty,” said everyone in Israel knows the war is the forerunner for the next one. “This war ended in complete failure,” Cohen added.
Banging on the table angrily in response to the criticism, Olmert said, “I’m sorry that some MKs have lost their sense of proportion. Stop exaggerating.
“No danger to Israel was revealed during the past month. You didn’t know that Hezbollah had 12,000 missiles in Lebanon? You didn’t know that Iran supported them?”
Olmert also told the committee that “there were failures in the war, but there were also amazing achievements. Has the U.S. collapsed after three years in Iraq? What’s the panic? We all make mistakes, I first of all.”
“What did you think, that there would be a war and nothing would happen to our soldiers,” Olmert asked the committee. “The claim that we lost is unfounded. Half of Lebanon is destroyed; is that a loss?” [Actually, Ehud, I think it is. It’s a terrible loss, both in absolute terms, and in terms of Israel ever thinking it can live in peace and equality with its neighbors… You honestly think that destroying half of Lebanon can be counted as anyone’s gain??? ~HC]
With regard to the demand for a state commission of inquiry, Olmert said that while he valued the judicial system very highly, “that does not mean that at any given time they have to be the problem-solver.”
The prime minister argued that a state commission would paralyze the political and military systems for a long period of time.
Olmert said the Shahak committee appointed by the Defense Minister Amir Peretz [see above] to examine the military aspects of the war had to discontinue its investigation because the Military Justice Law does not authorize the committee to ensure the immunity of witnesses it might call to testify.

My G-d, what a shambles here. But, moving right along, we have:
(6) This article, saying that Amir Peretz’s Labour Party, plus Shas and the Pensioners’ Party– all key members of Olmert’s present governing coalition– are now threatening to pull out of the coalition “if it turns out today that the social welfare cutbacks are included in the budget book.”
Well, I would say that the fact of the recent war means that Israeli society now needs to decide in a serious way whether it is going to invest in “guns” and the big demands of military readiness, or “butter” and the ever-attractive latte-sipping lifestyle over the years ahead. Can’t have both. Cash is one constraint, sure, but the bought-and-paid-for US Congress will always ensure that ain’t too much of a problem. The real constraint there is the manpower needed for the “guns” option… But right now, it looks like a tussle over the budget. So let’s see which way this one goes.
And finally we have–
(7) This article by Yoel Marcus, in which he makes the interesting argument that Olmert should not as many have urged him to, opt to establish a fully empowered “state commission”, most likely headed by Supreme Court head Aharon Barak, to investigate Israel’s shortcomings in the recent war. Marcus makes two interesting arguments here. First, that this is a highly political matter, so it is best to leave it to the political process to deal with it (including, presumably, the possibility of a coalition breakup and/or a vote of no confidence) rather than throwing the burden onto the judiciary, as happened with the post-October War “Agranat Commission”. His second argument is that actually Olmert shouldn’t have to bear more than a small amount of the responsibility for the failings revealed by the recent war, since he has only been PM for four months, and the failings at all levels that were revealed by the war were the responsibility of many more people– from all parties– acting over the the past few years.
Here’s some of what Marcus writes:

Yes, the situation on the home front was scandalous. But the commission of inquiry will have to start investigating five years back. It will have to scrutinize what Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, Ariel Sharon and Shaul Mofaz did when they were in power. And the same goes for Moshe Ya’alon, who, according to his friends, is walking around with a belly full of grievances, but who has those empty supply rooms to answer for. And Dan Halutz may be guilty of bad judgment, but he was not appointed by Olmert.
Olmert can tell the state commission: As far as things that depended on me are concerned, I was the one who created the most supportive atmosphere we have ever had in the international community for a war on terror. We had all the time in the world to take care of Hezbollah. In the end, we signed an agreement that will keep Hassan Nasrallah away from south Lebanon, and Lebanese soldiers and a multinational peacekeeping force will deploy in the vacated zone, which is the arrangement we have been wanting for years. From this standpoint, I got Israel the best possible deal – I, Ehud Olmert, who had been prime minister for a total of 120 days. I can only be accountable for things that went wrong after I assumed responsibility…

So there you have it. Or rather, just a portion of what’s right there, in a single Israeli newspaper on a single day in early September.
Is this a country experiencing a severe leadership crisis and crisis of self-identity, or what?
And in “normal” times, wouldn’t the US MSM be absolutely chock-full of details about all these developments? (I’ve never before noticed them ignoring Israel as much as they do most of the other countries in the Third World.)
So as to why the US MSM aren’t writing about it, I have a couple of ideas. One is that all the journos there who write about Israel were so busy during the war that they’ve taken a few days off since then… And the other– operating mainly at the editorial level– is that many of those editors may be kind of embarrassed to give much coverage to this whole cascading set of developments that indicate just how much the strategic failure in Lebanon has rocked the Israeli political system. Much better and safer not to mention that all intra-familial “dirty linen” in front of the broader public, don’t you think?
As for me, I don’t think so. I think these political developments are really important and interesting, and we need to know much more about them. In fact, I’ve been thinking maybe I should go to Israel soon, because so much of great political interest is happening there…
(By the way, as a small counter-weight to all the above-mentioned political shenanigans, I discovered a great new Israeli web-site recently called Occupation magazine. It looks as though it has some great material on it. Check it out! As soon as I can, I’ll put a link to it on the sidebar here.)

Israel’s hasbaristas (propagandists and apologists) have been out in force the past couple of weeks, here and elsewhere, desperately trying to shore up the confidence of Israelis and their friends around the world that the country’s military services have not fallen into operational disarray. Yossi Melman, a purported journalist, has been one of the most active– and far-fetched– of these spinmeisters. (Also, on occasion, our commenter here, JES. Okay JES: I “grant” you that the Israeli Air Force was extremely effective in knocking out Lebanon’s vital infrastructure and services, and killing large numbers of civilians. You happy now?)
But the performance of the IDF’s once-vaunted ground forces during the war was truly pathetic… And the navy got a nasty jolt in the war’s early days, too, when a Hizbullah C-802 missile hit its flagship, the INS Hanit, killing four crew members, essentially disabling the ship, and sending it limping back to port…
By chance, today my colleague and friend Nick Blanford, an experienced reporter for the CSM and other media who stayed in Lebanon during the war, penned this, which I share here with his permission:

Despite US intelligence officers’ assertions that it was Hizbullah’s Iranian-assisted jamming prowess that enabled the Israeli flagship INS Hanit to be struck and disabled, there have been several articles in the Israeli media blaming the ship’s crew for failing to switch on their defensive systems. The latest was by Zeev Schiff of Haaretz who wrote in yesterday’s edition, “Even though the destroyer entered a war zone and cruised along the Lebanese shores, the crew forgot to turn on the automatic operation system of the Barak [anti-missile system]. The result was that no effort was made to intercept the Iranian-Chinese missile, and unobstructed it struck its target.” [I note, parenthetically, that though Ze’ev is an old and valued friend of mine, he has also done a certain amount of hasbara throughout his long career, as well. His despatches sometimes have to be read and decoded with Kremlinological skill. ~HC]
As for the claim [Blanford continues] that the INS Hanit was the only Israeli navy ship struck by Hizbullah’s C-802 missiles, I can only offer this personal observation. I was in Tyre in south Lebanon on August 12 when a flash came through that Hizbullah had hit another Israeli ship off the Tyre coast. I went out onto the seafront and scanned the horizon with a pair of binoculars. After a minute or two, a thin tendril of smoke could be seen on the horizon to the southwest. The smoke grew into a thick plume and lasted for about 20 minutes before dissipating. I couldn’t see any ship and cannot confirm that it was the result of a Hizbullah missile attack on an Israeli navy vessel, but the timing was suggestive as was the most unusual sight of smoke on the horizon off the Lebanese coast.
The threat posed by Hizbullah’s C-802s appears to have forced the Israeli navy to deploy its ships far further from the Lebanese coastline than in the past. During the April 1996 Grapes of Wrath operation, Israeli ships could be seen easily with the naked eye shelling sites inland. This time around they weren’t to be seen at all. Also the Israelis appear to have made far less use of helicopter gunships than in the past, presumably, as Schiff mention in his article, because of the prospect of Hizbullah having acquired more advanced anti-aircraft missiles. We saw them flying at high altitude over the sea and could hear them come closer inshore at night, but I didn’t see any helicopters over land during the war. Instead, the helicopters seem to have been replaced by missile-firing reconnaissance drones whose handiwork was evident in the number of destroyed civilian vehicles lining the roads of south Lebanon.
Nicholas Blanford
Beirut

So the navy commanders realized that something serious had indeed happened when the C-802 hit the Hanit, it seemed.
I just want to add a couple of footnotes to this discussion. Firstly, it is evident that even as I write this, officers in all branches of the Israeli military– with, most likely, some coordination with their US counterparts, as well– are poring over the exact record of what worked, what didn’t , and why during the war, and trying to figure out ways to “fix” the problems identified.
Evidently, planners within Hizbullah’s military wing and their colleagues in the Iranian military will be doing the same thing, too. Hizbullah has proven over the years to have an impressive operational lesson-learning capacity.
On both sides– but particularly in Israel, given the many operational failings revealed by the war– there will be a huge temptation to invest a lot in significant upgrading of its forces. (Two nuclear subs recently received from Germany… But they might be just the tip of a much larger– submerged– iceberg of naval and ground-force upgrading yet to come.)
Israelis might well find themselves tempted to become even more of a “Sparta” than they already are. But that stuff is expensive– in financial terms, and also in the requirements for manpower, which could make the recently discussed plans of transforming the IDF into something close to a US-style all-volunteer force just impossible to realize any time soon.
Time for the country’s people to revolt and join the latte-sippers of the “western” nations that so many of them identify with, I say! Time, too, to learn some lessons from Portugal, circa 1974; to turn away from a strengthened reliance on militarism, and check out the prospects for its very realistic and much more hopeful alternatives.
… One further point. In my 1991 book The Superpowers and the Syrian-Israeli Conflict I had a whole chapter charting, basically, how after the 1967 war Israel started basing its “pitch” to members of the US policy elite increasingly on its “strategic value” to the US– this was in the Cold War, remember– rather than on the “shared values” of respect for life, freedom, tolerance, all those good things, that had previously lain at the heart of its appeal.
Well h’mmm. After what happened in the latest war, Israel’s “appeal” as a humane, caring, life-loving, etc country has (once again) been significantly dented.
But this time, its reputation for “military prowess” and for the ability to provide solid military/operational services to the US in that part of the world, has also taken a noticeable nose-dive, I’d say… I think it is that reputation that the hasbaristas have been working so hard to try to shore up.
So to JES, Ze’ev, and all my other Israeli friends I’d say, Look guys, if you want to gather some shreds of self-esteem around yourselves in order to enter into a serious peace process with your heads held high, I’m all for that. (And you should understand the need to let the Palestinians do it, too.) But if you want to shore up your reputation for “military prowess” in order to keep a solid lock on a strategic relationship with the militarists of the Bush-Cheney administration, then I don’t support that at all.

HaAretz’s Bradley Burston has a great piece in Wednesday’s paper– and I don’t see an “irony alert” anywhere in there, so he has to be serious, right? Burston first of all surveys the lamentable chaos in Israel’s national decisionmaking ranks, then he proposes the following:

If assassinating or abducting the Hezbollah leader is still on the agenda, as Israeli officials maintain, why not put Nasrallah to useful purpose?
Look at the issues. Consider his record. Here is a man who is both strong and wise on security issues. He saw to it that his troops were well-prepared, well-trained, well-supplied, and and well-protected.
Nasrallah would be a new sort of Israeli leader. One who gets things done.
Here is a man who addresses social welfare needs head-on. He doesn’t wait to help home-owners rebuild residences destroyed by aerial attacks. He hands out literal lump-sums, immediately, in cash.
Here is a man who delivers medical care to the needy, affordable housing to the homeless, food and even clothing to society’s disadvantaged.
Here is a man who cares deeply about, and puts major emphasis on, education and youth [even if the message is one of incitement, hatred, and anti-Semitism].
Moreover, as he proved this week in admitting to having miscalculated the Israeli response in Lebanon, Nasrallah, as opposed to, say, Olmert, is a leader who, when he’s made an error in judgment, can openly admit to it.
For more than 20 years, Israeli prime ministers have come to office pledging to be leaders for all the people, only to exacerbate existing divides and create new ones.
Why not tap the one leader who has managed to unite the Israeli people as has no prime minister in memory?
… Nasrallah has a proven record.
What do our present leaders have to show for theirs?

No Irony alert, no, but probably a humor alert would be in order. I just wonder whether many people in Israel or Lebanon are yet in the kind of emotional space where they can appreciate this kind of humor?
(Far less humorous– old Mr. Divide-&-Rule Martin Indyk still up to his nasty imperialistic D&R tricks in this interview.)